Rhythms of Writing: An Anthropology of Irish Literature 1474244130, 9781474244138

Citation preview

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RHYTHMS OF WRITING

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Also available from Bloomsbury The Anthropology of Writing, David Barton and Uta Papen Ballet across Borders, Helena Wulff The Emotions, edited by Helena Wulff Irish Literature in the Celtic Tiger Years 1990 to 2008, Susan Cahill

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RHYTHMS OF WRITING

An Anthropology of Irish Literature

Helena Wulff

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

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Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10018 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Helena Wulff, 2017 Helena Wulff has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-​1-​4742-​4413-​8 ePDF: 978-​1-​4742-​4415-​2 ePub: 978-​1-​4742-​4414-​5 Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Cover design: Adriana Brioso Cover image © Paul Hart /​Getty Images Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India

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CONTENTS Foreword Acknowledgements Prologue: Writing as Craft and Career 1. THE MAKING OF A WRITER: TRAINING AND CREATIVITY

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2. PATHS AND PROFILES: IN SEARCH OF RECOGNITION

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3. THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL: WRITING JOURNALISM

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4. MODES OF WRITING: GENRES, TOPICS, STYLES

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5. TRACING TALES: FOLKLORE IN FICTION

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6. SELLING STORIES: THE PUBLISHING MARKET

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7. VARIETIES OF TRANSLATION: WITHIN AND ACROSS MEDIA

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8. AMERICA AS HOPE: LEGACY OF LEAVING

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9. IRISH LITERATURE AND THE WORLD

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Notes Bibliography Index

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FOREWORD Most of us usually choose to read a book of literature on the basis of the author’s name and reputation. We usually do not think at all about publishers, editors, literary agents, translators or our fellow readers, all with their own demands and expectations of the writer, and –​perhaps –​influence on the finished work. Least of all do we think of the lifeworld of the writer, which involves negotiating all of the above and balancing them with the responsibilities of everyday life, not to speak of the intellectual and practical processes of artistic creation and active engagement with a professional-​cum-​vocational group –​writers –​to which he or she belongs. This complex world is the subject of Helena Wulff ’s engaging study. Scholarship over the years has enriched our understanding of art by showing how it emerges from multidetermined processes that are not only aesthetic, but also have significant social, economic and political dimensions. Peter Burke has described how the idea of aristocrats as a group characterized by culture, refinement and their appreciation of the arts arose as a way of maintaining distinction at a time when their traditional military role had declined (1994: 270–​81). Pierre Bourdieu (1993) has explained how the notion of ‘art for art’s sake’ arose when artists ended their dependence on patrons and when an impersonal and anonymous market for their work developed. Pascale Casanova (2004 and 2011) has shown how the apparent universalism of great literature is belied by the fact of hegemonic forces at work within the literary field that alone have the power to consecrate ‘world literature’. This book, on writing and literature as a cultural process, is a valuable addition to this burgeoning field. Respect for the power of the word goes back centuries in Ireland, which has the oldest vernacular literature in Western Europe, and witty conversation and storytelling are highly regarded in Irish life. Storytelling may well be the bedrock of the Irish literary tradition as Wulff suggests. A popular folktale tells of the man who had no story, suggesting the inability to tell a story as an unnatural affliction. Writers are the most prestigious intellectuals in Ireland, their role officially acknowledged in various ways –​even by a 1969 government provision allowing them tax exemption. The most recently commissioned warships of the Irish Naval Service (named not without controversy) are the Samuel Beckett (2014), the James Joyce (2015) and the William Butler Yeats (2016). Irish pubs, at home and abroad, often use the names of writers: the Oliver St. John Gogarty in Dublin, the Oscar Wilde in Berlin, the James Joyce in Istanbul and the Lady Gregory in Chicago. Among the Irish paper money circulating before the adoption of the euro in 2002 were the £10 note, bearing the image of James Joyce, and the £20 note, of W. B. Yeats.

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Yuri Lotman (1977) describes art as a modelling system, as a sort of secondary language. Artistic work by its nature has a structure and a dynamic that sets it apart from real life. Its logic derives not from its relationship to a supposed objective reality, but from its own inner system. It does not tell the truth, yet it is paradigmatic, and, as such, it can reveal the real world. Joyce wished to give so complete a picture of Dublin in Ulysses that the city could be reconstructed from it. Was it because he thought that the demotic experience of the city had never been told? If history, as Carlyle once said, was no more than the biography of great men, could it be that literature is able to reveal a deeper truth? The statist historiography that has dominated in Ireland does not easily resonate with popular perceptions of the past. Writers gave Ireland a way of understanding the past that subverted statist history: this, after all, was what the Irish Literary Revival was about. And writers gave a specifically political twist to the mantic role of the artist, which we can see clearly in this centenary year of the Easter Rising and its executed poets. Yet literature cannot be seen merely as a sort of displaced history and politics, though Helena Wulff ’s identification of specific ‘storylines’ in Irish writing shows how history and politics can and do inform artistic expression. This book joins her earlier work on dance in Ireland, Dancing at the Crossroads (Wulff 2007a), the title of which refers both to the traditional rural pastime and to a phrase from de Valera’s famous speech in 1943, which evoked a bucolic ideal in an impoverished country. The gap between lofty ideal and prosaic reality seems to characterize much Irish reflection on Ireland, much of the country’s cynicism and of its mordant wit, and writers are particularly good at illuminating it, implying how it may be bridged, and pointing from the past to a workable future. Their role as public intellectuals no doubt owes much to this. For long, Irish anthropology, pioneered by Arensberg and Kimball (1940), examined a frugal rural world characterized by late marriage, big families, small farms and emigration. A wider spectrum of Irish life today offers research fields to anthropologists, often studying ‘sideways’, researching people not that different from themselves in terms of socio-​economic background and education levels. In the past, anthropologists immersed themselves in the lives of small communities as participant-​observers, the better to understand them. Wulff shows in this study how writers form an anthropological group just as peasants do. But writers, as many other groups today, are particularly mobile, so that research strategies different from those of the classical anthropological monograph are needed. Wulff notes the ‘small scale’ and ‘density of networks’ in Ireland, but the lives of individuals and communities are not geographically bounded as before, necessitating both ‘yoyo fieldwork’, so that the anthropologist can ‘keep up with the mobility and speed of contemporary social life’ (2007:  139), and ‘interface ethnography’, carried out when writers at public events socially interact with the wider world. She interviews writers, publishers, editors and translators, and attends creative writing workshops, book launches, readings and literary festivals. She identifies an Irish tone of voice in writing, and Irish ‘storylines’, which attract publishers and readers, and often coincide

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with Irish intellectual debate at the core of which, she finds, is a Dublin-​based ‘public conversation’. She discusses the careers of writers, in relation to their family life, to their networks, to their movements between home and abroad, to their publishers. Some have a national reputation, some an international reputation, but success, as she argues, tends to happen in London, where most Irish literature is published. Helena Wulff is one of a distinguished number of Swedish scholars  –​of folklore, folklife, archaeology, linguistics and literature –​who have made seminal contributions to the study of Irish culture. In this anthropology of Irish writing, she reveals the social and the cultural world from which Irish literary works emerge, illuminating those works, the process of their creation and the Irish society that in many ways grounds them. As with every compelling work of scholarship, as of literature, we continue to reflect on it long after closing the book. Diarmuid Ó Giolláin

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Literature has been a guiding light for me for almost as long as I can remember. As Ireland has a celebrated treasure of novels and short stories, it was an obvious location for my ethnographic study of writing as craft and career which is the topic of this book. How come the Irish are such great writers? To locate the study in Ireland also entailed that I could build on my previous study of dance as an indicator of a changing Ireland, with roots in tradition. It goes without saying that the writers are the main protagonists in this study, but they depend for their work on many other professionals such as publicists, editors, literary agents, critics, literary journalists and translators, in addition to the reading public. My warmest thanks go to my key interlocutor and friend, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne. She has been an invaluable gate-​opener and versatile conversation partner. Not only does she as a writer connect the Irish-​language literary world with the one in English –​which is in focus here, as I unfortunately do not know Irish  –​but she also bridges the Irish and the international publishing markets. With her training in Irish folklore, Éilís moreover has an insight into an academic perspective, which she also uses when teaching the MA course in creative writing at University College Dublin. I  was delighted to be present when Éilís received the Irish PEN Award for her outstanding contribution to Irish literature in 2016. Her late husband, Bo Almqvist, professor emeritus of Irish folklore, who sadly died in 2013, was also a source of much knowledge for my study. Moreover, I wish to thank their son, Ragnar Almqvist, diplomat with a great inclination for literature, very much. I was really pleased to be invited by Ragnar to moderate a public conversation with Anne Enright in Stockholm, when he was posted there at the Embassy of Ireland. I am immensely grateful that I was able to interview at great length a number of busy writers such as John Banville, Dermot Bolger, Evelyn Conlon, Celia de Fréine, Roddy Doyle, Anne Enright, Deirdre Madden, Kevin McDermott, Michael O’Loughlin, David Park, Siobhán Parkinson, Ross Skelton and Colm Tóibín. And many thanks to Colum McCann, Mary Morrissey, Joseph O’Connor and Belinda McKeon for conversations of various length on email and in person. I am most indebted to publicists, editors and literary agents in Ireland. It was a pleasure to interview Declan Meade, then editor of The Stinging Fly, a small literary magazine, and also a publisher of books. At Lilliput Press, I did enlightening and enjoyable interviews with its publicist Anthony Farrell and editor Fiona Dunne. The only pseudonym in the book is used for an editor, with Jonathan Cape in London at the time, who came to Ireland for a literary festival. He told me with great elan about the intricacies of global conglomerates publishing, for which I  am very pleased indeed. I was in touch with literary agents Marianne Gunn O’Connor and

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Jonathan Williams, and did an email interview with Paul Feldstein of The Feldstein Agency. Back in Stockholm, Ulla Danielsson, who works as a translator of Irish fiction into Swedish, explained in great detail how this process works. It was a most rewarding interview which generated new theoretical perspectives. In the university world in Ireland, north and south, friends and colleagues have contributed to the study. Profound thanks to Angela Bourke, Steve Coleman, Hastings Donnan, Andrew Finlay, Pauline Garvey, Mark Maguire, Jamie Saris and Fintan Vallely. Ullrich Kockel, Máiréad Nic Craith and Jonathan Skinner have all left for the United Kingdom since I did my research. In Dublin, I owe great thanks to Jane O’Hanlon for connecting me to the Writers in Schools scheme. Special thanks go to Seona MacReamoinn for helping me along her literary networks in Dublin, and for friendship. Many friends and colleagues outside Ireland have also taken much appreciated interest in the study. Warm thanks to Don Brenneis and Dominic Boyer for writing such appreciative endorsements for my book proposal. I am also indebted to Regina Bendix, Ayse Caglar, Thomas Fillitz, Irene Gilsenan Nordin, Andre Gingrich, Alma Gottlieb, Stuart McLean, Narmala Halstead, Stefan Helgesson, Kirin Narayan, Hélène Neveu Kringelbach, Judith Okely, Nigel Rapport, Moshe Shokeid, David Zeitlyn and most especially to Deborah Reed-​Danahay. Diarmuid Ó Giolláin has been a great supporter of this study. I am most honoured by his generous foreword to this book. The study has benefitted from thoughtful responses to papers I have presented at Maynooth University, University of Ulster, University of Göttingen, University of St Andrews, University of Kent, University of East London, University of Illinois at Urbana-​Champaign, National University of Singapore, University of Vienna and Dalarna University College. At Stockholm University, I have appreciated feedback at the Institute of Ethnology, and in my home Department of Social Anthropology. I have also had insightful input to papers on my study at conferences such as at the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association in San Francisco, 2008 and 2012; in Philadelphia, 2009; in Chicago, 2013; and in Denver, 2015; at the biannual conferences of the European Association of Social Anthropologists in Maynooth, 2010; in Tallinn, 2014; and in Milan, 2016; at the conference Irish Women Writers: National and European Context in Leuven in 2007; at the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore conference, Derry, 2008; at the conference Myth and Reality:  Language, Literature, and Culture in Modern Ireland, Falun, 2009; at the annual conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth, Belfast, 2010; at the Anthropological Association of Ireland, Belfast, 2011; at the workshop Scanning Digital Visuality, Kista, 2011; at the conference Small Countries: Being, Feeling, Acting in the Contemporary World, Landskrona, 2012; at American Comparative Literature Association, Toronto, 2013; at the symposium Irish America: Past and Present Perspectives, Uppsala, 2014; and at the annual conference of the Swedish Anthropological Association, in Linköping, 2014. At Bloomsbury it has been a true delight to work with Louise Butler who first encouraged me to submit a book proposal, Jennifer Schmidt who contracted it

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with exceptional insight and care, and Miriam Cantwell who saw it to its fruition with fantastic skill and speed. The project, which was originally titled ‘Writing in Ireland: An Ethnographic Study of Schooling and the World of Writers’, was funded by the Research Council of Sweden 2007–​2009. It was my parents who introduced me to literature. As my late father had a special interest in Irish literature, he would talk enthusiastically about Edna O’Brien and Brendan Behan among other writers of his generation. Many years later, in the early 1990s, my husband and colleague Ulf Hannerz came back from external examining visits to Maynooth University outside Dublin, with novels by John McGahern and Molly Keane that could be read as ethnographic accounts about Ireland, but also as prime examples of unputdownable writing. Ulf has been an extraordinarily supportive and inspiring follower of the unfolding of this study, all the way from when I was putting together the proposal for funding and the lengthy research process to the writing of this book. When I made the final push to complete the book in the spring and summer of 2016, which entailed a firm writing schedule of long days at my desk and a summer without holiday outings, Ulf ’s acceptance was total. For months on end, he took charge of the household and the garden as we were in our summer house in a village by the sea in southern Sweden. My thanks to Ulf are wholehearted. Helena Wulff

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PROLOGUE: WRITING AS CRAFT AND CAREER Summoned to rise, we all waited in breathless silence: writers, publishers, critics, one or two foreign diplomats. As crystal chandeliers made the jewellery sparkle on ladies in evening dresses, the anticipated PEN dinner 2012 in Dublin was about to commence. There the president of Ireland, Michael D.  Higgins (who is also a poet), entered, followed by this year’s awardee for Outstanding Contribution to Irish Literature, Joseph O’Connor. A loud applause broke out. Surrounded by spouses and security, the president and Joseph O’Connor made their way to the top table. This is the public sphere1 of the social world of contemporary fiction writers in Ireland.2 But the splendour of prize ceremonies and success originates in a very different mundane private sphere, with long hours laboring at the desk. Here is how Colum McCann conveys the complex craft of writing through his protagonist Emily Ehrlich of Irish descent (in the United States) in the novel TransAtlantic (2013: 188–​9). Remarkably, she is a woman journalist and poet in the early 1900s in St Louis, Missouri: Stories began, for her, as a lump in the throat. She sometimes found it hard to speak. A true understanding lay just beneath the surface. She felt a sort of homesickness whenever she sat down at a sheet of paper. Her imagination pushed back against the pressure of what lay round her. Emily Ehrlich survived not by theory, or formula, but by certain moments of ease when she felt herself at full tilt, a sprinting, hurdling joy. Lost in a small excelsis. The best moments were when her mind seemed to implode. It made a shambles of time. All the light disappeared. The infinity of her inkwell. A quiver of dark at the end of the pen. Hours of loss and escape. Insanity and failure. Scratching one word out, blotting the middle of a page so it was unreadable any more, tearing the sheet into long, thin strips. The elaborate search for a word, like the turning of a chain handle on a well. Dropping the bucket down the mineshaft of the mind. Taking up empty bucket after empty bucket until, finally, at an unexpected moment, it caught hard and had a sudden weight and she raised the word, then delved down into the emptiness once more. (McCann 2013: 188-​9)

Emily Ehrlich could have used a typewriter, but here she writes longhand with an ink pen. It came as a surprise to me that the writers I was studying at the turn of the twenty-​first century also wrote longhand. One after the other they showed me

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big blue notebooks with wide margins useful for revisions and told me that they preferred to write their first drafts longhand, with ink pens or ball pens. Joseph O’Connor and Colum McCann are among the writers figuring in this book. It is an anthropological study of the social world of writers in Ireland (and to some extent in New York) and their work (cf. Becker 2008 [1982]; Wulff 2001). Famous for its rich literature, Ireland keeps producing award-​winning fiction writers. How come the Irish are such great writers? Combining ethnography with a scrutiny of texts, I argue that the making of an Irish writer goes back to the storytelling tradition in Ireland. Once in the profession, a writer’s career is built on the rhythms of writing: long hours at the desk, alternating with periods of promotion. As a writer has to spend most time writing, this is a career which demands solitude but also paradoxically, sociability: besides prize ceremonies there are media appearances, interviews and readings. At stake is writing as a craft, reputation and competition, and negotiations with the publishing market. An Irish tone of voice tends to combine a dark streak with wit, and is carried by its rhythm. Focusing on fiction, novels and short stories, this book also discusses journalism by the writers in their capacity as public intellectuals. Ireland is an ethnographic case which speaks eloquently to wider issues: an economic boom and its dramatic ups and downs, exile and emigration, postcoloniality, violence and reconciliation, as well as new immigration. These literary and journalistic accounts entail complex social commentary. Ultimately, this book is about the role of society in literature and the role of literature in society. Ireland’s literary tradition was founded by classic writers such as James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. In the late nineteenth century, literature was a pivotal part of the nationalist cultural revival in Ireland.3 With W. B. Yeats (poet and senator) at its helm, the literary movement was included in Ireland’s transition into political independence. Momentously, literary theorist Declan Kiberd (1996) has pointed out that it was this literary movement that turned Ireland into a modern nation. It is noteworthy that Ireland, with its relatively small population, has produced four Nobel laureates in literature: W. B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, George Bernhard Shaw and Seamus Heaney. Emerging from this tradition, an acclaimed generation of contemporary writers is now taking it further into new topics, genres and media. Most of the writers discussed in this book such as Evelyn Conlon, Roddy Doyle, Anne Enright, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Colum McCann, Deirde Madden, Joseph O’Connor, David Park and Colm Tóibín were born in the 1950s and 1960s. John Banville is somewhat older, and Belinda McKeon belongs to a younger generation.

Locating a Literary Study My engagement with literature is longstanding; it goes back to my childhood. Already as a young teenager I was an avid reader of novels, short stories and poetry. For my bachelors degree, comparative literature was a given. But in those days, this was in the early 1970s, the Department of Comparative Literature at Stockholm

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University did not yet include social theory in its scope for research and teaching. When I found anthropology and saw opportunities to develop my dual interest in people and social theory, I  was hooked. Eventually, I  placed my research in Ireland and conducted a study of dance and questions of memory and modernity (see mainly Wulff 2005a, 2007a).4 While fieldworking for that study, I  detected the novel The Dancers Dancing (1999a) by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne in a bookshop. The novel, and my subsequent meeting with its author, would become my entry into the literary world in Ireland, and the beginning of the research for this book. So here I am full circle, back to my beginning with literature. Even though it took quite some time for me to join the expanding anthropology of literature, there were early indications during my anthropological training of the significance literature can have in anthropology. Nigerian Chinua Achebe’s celebrated novel Things Fall Apart (1976 [1958]) (the title was incidentally inspired by a line from a poem by Yeats) was on the syllabus of the introductory course in anthropology at Stockholm University in the 1970s. The novel reveals devastating change in local relations in a West African village after the advent of the first white men. Later, as a PhD student in the department, I was in a cohort that was told to read ‘fiction from our fields, as one way to learn about the places and people we were studying’ (Wulff 2013:  208). Years later as a senior scholar, I  would conceptualize this in terms of ethnografiction (Wulff 2013). This book combines an ‘anthropology of literature and writing’ approach with cultural analysis contextualized in Irish studies. The immense scholarly work by literary theorists on Irish fiction in English is a reference point for this study as it offers historical and contemporary reviews and/​or anthologized collections such as The Irish Storyteller (2001) by Georges Denis Zimmerman and Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century: A Reader (2000) edited by David Pierce. To include A History of the Irish Novel (2011a) by Derek Hand here is, of course, prompted by the prominence of Irish novels. The short story is often singled out as a literary genre where Irish writers excel in competition with writers from other traditions, and this is attributed to the strong oral storytelling tradition in Ireland. For literary scholarship on the Irish short story, I mainly rely on A History of the Irish Short Story (2011) by Heather Ingman. There is also the short story writer William Trevor’s (1989) Introduction to The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories, as well as introductions by other writers to short story anthologies published by Faber and Granta. As will become clear, I also depend on literary biographies of the writers in the study. Looking back, literature and writing have been analysed by anthropologists for a long time, recently increasingly so. Already Victor Turner (1976:77–​8) observed that Ndembu ritual and Western literature were ‘mutually elucidating’.5 Clifford Geertz (1988) considered the anthropologist as author, especially Malinowski, Benedict, Evans-​Pritchard and Lévi-​Strauss. The 1980s was the decade of the ‘writing culture’ debate (Clifford and Marcus 1989). Now we know that it taught us a greater awareness of how texts and thus knowledge are produced in anthropology. The critique of the writing culture agenda as narcissistic, where the fieldworker seemed to take the leading role at the expense of the people in the study, was most

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fierce in British anthropology, but the issue of Cultural Anthropology (Orin 2012) honoring the twenty-​fifth anniversary of the publication of Writing Culture (1986) is evidence of its lasting legacy.6 Revisiting the boundary between ethnography and fiction, Didier Fassin (2014: 53) makes the case for the value of ethnography as a way to access ‘true life’ rather than ‘real lives’: ‘while fiction could never claim to simply reproduce the real, the argument that it is faithful to reality gives ethnography a form of authority that has important ethical and political consequences.’ In the 1990s, Richard Handler and Daniel Segal (1990) identified Jane Austen as an ethnographer of marriage and kinship among England’s landed gentry at the turn of the nineteenth century. Doing fieldwork in the village Wanet in England, Nigel Rapport (1994) envisioned the writer E. M. Forster as his partner ethnographer by including Forster’s literary writings in a dialogue with his own field notes from the village. Texts such as fiction, songs, letters and newspapers are examined anthropologically in the volume Exploring the Written (1994a) edited by Eduardo P. Archetti. As Archetti (1994b: 13) points out in the introduction, ‘a literary product is not only a substantive part of the real world but also a key element in the configuration of the world itself ’. The volume Anthropology Off the Shelf (2009), edited by Alisse Waterston and Maria Vesperi, discusses anthropological writing for a general public, in particular issues on racism, sexism and ethics, while Marilyn Cohen’s volume Novel Approaches to Anthropology (2013) explores the role of historical and contemporary novels in anthropology.7 To the anthropologies of literature and writing belong the social analysis of text (Barber 2007), reading (Boyarin 1993; Reed 2011; Rehberg Sedos and Fuller 2013; Driscoll 2014; Helgason et al. 2014), literary culture (Wiles 2015) and literacy (Street 1997). As Brettell (2014) shows, literature itself has been a close companion for many anthropologists. Kristen Ghodsee’s Lost in Transition (2011) about the end of communism in Bulgaria, is one example of an experimental ethnography:  short stories from the field by the author alternate with ethnographic chapters. This could be categorized as one hybrid genre. Another is Alive in the Writing:  Crafting Ethnography in the Company of Chekhov (2012) where Kirin Narayan blends her experience of ethnographic writing with that of Anton Chekhov (playwright and short story writer) as he documents life on Sakhalin island, the Russian penal colony. In addition, the book is a writing guide with exercises. McLean and Pandian (2017) join artistic and academic approaches into experiments in ethnographic writing. Academic scholarly writing, sometimes in the form of experimental ethnography, has obviously been the main writing genre for anthropologists, and this is where the debate has had its centre. But anthropologists also write in many other genres: there are memoirs by Narayan (2007) and Stoller (2008), and poetry which Michael Jackson (1989) has produced quite extensively. It is actually a quite widespread practice among anthropologists to write fiction, as discussed by Ruth Behar (2009) in ‘Believing in Anthropology as Literature’. Writing under the pen name Elenore Smith Bowen, Laura Bohannan already published the novel Return to Laughter in 1964. Just like Stoller in his novels Jaguar (1999) and The Sorcerer’s Burden (2016), Bohannan drew on her fieldwork for this novel. So did Amitav

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Ghosh when he wrote In an Antique Land (1992). Ghosh is among those fiction writers who were trained in anthropology but left academia to pursue a literary career. Also crime novels by anthropologists such as Jenny White’s The Sultan’s Seal (2007) tend to originate in a field or its history. As Regina Bendix (2012) has discovered, there is also a widespread habit among anthropologists to read crime novels. Writing about a Swedish crime novel writer Stieg Trenter (whose work only exists in Swedish and whose peculiar spelling of his first name probably was why Stieg Larsson, author of the bestselling Millenium Triology changed his name from Stig to Stieg), Hannerz (2013) identifies affinities between anthropologists and crime novel writers. Some of the considerations over forms and techniques of writing have included journalism and reportage as exemplified by Gottlieb and Graham (1994) when they weave their respective experiences as anthropologist and fiction writer together into the same book.8 This leads to the concern with making academic writing reach a wider audience, as discussed by Thomas Hylland Eriksen (2006). This book is supported also by the substantial literature on the anthropology of Ireland. In the standard reference work, Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan (2006) observe that this corpus began with topics focusing on rural harmony, family farms and community and then moved on to history and nationalism, sectarian conflict and violence, but has of late opened up to include studies of sport, parades, youth, policy, migration, gender, music and dance in relation to the local versus the global.9 In an article reviewing the anthropology of Ireland, Murphy and Egan (2015) mention consumption and material culture among the topics recently added to the list of anthropological studies in Ireland. As I note in my commentary to this article, Irish ethnography is distinctive and contributes to anthropology through ‘the small scale and density of networks, but also in the major social change that was brought about quite quickly by the economic boom in the late twentieth century, and its dramatic downturn in the early twenty-​first century. Now the economy is improving again. With emigration and exile and the new immigration and the large Irish diaspora maintaining connections with Ireland, emigration and exile, as well as new immigration, Ireland is a cosmopolitan society (Wulff 2015: 142).

In the Field: Interface and Interviews ‘A majority of fiction writers, born watchers, tend to dislike being objects of people’s attention. Dislike being watched,’ American writer David Foster Wallace (1997: 21) noted. The Irish writers I researched did not mind that I watched or interviewed them as long as they got something out of it, whether thoughtful feedback on their writings or the literary world, or (positive) promotion in my publications. Aware that these writers had been interviewed a countless number of times by journalists and literary scholars, I tried to formulate questions that would add new insight for them, at least surprise them and perhaps even evoke their curiosity. As long as they stayed in the public sphere, the writers knew that they had

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to put up with being watched, and certainly not only by me. And even though it happened that I heard writers, struck by stage fright regret before a public event having accepted to do a reading or a plenary discussion, they usually did very well once they were up there, and also enjoyed being watched. Still, Foster Wallace’s observation was right when it comes to a general disposition of the Irish writers as ‘born watchers’: rather than appreciating being observed themselves, they prefer to observe other people. This is what they spend most time doing –​watching (or listening to) social life as it unfolds around them, or reading about it. Then they write it. While relating to the anthropologies of literature and writing, this study is differently phrased than those orientations has tended to be. It brings to the fore certain current issues, for example, on methods for ethnographic research on celebrity, and on fellow intellectuals. The role of the anthropologist is being redefined here. Some of the Irish writers have acquired a global celebrity elite status. To do research with them thus entails ‘studying up’ (Nader 1999). Still, in his research with foreign correspondents, Hannerz (2004: 3, 226) argues for the usefulness of the notion ‘studying sideways’, as it is ‘not so much as a matter of power or rank’ but a way of ‘trying to understand the workings of a neighboring group engaged in a somewhat parallel pursuit’. Sherry Ortner (2010: 213) similarily suggests that ‘much of what is called studying up is really “studying sideways”, that is, studying people  –​like scientists, journalists, and Hollywood filmmakers  –​who in many ways are really not much different from anthropologists and our fellow academics more generally’. Ortner (2010: 223) goes on to point out that not only do ‘the people being studied have the same kinds of educational background as the anthropologist’, but importantly they are also ‘working in the same general cultural zone as ourselves –​the world of knowledge, information, representation, interpretation and criticism. This I think plays a large role in the fact that some of the most active areas in the “studying up” game today are the anthropology of (the work of) the knowledge classes’. This is an expanding trajectory in anthropology, which is reforming fieldwork, knowledge production and the act of writing. Contrary to classic anthropology, research with people who are the anthropologist’s colleagues and counterparts is clearly growing (Holmes and Marcus 2005; Wulff 2014). To repeat, the book builds on a combination of ethnographic observations and analysis of literary texts, and to some extent journalism. In-​depth interviews have been central, mostly with writers at different stages in their careers, but also with publicists and agents, also in the form of extended conversations and informal interaction with altogether about fifty people. While in the public sphere, they can be studied with what Ortner (2010: 213, 2013; see also Wulff 2014), drawing on her Hollywood study, refers to as ‘interface ethnography’. This entails ‘doing participant observation in the border areas where the closed community or organization or institution interfaces with the public’ (Ortner 2010: 213). The interface events with the Irish writers took place at book launches, prize ceremonies and readings, literary festivals and conferences, and creative writing workshops taught by the writers, as well as in writing classes at secondary

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schools and at university master’s courses mostly in the Dublin area. I visited the artists’ retreat Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig where writers can apply for a two-​week stay in order to write in a peaceful surrounding. And I went to Cúirt International Festival of Literature in Galway, to the Listowel Writers’ Week where I also participated in a workshop on creative writing and to West Cork Literary Festival in Bantry. It was through the Writers in Schools Scheme organized by Poetry Ireland in Dublin that I was able to visit secondary schools and observe in classrooms how writers taught writing to school pupils. I also had the opportunity to do observations at Fighting Words (with the slogan ‘the right to write’ cf. Chapter 1), a centre for creative writing established by Roddy Doyle in collaboration with schools. Academic conferences on Irish literature such as Writers in Conversation: A Dialogic Genre: Issues and Transformations in Leuven in 2011 and a number of conferences at Dalarna University Centre for Irish Studies, in Falun in Sweden, have also been occasions for interface ethnography for my study, as Irish writers have been invited to do readings or give papers on these occasions. Frequently, Irish writers have also been invited to Sweden to do readings and public interviews in connection with a new translation into Swedish of one of their books. This is how I first met John Banville and Joseph O’Connor. When Anne Enright’s novel The Forgotten Waltz (2011) was published in Swedish as Den glömda valsen (2013), I was asked to moderate a panel interview with Enright in Rönnells bookshop in Stockholm. As I by then had met Anne Enright on several occasions in different contexts (from book launches and readings to dinners) and countries (Ireland, Hong Kong, Belgium and Sweden), she dedicated my copy of the Swedish translation to me: ‘For Helena my Zelig!’ This was a reference to the film Zelig by Woody Allen, featuring a man who takes on the looks and behaviour of whoever he is around, many of them famous people. This was indeed what my fieldwork in the literary world was about, to a great extent. As events in the literary world in Ireland happen regularly but occasionally, the fieldwork was spread out over seventeen one-​or two-​week stints during 2007–​ 2009, when the project was funded by the Swedish Research Council, and subsequent follow-​up visits. Just like many contemporary field studies, this study required recurrent visits back and forth between Stockholm and Ireland over more than the traditional uninterrupted year in the field –​in the form of yo-​yo fieldwork (Wulff 2002, 2007). Like in any fieldwork, I  met with some interlocutors more often than others, even forming friendships. This provided many occasions for spending time together informally and having crucial conversations, not least over innumerable dinners in the homes of writers.

Itinerary and Issues Despite a remarkable expansion of workshops and university programmes in creative writing, the next chapter discusses whether writing can actually be taught, as this remains an issue. The writers in the study agree that formal technique can be taught, but that also those with a natural talent for writing should learn some basic

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principles. Many established writers have degrees in creative writing and teach this subject (Wulff 2012a). After a brief background about the emergence of creative writing courses in the United States, Chapter 1 focuses on how writing is taught in Ireland, in schools, at university and in non-​academic workshops. Cases from classrooms will be discussed in relation to literary scholarship on creative writing (Fogarty, Ní Dhuibhne and Walshe 2013) and education theory (Lave and Wenger 1991). The chapter offers accounts of how writers in the study learnt to write, and began to publish, and how they keep developing as writers. Starting with the example of a breakthrough, Chapter 2 traces career paths that entail sudden fame and systematic reputation building including the creation of a profile. With success comes competition, and different ways to handle it. Fame is not a guarantee against drawbacks, however, such as unexpected rejections by publishers, or bad reviews. Here the idea of the rhythms of writing concerns the way success and drawbacks keep replacing each other over the course of a long writing career. This is where writers’ gender, generation and class background will be related to the making of a career. Ireland does not only have an established reputation for literature, it also produces well-​crafted literary journalism. Chapter  3 explores Irish writers as journalists, primarily in their capacity as public intellectuals, but also as cultural journalists in general. Particularly John Banville, Fintan O’Toole, Colm Tóibín and Anne Enright act as public intellectuals. They express what has not yet been formulated, summon their fellow countrymen and women in times of crisis, and are even at times able to predict the course of events. Most of the writers in the study started their writing career as journalists, and have continued to write journalism –​also as a way to make a living –​in Ireland, Britain and the United States. They write features, reviews and political commentaries. Drawing on the work by Lederman (1993: 12–​13), Hannerz (2004: 103–​4) in his study of news media foreign correspondents developed the notion of storylines to signify ‘the way stories are selected, contextualized, and presented to portray regions in foreign news’. Journalists and readers alike expect a certain region to produce certain storylines. This might mean that storylines are exaggerated and other events and circumstances are neglected. My experience of researching Ireland over almost two decades resembles that of Lederman and Hannerz in that ‘narrative threads’ about Irish society kept recurring both as focus and as contexts. But when I made an effort to move away from them –​sooner or later they appeared anyway, at least lurking in the background. This would indicate some accuracy after all. The storylines in Ireland are thus the Great Famine in the mid-​nineteenth century, emigration and exile, consequences of the British colonization, the social impact of the Catholic Church, the Troubles and the peace process in Northern Ireland, the economic boom (the Celtic Tiger) at the end of the twentieth century and its ensuing downturn followed by other ups and downs. There is an emerging storyline on immigration. Irish storylines are considered in Chapter 4. To the rhythms of writing belongs an ability to shift back and forth between fiction and other genres, not only journalism, but also crime novels, poetry, plays and memoirs. This chapter scrutinizes how different genres that the Irish writers engage in relate to their

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career making. When writers venture outside of Irish storylines they are risking not to be published or read. It is Irish storylines that sell. In addition, this chapter details the physicality of writing, how writing is embodied by the writers. Writing engages the senses –​sound, rhythms and movement. In the acclaimed memoir Angela’s Ashes (1996, 2005a) Frank McCourt is upset as a child when his brother ‘steals’ one of his stories. For an understanding of stories as process and form, Chapter 5 discusses folklore methods in relation to stories’ ownership and endings, as well as the notion of fiction flow, referring to how stories go on and on not least through various media nowadays. The chapter also explores how folklore is incorporated in Irish fiction. A story can be borrowed, shared, elaborated on. There are instances of alleged theft and appropriation of stories. But when it comes to urban legends with their strong emotional engagement and slightly otherworldly nature (cf. Zimmerman 2001), nobody owns such legends, and no version is the correct version. In the literary world, a writer has the legal ownership of a published story, and anyone who takes it is plagiarizing. And yet, this sort of borrowing goes on all the time in literature. As Ó Giolláin (2000) shows, Irish folklore was instrumental for the political independence of what is now the Republic of Ireland. Thus, it was a part of the official ideology of nationalism. Having experienced a certain decline, there is now a renaissance for Irish folklore. References to legends and myths have been included in classic fiction, poetry and plays and also appear in contemporary fiction. From an anthropological point of view, this is an example of how traces of traditional beliefs can be found in modern thought and life, not only in Ireland, which admittedly has a strong folkloric tradition, but in other societies as well. So when does a story end, Becker, Faulkner and Kirchenblatt-​Gimblett (2006) ask. The continuous telling of a story in folklore, in different versions, on and on, resembles not only how novels (and films) are available in many sequels over a number of years, but also how successful television shows run in hundreds of episodes year after year, even decades in some cases. This can be conceptualized in terms of fiction flow. One way of keeping a story going is the way John Banville –​mainly a fiction writer and journalist but sometimes a crime author writing under the pen name Benjamin Black –​has transferred a protagonist from one fiction story to another. Writing as Black (2014), it has happened that he has ‘borrowed’ a protagonist from another crime novel author, Raymond Chandler. Chapter  6 discusses Irish fiction in relation to the publishing markets in Ireland, Britain and the United States that are crucial for the writers’ careers. Writing in English, the Irish writers compete with other English-​language writers from Britain and the United States. In sociologist John Thompson’s (2010) major work on the publishing industry, two points stand out: the rise of the literary agent and the revolutionary role of digital technology in book publishing. In Ireland, writers who publish with Irish publishers work directly with the editors, while writers who publish in Britain and the United States have agents. As a part of making their careers, Irish writers learn that the acquisition and production processes vary greatly between Irish and British publishers. In the Irish literary world, it is more prestigious to publish in London and New York than in Ireland.

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As the literary world in Ireland is very small, there is a sense that ‘everyone knows everyone’ while publishers in Britain and the United States are part of global conglomerates that keep expanding where editors ‘buy books’ through bidding on the phone or email at auctions. The global conglomerates have links to Ireland. Varieties of translation is the topic of Chapter 7. It features instances of translation of Irish fiction both within and across media, the latter in what Bal and Morra (2007) call ‘intermedial translation’. There are cases of translations from image into text, as well as from text into film and musical production. A part of this is how, and to what extent, Irish writers ‘translate’ Irish concerns, or other historical and political events for an Irish readership on the one hand and on the other for a European, American even a global readership. What is it exactly that is translated? Writers who aim at an Irish readership do not have to explain certain Irish circumstances or notions (such as that Temple Bar is an entertainment area in Dublin, for example) while those who write for an international readership have to be less specific, more general in their style. This is something not all writers are aware that they do, but it has considerable consequences for their success as writers, whether they will make it internationally or not. Colm Tóibín’s novel The Testament of Mary (2012a) was translated into a play on Broadway, in London, and (in Spanish) in Barcelona. His novel Brooklyn (2009) was the basis for a film that first premiered in 2015. Drawing on crime novels by Benjamin Black (John Banville), a three-​part series called Quirke has been broadcast on RTÉ. As to media promotion, unlike their classic predecessors, contemporary writers have to be media savvy. Many have elaborate websites, some have fansites, while other writers have Facebook and Twitter accounts for their readers to get in touch, and eventually perhaps occasionally get replies from the writers. Readers can also comment on online newspaper articles. The relationships between writers and readers have changed considerably with new and social media. There is a kind of closeness now, at least with the writer’s public persona. As Irish emigration to America has defined so much of Irish life for such a long time, it is a recurrent topic in literature. There are many literary cases, ranging from loss and longing to displacement. No doubt Irish ethnicity is diversified, and has kept changing over time and in different contexts. Yet contrary to many other immigrant ethnicities, such as a Swedish-​American and German-​ American that have in large part faded away, Irishness is still visible in America. Following Hannerz and Gingrich’s (2017) analysis of the nature of small countries, the Republic of Ireland can be said to have two ‘binary constellations’. There are two Big Others: Britain, the former colonizer, still in many ways represents a lingering hegemony, while America represents hope. Supported by anthropological studies of Irish America (Byron 1999 among others), Chapter 8 suggests that in order to make sense of the hopes of Irish immigrants to America, fiction on this topic tends to deal with the past, whether the mid-​nineteenth century or the 1950s. This is a way to understand the present through the past. Joseph O’Connor’s historical novel Star of the Sea (2002) is a racy thriller story set on an overloaded ship in 1847, carrying emigrants away from the Great Famine in Ireland to New York. The novel Brooklyn (2009) by Colm Tóibín details the

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dilemma of a young woman, Eilis, in the 1950s Ireland who has to emigrate to get a job. In the end, the novel is a painful reminder about the legacy of leave-​ taking in Ireland. Literary cases representing America as hope inevitably include hardships as well. Still, the idea of hope prevails as emigration waves keep replacing each other. But, finally, examples abound conveying how experiences of emigration to America generate another hope –​the hope of going back home to Ireland. Irish writers working between Dublin and New York live in one of the cities, but spend a lot of time in the other. They often set their stories in both places, having protagonists move back and forth between them. And they do not comment on Irish concerns only, but also on American concerns intertwining them. One example of this is Colum McCann’s novel TransAtlantic (2013) which at first seems to consist of separate stories. Then it turns out that the real historical people and events that form the basic structure are connected over time and across the Atlantic through protagonists that McCann has invented. Starting with an account of emigration as intrinsic to Ireland, Chapter  9 discusses the role of Irish literature in the world and the world in Irish literature. The most fateful emigration was forced by the Great Famine in the mid-​nineteenth century when Ireland was still under British colonization. It is estimated that two million people had to leave the island while one million people starved to death. There was a loss of 20–​25 per cent of the population. Not even in the twenty-​first century has the population been on the same level numerically as it was before the Famine (Whelan 2005). For centuries, unemployment has led to emigration waves, yet return migration has increased, and there is a new immigration also of refugees (Brown 1985; Tovey and Share 2000; Titley, Kerr and King O’Rian 2010). This is beginning to make it into fiction, as commented on in Literary Visions of Multicultural Ireland (2014a) edited by Villar-​Argáiz. Writers have also left Ireland, and gone into exile in Europe, North America, Australia or New Zealand, many for political reasons. In The Irish Writer and the World, Declan Kiberd (2005a) discusses the impact of exile on Irish writers and of the diaspora on Ireland. A number of the writers live abroad regularly, in the United States or Europe, on writing residences or teaching creative writing at universities. They also go on extensive book tours launching their new books. For Colm Tóibín, travelling and living abroad is crucial as ‘some writers are in France, the United States, all you want is three writers who share the same jokes . . . How people know each other is through travelling!’ (Wulff 2010: 110). Meeting abroad for readings on panels at literary festivals is often when writers make friends with each other, or get to know each other better, and then continue these friendships back in Dublin. As to readership, apart from a general readership, there is a captive one for Irish contemporary fiction and journalism. It is the vast Irish diaspora communities: 80 million people identify with Irish descent outside Ireland.

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Chapter 1 T H E M AK ING OF A  W RI T E R: T R AINING AND C R E AT I V I T Y

‘Can writing be taught?’ is the challenging question that haunts university programmes and non-​academic workshops in creative writing. Replying to this question in an interview, John Banville told me: ‘You can be taught what not to do. But not what is needed –​dedication, ruthlessness, love of language, insights of tips you don’t really think about.’ There was consensus among the writers that certain formal technique can be taught, and can be useful even for those with a natural flair for writing. Many prominent writers have doctoral or master’s degrees in creative writing and frequently find themselves teaching this subject. Also, the number of programmes and workshops in creative writing is growing apace (Wulff 2012a). Still, the vast majority of graduates of creative writing programmes do not become professional fiction writers. There are those who try but fail to make a living as writers, or do not succeed as well or as soon as they would have hoped to, as novelists or short story writers. It is even more common that training in writing comes in handy in other lines of work ranging from social services to corporations, as well as journalism, media and communication –​generally any administrative task where writing a clear and convincing prose in reports and other documents is a valuable skill. Starting out by considering how creative writing is taught in Ireland in schools, at the university as well as in non-​academic workshops, this chapter moves on to a discussion on learning writing as a creative skill. This raises the issue of to what extent formal training and institutions –​while providing a structure and rules for learning to write –​might in fact risk limiting creativity. It is the making of a writer in Ireland that is under scrutiny here, including a closer look at the idea of creativity. Running through this chapter is the rhythms of writing in terms of technique versus creativity.

Teaching Creative Writing University degrees in creative writing were first set up in the United States in the late nineteenth century. In The Program Era (2009), literary scholar Mark McGurl traces the rise of creative writing degrees to the postwar expansion of

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higher education. In 1936, the renowned Iowa Writers’ Workshop was established at University of Iowa offering a master’s of fine arts (MFA) programme in creative writing. Many successful fiction writers from the United States and Europe were trained there. John Banville is one of them. With time, creative writing programmes were initiated also at European universities. In Britain, University of East Anglia started another influential programme in 1970. Anne Enright and Deirdre Madden are two of the Irish writers with a degree from there. It was in the early 1970s that the teaching of creative writing appeared in Ireland, at the annual Listowel Writers’ Week, leading to an upsurge in other non-​academic workshops. Since the late 1990s, creative writing courses have been available at universities in Ireland, and degree programmes are now proliferating there as at many other European universities. Creative writing has usually been based at English departments, which would be in line with the idea that this is a global Anglophone discipline (McGurl 2009; Ní Dhuibhne 2009, 2013; Dawe 2013). Yet, creative writing courses have extended into other languages, as well as in English: in Irish, Swedish, French and German in their respective countries. In Ireland, professional training thus begins at master’s and PhD programmes in creative writing at Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin, University College Cork and Queen’s University Belfast among other universities, as some graduates publish short stories, even novels. Non-​academic creative writing workshops taking place at writers’ festivals, or at community levels, are mainly attended by aspiring writers. In 2011, the first conference on Teaching and Learning Creative Writing in Ireland was convened at the Royal Irish Academy. It resulted in the volume Imagination in the Classroom (2013), edited by Anne Fogarty, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne and Eilbhear Walshe. The issue of whether creative writing can be taught was acknowledged there, too, but the main body of the discussion soon turned to focusing on how creative writing is taught. Connected to this was the intriguing issue of whether (and how, and when) creative writing can be evaluated. It is obvious that those writers who are engaged in teaching creative writing do not question the possibility of teaching writing, even though it happens that they are reminded of this discussion when some of their students are not doing very well at all, while others show what can only be identified as true talent. Teaching creative writing is common among the Irish writers not only in Ireland, but also abroad, especially in the United States. Some of them are invited to residencies at universities, and to teach master workshops at festivals and conferences. There are those who are fellows or lecturers, even professors in creative writing in Ireland. A standard syllabus would include literary genres ranging from the novel, short stories to drama and poetry. At non-​academic workshops, such as the Listowel Writers’ Week, the genres would also include popular fiction, screenplay, song writing, crime writing, storytelling, freelance journalism, memories into memoir and writing humour. Primarily, writers teach creative writing as a way to make a living, to support their own creative writing, but it often has the added advantage of an opportunity for marketing their own books. Students make up a captive audience, assigned to read books and to discuss them in class and in their exam papers. They are likely

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to come back to these books over the coming years, and to keep up with new books by their teacher in the future. To some extent, teaching can also provide inspiration for the writers’ own writing, as delivering lectures and having students discuss texts can generate fresh ideas. The university setting is in itself a topic for creative writing. University people figure in a few contemporary Irish novels. But it is unusual to set a whole novel in a university class, let alone a creative writing class at Trinity College Dublin –​yet this is what Claire Kilroy has done in the satire All Names Have Been Changed (2009). Kilroy is indeed a graduate of the very programme she is fictionalizing. The review in The Guardian captured the mood of the novel: Michaelmas Term, 1985. Dublin languishes in a fug of tobacco and poverty. Chucking in his factory job in Leeds and sneaking back without telling his ma, Declan joins the Trinity College creative writing class run, in theory, by his idol, the appalling genius Patrick Glynn. There are eight of them, ‘a shower of messers’ all in awe of the great Glynn, all vying for his erratic approval. Declan, narrating, tells us how their year wears on. Much Guinness is drunk, much whiskey. Souls are bared, hearts are broken. Novels are begun, savaged, abandoned. The weakest fall by the way. (Greenland 2009)

The novel depicts this creative writing programmes as a dubious activity. Perhaps it is intended as a ridicule of any writing programme, academia on the whole, even (surprisingly in light of the fact that Kilroy is a writer with a reputation in Ireland) writing as a profession, at least in relation to famous writers (Wulff 2012a).

Early Training The making of an Irish writer is supported by a school system where creative writing is taught already at school. Two organizations stand out here: the Writers in School Scheme and Fighting Words, the creative writing centre established and run by Roddy Doyle. Writers who have published one book or more commercially, with national distribution, are qualified for the Writers in Schools Scheme. Funded by the Arts Council of Ireland (and the schools), this scheme is run by Poetry Ireland, an organization that also hosts literary festivals, readings and writing competitions, and publishes literary journals.1 Poetry Ireland is a major institution in the Irish literary world, not least because it is in charge of the Writers in Schools Scheme with about 250 writers and storytellers. They go to primary and secondary schools either on a three-​hour single visit or a residency for eight–​ten weeks, when the writer teaches one class about once a week. The scheme involves literary genres such as short stories and novels as well as poems and drama. Even storytelling is there –​oral tradition continues to influence the writing of literature in Ireland. In an interview, Jane O’Hanlon, the Education Officer of the Writers in Schools Scheme, talked about writing in Ireland and said that ‘we think in stories, we’re natural storytellers also in song, dance, music’ and ‘you can’t get away

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from our history.’ What she meant was that storytelling used to be the only way to ‘preserve our identity’ during colonialism, and that the habit of telling stories has stayed with Irish people. On a bleak January Monday in Dublin, I  was joining Siobhán Parkinson, a prominent and prolific writer of childrens’ books, as she was going on a visit to a primary school in a working-​class area. As we entered the classroom of 9–​10-​ year-​old pupils, it was immediately evident that this writer was a great teacher. There were six boys (one of them African) and four girls, all in school uniform –​ red sweat shirts with the school emblem and grey trousers –​looking somewhat reserved. But Parkinson began by asking about what they watched on television, and they opened up. They felt her empathy for them, and that she had an interest in their world. ‘What do you read?’ she went on. ‘Did you read any of my books?’ But none of the pupils seemed to have read any of them. They started mentioning other books, and then a red-​haired boy announced that he had read two books over the weekend. ‘What do you have to have in a story?’ Parkinson is getting down to the writing now. As she is talking to them, she half-​sits on the desk they are at. There is no teacher’s desk, just a small whiteboard on the wall. ‘Storyline!’ the red-​haired boy suggests. He is quick and sharp. ‘Plot!’ a girl adds. ‘Plan!’ another boy interjects. ‘Beginning –​ middle –​ end!’ ‘Characters!’

The children light up, they are soon absorbed by the class. It is obvious that they really enjoy it. All of them are completely focused on Parkinson. Also they clearly have done this before. They know terms such as ‘storyline’ and ‘editor’. Parkinson moves on: ‘Characters can do the stuff! A famous American writer, Henry James, said that ‘plot and character are like needle and thread’. ‘Why would a reader go on reading the story?’ she asks and tells a story about a car accident, one taking place in Lithuania, one in Birmingham and one just outside the school. Her argument is ‘the last one is the one that we would care about, the closet one’. As she talks, she rises, and starts speaking with her whole body, and face, waving arms, raising and lowering her voice to make points. Soon she is writing on the whiteboard: ‘Beginning: the action –​Middle: something happens, it gets worse, gets worse again, gets worse again –​End: the problem is solved.’ And she explains: You drop in little clues as you go along, so the reader thinks he or she is really intelligent. The best way to begin a story is action, action, action. Think about the character in the group! What would your character have in the back pack?

Having divided themselves in two groups, boys in one, girls in the other, the pupils are writing now. Parkinson goes from group to group, asking how it goes, talking

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about how it goes. The groups are happily chatting away, making up stories, characters. The red-​haired boy asks ‘Can we start out with a nightmare?’ Parkinson agrees, but moves the story of the boys’ group about a car chase with cops and a lot of shooting towards a happy ending. ‘There has to be a few adventures before the boy in the story goes home,’ she urges. One of the other boys is writing the story, doing his best following the quick oral pace. Two of the boys start fighting with rulers. Parkinson goes over to them and tells them firmly ‘Put those down!’ Addressing the whole group, she says: ‘Lets hear the girls’ story!’ One of the girls volunteers:  ‘Kelly lives in a house on a mountain and she auditions at a music school.’ ‘You need to write out four–​five events! You need to make it worse and worse, build up a tension! It gets worse and worse and worse!’ Parkinson admonishes. ‘They make a band’ the girl goes on. She enumerates the events: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Kelly auditions The enemy girl wins competition Kelly and enemy girl Ashley become friends They have a fight They become a band at the end, they make friends at the end

‘Now each one of you write out one scene and describe it really lively, make it come alive,’ Parkinson says. One girl does the writing, shy but enthralled, as the others take turn contributing one sentence each. The writing girl writes almost a page: ‘We’re ready!’ One of the other girls reads it aloud to the group, and Parkinson says: ‘That’s great but what you have there is the stuff –​not the story.’ The girl who does the writing writes on, the others start playing with a pen box and an eraser. But the ding-​dong-​dong sound of the school bell interrupts them. Parkinson tells the pupils they have to stop. They all look disappointed and sad. Parkinson concludes by saying that they had been very good, and that they had made a lot of progress since they started an hour and fifteen minutes ago. Afterwards I talked to Siobhán Parkinson about the class, and she told me: It’s important to develop the children’s language skills, to teach them to make lists, to collaborate. They are much more competitive than they normally think at school. Here they don’t have to be. The idea is to collaborate. The difficulty the children has is the transition to the written from the verbal expression. If I try to explain, they never get it. If we do it on a computer –​they get it!

She pointed at the necessity of rhythm: ‘Once in a mystery they had written: “and the window was opening and closing.” I added “. . . and opening and closing and opening and closing.” ’ Then she paused and changed her tone of voice: ‘I don’t follow the rules for writing that I teach the pupils as I know how to do it. They need structure.’ I was also able to interview the girl who had done the writing. She came originally from Bulgaria and had lived for six years in Ireland. As expected from a pupil who writes well, she was a devoted reader of children’s books (primarily

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by Jaqueline Wilson) that she borrowed from the school library or bought at the school fair. She was truly enthusiastic about the creative writing class: ‘It was great because the teacher was explaining very well and we were all girls in the group. I liked it very very much! We were working together as a team and we made up a story. When we came back we had to do Maths.’ Contextualizing the creative writing class in a pedagogical perspective, two observations emerge: on the one hand, the great enthusiasm of these young pupils and, on the other, their short attention. It is often noted that teaching benefits from small classes, as the teacher is then able to relate to pupils as individuals. Tailoring comments directly for individuals makes for efficient teaching. Interestingly, the basic components of this class: the importance of reading in order to learn how to write, the beginning-​middle-​end organization of a story with action that builds and builds and then is resolved in one way or another, the character-​plot-​place (and point of view and style) elements, and editing all appear as standard elements of any creative writing class at all levels. Key is encouragement, as are suggestions for improvement phrased in a positive tone. It was a rainy February morning a few years later that I  made my way to Fighting Words, located in a housing estate in a working-​class area in Dublin. This creative writing centre for children and young adults was established by Roddy Doyle in 2009. Up until 2013, more than 40,000 primary and secondary-​ school pupils, as well as older people, had visited the centre. Drawing on his success as a writer (both economically and in terms of reputation), in combination with being raised in a working-​class area of Dublin (in a middle-​class family) and a strong urge to make the skill of writing widely available, Doyle’s mission is to offer tutoring in creative writing for free, and to help children publish their texts. The centre is modelled on the non-​profit writing centre 826 National in San Francisco (there are several in the United States), and has in turn inspired other centres such as Berättarministeriet (‘the ministry of storytelling’) in Stockholm. To name the creative writing centre Fighting Words with the slogan ‘the right to write’ has a double meaning as it is signalling a political agenda for social justice and personal liberation through writing. Fighting Words organizes storytelling fieldtrips for pupils in primary schools, creative writing workshops for secondary-​school pupils and workshops set up for adults. Professional writers are engaged as teachers, also secondary-​school teachers (some of them are retired), journalists and students as volunteers. The focus at Fighting Words is on ‘character development, dialogue, plot, and on the importance of editing –​ editing as a form of, and help to, creativity’ as it says on the website. The centrality of editing in the writing process came back when I interviewed Roddy Doyle. We were talking about his strict writing schedule. He told me how he, a committed family man, keeps office hours Monday to Friday in his attic study at home. But when it is time for editing then ‘I’m a bit obsessed!’ Only editing can make him work into the night or on a Saturday morning.2 Before moving on, let us note that Roddy Doyle (2013) started out as a secondary-​school teacher –​eventually, because of his success as a writer, he was able to write full

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time. It is noteworthy that he has an aversion against regulated institutional teaching for children. In his view, this might constrain creativity. He elaborates on this in the book chapter ‘Write first, worry later: fostering creativity in the classroom.’ What follows here is a composite of my fieldnotes from my visit to Fighting Words and Roddy Doyle’s own chapter about his writing centre. At first I was a bit hesitant about merging my simple notes with Doyle’s eloquent text, but I decided to go ahead with it. In any case, it should be quite clear what sentences I have put together from my fieldnotes and interviews, and what sections originate in Doyle’s chapter. If in her endeavour to reach the children, Siobhán Parkinson was as playful as she was allowed in the classroom setting, a session at the Fighting Words is a truly theatrical experience which draws you in, no matter your age. Doyle opens his chapter with a scene from Fighting Words as he ‘watched a class of nine-​year-​ old girls as they wrote a story, together. They sat on little bean-​bags, in front of a big screen’ (Doyle 2013: 35). The wonder of reading is emphasized already in the entrance to Fighting Words. There are colourful bookshelves filled with books along the wall. A group of expectant children is looking around this surprisingly small space: But then, once they’d all been photographed, the first piece of magic occurred. An adult –​a Fighting Words volunteer asked them to lean against a bookshelf, and it swung open. It was actually a hidden door, and now they saw the bigger room, the real room, the screen and the bean-​bags. It began to make more sense. (Doyle: 2013: 38)

And the children sit down in front of the screen. It is their page. I am in the back with a group of volunteers –​young and old, men and women –​who are going to assist the children later when they write individually. A volunteer is sitting at a laptop, beside the screen ‘ready to write their words’. Another volunteer is standing in front of the screen and the children. Instead of urging ‘write anything you want,’ she asks, ‘What do all good stories have?’ (Doyle 2013: 39): ‘Scary things!’ ‘Full stops!’ ‘Characters!’

So the children agree on a main character out of ‘sharks, pigs, doughnuts, leprechauns, gorilla boys. Bananas are popular’. But they cannot start the story just yet. First they are ‘introduced to one more character’: the editor, a cranky woman or man, called depending on which staff member is behind the wall in the Fighting Words office that particular morning, Missus, or Mister, McConkey. McConkey doesn’t think that children can write good stories, hates being interrupted, and threatens to sack the volunteer if the kids don’t come up with a good story. McConkey is always a hit. (Doyle 2013: 39)

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The children compose the story together sentence by sentence that come up on the screen as the volunteer by the laptop writes them. A lot of laughing and joking drives their shared endeavour. What comes up on the screen is often hilarious. The children trigger each other. After about an hour, the woman volunteer in front of the screen who is chairing the exercise concludes that part of the session. The children then move over to tables where they finish the story individually on paper. They each get a printout of their screen story stapled together and with space for their own endings. Then the session concludes by the little booklets being given to McConkey through a hatch in the wall. McConkey reads out the shared story and some of the individual endings. ‘He –​she –​has changed his mind. Children can write stories. Each child goes home with his or her own book’ (Doyle 2013: 40, 43). It is Roddy Doyle’s contention that even though ‘writing is a solitary occupation –​ eventually’ if it begins ‘as a collective exercise, a bit of fun, almost a piece of theatre’ when the young writers go to the tables and start writing by themselves, their texts are already better and more confident. To produce a booklet to bring home is obviously a crucial and lasting part of the writing experience. A lot of work is put into finding channels for publication at Fighting Words. Their website comes in handy here, blogs are a quick way to publish and get exposure. It happens that stories composed at Fighting Words make it into commercial publishing, such as the collection of fifteen essays edited by Roddy Doyle titled Fighting Words:  Stories by Transition Year Students from Coláiste Dhúlaigh (a post-​primary school in Dublin) and published by the New Island Open Door in Dublin in 2011. (See also ­chapter 6 in the anthology Fighting Tuesdays.)

Training for a Possible Profession It is no surprise that university courses and workshops in creative writing for adults entail more and more complex exercises than those offered to children, including theoretical attention to narrative structure. Another major difference compared with the children’s classes is that university students are required to read novels and short stories by professional writers which they are then expected to analyse in class. So here is a class at an MFA course in creative writing of fiction at University College Dublin. The topic is short story writing, and there are seven committed students around a table, male and female. The teacher, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, is renowned for her short stories, novels and plays both in English and in Irish. Just like Parkinson, she is an engaging teacher, but also a role model for her students as they are young adults. They have chosen this education in the hope of starting a career in writing of some sort, or at least be able to make use of a writing skills in their working life which will soon start. So they are completely focused the whole time. Contrary to young school children, master’s students are aware of the possible outcome of this training. Teaching creative writing at the master’s level should ideally entail that ‘you set up a supportive but critically robust environment

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that allows students to learn from their peers and their peer’s work’ (Morrissey (2013: 139)). The goal is to teach the students self-​editing for that time when they will work on their own. Ní Dhuibhne has read all stories in advance and prepared comments. But before she shares them, one female student starts reading her story. First the other students respond in an appreciative way, and then Ní Dhuibhne makes the more substantial commentary about style, structure and storyline –​complimenting and correcting. Most comments are phrased in terms of adjusting to the reader. When they read their short pieces aloud, the students vary in their ability to perform the texts. This impacts on how they are received by everyone –​except by Ní Dhuibhne, as she already formed an opinion when she read the stories beforehand. The students seem to work hard, they have all written a text for the class and are eager to present it. After a while, one of the girls arises as the top writer in the class. Even though she reads somewhat shyly, her story comes across as the best. It is a well-​ organized ghost story, written in a lucid style as it features suspense and surprise. Writing competitions at all levels abound in Ireland, and probably play a role in what can be identified as a massive writing movement going back in history. As a part of her teaching, Ní Dhuibhne advises promising students to submit their novels and short stories to competitions, and they often win. This entails not only publication, but also promotion in connection with a prize ceremony that is reported on in newspapers, television and social media. The volume Surge: New Writing from Ireland (2014) features short stories by graduates from university programmes in creative writing across Ireland, as well as by teachers. In the proliferation of workshops in creative writing in Dublin has also been a workshop referred to as the Writers Group. It started as a part of a class Ní Dhuibhne taught at Trinity College Dublin when she was Writer Fellow in the Oscar Wilde Centre there in 2004–​2005. The Writers Group met once a month in order to discuss each other’s essays and poems. Eight people, five men and two women, most of them in their forties and fifties, a couple in their twenties, took turns commenting on each other’s essays. Some of them had published one or two novels or short stories, but most of them had not yet found their outlet. They were still aspiring writers in that sense. One of the participants, Kevin McDermott, used to be a secondary-​school teacher but had moved to work with Navan Educational Centre, a governmental secondary-​level support service where he organized courses for English teachers, called ‘The Teacher as Writer’ where one emphasis is on oracity, on storytelling as ‘this is still a very oral culture, people make jokes, people tell stories’. According to McDermott ‘the best writers have an ability to recreate the way people speak’. Referring to the fact that English teachers come to their profession out of a ‘love of literature’, he went on to say that ‘we try to encourage teachers to think of writing in a conversational way, a craft to be learnt, not as something magical’. The Writers Group resembled the workshop on short stories I attended at the legendary Listowel Writers’ Week in the west of Ireland. The difference was that the Listowel workshop only lasted for a few intense days, and the participants were probably more of occasional writers, some almost beginners, that took the

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workshop for fun rather than with any serious thoughts or even aspirations of becoming professional writers. But the age range with a focus on middle age was the same as in the Writers Group, and so was the generous ambiance, coupled with enthusiasm and curiosity for writing. The teacher, Mary Morrissey, with a background in journalism, and an established fiction writer, taught the workshop with warmth and a sense of humour. She recommended the book Writing without Teachers (1998) by Peter Elbow (one of many ‘how-​to’ books in this growing genre) as it argues for ‘non-​stop or free uncensored writing’ in order to get going. So our first exercise was to write a diary text for ten minutes without lifting our pens, a text we were not to read aloud or show anyone. This is one way of getting started. ‘The cure for writing is writing,’ Morrissey pointed out, and matter-​of-​ factly: ‘Bum on seat and pen in hand! You have to write an awful lot badly before you write well!’ As a way to concentrate, her expression: ‘Declutter your mind!’ has stayed with me. Later we did a number of other exercises, such as writing a portrait of a person based on an interview about dreams, fears, joys with the person sitting next to us, and then put this person as a character into a story. We were also asked to compile a list of adjectives that might be useful for a story on ‘The Millenium Ball’ and then chose from the list for our individual stories. And Morrissey asked us to write a story inspired by a picture of the painting of a pair of old shoes by Van Gogh. ‘Put the editor in another room for the time being,’ Morrissey urged us, ‘in order to be creative!’ She talked about the trend to use poetry as a starting point for short fiction –​to learn from poetry, as poetry is short fiction compressed. The Listowel workshop was much appreciated by the participants. It was defined as a leisure activity for people who had other jobs but harboured some sort of writing ambition. Just like community workshops in creative writing, this one was like a laboratory where imagination and personal transformation matter more than public consumption, as Perry (2013) has said. There was a lightheartedness about it which probably had to do with the fact that we were not going to be graded. Mary Morrissey did not read our texts, we did not have to hand them in to her. She just listened and commented to those of us who volunteered taking turns reading what we had written to the group. In the book chapter ‘Grading Creativity’ Morrissey (2013: 136) brings up the issue of how to grade creative writing. She goes back to her first shocking experience of this, when she was a visiting fellow at a university in the United States. There she gave a student a C grade for one story which was a part of her final assessment. But the student did not accept this. She bombarded Morrissey with abusive, even threatening emails suggesting that she and her boyfriend knew where she lived and might come over to deal with her. Morrissey would have let this go as an odd incident of no importance, but several years earlier, a student in that English department, ‘enraged by poor grades, had shot dead a professor before turning the gun on himself ’.3 This was, of course, an highly exceptional case, but it is nevertheless a dramatic illustration of the difference in grading undergraduates and postgraduates, both in the United States and in Ireland, Morrissey (2013: 139, 140) says, ‘as there is a vocational component in a Master’s level course’. These students should be treated as setting out on a writing career, even though most of them will not actually become professional writers.

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Aware that she is ‘awarding raw talent’ which cannot be taught only nurtured, she realizes that she is exposing her master’s students to the same mechanisms as those professional writers are facing ‘subjective reactions from editors, reviewers and readers’. She finds that she evaluates the students’ writing in terms of her own taste and possible marketability. The market is by definition driving evaluative practices in creative industries, as Moeran and Christensen (2013: 38–​9) show through various examples from publishing, fashion, design, film and music. It goes without saying that people who work in cultural production have to make an assessment of how a new product such as a book manuscript in publishing would fit in relation to other books he or she is publishing that year as well as in relation to similar books that are coming out with competing publishers. Moeran and Christensen (2013: 8) apply Howard Becker’s (2008) notion of ‘editorial moments’ which refers to ‘the actual choices made by different people at different stages during the performance of a creative work’. This is what actually constitutes evaluative practices. There are constraints such as time, place and social relations, as well as money and ‘aesthetic visions of a particular product’ that is negotiated with colleagues and evaluators, potential buyers and audiences that in fact can generate creativity. As Keith Sawyer (2013) concludes in an afterword to Moeran and Christensen’s volume: evaluative practices are essential for creative work. In addition to learning how to compose texts, the prospective writer has to learn how to operate on the publishing market, in the politics of publishing. We return to this discussion in Chapter 6.

Crafting Creativity Ireland has long been associated with a creative vein expressed through storytelling, literature, music and dance (Wulff 2007a; Cashman 2009). Flourishing creativity tends to be explained in social theory as a reaction against political repression. In line with this, Ireland’s 400 years of colonization would underlie this creativity, but it is noteworthy that oral storytelling and literary accounts existed before that. Going back to the question ‘Can writing be taught?’ and John Banville’s pithy reply that ‘dedication, ruthlessness, love of language, insight of tips you don’t really think about’ are essential but cannot be taught, these characteristics are either there, in a person, or not. Still, writers, and other artists, are well aware that these qualities have to be nurtured in order to thrive. In the worlds of art and performance (even sports), there is an indigenous dichotomy between those practitioners who have a ‘natural talent’ or a ‘good body’ and those who possess ‘the right mentality’ or ‘determination’. In the highly specialized world of ballet, for instance, both qualities are necessary, ‘a good body’ and ‘determination’ in order to make it. Still, it can happen that to the wonder of ballet directors and coaches dancers who do not have the ideal physicality for ballet are able through strict training and diet schemes to rise to leading dancers, if not to the absolute top (Wulff 1998: 104). Identifying the importance for athletes and pianists, of having a body of certain proportions, ethnomusicologist John Blacking (1977:  23)  noted that

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‘a mysterious quality such as determination or will may help a less adequate body to perform better than expected’. Determination and willpower thus unite sports, dancing and writing, but there is another element in the work routine in the ballet world that can illuminate the making of creative writing. Ballet and dance are valued by ballet people (choreographers, dancers, audiences and critics) according to two criteria:  technique and artistry. In ballet, rehearsals take place in a studio with walls covered by large mirrors. The mirrors are there to show the dancers what the steps look like when they are doing them. The dancers thus learn the feel of a step executed correctly as they can check in the mirror what their bodies look like then. This is how the technique, the steps, of a certain ballet, is learnt. But when the premiere is getting closer, a long curtain is drawn in front of the mirror hiding it. The dancers have to forget what they look like, the technique, and start expressing themselves. This is when artistry springs up, and is taken further later on stage with an audience present. Liberated from the mirror, they start telling a story through their steps. At best this is when a dancer is lifted into flow. This does not happen at every performance, seldom during an entire three-​hour performance. More often it happens in sudden unpredictable zones (Wulff 1998: 8). So if a dancer, just like a writer, can be said to have to forget the technique in order to create artistry, this also applies to the ballet audience or a book reader: as long as the audience or the readers are trying to figure out the technique of the dancer or the writer, they are prevented from experiencing the artistry. In an interview with Vanessa Fox O’Loughlin (2014) for the online magazine writing.ie, Mary Costello (2014) talked about how she moved from writing short stories to writing a novel, Academy Street (2014) (which is discussed in greater detail in Chapter 8) in relation to intuition and technique: I didn’t find the experience of writing the novel all that different to writing a short story, apart from the time span. You still have to be patient and keep faith with the story. You’re trying to do the characters justice, trying to get the voice and the tone right, and do the best writing you possibly can, word by word, sentence by sentence. And, as in a story, you’re hoping it will ‘take’. There’s an element of intuition involved, so I don’t actively think about structure or, ‘apply’ technique in case it all falls in. Anyway I’m not sure I’d know how.

Creativity tends to be seen as a positive, free-​flowing force. But what about constraints to creativity? Writer’s block, for example, would be a very concrete constraint. Strategies to get out of writer’s block are taught at creative writing courses spanning from the advice to stay away from writing for a day to the ‘free writing’ used by Mary Morrisssey in the workshop described earlier. Among some writers in the study, there was an anxiety about getting stuck which came up during informal conversations, but mostly the writers just continued to write no matter what. In an interview with Roddy Doyle, I asked him if he gets writer’s block. His was a frank reply:

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No. There are times when things are not going well. I just write through them! If I weren’t working particularly well –​I keep writing. Later I read through it, if I see it’s a bit messy, some of it you can use.

It is obvious that the strength of creative writing programmes and workshops is to offer training in the technique of writing from simple down-​to-​earth advice such as to start writing in the morning without checking emails (or social media) to develop an editorial eye for style and structure. This can be taught and learnt, but not automatically the artistry, the creativity. Regardless of taste for style and genres, there are ‘natural’ writers, while other writers can practice until they become rather good writers. Yet acquiring the techniques of creative writing does not as a matter of course release original textual creativity. Technique is how far creative writing is likely to be taught. It accentuates the question of how to conceptualize creativity. In Creativity and Cultural Improvisation (2007), Hallam and Ingold consider the concept of creativity, and how to define it. Looking at early twentieth-​century philosophical thought, they argue that creativity can be regarded ‘on one hand as the production of novelty through the recombination of already extant elements, or on the other, as process of growth, becoming and change’ (Hallam and Ingold 2007: 16). In order to put together such a ‘recombination of extant elements’ creatively in writing, which might include adding one or two new parts, the technique has to be honed and the parts carefully selected to suit a certain context. There is, or was, an assumed connection between creativity and individual talent, skill, even ‘genius’, producing art on his or her own, at least in the past. None of the writers in the study was referred to as a ‘genius’ (except for the professor in Keegan’s satire), but there was a ‘master’. This designation was assigned with respect and admiration, certainly gratefully to the late Nobel laureate poet Seamus Heaney who died in 2013 at the age of seventy-​four. A master would be someone at the end of a brilliant career, and in Heaney’s case, this designation can be explained by his poetic treatment of the conflict in Northern Ireland, but also of familial relations, of experiencing disaster and dealing with it. He captured an essence of Irish life for almost half a century. Heaney’s gregarious personality, and his generosity to media and the public, most likely played a role in his widespread success. Like the fiction writers in this study, he worked long hours on his own, incidentally in a house without a phone, on the outskirts of Dublin. And just like the fiction writers, Heaney discussed his work with his writer friends. Comments on literary ideas and drafts by writer friends and other friends were crucial in the Irish literary world. A friend’s honest interest can even help shift a writer’s block into creativity. The novel Molly Fox’s Birthday (2008: 54, 61, 32, 42) by Deirdre Madden circles around the writer’s block a woman playwright is suffering from as her previous play, ‘my nineteenth had been an unprecedented disaster’. (Unprecedented success can also generate a writer’s block especially after a breakthrough with a debut novel.) For now the playwright has borrowed a house in Dublin from her friend Molly, an actor who is away in New York avoiding her birthday, in order to write

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a new play. But the playwright is procrastinating as ‘now I was beginning to realise how severely damaged my confidence had been’ by her recent failure. In the morning, she recalls that ‘I knew that by this time I should go upstairs and get to work, but couldn’t bring myself to do so. Instead I made another cup of coffee and took it out to the back garden’. After quite some time ‘the morning was moving along but I wasn’t moving with it. I would have been happy to sit there for at least another hour just thinking about the past, but I knew that if I let more time slip away, I would regret it later’. So she climbs the stairs to the study and I spent what was left of the morning working, that is to say, given that it was the early stages of a new project, that I spent the morning wool-​gathering, staring out of the window into the back garden, reading over my notebooks, writing things down and then crossing them out again moments later; and all the time thinking about the man with the hare. (Madden 2008: 52)

It was a memory of a man holding a hare that she had observed on a tram in Munich that kept coming back to her. Here Madden can be said to have developed the legend about the hare symbolizing an old woman in Irish folklore into a female figure of strength and ability, of creativity (Ní Dhuibhne 1993; Wulff 2009a). It turns out that this scene triggers the playwright’s creativity, but the man with the hare would curiously not appear in the play. As she explains, ‘I knew that by going through them, by grasping imaginatively something about them, I would be able to get at what I needed to know and then I would be able to write the play’ (Madden 208: 54). Later that day, Andrew, an old friend from university arrives on an unexpected visit. As they sit companionably in the garden drinking wine and talking about old times, he asks carefully about her work ‘if I might?’ and if she ‘felt able to say what it was about?’ That puts her back on track: All day when I had tried to think of my work I had felt a kind of panic, and the more this gripped me the less able I had been to think straight. Instead of one idea opening into another, growing and developing, I had watched my thoughts close down, like some computer system into which a terrible virus had entered, blocking, deleting, destroying, irrevocably. Now I  felt no panic whatsoever. (Madden 2008: 171)

Contrary to a growing trend in academia, the writers in the study did not co-​ author texts. That would go against the acute ambition to make a name for yourself as a writer. In any case, they were probably too much of individualist creators to compromise over how to put together a text. The crime novel Sister Caravaggio (2014) edited by Peter Cunningham is one rare instance of as close as they would get to co-​authoring. The book has seven c­ hapters –​one each by the late Maeve Binchy, Peter Cunningham, Neil Donnelly, Cormac Millar, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Mary O’Donnell and Peter Sheridan  –​but it does not say which chapter each author wrote. Not even the writers know more than their own. The writing process

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was a relay: a writer would get what had been written that far, just continue from there, and then leave what he or she had written to the next writer. On an analytical level, the point here is that a writer’s creativity does not arise in total isolation. In line with Howard Becker’s (2008) argument, all artists, also writers, are included in art worlds where various people contribute to the production of art work. It can be friends as in the novel by Madden, and ‘other writers, agents, publishers, and critics, as well as readers, are among these people who can be said to contribute to how creative writing is composed’ (Wulff 2012a: 542). This is well illustrated in the acknowledgements to Let the Great World Spin (2009) by Colum McCann where he expresses his gratitude to many different people: This particular story owes enormous thanks to many –​the police officers who drove me around the city; the donors who patiently answered my questions; the computer technicians who guided me through the labyrinth; and all of those who helped me during the writing and editing process. The fact of the matter is that there are many hands tapping the writer’ s keyboard. (McCann 2009: 351)

The establishment of creative writing courses in Ireland in the early 1970s coincided with the ‘transformation of Ireland from an oral culture, in which storytelling provided a valid and important outlet for the narrative and poetic impuses of ‘uneducated’ people, to a literary one’ as pointed out by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne (2013: 13, 17). She also considers the fact that her generation of teachers of creative writers in Irish universities, now mid-​career fiction writers, never was formally trained. Ironically, those few writers who went abroad for an MFA have tended not to be involved in teaching creative writing on a more regular basis. Most teachers of creative writing are ‘instinctive writers, or perhaps more accurately, autodidacts, who have learnt by reading’. Like many Irish writers, Ní Dhuibhne has a degree in English. On the topic of starting out as a writer, she says: ‘I learned by imitation and practice, as people of my father’s generation learnt to drive, without the benefit of formal lessons or even a handbook outlining the rules of the road.’ Learning by imitation was incidentally also how John Banville described to me how he learnt to write, despite the fact that he spent time at the creative writing programme at University of Iowa: I was 12-​13-​14 something like that. My brother was teaching in Africa and he gave me a copy of Ulysses. I had not realized writing could be life as I knew it –​ I wrote immensely, incredibly bad imitations. I’m still learning, with a bit of luck I might learn to write soon . . . I worked as a journalist all my life –​copyediting at night. It’s a hard life but I could write exactly what I wanted. It’s foolhearted by young writers to think they can support themselves on writing.

Pulling together the issues in this chapter, it is obvious that an understanding of how an Irish writer is made can be related to the exponential growth of institutional initiatives, ranging from the Writer in Schools Scheme and Fighting Words for children and teenagers to university degrees and non-​academic

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workshops for students and aspiring adult writers. But this goes back to the extensive storytelling tradition. Irish fiction writing happens to a great deal through informal ‘situated learning’ as Lave and Wenger (1991) suggest:  a skill is learnt by observing and interacting with professional practitioners. In Ireland, writing fiction is learnt by spending time in settings (homes, schools, places of work, pubs) where writing is performed as a matter of course, and discussed as a part of daily life. Not only professional writers engage in creative writing in Ireland, so do many other people more or less openly, more or less ambitiously. The Irish are a people of the pen. Writing can indeed be taught. That is, anyone can learn structure and style, the technique which is the basics, the point of departure. When a writer knows the technique so well that he or she does not have to think about it –​that is when the creativity is released.

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Chapter 2 P ATHS A ND P ROF ILE S:  I N S E ARC H OF R E C O GN I T ION

When a writer has been published, a first book might entail a breakthrough, but it often takes more than one novel or collection of short stories to make a name. Some writers are established in Ireland with Irish publishers before they venture out into an international market. This tends to mean being published first by British publishers, and second by American publishers that have a global reach. Still, there are Irish writers who publish regularly with British publishers, but do not really make it outside Britain. In this chapter, the idea of rhythms of writing relates to the different phases of a writer’s career from breakthrough to acquiring recognition, yet having to deal with drawbacks.1 In many cases, of course, a writer’s reputation lives on after his or her death. Seamus Heaney (who died during my research period) would be a case in point. Otherwise, writers’ recognition varied depending on the path that includes a profile they have built that to some extent also is ascribed to them by journalistic critics, literary scholars and publishers. Gender and generation are often at play in the profiles. As to a definition of career, the one by Ulf Hannerz (2004: 72) pertaining to that of foreign correspondents captures our purposes here: A career, as I use the notion here, is a path through life; but I do not assume that it can be entirely planned or predicted or that it always moves in some sense upward. It involves intentions as well as contingencies. We may be inclined to associate the idea of career mostly with working life, but the concept can be extended to other domains of life, as well, such as domesticity:  being single, teaming up with a partner or a succession of them, rearing children, perhaps being single again. And careers in different domains have a way of becoming entangled with one another. One fact, however, is basic to a concept of career: it entails passages, shifts, changes, discontinuities, phases.2

Incidentally, it was mostly women writers who talked about their writing career in relation to family life. As in Evelyn Conlon’s case ‘her trajectory as a woman writer with two children is the classic one:  it wasn’t until they were coming into their teenage years that her writing career could really take off ’ (Devlin-​Glass 2013). Roddy Doyle was an exception as a male writer who talked about how he organized his writing day in order to match his children’s school schedule: once he had

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sent them off to school by 8.30 in the morning, he climbed the stairs to his study in the attic and wrote all day with one or two breaks (including watching the BBC football page), until the children came back home in the afternoon. For our analytical understanding, it is useful to try to find categories here even though categories tend not to be totally isolated from each other, but often overlap to some extent. During my research, I asked writers to identify ‘different categories of writers, different career paths’. They all distinguished between writers with a national reputation, on the one hand, and those with an international reputation, on the other, but some also mentioned young aspiring writers with a master’s degree in creative writing who have published one book or are in the process of looking for a publisher for a first book. Taking this categorization as a point of departure, and including my observations, I was able to put together five basic types of career paths: first, writers who published in both Irish and English which usually entailed that they mostly worked with publishers in Ireland but had some international publications, second, writers who published in English only and mainly with publishers in Ireland but had a few novels and short stories with British or other international publishers, third, writers with an international reputation who almost exclusively published internationally, fourth, writers who had moved to the United States where they had achieved international success. A fifth category would be writers in Northern Ireland who publish in Britain rather than in the Republic of Ireland. In addition, there is a substantial group of writers who lived in Ireland but spent periods of time in the United States, mostly New York. There were occasions such as reading panels at literary festivals in Ireland where writers from all these categories would appear together, yet writers with an international reputation, whether based in Ireland or North America, were in many ways the same category, even though their paths were not quite overlapping. As they published with the same publishers in Britain and the United States they were often invited to do readings or interviews together, at literary festivals and other events in Europe and the United States. They were in the same network and might suggest each other as speakers for panels if asked. Writers who primarily published in Ireland, on the other hand, stuck together and were often identified as belonging to the same network by publishers, scholars, journalists and festival organizers. In line with the argument in Chapter 8, that Ireland is a small country (but with a global impact through its literature), the literary world is certainly small and everyone does indeed know everyone, at least they know of each other. It comes as no surprise that some writers know and like each other better than others, and that such feelings might change over the course of many years, often with change in success. Crucially, writers tend to move in circles of about the same level of fame, except for one or two young aspiring writers who might be invited to spend some time with more famous colleagues. These young writers are often ex-​students of an established writer who takes on the role of mentor even after a creative writing course or programme degree is finished, coaching her or him not least through introductions to publishers. As mentioned in Chapter 1, only a few of the senior writers in the study had degrees in creative writing themselves, even though, most of them were teaching workshops, courses and/​or programmes, at least the occasional

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master’s class. Attending creative writing programmes is thus a way to start building networks that can last for decades. Literary societies also provide occasions for networking such as the Aosdána (academy of artists and writers), the Royal Irish Academy, and in Britain the Royal Society of Literature to which some of the Irish writers have been elected. It also turns out that networks from working as a journalist can be helpful for a literary career. Ex-​colleagues from journalism may take an extra interest in seeing to it that a new book is reviewed, and that there are feature articles about its author. In what follows here, two writers represent one type of the four career paths in order to indicate varieties within the paths, and, again, there are overlaps between them. It should be pointed out that this chapter explores career paths as they were at the time of my research and writing up. They may well change later on, and in a longer perspective, at different points in a European or Western literary history, be reassessed.3

Breaking Through For writers based in Ireland, breaking through means first, recognition in Ireland and second, internationally. In one way, all writers are striving for an international breakthrough, but there is also a sense (among those who stay with Irish publishers) that for those who have an international breakthrough, Ireland is not good enough –​while they themselves contribute to the development of the nationalist project in a relatively recently independent country. Those who leave for extended periods abroad or move to another country (usually the United States), tend to have experienced Ireland as small and narrow-minded. Some have been disturbed by lingering Catholic views especially on family life and sexuality or the post-​ conflict in the north, while others just wanted to see more of the world. Most other young people who left Ireland during the last decades, did so because of the roller-​ coaster economy that included long stretches of youth unemployment. This was not why these writers-​to-​be left. Recognition, whether national or international, is obviously essential to be able to continue to write and get published. It goes without saying that breaking through is regarded as desirable, and when it happens it is experienced as a major confidence booster and confirmation of the quality of one’s work. Still, it comes more often than not as a surprise to the writer with some reputation, who might already have been active for a long time. When Joseph O’Connor was recognized as a journalist in Ireland, but not yet as famous as he would become with his bestseller, the novel Star of the Sea (2002), he met Frank McCourt in New York after the latter’s unprecedented breakthrough with the memoir Angela’s Ashes (1996, 2005a). McCourt then talked at great length about how he was suffering from his success. It had given him no time to sit down and write: for about three years he had constantly been travelling for promotion of the book. Of course, he had told O’Connor, there were all these checks coming in the post, so suddenly he could afford to buy a house, a flat, even a house for his daughter  –​but he missed writing. Eventually he would get back to writing,

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with his two follow-​up memoirs ’Tis (1999) and Teacher Man (2005b). In general, successful writers learn to organize their writing time efficiently, and those who are in high demand for public events and readings simply take a break from public appearances for a few months each year, or even for a whole year when they do not accept invitations. ‘I don’t pick up the phone for six months,’ Joseph O’Connor claimed jokingly, but still indicating the need to keep to himself while writing. Early in my research, Anne Enright who was already established, albeit mostly in Ireland, had a major international breakthrough when she was awarded the Man Booker Prize in 2007 for The Gathering (2007a), a novel about a big family that gathers in Ireland for the funeral of a brother who has committed suicide.4 A few years later, in 2011, Belinda McKeon achieved international success with her debut novel Solace. While enormously appreciated by the writers and providing great opportunities for exposure and networking, both breakthroughs turned out also to be a bit of a burden for them, but in different ways. The announcement of Anne Enright’s win of the Man Booker Prize was initially received with great delight in Dublin, not least by her colleagues and friends. But the prize came with two drawbacks. The first one exploded only days after she had accepted the prize, taking the form of a media attack on her for having written an opinion piece ‘Disliking the McCanns’ (2007b) published on 4 October in the London Review of Books. Her intention with the piece was to come to terms with her own anxiety over the Madeleine McCann case (involving a girl gone missing on a family holiday in Portugal), but it became a controversial issue not least in social media and blogs, but also in British and Irish newspapers. In Dublin, the literary world was divided between those who were fiercely critical of her McCann piece, on the one hand, and those who supported her Booker win by sending cards and calling her to congratulate, on the other. The media attack did not end until Enright apologized publicly to the McCann parents. (See Chapter 3 on Enright as a woman public intellectual.) As the media attack was connected to the Booker win, it may well have been started by an envious writer, with others following suit (Wulff 2012a). But Enright also had another burden to deal with after the international breakthrough that the Booker brought. It concerned consequences of the required global touring which was extensive:  she had to be away from her young children during long periods of time. This was a pain she kept coming back to not only in interviews, but also in informal conversations. It was obvious that she quickly lost interest in touring, yet had to keep up an intense travelling schedule, often including long-​distance flights. And once in place for readings and interviews, there were dinners, receptions and meetings with the media, prominent Irish diaspora people and literary writers, scholars as well as publishers. Having to reply to the same interview questions over and over again, took its toll. Anne Enright was relieved when her Booker year came to an end, and she could go back to writing. Belinda McKeon’s breakthrough came straight away with her first novel Solace (2011), published with Picador in London and Scribner in New York. Depicting a young widower’s grief, the novel was received with rave reviews in newspapers and magazines in Europe, Australia and the United States. Not only was it a sudden

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success, but it was also extensive. But the magnitude of her success turned out to be something of a mixed blessing for McKeon when she was faced with writing her next novel. In an interview with Marése O’Sullivan (2012), the year after Solace (2011) was published, McKeon said that while growing up in Longford in Ireland, she had been writing stories for fun since she was eight or nine. A few years later, one of her teachers had remarked that ‘if she wanted to write she’d need a job too’, such as journalism. At the time, McKeon had enjoyed writing ‘at a very primary level’, it was a ‘natural escape’. Later, as an undergraduate student at Trinity College Dublin, she studied literature, English and philosophy, and then went on to an MLitt at Dublin University College. Cherishing all these opportunities for ‘absolute immersion in novels, poems, plays and ideas’, she notes that this was ‘intoxicating and fulfilling in a way I’d not experienced before’. After finishing her MLitt she worked as a journalist, but felt that she wanted to develop her fiction writing. So she made the momentous decision to go to New York and enroll in an MFA in fiction at Columbia University. Solace (2011) won many prizes, most notably the 2011 Faber Prize, but it was also the Irish Book of the Year and the winner of a couple of prizes for debut novels. In her interview with O’Sullivan (2012), Belinda McKeon is obviously very pleased with the prizes, saying that they are ‘a boost’, even though ‘what matters more is always the next project you’re working on, which is always going badly!’ Yet it is clear that this appreciation does help her go back to her current writing project. During the following years, she introduced herself as ‘Writer/​ Procrastinator’ on her website belindamckeon.com. While writing literary journalism for the New York Times, the Paris Review and The Guardian among other newspapers and magazines, she was blogging about how she was avoiding and postponing her literary writing. Again, this pressure is not unusual after a huge success as a debut novelist: the public literary sphere impacts on the private sphere demanding the first success to be repeated. It is not until the writer is able to cut off the public demands that the writing will start flowing again. Eventually, Belinda McKeon managed to do this, and four years after the publication of Solace (2011), her second novel Tender (2015) came out. This is a story about a woman student who falls in love with her male friend who turns out to be gay. It was also very well received, if not quite as celebrated as Solace (2011). This may have to do with the fact that Belinda McKeon was already discovered by the time Tender (2015) was published. There is a certain joy of discovering new writers among critics, which makes it even more difficult to repeat a first success. In fact, it hardly ever happens that a follow-​up novel is as successful as the first one. They are more often than not commissioned by the publisher of the debut novel, hoping to keep surfing on the previous success. As Belinda McKeon lives in Brooklyn but spends a lot of time in Ireland, and has started to set her literary work in both Dublin and New  York, she also fits into the category ‘Between Dublin and New York’. When she was interviewed by O’Sullivan (2012), she saw New York as a place to work –​this is ‘where my desk is’, as it gives ‘her the headspace to make her writing more of a priority again’. In Ireland she cannot really focus on writing. In addition to her literary and

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journalistic work, McKeon has also written plays, including one commissioned by the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. She is an assistant teaching professor of creative writing at Rutgers University, and has curated literary festivals on both sides of the Atlantic. As burdensome as a breakthrough thus can be, it does entail recognition not least by prize foundations and critics, but also usually by readers and fellow writers. But in order to really mark the beginning of a writer’s career, a breakthrough has to be confirmed with a second novel, which is not always the case. And a critical success, even an award-​winning novel, does not necessarily get a large readership. In Chapter 6 we see how publishers try to predict the fate of a novel, but often fail.3 During my research, I noted a few instances when a novel by an established Irish writer and published with an international publisher, did not fare all that well critically in Britain and the United States, but was hailed as a great accomplishment in Ireland. There are two sides of the same coin when it comes to publishing internationally: while it might be regarded with envy among writers who do not really ever get to do it, or as a disloyalty to the national project, it also generates pride in Ireland.

The View from Ireland Irish-​language publishing is relatively small in Ireland –​this is a literary world-​ within-​the-​Irish literary world. As I do not know the Irish language, I was largely unable to access this literary world and, of course, to read its literature. There are, incidentally, Irish language chapters and short stories included in certain English language anthologies. However, through Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, who is a prominent Irish speaker and writer, I learnt a little about this carefully cultivated part of Irish literature. While most Irish writers published both in Ireland and internationally, although to quite different degrees, Ní Dhuibhne has actually published on three language markets: the Irish in Ireland, the English in Ireland, and the English in Britain, the United States and Australia. (Moreover, there are translations of her fiction into German, Italian, Czech and Japanese.) Born in 1954, Ní Dhuibhne went to Irish language schools in Dublin, and then to University College Dublin where she completed a PhD in Irish Folklore. She worked for many years as a librarian in the National Library of Ireland, but moved on to a position as teaching fellow at the MA in creative writing at University College Dublin. It was when she was a student that she started writing short stories for the Irish Press. Her first book, a collection of short stories, came at the end of the 1980s. She made her debut as a novelist in 1990 with The Bray House (1990), a science fiction story about a landscape devastated by a nuclear accident. Even though her novel The Dancers Dancing (2007) was nominated for the British Orange Prize for Fiction and she has written other acclaimed novels, she is primarily renowned as a short story writer, but also as a writer of stories for children and young people, a literary and scholarly critic and commentator, and to some extent as a playwright. Altogether there are about thirty books by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne. She has had many

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short stories anthologized in collections published internationally, especially with Faber in Britain. Yet one obstacle to publishing more widely internationally has been her name. She is well aware that most non-​Irish speakers cannot pronounce it, and thus will not remember it. This is sometimes a problem even in Ireland. Nevertheless, she has been able to establish herself in the top tier of the Irish literary world. She is a member of Aosdána and serves on literary committees that decide about scholarships, awards and prizes for competitions. But the issue with her name does not stop there. Her career path has been more fragmented than what is the case for most Irish writers because she has written fiction under no less than three names, including two pseudonyms. She started out by calling herself Elizabeth Dean (the full English version of her name is Elizabeth Deeney). In the introduction to an anthology in Ní Dhuibhne’s honour, Rebecca Pelan (2009a: 15), the editor, notes: ‘In relation to the earliest pseudonym, Elizabeth Dean, Éilís has said that she used it when she first started publishing her work, at age 18 or 19, because of a certain shyness about being a writer generally, and because of a concern that people she knew would find out that she was writing about sexual feelings.’ Later, in order to ‘distinguish her children’s books from her adult ones’ and ‘to use a name that readers might be able to pronounce’ she started writing as Elizabeth O’Hara (her grandmother’s family name). But for most of her publications, in Irish and English, she has used the Irish version of her name: Éilís Ní Dhuibhne.5 Her fiction focuses on relations from a woman’s perspective, the everyday, often contextualized ‘in a nation going through major social and economic transformations’ (Wulff 2009a: 245). Anne Fogarty (2003: xii) observes that she ‘explores the gaps between decades of the late twentieth century that appear to be contiguous and shows how the tensions between competing timeframes and value systems are at the basis of the moral and emotional dilemma of her characters. The uncanny familiarity and oddity of the past are central preoccupations of many of her stories’. Ní Dhuibhne’s training in Irish folklore is a source of inspiration that has become a part of her writer profile. (We come back to this in Chapter 5 on fiction and folklore.) So has, again, her positioning as a woman writer. ‘My impression was that Irish women hadn’t had a voice,’ she explained to me in an interview and went on to say that this is why she has taken an interest in writing fiction about women’s lives. The short story ‘The Flowering’ (2009), for example (which originates in an anecdote in Elizabeth Boyle’s The Irish Flowerers (1971)), describes ‘a gifted woman embroideress who was prevented from doing her art when her father died and she had to help support the family. Missing her lace-​making made her wither away, go mad and finally die’ (Wulff 2009a: 254). Ní Dhuibhne concludes the story by comparing the craftmanship of embroidering with that of writing. The point is ‘to convey an urgent message that women writers who have found fulfillment in writing should be given every opportunity to write. If their inner drive to write is thwarted, their lives will be thwarted also’ (Wulff 2009a: 254). Another writer with a feminist profile and a perceptive Irish eye is Evelyn Conlon. She sets her novels in Ireland, but also in Australia and the United States, often with Irish characters or connections. Conlon was born in 1952 in Co. Monaghan in Northern Ireland, but has lived for many years in Dublin. She

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has also spent long periods of time in Australia. This is where her novel Not the Same Sky (2013), was published featuring orphaned Irish girls sent on a ship to Australia during the Famine. In an interview with Conlon, Frances Devlin-​Glass (2013) writes: ‘Her writing life began early at school in Monaghan, and like many young girls, diaries and essays were the starting point. It was heartening for her to have her writing read to the class by a teacher who recognised the talent she had. She was in print early, her first short story, “Foxgloves,” being published in New Irish Writing, the Irish Press newspaper when she was sixteen. The piece was in its way quite subversive: a critique of marriage and its boredom. She was frustrated about how women were described in contemporary Irish fiction.’ Already then, only a teenager, ‘she had set herself on a path that would focus on women in Irish society and in the world, and would challenge and query taken-​for-​granted gender inequities. These days she wears the label of feisty (spirited, but optimistic and rational) feminist with pride’. Her strong feminism was most likely also fired by her experience as a young mother in the 1970s Ireland:  she wanted to do an undergraduate degree at Maynooth University, but ‘she needed a crèche service; there was none; so, she set one up. She had her second child in second year and by third year was separated from her children’s father. Her experiences deepened her and she began to identify with the radical end of the Irish Women’s Liberation movement –​Irish Women United. Second level teaching was what she wanted to do, but it was a short career, however, for she was sabotaged by institutional prejudice –​against her opinions and “separated” status’. What at first looked like a calamity, turned out to be a blessing in disguise: ‘When she was mysteriously dumped from her teaching job one morning, she decided to become a freelance writer, doing reviews, radio programmes, and some ESL (English as a Second Language) teaching to butter her bread and that of her family.’ But she did get more time for writing fiction, novels and short story collections.

Between Dublin and New York In Colm Tóibín’s novel Brooklyn (2009), the young woman Eilis is forced to leave the 1950s Ireland for Brooklyn in order to get a job. After suffering homesickness and loneliness, she eventually meets an Italian man and life turns to the better. She blossoms. But then her sister dies, so she is suddenly called back to Ireland. Even though she is now offered a job in her home town and courted by a man she likes, she makes the momentous decision to leave Ireland for good. She has to tell her deeply distressed mother that she is already married to the Italian. Her mother can do nothing but say that she should go. In 2015, the novel was made into a film, and the following year it was nominated for several awards, most notably for no less than three Oscars (cf. Chapter 7). This huge success for Colm Tóibín came when his international career already was well established, with many literary awards as a novelist, short story writer, playwright, poet, critic and literary journalist. He had one major success after another, but also –​which keeps being a

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part of a distinguished career –​one or two drawbacks. One was when his novella The Testament of Mary (2012a) was set up as a play on Broadway, but closed after only a few performances. (This was commented on with a certain gloat in some corners of the Dublin literary world. See Chapter 4 for more on this book.) But The Testament of Mary (2012a) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, as was already The Master (2004a) a biographical fiction about Henry James, and before that The Blackwater Lightship (1999), the first fictional account of AIDS in Ireland (which did contribute to a more open awareness about the disease in Ireland). After his success with Brooklyn (2009) as a novel and film, and a steady stream of new books, short stories and literary journalism, he has most likely put ‘the very bruising Booker Prize experience’, behind himself when ‘you would have to go over to London and wash yourself and put on formal clothes, and have a TV camera in your face for about two hours’ (O’Toole 2008: 199). Tóibín had used this experience of failure when he opens The Master (2004a) with Henry James’s play Guy Domville  –​a fiasco in London, with both audience and critics unimpressed. In the novel, James leaves abruptly for Ireland ‘since it was easy to travel there and because he did not believe it would strain his nerves’ (Tóibín 2004a: 22). He is taken well care of by his friends in Dublin, who have no views about his play. He even enjoys a polite flirtation with a male servant. As the novel moves on, so does James’s career:  upwards again. There is yet another point of identification with Henry James for Tóibín. In the novel, James is absorbed by Oscar Wilde’s trial which is going on at the time, and Wilde’s public humiliation, worrying that he might find himself in a similar situation. ‘James, like Wilde, was of Irish Protestant descent, but kept his Irish ancestry “hidden” ’ (Walshe 2008: 128). Talking to Fintan O’Toole (2008: 197) about what urged him to write The Master, Tóibín said that he was intrigued by James’s abandonment. ‘I was interested in that. I was also interested in James versus Oscar Wilde, his Irishness being hidden, his homosexuality being hidden.’ It is well known that James had chosen to live on his own as single, a circumstance that Tóibín (2007) has commented on in the essay ‘Single Minded’ in The Guardian. James needed solitude in order to write (Wulff 2012a). (See Chapter 3 on Tóibín as a homosexual.) Colm Tóibín has deep roots in Irish history. He was born in 1955 and grew up in Enniscorthy which is a recurrent setting in his work (it is for instance, the town that Eilis in Brooklyn (2009) also comes from). Tóibín’s grandfather fought on the frontline in the 1916 Uprising against Britain and was taken to Wales where he was interned. Tóibín’s father, who died early, was a teacher. The novel Nora Webster (2014) is a fictional account of the family’s grief after his father’s death, especially that of his mother. One of her sons is a portrait of young Colm, who just like in real life had a stammer that he overcame. He also overcame the harsh St Peter’s College where he was taught by priests, went on to University College Dublin and then moved as soon as he could to Barcelona, where he came out as a homosexual. Even though he has a house in Spain where he spends time writing every year, Tóibín often goes to the United States, especially New  York, for visiting professorships and book launches. In 2016, he was the chair of The Pen World Voice Festival in New York.

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When Tóibín was seventeen, he worked over the summer as a barman in a hotel not far from his home town. As his working hours were between 6 pm and 2 am, he was free during the days. So he spent the days on the beach reading The Essential Hemingway (2004 [1947]) which made a lasting impression on him. He has kept the book, ‘its pages stained with seawater’, as it was a turning point for him. Not only did the book plant an enchantment with Spain in him, but even more importantly it also gave him the impetus to write: ‘an idea of prose as something glamorous, smart and shaped, and the idea of character in fiction as something oddly mysterious, worthy of sympathy and admiration, but also elusive. And more than anything, the sheer pleasure of the sentences and their rhythms, and the amount of emotion living in what was not said, what was between the words and the sentences’ (Tóibín 2011a). Parallel to his literary work, Colm Tóibín is a public intellectual. This he shares with Colum McCann (see Chapter 3). The two of them also often appear on literary panels in New York and elsewhere. Colum McCann grew up in Dublin and moved to New York as a young adult. Eventually, he became distinguished professor of creative writing in the MFA programme at Hunter College. Born in the mid-​1960s in Dublin, the son of a journalist (who wanted him to become a fiction writer, according to Cusatis (2011)) he studied journalism and worked as a reporter for The Irish Press. Already by twenty-​one, he had his own column. Shortly thereafter, he moved to the United States. For two years in the late 1980s, he bicycled across the country, more than 12,000 kilometres. It was when he was completing a degree at the University of Texas and was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa Society that he began writing short stories eventually to be included in his first collection, Fishing the Sloe-​Black River (1994). He lived with his wife in Japan for over a year, and then moved back to New York and Manhattan, and is now a dual citizen of the Republic of Ireland and the United States. As he was writing fiction on emigration, displacement and mobility, his transnational reputation as an Irish writer kept growing. It exploded with the novel Let the Great World Spin in 2009 (see Chapter 8) which sold over one million copies. This commercial success probably plays a role in the fact that he for some time has had the financial means to be involved with charities in New York and Ireland, especially Roddy Doyle’s Fighting Words in Dublin and the new global charity Narrative4. The remit of both charities is to teach writing to young people for free. In his capacity as the co-​founder of Narrative4 ‘which brings together kids from different places –​sometimes directly contentious places, sometimes just places with their own hardships –​and how over a span of days the kids pair off, one from each place, and exchange the story that most defines who they are. At the end of their time together, they tell the stories to the larger group, taking on the persona of their partner –​an exercise’ according to McCann, ‘in radical empathy’ (Lovell 2013). The idea is to connect children with very different lives such as children from gangs in Chicago with children in the streets of Limerick, and from Kentucky to Mexico through story exchange as a way to increase mutual understanding. In the long run, some of these children might become empathetic leaders. This is in line with McCann’s writing, as Cahill and Flannery (2012a: 8) note: ‘McCann’s

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work, both individually and as a whole, stimulates compassionate engagements with other lives, makes us alive to the potential of storytelling, and insists on the connective power of memory. His work searches out the dark corners but always returns us to “this side of brightness.” ’6 Part of his profile as a writer is now that he uses a non-​linear narrative as in Let the Great World Spin (2009) and TransAtlantic (2013), as well as in Thirteen Ways of Looking (2015), the latter including a lead novella with shorter stories in the same collection.

Gender and Generation In his extensive Reader on Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century (2000: 1267–​81), David Pierce discusses gender and modern Irish writing in relation to a range of topics such as the representation of Ireland as female, rites of passage in male autobiographical writing, guilt, the body, male violence, domesticity, sexuality and desire, gay sexuality, history and evasion, and censorship. True, except for a few women writers, especially Lady Augusta Gregory, who set up an Irish national theatre together with Yeats in the 1920s, and was a well-​known dramatist in her time, the history of Irish literature has mostly been one of male writers. Yet there were actually large numbers of women who wrote short stories as well as novels, although they did not make it into the Western canon of literary history (Wulff 2009a: 253). Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s anthology Voices on the Wind (1995) is a testimony to the many women who wrote poems, plays and fiction during the literary revival at the turn of the previous century. It was not only ‘acceptable for women to write’, but they were also ‘encouraged and admired’ by their male colleagues. These early women writers published with prominent publishers in Ireland and were active in the literary establishment there. According to Ní Dhuibhne, this brief upswing in women’s writing was an outcome of international and literary intellectual forces such as the struggle for women’s suffrage in combination with the formation of an Irish identity during the passage into political independence. But it was not until the 1960s and 1970s that a second literary revival by Irish women writers appeared. In 1991, an encyclopedic anthology on the history of Irish writing (in three volumes) came out, edited by Seamus Deane. Despite its massive scope and great detail, very few women writers were included. This led to a critical debate in the Irish literary world, and the subsequent publication of two additional Field Day anthologies focusing on women’s literary history, edited by Angela Bourke et al. (2002). They cover more than 750 women writers between the years AD 600 and 2000.7 All women writers in my study who had published by then are included. Edna O’Brien, who left Ireland early, and is now in her eighties, is one of the most famous Irish women writers. Also there is Maeve Binchy who died in 2012. Some other renowned classic women Irish writers are Elizabeth Bowen, Kate O’Brien, Iris Murdoch and Maria Edgeworth. As to the writers in my study, they exemplify a diversity of paths and profiles, and also reveal the fact that more men than women writers from Ireland have had international careers. There

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has been a palpable gender boundary in the social life of writers in the same generation, those born in the 1950s and 1960s, a tendency to stick together with your own side socially and thus professionally by connecting each other to publishers, festival panels, literary committees and the like. In response to a conversation about the neglect of women writers by male colleagues, a woman writer who had access to both circles was allegedly telling one that did not, that ‘I run with the hare and hunt with the hounds’. Thereby she was acknowledging the dominance of male writers in the literary world, but at the same time her own wish to also spend time with fellow women writers.8 A sense of lack of influence among women writers can be explained by a certain lingering lack of public and institutional influence of women in Irish society –​compared with Scandinavia, for example, where laws on parental leave including several months of father’s leave in combination with extensive policy for work place equality, and institutionalized efforts to further women’s careers, are in place. The idea of age discrimination, ageism, which would concern women who are still very active in middle age and older, is not really identified as an issue in Ireland yet either. Nevertheless, gender equality is starting to improve in Ireland both in public and private life, especially among young people. In her edited The Long Gaze Back: An Anthology of Irish Women Writers (2015), Sinéad Gleeson, broadcaster and critic, recently noted the shortage of Irish women writers represented in anthologies before the 1980s. She mentions the impact of Cutting the Night in Two: Short Stories by Irish Women Writers (2001) edited by Evelyn Conlon and Hans-​Cristian Oeser. As Gleeson (2015: 2) writes: ‘Visibility was once an issue, and in the last five years, regardless of gender, Irish writing has flourished and expanded.’ Gleeson’s hopeful comment can at least partly be explained by the fact that she is a part of a younger generation of women in the literary world in Ireland. Another point is that those older women who felt left out were in search not only of national reputation, but also international. To recap, the public literary social life is enacted at events at Aosdána, the annual PEN dinner, literary festivals and conferences, as well as book launches, in the media. These events are often reported on in newspapers and magazines, and filmed for YouTube. While some of these events are writers-​only, other ones include a general audience, their readers. The private social life consists of small groups of friends, or pairs, of similar type of fame, again, who meet at restaurants, bars and in homes for meals and drinks. A few groups of friends went to university together in the early 1970s and have stayed more or less close since then. Even though all writers by now really live middle-​class lives, the class they were born into also matters, dividing friendship groups accordingly. This is mostly between what is referred to as ‘middle class’ (meaning that fathers worked as teachers, journalists etc.) by those whose fathers were craftsmen or servicemen. As to religious background, just like the vast majority of the population of the Republic of Ireland is Catholic (although the number of church-​goers is quickly diminishing), the majority of the Irish writers in this study had a Catholic upbringing. It surfaces in their work occasionally, but it has not impacted on friendship patterns in the literary world. The social class

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backgrounds of the writers were mixed, there was no particular trend in this, nor was an urban or a rural childhood a factor in influencing who becomes a writer. Writers review each other in newspapers and literary magazines, which can lead to tensions –​but if they are friends, a review might be more positive than what the reviewing writer actually thinks of a book or a play. A few writers with international reputations told me that they do not read reviews about their own work. This they can afford to avoid at that stage in their career when they already are recognized, but it is likely that they will get to hear about how their books have been reviewed as family, friends as well as competitors, let alone publishers read reviews (cf. Wulff 1998 on the ballet world). Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s Fox, Swallow, Scarecrow (2007) is a fictional satire about the literary world in Dublin. The main protagonist, Anna, a middle-​class aspiring writer of popular fiction, leads a comfortable but boring life and remains unsuccessful in a ruthless literary world contextualized in the greedy Celtic Tiger economy. This chapter has offered examples of Irish writers’ paths and profiles in relation to their search for recognition. During my research a younger generation was emerging, now quite established, such as Belinda McKeon whose breakthrough I  was able to include here. As new generations of writers in Ireland will keep replacing older ones, the reputation of the writers in my study is likely to linger on, albeit to different degrees in Ireland and abroad.

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Chapter 3 T HE P UBL IC I NTE LLE CTUAL:  W RI T I NG J OU RNA LI SM

At the core of the career of Irish fiction writers is journalism. Starting out as journalists, many Irish fiction writers have continued to write journalism (also as a way to make a living) in Ireland, Britain and the United States: book reviews, columns and political commentary. This chapter explores Irish writers as journalists, primarily in their capacity as public intellectuals. How and where do these activities take place? Among the writers in the study, it is Colm Tóibín who is the most prolific public intellectual followed by John Banville, Anne Enright and to some extent Colum McCann. Joseph O’Connor has had a widespread impact in Ireland through his radio diaries. Other leading public intellectuals in Ireland are journalist Fintan O’Toole and literary scholar Declan Kiberd, illuminating the same issues from their different vantage points. It is noteworthy that those who would be categorized as public intellectuals in Ireland have transnational reputations in addition to national ones. A  transnational reputation is built by way of substantial stays, with networking opportunities, in Britain or the United States; often starting with a university degree and followed later by recurring visits as writer-​in-​residence. Publishing in Britain and/​ or the United States is an obvious prerequisite for a transnational reputation. In relation to one of this book’s major themes, writing as a craft: acquiring a routine of writing journalistic pieces, which requires meeting short deadlines, has most likely been a beneficial training for the writers in their fiction writing. This may be one important explanation to why they are able to keep up the speed and eloquence as they keep publishing short stories and/​or novels every, or every other, or at least every third year. Rather than dreading deadlines (or dancing on deadlines like many academics) the writers see to it that they submit pieces or manuscripts in time. As Colm Tóibín told me:  ‘Deadlines are good. They make you get the work done.’ Since first appearing in the 1970s, the anthropology and sociology of journalism has kept expanding.1 In their article on the worlds of journalism, Boyer and Hannerz (2006: 5) argue for the value of ethnography in social science studies of journalism in a global context, and call for more attention to ‘the involvement of media professions like journalism in processes of social mediation and cultural production more broadly’. Also Boyer’s (2001) notion of ‘practices of mediation’ is useful for our purposes here. When the writers act as public intellectuals, they

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perform through different modes of mediation: textual as well as spoken. Mostly they produce journalistic texts for newspapers and literary journals, occasionally for popular non-​fiction books. But they also give speeches and lectures that usually are written beforehand and thus exist as texts, perhaps somewhat revised afterwards. This is why their journalism can be included in our discussion here about writing as craft and career. In what follows there are two extracts from speeches, one by Colm Tóibín and one by Anne Enright, as examples of speeches in textual forms. As to the topics of public intellectual debate in Ireland, they turn out to coincide with the storylines of fiction that were introduced in Chapter 1. Both journalists and readers take for granted that storylines grow out of regions. One consequence of this might be that storylines are overemphasizing some events and circumstances while others are neglected. Driving public debate in Ireland is what makes the writers public intellectuals, again, against a backdrop of transnational activity. In Ireland, they express what has not yet been formulated as public issues, summon their compatriots in a time of crisis or suggest an alternative stance on a thorny issue, and are even sometimes able to predict the course of events. One evidence of their importance in Irish society is the fact that the writers keep being awarded prestigious prizes, not only for their literary work but also for their journalism. Here Fintan O’Toole is paramount. Among other awards, he won the TV3 Tonight Show’s Journalist of the Year in 2011. Even in the country of ‘the gift of the gab’, O’Toole is famous for being loquacious and opinionated. A columnist, drama critic and political commentator from the Left, O’Toole has critically examined political corruption, the Celtic Tiger and its downturn, inequality between men and women, the public services in Ireland, the Iraq war. He has also expressed concern over problematic attitudes towards immigration in Ireland, and the country’s abortion law. Born into a working-​class family in Dublin, Fintan O’Toole was educated in Irish schools by the Christian Brothers, and then went to University College Dublin where he studied English and philosophy. He started his career as a drama critic for In Dublin and Magill magazine, also editing the latter. Having written weekly political commentary and drama reviews for the Irish Times since the 1980s, he is a household name in Ireland, also because of his many appearances on RTÉ, Irish television. O’Toole writes regularly for the New York Review of Books, and has been a visiting lecturer in Irish Letters at Princeton University, as well as a foreign correspondent in China. For a while in 2011, he planned to run for a seat at Dáil Éireann (the lower house of the Irish government) as an independent candidate, but withdrew after a few weeks. With his appointment as literary editor of the Irish Times –​one of the power positions in the Irish literary world -​his influence was even further strengthened. O’Toole has written op-​eds for the Irish Times since the 1980s, and has a column called Culture Shock, mostly about the arts. He has written over twenty books, many on contemporary Ireland. Excelling in evocative titles, here O’Toole has them telling poignant tales in themselves about emigration, the beef industry and the recession: Black Hole, Green Card: The Disappearance of Ireland (1994a),

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Meanwhile Back at the Ranch:  The Politics of Irish Beef (1994b), The Ex-​Isle of Ireland: Images of a Global Ireland (1997a), After the Ball (2003), Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger (2009) and Enough Is Enough: How to Build a New Republic (2010). In contrast to most of the fiction writers, Fintan O’Toole is an active twitterer. In this way, he has a direct relationship with his readers: they are constantly twittering about his writings, also commenting online on his articles in the Irish Times and The Guardian. With such an intense mind, he keeps moving quickly to various topics and does not enter into dialogue. But he clearly engages people’s strong views. He certainly has the attention of Dublin intellectuals, academics and artists. They read what he writes, watch him on talk shows, and discuss his ideas in conversations with each other. Spending time with the writers, I often heard them commenting in favour of O’Toole’s ideas.

Speaking Truth to Power According to literary scholar Helen Small (2002: 1–​5), in the introduction to her edited volume on the public intellectual, the notion is relatively new, and was first used more widely in the United States in the late twentieth century (as a reaction against ‘a society often thought of as peculiarly hostile to the intellectual life’). It took some time for the notion of a public intellectual to be recognized in Britain, and it has been slow to make it into French and other European cultural debate. Helen Small sees the rise of the public intellectual as part of ‘an increasingly transnational conversation’, a conversation that has been triggered by ‘a series of structural changes . . . which have fundamentally affected the ways in which we conceive of the public domain’ such as ‘the increased power of the media and development of new information technologies’. As Small concludes, examining the public intellectual ‘is one way of examining the nature and consequences of social change much more broadly’. Clearly, it is social change in the form of acute social crises, political and economic ones, that accentuates a need for public intellectuals. This is brought out in the volume Reflections on Crisis: The Role of the Public Intellectual (2012) edited by Irish sociologists Mary Corcoran and Kevin Lalor. Corcoran (2012: 5) states: ‘Public intellectuals help us to understand the connections between our individual biographical narratives and the historical, social and economic forces that help to shape them.’ The volume is put together by Irish academics who  –​not least in light of the corporatization of universities in Ireland and elsewhere –​warn against ‘the excessive focus on ‘managerialism’ in contemporary public discourse at the expense of a more humanistic, social justice perspective’. In his contribution, sociologist Liam O’Dowd (2012: 87, 91) talks about two types of public intellectual in twentieth century Ireland: first, the type that was allied either with the state or the church rather than with political parties or ideologies, and second the type of ‘more independent public intellectuals that were mainly writers or other creative artists’ who were able to keep a certain distance to the church and the state in

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Ireland, because they had emigrated or because they had found a literary critical tone which appealed to an audience both nationally and internationally. O’Dowd (2012: 89, 94) enumerates as examples ‘such luminaries as Joyce, Yeats, O’Casey, Synge and their literary successors’. These successors would be contemporary fiction writers, primarily Colm Tóibín, John Banville, Colum McCann and Joseph O’Connor, but include Fintan O’Toole and literary scholar Declan Kiberd, as O’Dowd later notes that: ‘Irish intellectual discourse became more state-​centric. At its core was a Dublin-​based “public conversation”, pursued in the print and electronic media and represented at its apex by RTÉ and the Irish Times’ (see also Kirby et al. 2002). Liam O’Dowd (2012) goes on to identify the influence of the Irish national movement, British imperialism and the Catholic Church on public intellectuals in Ireland.2 More specifically, he discusses how four crises have formed Irish intellectuals and their debates in the history of the state: the economic collapse of the 1950s, the breakout of the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, the recession in the 1980s, and the current global economic crisis. These crises almost overlap with the storylines in the public commentary of the literary writers and journalists in the present study, but sooner or later they also mention the Great Famine dating back to the 1840s when Britain still colonized the country.3 Having expressed their views (and worries) about the economic boom, it was the bust that made them prominent as public intellectuals, not least as they reported on Ireland’s situation as a part of the global economic crisis to a global audience: especially newspapers such as the New York Times, The Guardian and The Telegraph have a global audience, but also journals and literary magazines such as the New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. (When they publish in the New Yorker, it is mostly short stories by Colm Tóibín or Anne Enright, often extracts of coming books.) Comparing the public role of writers and intellectuals, Edward Said (2010: 24–​ 5) interestingly noted that ‘writers have a separate, perhaps even more honorific, place than do intellectuals’ who tend to be regarded with a certain disdain: ‘Yet during the last years of the twentieth century the writer has taken on more and more of the intellectual’s adversarial attributes in such activities as speaking the truth to power, being a witness to persecution and suffering, supplying a dissenting voice on conflicts with authority.’ When suggesting outlets for the public intellectual, Said begins with ‘the impressive range of opportunities offered by the lecture platform, the pamphlet, radio, alternative journals, the interview form, the rally, church pulpit, and the Internet to name a few’. Said mentions Ireland as one country where issues on ‘freedom of speech and censorship, truth and reconciliation’ have been addressed by ‘the writer as an intellectual testifying to a country’s or region’s experience, thereby giving that experience a public identity forever inscribed in the global discursive agenda’. As to Irish intellectuals, Said identifies ‘an impressive battery’ such as the novelist and poet Seamus Deane, and the literary scholars Declan Kiberd and Luke Gibbons. The fact that they have all been based at University of Notre Dame in the United States, rather than in Dublin only, might well be the reason why Said was aware of them. It was Gibbons (1996)

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who famously described Ireland as ‘a First World country, but with a Third World memory’. In the much-​quoted list of ‘Top 100 Global Public Intellectuals’ first published in Prospect Magazine and Foreign Policy in 2005 (Wikipedia 2011), Said would undoubtedly have been included had he still been alive then. A  number of the writers on the list are Nobel Prize laureates such as Wole Soyinka, Orhan Pamuk and J. M. Coetzee. There are no Irish names on the list. Ironically, because of the history (of long, brutal British colonization of Ireland), Colm Tóibín was one among a number of Irish names, including Fintan O’Toole and Seamus Heaney on the Observer’s list of Britain’s Top 300 Intellectuals in 2011 (Naughton 2011). They were removed a few days later in a corrected version of the list. An authority on the literature of Ireland, both in English and in Irish, Declan Kiberd was kept on the list under the section of critics, possibly because of his exceptional reputation both in Ireland and transnationally, established when he was a DPhil student at Oxford University. Again, Kiberd belongs to the group of Irish academics who divide their time between Ireland and the United States, in his case University College Dublin and University of Notre Dame. Among Kiberd’s multitude of articles and books, his influential Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (1996) has a special status, as it explains the part of the literary movement at the end of the nineteenth century in transforming Ireland into a modern nation. Kiberd has also written extensively as a public intellectual for the Irish Times and the Irish Press, and worked for the RTE Arts programme. He continues to write essays and book reviews for newspapers and journals in Ireland, Britain and the United States. Kiberd’s success can to a great deal be attributed to his accessible academic style. In a review of Kiberd’s Irish Classics (2000), his distinguished colleague literary theorist Terry Eagleton (2000) described Kiberd even as having ‘the talent for popularising of the public intellectual’: In the wake of both Troubles and Tiger had poured a torrential flood of Irish anthologies, cultural dictionaries and bluffer’s guides. Among the finest of these on the literary front was Declan Kiberd’s Inventing Ireland, a blockbuster of a book that he has now followed up with the equally door-​stopping Irish Classics. Kiberd is a Dublin academic, but he has the talent for popularising of the public intellectual. Witty, astute, and compulsively readable, he knows how to shape a critical narrative and where to slide in a comic aside.

Wit as a Weapon A master of many genres and styles ranging from stand-​up comedy and song lyrics to plays, film script and fiction, Joseph O’Connor has also kept working as a journalist parallel to his other writings. It was when he was a student at University College Dublin in the early 1980s that he took up journalism on a part-​time basis, writing reviews for Magill magazine and the Sunday Tribune. In 1985, he spent five months in Nicaragua, reporting for Dublin publications on

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the situation after the Sandinista revolution. While attending Oxford University for a year, he wrote occasionally for London magazines. After having had many rejections by literary magazines, he finally managed to get a short story published in 1989 in the Dublin Sunday Tribune’s New Irish Writing page. Two years later, in 1991, O’Connor’s first novel Cowboys and Indians (1991) was finally published. By then he already had a popular reputation in Ireland, going back to 1994 when he was invited by the Sunday Tribune to report on the activities of the Irish soccer fans at the World Cup in the United States. O’Connor’s detailed diary of the trip was the defining part of the collection The Secret World of the Irish Male (1994), a major bestseller in Ireland. But it was Joseph O’Connor’s daily radio programme The Drivetime Diaries (2010) that turned him into a public intellectual.4 The programme, which was broadcast on RTÉ One in the late afternoon between 2008 and 2010, was designed to be listened to on the car radio while driving home from work, whether stuck in traffic jams or driving long distances. The Drivetime Diaries (2010) offered O’Connor an opportunity to cultivate his remarkable verbal virtuosity. Warm and witty, O’Connor’s rhythmical rapping commented on the state of the economic crisis in Ireland, seasonal events, news stories often through snapshots of everyday life. The ‘songs’ had titles such as ‘Bye Bye Celtic Tiger’, ‘Christmas Play’ and ‘Hope’. If The Secret World of the Irish Male (1994) with its reprints had a big audience in Ireland, there is no doubt that The Drivetime Diaries (2010) reached an even larger audience, men and women, young and old. Far from every listener was stuck in the car –​many, if not most, were busy preparing dinner. It was, in other words, a very well chosen time of the day to reach out to a vast audience. It may well be because he had his breakthrough as a comedian, and continues to do funny pieces, that he still tends to be categorized as a ‘popular’ writer in the literary world. Still, Joseph O’Connor has written award-​winning ‘serious’ fiction, most notably the historical novel Star of the Sea (2002), this spirited thriller story about a crowded ‘famine ship’ sailing from Ireland to New York. Onboard are people who knew each other back home, who realize that their past is catching up with them. Wit as a weapon in politics is, of course, nothing new. Listen to Mary Douglas (1968: 366), back in the 1960s: ‘Whatever the joke, however remote its subject, the telling of it is potentially subversive. Since its form consists of victorious tilting of uncontrol against control, it is an image of the levelling of hierarchy, the triumph of intimacy over formality, of unofficial values over official ones.’ Even though the Irish are famous for their wit, O’Connor’s role, or at least potential role, as a public intellectual through his sense of humour may be better understood if we relate it to Dominic Boyer and Alexei Yurchak’s (2010) work on the political power of television comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert in the United States. Boyer and Yurchak apply the notion of stiob, originally Russian slang referring to political irony, a form of subtle subversive overidentification fusing irony and sincerity which was prevalent in late socialist societies in the 1970s and 1980s. For Stewart and Colbert have been not mere ironic political commentators on television. (One example of their real political impact was when Colbert testified to the United

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States Congress on the hardships of illegal immigrants who work on American farms. By using stiob he was able to get his serious political critique across.) Irish wit is multi-​layered like so much in Irish culture. Not only is telling jokes and funny stories that make people laugh appreciated, but also certainly a special skill of interactive creative wit, of answering back in an unexpected funny way, often making a joke out of a matter of fact statement. Then there is the habit of making fun of other people, for exaggerating in behavior or manner of speaking, often by boasting. This would not be played out in the presence of people, but after they have left the room. That is when they are ‘laughed at behind their backs’. Yet, even more significantly, ‘the Irish like to laugh at themselves, at their own sorrows’ (Ní Dhuibhne 1999b:  54). Just like the Russian stiob, an Irish sense of humour combines irony and sincerity, also in politics. In a literary biography about Anne Enright, the editors Claire Bracken and Susan Cahill (2011: 1), open the introduction by noting: ‘Anne Enright is one of the most innovative and exciting writers in Ireland today, whose work encompasses a wide range of genres, themes and interests. With her dark humour and wry tone she displays an ability to be remarkably funny while engaging with serious subjects and themes.’ One of Enright’s genres is journalism. Bracken and Cahill (2011: 10) go on to acknowledge that ‘since the beginning of her writing career she has produced opinion pieces in, for example, the Irish Times, the London Review of Books and The Guardian. As they rightly say about her journalism, it ‘combines Enright’s wit with an incisive look at current affairs and contemporary culture’. Ironically, Enright’s most controversial journalistic article ‘Disliking the McCanns’ (2007b) does not come across as funny, even though it was meant to be entertaining while exploring her own anxiety. As mentioned in Chapter 2, the article was spurred by the disappearance of Madeleine McCann from a family holiday in Portugal. Both her parents were doctors who mobilized an international search while there were allegations about their role in the case. Enright’s article evoked a heated media attack in Britain and Ireland at her, but she also had her supporters such as Sam Leith (2007) in the article ‘Anne Enright was Spot on about McCann Mania’. For a fair reading of Enright’s article, it is useful to know that Enright has a longstanding interest in psychoanalysis. Here she is having an imagined conversation with a medical doctor: How much do doctors drink? ‘Lots,’ she said. Why are the McCanns saying they didn’t sedate the child? ‘Why do you think?’ Besides, it was completely possible that the child had been sedated and also abducted –​which was a sudden solution to a problem I  did not even know I  had:  namely, if the girl in the pink pyjamas was being carried off by a stranger, why did she not scream? Sedation had also been a solution to the earlier problem of: how could they leave their children to sleep unprotected, even from their own dreams? . . . I realise that I am more afraid of murdering my children than I am of losing them to a random act of abduction. I have an unhealthy trust of strangers. Maybe I should believe in myself more, and in the world less, because, despite

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the fact that I am one of the most dangerous people my children know, I keep them close by me. I don’t let them out of my sight. I shout in the supermarket, from aisle to aisle. I do this not just because some dark and nameless event will overtake them before the checkout, but also because they are not yet competent in the world. You see? I  am the very opposite of the McCanns  . . . Distancing yourself from the McCanns is a recent but potent form of magic. It keeps our children safe. Disliking the McCanns is an international sport.

According to Sam Leith: It was not an attack on the McCanns. It was a subtle, humane, and darkly funny essay about self-​examination, second thoughts and the ugliness and presumption of the way in which our national obsession with the McCanns makes us feel entitled to praise or condemn, like or dislike, these people whom we have never met, and about whom we know next to nothing.

As noted in Chapter 2, the media attack on Enright flared up just days after she had won the Man Booker Prize for her novel The Gathering (2007a). Eventually, it stopped by the time she had apologized to the McCanns (Wulff 2012a). Completing her high school education by winning a prestigious scholarship to Victoria in Canada was the turning point for Anne Enright, she told me in an interview in Dublin in April 2008. Back in Dublin, she went on to a BA degree in English and philosophy at Trinity College Dublin. While a student she not only wrote plays and scripts for the student theatre The Players, but also acted in plays there. Another formative experience was the master’s degree in creative writing that Enright did at the University of East Anglia in Britain. Her teachers were Angela Carter and Malcolm Bradbury. A few years after graduation, in 1989, she published four short stories in First Fictions: An Introduction, the tenth volume by Faber of new short stories by previously unpublished authors. With her short story collection The Portable Virgin (1991), Enright was established as a fiction writer who publishes in Britain, and eventually her journalism would be published there, too. Having moved back to Ireland, Enright worked as a television producer at the RTÉ which gave her material for her first novel The Wig My Father Wore (1995), a story of magical surrealism. As Bracken and Cahill (2011) observe, here Enright’s experience from television comes through in her use of televisual technique: rewind and fast cutting. Enright has continued to publish novels most notably, again, The Gathering (2007a) (see Chapter 2) and collections of short stories. The lack of women on the lists of public intellectuals is disturbing. This far Anne Enright has been the only woman mentioned as a public intellectual in Ireland. Obviously, there were others during the time of my study. Nuala O’Faolain who died in 2008 was a journalist, television producer and writer. A stern feminist, she was most known for her memoirs Are You Somebody? (1996) and Almost There (2003), but she also wrote novels. For many years she was in a relationship with

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a larger-​than-​life journalist and activist, Nell McGafferty. Asking around about women public intellectuals, I was told about Margaretta Darcey, playwright and actress, who in her eightieth year spent time in prison due to breaking the law trespassing on Shannon airport runways in protest against the United States Air Force using it for fuelling planes on their way to Afghanistan. Just like Nuala O’Faolain, Nell McGafferty, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Evelyn Conlon, Mary Morrissey and Emma Donoghue among other contemporary Irish women writers, Anne Enright tends to be identified in literary scholarship as a feminist writing from a woman’s perspective about the new Ireland. Enright’s focus on family life, especially motherhood, stands out and is the topic of Making Babies (2004), a non-​fiction book. Its approach connects to a speech Enright (2007c) gave at the Merriman Summer School in 2007. The annual Merriman Summer School held in August in County Clare in the west of Ireland, is named after the poet and teacher Brian Merriman (1749–​1805). The aim of the school is to promote interest in Irish culture: the Irish language, history, literature, dance, music and the like. It is a forum where Ireland’s cultural and political elite gets together including distinguished academics, writers and journalists, and sometimes the president of the Republic. Anne Enright sent me a transcript of her speech in an email. Here is an extract: SOME RHETORICAL POSITIONS Before I start I want to say that I only have opinions for fun or for money. I am not married to them, the way I  am married to my fictions, (which are both necessary and indefensible in the way that fictions are). I want to talk about the distinctive nature of Irish feminism in the seventies and eighties  –​and how it differed from the American, and the Scandinavian models. The Ireland I grew up in was full of ‘beliefs’ –​feminism like nationalism was, you might say, one way of looking at the problem -​but I was never sure how these beliefs adhered to what might be called the national reality . . . The feminists of the 1970s didn’t make just me, or they didn’t just make my life easier, happier, more useful -​they made Ireland, or they unmade it. These women were fighters, this was an urgent and very moral national enterprise. There was little talk about climbing the corporate ladder, we didn’t have that many corporations for a start, Irish feminism was not, or only nominally, about the freedom to make a lot of money. In Britain and America they were talking about barriers to career advancement, while we were still talking about barrier methods of contraception.

Making use of wit like this is also a way to have an impact as a woman public intellectual. Enright does not only comment on women’s issues, however, but joining her male colleagues she has also expressed her views on the economy, especially the recession such as in the article ‘Sinking by Inches’ in the London Review of Books for a transnational readership while the talk at the Merriman Summer School was aimed at a very Irish audience.

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Recession Reality John Banville is probably most known for his novel The Sea (2005) as it won the Man Booker Prize. Born in 1945, John Banville grew up in Wexford in a working-​ class home. At the age of twelve he was already writing a lot but very badly lacking originality, he told me in an interview in Dublin in February 2010. He added that he never went to university because he wanted to leave home as early as possible, and had to support himself immediately after school. Banville’s literary biographer John Kenny (2009:  xv–​xvii) details his development into a writer, both literary and journalistic by starting out how Banville finished Christian Brothers’ secondary school, and moved to Dublin where he worked as a clerk for Aer Lingus. Disliking the job, he still appreciated the discounts on international flights that it entailed and travelled to cities across the globe. This was when he started submitting short stories, such as ‘The Party’ to The Kilkenny Magazine in 1966. Two years later, Banville got a job as a copy editor for the Irish Press (a leading newspaper in Ireland which folded in 1995) where he eventually became chief subeditor. He also started writing book reviews and comments on literature for Hibernia, the Irish political and cultural magazine, which he continued to do quite extensively for a decade. In 1970, Banville’s first novel Nightspawn was published and by the early 1980s his reputation as a fiction writer was established and he was elected to Aosdána (which he eventually resigned from, to a great shock in the literary world, on the ground that someone else would need the stipend more). He left his job at the Irish Press in order to be able to spend more time writing. After the success with The Sea in 2005, Banville made his debut as a crime writer under the pen name Benjamn Black. Then he was invited to write book reviews for the Sunday Tribune and a number of novels later, he continued to write book reviews regularly for the Irish Times. This was the beginning of his influence as literary editor of the Irish Times. A couple of years later, he began his long-​time assignment as a reviewer-​essayist for the New York Review of Books. Talking about his journalistic career with me, Banville said: I also did book reviews for newspapers and magazines. I was literary editor of the Irish Times for a long time, twelve years. I loved getting all those books to review. I wanted to take them all home. I did a lot of book reviewing. It’s an honorable trade. I ran the book page as I would run a book shop including everything from children’s book to philosophy.

He added that he was not an arbiter of taste, but simply wanted to get everyone to read. An article that was read by a great many people was Banville’s (2010: A3) New York Times op-​ed titled ‘The Debtor of the Western World’ dated 19 November 2010 where he commented on the drastic deepening of the economic crisis in Ireland:5 This year there were no fireworks. Throughout most of the past decade, for weeks before and after Halloween, the night skies over Ireland were filled with

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the crack and crash of bursting rockets and fountains of multicolored flame . . . Now, with the (Celtic) Tiger dead and buried under a mound of ever-​increasing debt, a silence is falling over the land. This year, the eve of All Saints passed in a deathly hush, save for a few damp squibs. There seemed little left to celebrate, with nothing to be seen in the skies save, in the murky distance but approaching ever nearer, the Four Horsemen of our particular Apocalypse: the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission, Brussels and the Iron Chancellor, Angela Merkel.

Also Colm Tóibín has contributed to public debate on the economic crisis. In order to contextualize this, we need to go back to the fact that homosexuality was illegal in the Republic of Ireland until as recently as 1993. This, in combination with the domination of strict Catholicism in Irish society, made Colm Tóibín flee Ireland as soon as he had completed his final exams at University College Dublin in 1975. He moved to Barcelona where he immersed himself in Catalan life, and also its post-​Franco politics. It was on his return to Dublin that he went into journalism, starting as editor of the magazine Magill while writing literary essays. That was how he learnt to take turns writing the two genres journalism and fiction. By the mid-​1980s, Tóibín set out on a long journey to South America where he ended up in Buenos Aires in Argentina. He was present at the trial of the generals after civilian rule had been reinstated, and reported back to Dublin about it, as he did from his following trips to Sudan and Egypt. Tóibín has written novels, plays, literary essays, book reviews and articles on art and politics for newspapers and magazines in Ireland, Britain and the United States (Wulff 2010). In light of Colm Tóibín’s early escape from Ireland fuelled by feelings of marginality, it was remarkable, and also indicative of the new more open climate in Ireland, that when the economic crisis reached unprecedented levels (and incidentally the day before John Banville’s op-​ed quoted earlier was published in the New York Times), Tóibín (2010a) was invited to make a public speech in Dublin. Aware that news stories and news headlines about Ireland to a transnational readership were painting a dismal picture of the country, Tóibín was lifting the spirits of his uneasy compatriots by reminding them of the greatness of their art and culture. The speech was an opening lecture at the Ireland Literature Exchange acknowledging 1,500 books in translation. The next day the speech was printed on the front page of the Irish Times. The headline read ‘Spreading the Real News from Ireland’: This country’s economic crisis may be making headlines, but a much more serious and deeply influential image of this country emanates from the culture we send out to the world. And now, more than ever, that mission is vital. I think it is possible to argue that both trade and diplomacy are culture for slow learners, that what happens with music and books, with painting and poetry, how they move and spread, how they do not recognise borders, how they find translators, is a blueprint for what happens later with goods and services and with treaties between governments . . . Our duty is to make good

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Rhythms of Writing sentences, and that is our responsibility too. Beyond that, nothing much. But maybe good sentences stand for other things that are good, or might be improved; maybe the rhythms of words used well might matter in ways which are unexpected in a dark time.

Even though John Banville and Colm Tóibín were addressing the same issue –​the deepening of the economic crisis in Ireland –​what interests us here, is the fact that the two texts are written for different readerships: while Banville is reporting on the situation in Ireland for a transnational readership, explaining the situation, Tóibín is formulating his words for Irish people in Ireland, infusing hope in them.

Conflict and Peace An infamous storyline from Ireland is the Troubles, or the conflict as it tends to be referred to in Northern Ireland where its centre is, or was, now that the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 has moved into a peace process. (See Chapter 1 for a historical background to the Troubles.) It was probably because Colum McCann has a chapter on the negotiations towards peace (where the real George Mitchell figures) in his novel TransAtlantic (2013) that led him to write a New York Times article in May 2014 titled ‘Ireland’s Troubled Peace’. In the article, McCann (2014) acknowledges the peace process in Northern Ireland, yet explains forcefully why he finds it fragile: Forty years ago this Saturday, three no-​warning bombs ripped through Dublin. Less than an hour later, another bomb shattered the rural quiet of the town of Monaghan. In all, 33 people were killed and more than 300 injured. In Dublin, sheets of newspaper were laid over the dismembered bodies to hide them from view. The headlines soaked up the blood: the news in advance. There would be more bloody headlines; over the next 24  years, 3,600 people would lose their lives in what have euphemistically been called the Irish ‘Troubles’  . . . It is, of course, naïve to expect total reconciliation. Some grievances are so deep that the people who suffered them will never be satisfied. But the point is not satisfaction –​the point is that the present is superior to the past, and it has to be cultivated as such.

Drawing on my ethnographic experience in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, I can only say that Colum McCann captures the core of the conflict and the peace process. This is what the violence looked like, and this is the state of the peace in 2014. With Brexit comes a new uncertainty about the peace process. Colum McCann has not been as visible as Colm Tóibín, Fintan O’Toole and John Banville in his capacity as a public intellectual. This may be about to change. It is time to conclude this chapter about Irish writers as public intellectuals and their modes of mediation –​written and spoken –​that they engage in for this endeavor. Despite all the stories I have discussed here, in Ireland on the one hand

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and in Britain and the United States on the other, Irish writers are sometimes criticized for not being sufficiently involved in public life and public debate. This I have learnt both from writers with a national reputation and a transnational one. Even Fintan O’Toole has addressed this critique. Most public intellectual work is in connection with an arts or literary issue, but as we have seen it does contribute to political debate, often with wit as a weapon. Since John Banville, Colm Tóibín and Fintan O’Toole spoke truth to the power of Irish economic politics, things have improved. The Irish economy is recovering. It is well-​known that Irish people are opinionated and keep debates going. Still the role of Irish public intellectuals is to give public expression to thought that in some cases is directly linked to action. It tends to be academics who are invited to serve on policy committees advising the Irish government, rather than literary writers or journalists. Their accomplishment as public intellectuals is that they have an ability to boost the morale of their compatriots, especially important in a time of economic crisis when job loss and emigration are hurting the country. The reason that this morale boosting works in Irish society, I think, is to a great extent because the Republic of Ireland is a small country, both geographically and in population size (Wulff 2017). And as Mary Corcoran (2012: 11) productively points out: ‘At a time of crisis in particular, we rely on the critique and creativity that public intellectuals can proffer. Finally, if we are to prosper as a people in the coming decades it is imaginative thinking that must be at the core of the renewal project.’ Looking back at this chapter, we have seen instances of public intellectuals in Ireland contributing to a national debate, as well as a transnational one. There are occasions of overlap, as some Dublin readers keep up with certain international newspapers and journals, but mostly these debates take place in either national or transnational publications, with separate readerships. Articles in the New York Times or the London Review of Books attract readerships in many countries and continents across the globe, not only in Britain and the United States but also in Scandinavia, Australia and Asia. Still, cultural journalism is just one genre the Irish fiction writers master. In Chapter  4, we scrutinize other genres and styles where they also excel.

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Chapter 4 M ODES OF W R ITING:  G E NR E S , T OPIC S ,   S T Y LE S

To the Irish writers’ rhythms of writing, as noted in the Prologue, belongs a capacity to switch, now and then, from writing fiction, novels and short stories, to other genres, primarily journalism, but also for example, to crime novels and memoirs. Historical fiction and biographical fiction are genres in their own right here. Other literary genres Irish writers engage in are poetry and plays, but they also practice script writing for film, radio and television (sometimes translating from their fiction, sometimes writing directly for these media, also in the form of radio diaries). Occasionally, they write songs. Like many artists, Irish writers do not necessarily appreciate being pigeon-​holed into genres by critics and scholars.1 This concerns especially those who write fiction featuring crime. We saw in Chapter 3 how journalism is a parallel pursuit for many Irish writers. In this chapter, I discuss varieties of writing in terms of genres, topics and styles. It is in particular crime fiction, also referred to as Irish Noir, and memoirs by the Irish writers that are considered, also in relation to fiction writing. An Irish tone of voice of ‘grim comedy’ is mostly articulated in fiction, as are Irish storylines, but they do surface in crime novels and memoirs, as well. Perspectives from the anthropology of the senses is applied to literary texts for an understanding of how they are composed and read. This is literary senses as plot-​turners. All writing genres that the Irish writers engage in are distinguished by rhythm. Hanging around and interviewing writers, critics and publishers in the literary world in Dublin, I often heard ‘rhythm’ being mentioned in relation to writing. And as John Banville told Belinda McKeon (2009) in an interview: ‘It all starts with rhythm for me’ which made her note that ‘he is committed to language and to rhythm above plot, characterization, or pacing’.

Genres and Their Blurred Borders The notion of genre has been defined in various ways among literary scholars over time. Aware of this, folklorist Richard Bauman (1992: 53) says: ‘Classification has been a concern of literary and rhetorical theory since classical antiquity and has figured prominently in philological oriented studies of literary history, with emphasis throughout on the culturally valorized, canonically sanctioned forms of

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literature.’ Not only in folklore then, but certainly also in literary studies, has genre been a central organizing concept. According to Cuddon (1998: 342), genre is a French term for a kind, a literary type or class. The major Classical genres were: epic, tragedy, lyric, comedy and satire, to which would now be added novel and short story . . . From the Renaissance and until well on into the 18th c. the genres were carefully distinguished, and writers were expected to follow the rules prescribed for them.

Literary genres can be identified by components such as writing technique, topic, tone and length of the account. The list of genres and subgenres has kept changing over time according to different disciplinary, authorial as well as publishing market perspectives that might diverge. Bookshops tend to keep changing the designations of the sections where they put books in yet other directions. The introduction of new technology and media made a big difference to literary genres as it opened up for new creative combinations. Even though a strictness of genre definitions among certain literary scholars has been lingering on, there has in fact always been some overlapping between genres, where the genres have been inspiring each other. Clifford Geertz (1980:  165)  referred to this as blurred genres, in his classic article, in relation to the refiguration of social thought.2 Geertz pointed out that ‘there has been an enormous amount of genre mixing in social science, as in intellectual life generally, and such blurring of kinds is continuing apace’. He is pleased to note that sociological understandings depend on humanities, just as crafts and technology have influenced physical sciences. And, Geertz clarifies, ‘I not only think these things are true, I think they are true together.’ With his interest in literature (he was a published poet), Geertz exemplifies with Richard Nixon appearing in fiction which brings us back to the Irish writers and the growing literary genres historical fiction and biographical fiction. However, while enjoying new combinations of blurred genres, it is as I have observed, easy to forget that a blurred genre effect cannot happen without the original genres still being distinctive (Wulff 2016). Career-​wise there might be a risk involved in being versatile with genres outside fiction. A fiction writer who is also a prolific journalist is likely to get a reputation, but might not be an obvious candidate for literary prizes. The Nobel Prize in Literature has not been awarded to a fiction writer who also practices journalism writing parallel to that of fiction, however successfully, until 2015 when Belarusian Svetlana Aleksijevitj received it. The most famous case of an established literary writer with a worldwide reputation who also was a renowned foreign correspondent, and kept being nominated for the Nobel Prize but never won it, would be Graham Greene. It is well known that one member of the Swedish Academy, Arthur Lundqvist, was fiercely against Greene getting the Nobel Prize, but also that Greene at the time was considered by many to be ‘an “entertainer” rather than a “serious” writer’ as David Lodge (2014: 20) notes, suggesting that this idea might have come about because of Greene’s usage of ‘the structures of the adventure stories he read in his childhood and youth which accounted in part for his

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wide readership’. But contrary to popular fiction, Greene steered clear of stereotypes. And as Lodge adds, he was ‘a master of English prose’. Incidentally, building a fiction story around adventure or crime is a quite common technique among the Irish writers. John Banville has made a name as a crime writer, but then, again, he uses his pen name, Benjamin Black. It is not a pseudonym, as it says somewhere  –​on the cover or on one of the first pages of these books  –​that this is John Banville writing as Benjamin Black. Banville’s award-​ winning novel The Book of Evidence (1989) was advertised as a novel, but with a plot of robbery and murder, it could have been genred as a crime novel. The structure certainly is that of a crime story. It is the protagonist himself, Freddie Montgomery, a failed scientist and drifter, who tells the chilling but partly grotesque story of how he steals a small Dutch painting from a well-​to-​do friend simply because he likes it, but is detected by a chambermaid whom he subsequently kills. The book was inspired by a real murder in Dublin: a man who moved in the city’s social circles killed a young nurse while stealing her car. Some critics called The Book of Evidence (1989) a crime novel, but found the book more complex than most novels in that genre.

Irish Noir The long-​standing global reputation of Irish fiction, poetry, and drama, even literary journalism, does not quite include crime fiction by Irish writers. Irish crime fiction, or Irish Noir (sometimes referred to as Emerald Noir), only recently was acknowledged outside Ireland, possibly partly helped along by acclaimed Irish fiction writers sometimes turning to crime stories.3 Considering the development of Irish Noir, its relatively humble past could be understood in relation to the violent conflict in Northern Ireland as it to some extent reached across the island (as well as to London). According to one social analysis of crime fiction, those who live with a real threat of violence do not need it in fiction as well. The colonial history of Ireland could also have been a hindrance to crime fiction. There is an illuminating comparison to be made here with Nordic Noir as it takes place in peaceful Scandinavia. It is without doubt one of the major attractions, for example, of Henning Mankell’s popular Wallander books (made into a number of films and television series, as well as an opera), that they reveal a sleepy town in southern Sweden to be the site of spectacular crime. Wallander himself is a sullen but sharp loner, an anti-​hero of a detective. The slow pace of the stories when transferred to screen also makes them different than most crime series and films –​probably another reason why they have been so successful. In the autumn of 2013, the radio series Irish Noir was broadcast on RTÉ Radio 1 presented by John Kelly, journalist and fiction writer. The series featured famous crime writers in Ireland such as John Connolly and Stuart Neville, as well as John Banville. In the series, Irish Noir was identified as having become a literary force as recent as during the last fifteen years, that is, from the 1990s and onwards. Not only the history and politics of Ireland were put forward as possible explanations

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to this late blooming, but also how the mega-​fame of classic Irish writers, in particular Joyce and Beckett, might have been an obstacle to the rise of writers who were primarily drawn to hard-​boiled action. Here is a hint of the view that crime fiction is of a lesser literary quality than other fiction. But as John Banville, who not only writes crime novels, but also is a great reader of them, has said about crime fiction: ‘High art can happen in any medium’ (McKeon 2009). After his novel The Sea (2005) was awarded the Man Booker Prize, Banville (McKeon 2009) recalls: I started writing Christine Falls in March 2005, and it went very quickly. I was staying at the house of a friend in Italy. I sat down at nine o’clock on a Monday morning, and by lunchtime I had written more than fifteen hundred words. It was a scandal! I thought, John Banville, you slut. But then I remembered it was Black, not Banville, who was writing. I had fun doing it and I thought, if this has to be my day job, if Benjamin Black is going to earn some money so that John Banville can have freedom.

According to Belinda McKeon (2009), ‘Being Benjamin Black, however, allows him to play more loosely with character and storytelling; in interviews and in correspondence, he refers to Black (“the rogue”) fondly and mischievously, delightedly playing this identity against his own.’ Comparing his lucid crime fiction with his carefully constructed novels, McKeon (2009) describes the latter as ‘baroque cathedrals, filled with elaborate passages and sometimes overwhelming to the casual tourist’. In a YouTube interview, Banville says that he was inspired by Georges Simenon and how ‘he achieves his effects with a very small vocabulary, very direct style, with brief paragraphs’. The protagonist of the Black books is Quirke, a pathologist in the 1950s Dublin. He is indeed quirky but more likeable than Banville’s protagonists tend to be. Three of the Black books, Christine Falls (2006), The Silver Swan (2007) and Elegy for April (2010) have been made into a crime drama television mini-​series by RTÉ One and BBC One, called Quirke and first broadcast in 2014. The Irish actor Gabriel Byrne starred as Quirke to great acclaim. For John Banville, ‘crime fiction is a good way of addressing the question of the evil –​why people do dreadful things to each other’.4 He is not interested in delivering complete answers. As that is the way life is, he finds, some mysteries always remain. After six Benjamin Black books (there was a seventh in 2015), Banville had Black writing (so to speak) a hard-​boiled Philip Marlowe mystery set in 1950s Los Angeles, The Black-​Eyed Blonde (2014), where he ‘adopts’ the private detective Marlowe (famously acted by Humphrey Bogart on screen) from the pioneering American crime writer Raymond Chandler. (His mother was incidentally from Ireland which might have played a part in Banville’s interest in his work.) The Black-​Eyed Blonde (2014: 1) opens with Marlowe in his office: It was one of those Tuesday afternoons in summer when you wonder if the earth has stopped revolving. The telephone on my desk had the air of something that knows it’s being watched. Cars trickled past in the street below the dusty window of my office, and a few of the good folks of our fair city ambled along the

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side-​walk, men in hats, mostly, going nowhere. I watched a woman at the corner of Cahuenga and Hollywood, waiting for the light to change. Long legs, a slim cream jacket with high shoulders, navy blue pencil skirt.

The woman soon appears in Marlowe’s office and asks him to find her former lover. It does not take Marlowe long to learn that this incident is followed by a number of mysterious events, all connected to a prominent but merciless family. The Black-​ Eyed Blonde (2014) was fairly well-​received in Ireland, Britain and the United States. As The Guardian’s Mark Lawson (2014) wrote: ‘The Irish understudy takes on Chandler’s habits convincingly’ and concludes:  ‘The genre of new books by dead writers is a curious and questionable one, but Banville and his crime-​writing pseudonym have played the game as well as anyone could.’ This respectful but not overwhelmed tone is a common fate of these books where well-​known detectives come back to life. Agatha Christie and Conan Doyle are also among the classic crime writers whose detectives live on through the work of other writers, also made into film and television serials. But when the sequel to bestselling Swedish crime writer Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy was authored by David Lagercrantz (2015) only a decade after Larsson’s untimely death, his childhood friends sparkled a controversy arguing that this was ‘grave robbery’ and that this commercial ‘circus’ was completely against Larsson’s ideology (Brandén and Lindblom 2015). Larsson’s brother and father and, of course, his publisher Norstedts, fought back in the media. They kept repeating that readers need to know what will happen, that they have asked for it. This is a striking example of the creation of fiction flow –​ that stories live on and on nowadays, not forever, but much longer than writers, readers and publishers might foresee when they begin. Cormac Millar is the pen name of Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin, translator and professor of Italian at Trinity College Dublin. Besides his academic work he has published crime fiction, An Irish Solution (2004) and The Grounds (2006), relatively late in his career. Ó Cuilleanáin is a central figure in the Irish Noir scene also for giving talks and organizing events, and blogging about Irish crime writers, compiling a list of references that keeps growing and discussing the state of the art.5 Also Millar is taking into account how writings that are not advertised as crime fiction in fact turns out to deal with such issues. Roddy Doyle’s The Woman Who Walked into Doors (1996), for instance, is a strong story about domestic violence, against a backdrop of an armed robbery. Despite its title, New Ways to Kill Your Mother (2012b) by Colm Tóibín, is not as it seems, a collection of crime stories, but essays on writers and their dysfunctional families. Most of the essays were previously published in the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books. As John Preston (2012) wrote in his very appreciative review in The Telegraph: It comes as no surprise to learn that writers should often have had troubled relationships with their mothers, but as Colm Tóibín points out, the real interest lies in seeing how they exact their revenge. They do so in a lot of cases by murdering them –​not in cold blood, but metaphorically, on the page.

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There is a long and surprisingly distinguished history of matricide in fiction  –​especially in the 19th-​century novel. Jane Austen’s last three novels all have motherless heroines and they do so, Tóibín believes, for a very good reason. ‘Mothers get in the way in fiction; they take up the space that can be better filled by . . . the slow growth of a personality.’ Without mothers, Austen’s heroines are free to grow outside of the family’s arena of influence –​and to become themselves.

Preston goes on to acknowledge that ‘it’s not only their mothers that writers kill. Fathers are despatched just as brutally’. Tóibín thus writes about how the death of the fathers of Thomas Mann, Henry James, Virginia Woolf and W.  H. Yeats were liberating to them and their artist siblings. Also the Irish Times review titled ‘Everything Is Relative’ by Carlo Geblér (2012), prolific writer who teaches at Queen’s University Belfast, is a well-​written, quite positive account. It ends: ‘Unquestionably, Colm Tóibín’s prose meets Orwell’s standard: it’s like a pane of clear glass, and through it I saw a number of writers in their family settings. For the most part the writers weren’t nice, didn’t have a good time and didn’t create much domestic happiness, but, then, I suppose, it was ever thus.’ It is well-​known in Ireland that Carlo Gébler is the son of Edna O’Brien, a circumstance which might be linked to the last sentence, as it was by some writers and journalists in Dublin. Targeting the title (rather than Tóibín’s point about constraining mothers), the title of the book caused a certain controversy in Ireland. I  did hear critical comments from women writers (who also are Irish mothers themselves) during my fieldwork, especially when it was displayed in a bookshop window on Mother’s Day. This offended reaction is yet another indicator of the centrality of the Irish mother in Ireland, and it was in line with an opinion letter by Louise Callaghan (2012) in the Irish Times: Sir,  –​Colm Tóibín’s latest book, reviewed by Carlo Gébler (Weekend Review, February 18th) has a misleading and somewhat offensive title: New Ways to Kill Your Mother. It may be a catchy title for a book (‘new’ anything is a common publishers’ marketing ploy), but is in my opinion inappropriate for a series of essays about the relationships of great writers with their families. And with the exception of Jane Austen, Tóibín writes only about male writers. This is one sure way to kill off women writers  –​ignore them! I’m sure the reviewer’s mother, Edna O’Brien, would agree –​we must find ways of keeping our literary mothers and our women authors alive. –​Yours, etc, LOUISE C CALLAGHAN, Annesley Park, Ranelagh, Dublin.6

To this discussion should be added the piece of information that Edna O’Brien is not only a distinguished writer of fiction, but also an acclaimed memoirist. Her first memoir is significantly titled Mother Ireland (1976).

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After all this, the obvious question is: What about Colm Tóbín’s own mother? Who was she, and what was their relationship like? Far from overbearing, Bríd Tóibín is tenderly fictionalized as the protagonist in Nora Webster (2014): a young widow with two sons at home, one of them who would have been Colm Tóibín himself. There is no doubt that he was close to his mother (see also Fogarty 2008; Walshe 2013a). As she had published some poems and had an interest in literature, in a way Colm Tóbín has been able to accomplish what she could have become. This might thus be an instance of telling the truth through fiction.

Memoirs: The Irish Mother In anthropology and sociology, mighty mothers have long been recognized. The classic study by Willmott and Young (1975) depicts the impact of working-​class mothers on their married daughters with young children in east London in the 1950s. Here as in many other cases, the lack of influence that comes with lower-​ class positions in wider society is sharply contrasted by women’s, especially housewives’, control over their families at home. And drawing on data from the 1960s, Schneider (1980: 5) discusses the diversity of American family and kinship in his milestone book. After considering the prevalence of the matrifocal family in the lower classes, he goes on to describe how interviewees from ethnic groups emphasized the importance of their mothers: the Italian mother, the Jewish mother, and that ‘it is not really possible to understand the Irish family until one has understood the special place of the Irish mother. ‘If there is a link to religion here, it is a curious fact that there is no equivalent notion of a “Protestant” mother.’ When I did fieldwork on an ethnically mixed group of teenage girls in an inner city area of south London in the 1980s, the girls referred to their home as ‘Mum’s’ even when there was a very present father (Wulff 1988). It happened that this expression came up during my fieldwork on dance in Ireland about twenty years later (Wulff 2007a), but it was not as common as in south London. Still the Irish mother, in all classes (not only the working class), is a central figure in Irish literature, especially in memoirs, but also in fiction. She is not always a dominant person, but important in her capacity of providing unconditional love and support, often during poor conditions when everything else is scarce; including in some classic accounts, food. It may be tempting to link this literary celebration of the Irish mother to Catholicism and the worship of Mary, the mother of Jesus. In the novella The Testament of Mary (2012a) (which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize), Colm Tóibín imagines Mary telling the devastating story of how she lost her son and now lives in exile haunted by fear and grief. In a review in The Atlantic, Joe Pinsker (2013) points at Mary’s complexity: By her account, Christ’s most well-​known acts were far from providential, and Mary herself isn’t as demure as myth would have it: Halfway through the book, she threatens two disciples at knifepoint. Tóibín’s premise, then, is to turn to Christ’s mother to get the straight story. Unlike the pure, meek woman found on votive candles, this Mary is empowered, and above all, honest. She flees the

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Rhythms of Writing crucifixion scene before her son has died, and does so, she confesses, because it was ‘her own safety [she] thought of ’.

Other reviews have brought out Mary’s suffering and sense of morality, as well as a reminder that she actually has lived, this is historical fiction. Tóibín wrote the novella after the story titled Testament had been staged as a monologue at the Dublin Theatre Festival in 2011. Then in 2013, it opened as a much anticipated play on Broadway, but closed after only two weeks (cf. Chapter 7 on fiction and intermedial translation). The play was nominated for three Tony Awards including Best Play. It did stir a protest from the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property:  on opening night, about a hundred people were standing across the street from the Walter Kerr Theatre holding signs saying ‘Defamation is not free speech’ and ‘Mary, we love you. We reject this blasphemy’ while musicians played Ave Maria (Hetrick 2013). The play was reviewed quite interestingly and positively by Fr. Edward L. Beck (2013), Roman Catholic priest in the Huffington Post under the headline: ‘Blasphemy or Blessing?’ It is probably safe to state that Mary as an icon has a global and historical fame. She might well be the most famous mother in history. Another famous mother, at least in Irish literature, acquired her fame rather recently, but it has become huge. I am thinking of Frank McCourt’s beloved mother who is portrayed in his memoir Angela’s Ashes (1996, 2005a), depicting his impoverished childhood and early adulthood mostly in Limerick. (It premiered as a film in 1999.) This rhythmic rendering was the first in a trilogy, followed, again, by ’Tis (1999) and Teacher Man (2005b). Writing a memoir, of course, entails a selection process:  what to include, what to exclude, and how to present events and circumstances. Angela’s Ashes (1996, 2005a) is composed of stories McCourt and his siblings told each other time after another, and stories they listened to as they grew up. This is one way of remembering the past. The book (McCourt 1996: 1) opens: When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.

A certain sense of humour is detectable already here. What was not funny at all, however, was the often absent alcoholic father who was unemployed most of the time. An alcoholic father and a struggling cherished mother is also how John McGahern portrays his parents in his Memoir (2005). It ends with the memory of McGahern (2005: 271) walking with his adored mother in Leitrim. He imagines her coming back from the dead and the two of them walking ‘together through those summer lanes, with their banks of wild flowers that “cast a spell” ’ and on to a lake –​‘above the lake we would follow the enormous sky until it reaches the low mountains where her life began’. In order to take account of a certain diversity of mothers in Ireland, here are two portraits that diverge quite considerably from the generic Irish mother. The

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autobiographical Making Babies:  Stumbling into Motherhood (2004) by Anne Enright deals with her own experience of becoming a mother, as she looks back at a special period of her life. It is an entertaining, yet substantial memoir of what it is like to have babies after eighteen years of marriage, well into a career as broadcaster and writer. According to Bracken and Cahill (2011: 3): ‘This witty and poignant account of the trials and difficulties, as well as the joys, of mothering provides a remarkable combination of frank anecdote and reflective philosophy.’ Enright was born in 1962, which means that she is a relatively young memoirist. Making Babies (2004) is in any case an example of a memoir that reports on certain life-​changing events against a backdrop of changing Ireland where women staying at home with many children are more or less obsolete. From Anne Enright, we can still look forward to other accounts spanning longer periods and including a wealth of other experiences of her life. The second mother, who is very different from the Irish mother we have encountered this far, is Ross Skelton’s (2013:  28). It turns out that she was not Irish, but ‘came from a respectable Devon family’. In his delicate Eden Halt: A Memoir (2013), Skelton recalls: ‘My mother had set her heart on flower arranging but her mother disapproved of her becoming a florist. Headstrong, she rebelled against her family’s work of tea and tennis and joined the wartime RAF in 1940, where she met my father.’ As a young wife, she had to live with her parents-​in-​law on the Antrim coast in Northern Ireland while her husband was posted abroad. He comes back, but as the years go by, they fall into poverty and the marriage deteriorates. A  statement of the mother’s feelings for his father later in life was her appearance at his father’s funeral ‘dressed entirely in purple’ (Skelton (2013: 22). This makes her stand out in the book, even though she is not all that present throughout. Skelton taught philosophy and psychoanalysis for many years at Trinity College Dublin. This expertise has clearly sensitized him to how memory works, and the therapeutic effect of writing a memoir. ‘As Hegel puts it,’ Skelton (2013: 12) wisely says, ‘ “the owl of Minerva only spreads her wings with the falling of the dusk”–​that is, the truth of our lives can be seen only by looking back.’ Making memories public is, of course, also an important part of writing memoirs, and for those who are public figures and/​or have been part of public events, writing a memoir is an opportunity to express their point of view of what happened. In cases of obvious revenge, court cases might follow, but less serious controversy can also cause rifts between colleagues, old friends and relatives. In the aftermath of the unprecedented success of Angela’s Ashes (1996, 2005a), there were critical comments about the truthfulness of this memoir. Here envy might have come into the picture.

Stories and the Senses The New  York Times Sunday Book Review of Anne Enright’s The Gathering (2007a) by Liesl Schillinger (2007), provides an evocative visual impression of the

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text: ‘Reckless intelligence, savage humour, slow revelation, no consolation: Anne Enright’s fiction is jet dark –​but how it glitters. Her prose often ravishes and sometimes repels:  reading her can be like staring into the lustrous surface of a lake, trying to discern the dangers lurking beneath.’ Such ‘jet dark glitter’ is Irish fiction at its best. It is an observation that indicates the importance of the visual and is an incentive for us here to take a closer look at the use of the senses in some Irish literary texts. ‘Write through your senses!’ is a common call to students of creative writing by the writers themselves, often continuing, ‘and consider all of them: vision, sound, smell, touch, taste!’ This is a crucial way to convey stories. But does the visual dominate over the other senses in Irish fiction, as it tends to do elsewhere? And how are the senses made to relate to each other in what David Howes (2004: 9, 2010: 334, 336) has termed intersensoriality? Are there, for instance, certain senses that tend to go together? It is interesting to note that ‘senses may conflict as well as collaborate’. Senses also feature in negotiations across the border between Irish fiction and academic writing in the way I write about the social world of Irish writers and their texts, as well as in how Irish writers sometimes write academically. An experience in the field for an anthropologist, and an experience of life for a literary writer, are both embodied and multi-​sensorial: at least potentially it is possible to see, hear, smell, taste and feel a touch simultaneously, while a text is linear and thus has to be composed by describing one sense at a time, until all senses that are needed are there together providing a profound picture. As to the anthropology of the senses, it was conceptualized in the late 1980s by Paul Stoller (1989), and developed in the 1990s by David Howes (1991) and Constance Classen (1997).7 During my fieldwork with Irish writers, most of them told me that they were writing their first drafts longhand, and showed me their big blue notebooks with wide margins for comments and revisions. And it turned out that the reason that they kept writing longhand was that they were driven by sensuous aspects of the writing routine, at least in its beginning. As Deirdre Madden explained to me in an interview, she starts stories writing longhand as ‘the physicality is more natural with a fountain pen’, and ‘the weight is easier on your hand’. Also ‘my hand-​writing is not very good. It gets better with a fountain pen, easier to read afterwards’ and she added ‘plus I like the feel of the pen’. The black ink she uses provides both visual and olfactory sensory aspect of the physicality of writing. I was intrigued to learn that ‘the sound of writing’, meaning how the fountain pen makes a slight scraping sound against the paper, made Madden feel reassured that her writing was going well. After revisions she writes the next draft on her laptop, prints it out and reads again. ‘Something happens between the long-​hand and the laptop’, she noted, the rest of the revision is more mechanical. Writing longhand is widespread, she continued. ‘Many writers, we persist. I teach it to my students a lot, I try to encourage them to. But the younger ones don’t write long-​hand.’ A focus on fiction makes this process different from the one with memoirs (or anthropological texts for that matter), however, as fiction does not claim

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to represent reality in the same direct way as memoirs. Still, Irish fiction is not detached from reality. Both writing and reading fiction build on memory and imagination. The recognition of sensorial experiences is vital for an appreciation of fiction. Literary accounts of the senses can bring back the memory of certain situations for the reader, and this is why such sections tend to stick in our memory. Colm Tóibín’s (1993: 99) novel The Heather Blazing moves between an elderly High Court judge in Dublin and his humble childhood in a town on the south-​east coast of Ireland. Here are sound, touch and vision from his childhood: The shock of the alarm clock in the early morning. It was winter. He snuggled up in the warm bed, trying to stay awake and lie on until the last minute. His father was a light sleeper, the alarm would have woken him in the front room and he would stay awake until he heard some sound. Eamon dreaded the creak of his father’s footsteps on the bare boards of the front room; he knew that if he did not get out of bed his father would come to rouse him. One more minute: he lay still in the warmth of the bed and waited. The tip of his nose was cold and the bed more comfortable than he had ever imagined. He felt sorry that he did not appreciate it more at night. Then suddenly he braced himself, he jumped out into the freezing air, and walked shivering across the floor to turn on the light.

Even though the domination of the visual has been questioned, also by visual anthropologists, there is no doubt that Irish fiction keeps being very visual. This is also, by the way, one reason why novels transfer easily to film (unlike plays, for instance). A clear case in point of the visual is the story of a young man who feels at a loss in the Irish countryside. It is happening in the novel Songdogs by Colum McCann (1995: 8–​10): It was a camera that woke him. He found it in a large red box under one of the beds, forgotten . . . He didn’t know it then, but the camera would burst him out on to the world, give him something to cling to, fulminate a belief in him out in the power of light, the necessity of image, the possibility of freezing time. Along the backroads of Mayo he caught black and white images of old women head-​bent on the way to mass; flowers reaching up above black puddles; sheep huddled in the ruined shells of old cottages . . . It was a world that had seldom seen a lens of any sort.

So, the visual sets the scene in Irish fiction, and when other senses  –​primarily sound, but also smell and touch, and to some extent taste –​are added, they become driving senses in the story. It can be a sound, a smell, or a touch that makes the plot turn, often in a dramatic direction such as in the novel Room (2010) by Emma Donoghue, who moved to Canada from Dublin as an adult. This is a chilling and absorbing story about five-​year-​old Jack who lives in a single, locked room with Ma, his mother. She was kidnapped when she was a student, and Jack was born in

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the room. When their capturer visits, the cue of his dreaded arrival is the sound of the lock ‘Beep beep’ (spelled with italics), which he opens with a code. This sound becomes especially scary the day Ma has decided that they are going to escape. Eventually, they manage to escape, and go to live with Jack’s grandparents. I have been looking at great length for a short section that would contain all five senses –​and play a pivotal role in the story at the same time. But I have not found a section short enough that does all that, even though many, if not most novels feature every sense somewhere, and usually in a number of places. The following section from Room (2010) contains four senses, only taste is missing despite the fact that it is taking place in the kitchen of Jack’s grandparents’ house. It is about Jack’s continued exploration of the outside world. The narrator is still Jack himself: I’m watching the flames dancing all orange under the pasta pot. The match is on the counter with its end all black and curly. I touch it to the fire, it makes a hiss and gets a big flame again so I drop it on the stove. The little flame goes invisible nearly, it’s nibbling along the match little by little till it’s all black and a small smoke goes up like a silvery ribbon. The smell is magic. (Donoghue 2010: 338)

But soon Jack has burnt himself on the match, and as he screams, his Steppa enters scolding him: ‘Didn’t your ma ever teach you not to play with fire?’ (Donoghue 2010: 339). It is because of the use of senses that the reader remembers this short section: you can smell the smoke, see the dancing flames, and feel the pain from the fire. The visual in the text can be divided into two types: first, what the reader is made to see such as landscape, scenery and other settings, second, what the characters in the story see which the reader learns about second-​hand. Jack tells the reader what he sees throughout the novel. Many novels move back and forth between both perspectives. Written in an old-​fashioned period style, the award-​winning novel Ghost Light (2011) by Joseph O’Connor switches from the love story between the Irish playwright John Millington Synge and the young actress Molly Allgood, unfolding in 1907 in Dublin, to her memory of it as an elderly woman living in poverty in London almost fifty years later. Here is a quote from a romantic holiday they took in the Wicklow mountains outside Dublin: ‘The taste of Wicklow buttermilk has him moaning with pleasure’(O’Connor 2011:  110). Soon the reader is introduced to what the landscape looks and feels like: ‘There comes a day of golden sumptuousness, the shifting breezes scented with wild rosemary. Every blade of snipegrass can be heard as it grows or is mown into sweet-​smelling death. Larks and blue linnets arise from the furrows as she walks to the streamlet in the morning. Within, she feels the pulse and run of her blood, the calendar of the body, its flow’ (O’Connor 2011: 110). We all know how the sound of a song, or a special smell can bring back the memory of childhood summers, or the atmosphere of a foreign place. This is how the senses might work in Irish literature. If the visual dominates and sets the scene, again, especially sound and smell, sometimes touch and even taste, can be plot-​turners.

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An Irish Tone of Voice: ‘Grim Comedy’ As we have seen, the genres of fiction, crime fiction and memoirs by the Irish writers are somewhat blurred as, for instance, crime happens in novels that are advertised as fiction, and personal memories are sometimes also to be found in fiction. There are traits of other genres in what remain distinctive genres after all. This also applies to plots, structure and style. While there certainly are non-​Irish topics and storylines in fiction, located in New York, Scandinavia, Spain, the Soviet, Latin America or elsewhere, they often involve Irish protagonists or at least some passing reference to Ireland, but not necessarily. Yet throughout my research on Irish writers and their work I have, again, kept noticing some recurrent storylines. They are stronger in novels and short stories, but surface, in other genres as well. To recap, they related to the history in Ireland, the conflict and post-​conflict in Northern Ireland, the postcolonial situation, the economic boom in the late twentieth century, the so-​called Celtic Tiger, the downturn thereafter, even the following upswing. There were also family and grief. Other major Irish storylines were emigration and exile. However, not only emigration defines Ireland now, but also immigration, a recent storyline which has not quite made it abroad yet (cf. Villar-​ Argáiz 2014a, cf. Chapter 9). Roddy Doyle’s collection The Deportees and Other Stories (2007a) and Chris Binchy’s novel Open-​handed (2008) were rather early literary accounts of immigrant experiences in Ireland by Irish writers. In Open-​handed (2008), three immigrants, Marcin, Victor and Agnieszka work at night in hotels and bars. There are two Irish businessmen working with foreign property. They are all brought together in unlikely ways in their search for success, from their different positions in Irish society. The novel makes the analytical point that not only immigrants are unfamiliar with ‘class codes and moral mores’ (Hand 2008) in their new country, but also the Irish themselves in contemporary Ireland. In this country with its history of divided, even fractured identities, the new immigration has brought attention to the issue of who exactly counts as Irish, and by whom. In the satirical short story ‘57% Irish’ (2007b; see also White 2014) by Roddy Doyle, the protagonist is trying to find a method for measuring Irishness. He builds a machine that can register people’s emotional reactions while watching video clips of the Irish dance show Riverdance, the Irish traditional song ‘Danny Boy’, and a goal by an Irish footballer, Robbie Keane, in a game against Germany in the World Cup 2002 (Wulff 2014). There is also a short story titled ‘Guess Who’s Coming for the Dinner’ (Doyle 2007c) which (similar to the American film Guess Who Is Coming to Dinner from 1967) features a young Dublin girl introducing her Nigerian boyfriend to her working-​ class family. Is there then a particular Irish writing style? Ireland has had many dark dramas, historically and politically, but in literature they tend to be lightened up by wit and warmth. Creative wit is highly valued in Ireland, especially among men. ‘The gift of the gab’ or loquacity, is indeed a general trait among people in Ireland, which is reflected in the strong storytelling tradition (Ní Dhuibhne 1999b). Irish fiction

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is an excellent expression of how a ‘fusion of creative wit and dark drama forms a vital vein running through Irish culture’ (Wulff 2007a: 72). This is confirmed by Banville when in an interview with me he identified ‘an Irish tone of voice’ in fiction and drama as ‘grim comedy’. Just like any artistic work, Irish fiction, crime stories, not even memoirs, are mere mirrors of what the writers observe, they are complex commentary of contemporary life in Ireland, more often than not satirical (Wulff 2008). Ranging from the history to politics, the stories are often romantic, nearly always witty, but like John Banville says, they feature a dark streak. Yet they often end on an unexpected good turn, looking ahead with confidence after all.

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Chapter 5 T R ACING T ALE S:  F OLK LORE I N F IC T ION

In his learned Locating Irish Folklore (2000: 1, 2, 5), Diarmuid Ó Giolláin details the significance of Irish folklore in the process towards political independence in Ireland, and points out that Irish folklore is still included in the official ideology of nationalism in the country. Considering the concept of folklore, Ó Giolláin states that ‘as part of the national or regional heritage, folklore is of ideological importance and has often provided a reservoir of symbols for identity politics’. While noting that ‘folklore escapes clear definition’, he proposes that ‘ “folklore” is both subject matter and critical discourse, amateur enthusiasm and academic discipline, residual agrarian culture and popular urban culture of the present’.1 When it comes to a distinction between the notion of folklore and that of folklife ‘the former tended to encompass more the intangible aspects of agrarian popular culture  –​beliefs, narratives, music, customs  –​and the latter the more tangible aspects –​material culture specifically’. Narrative can, of course, be both oral and written storytelling. This is where literature comes in, which as already indicated in the Prologue of this book, also played a prominent part in Ireland’s independence movement. Ó Giolláin (2000: 34) guides us further towards the topic of this chapter when he says: ‘Literature has always been enriched by folklore, and the history of the narratives passes from the oral to the history and back again.’ This chapter traces folklore in fiction by focusing on the short stories ‘Midwife to the Fairies’ by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne (2003) and ‘The Pram’ by Roddy Doyle (2007d), as well as the novel Molly Fox’s Birthday (2008) by Deirdre Madden.2 Even though there is some systematic use of particular folktales and legends, when folklore occurs in contemporary Irish fiction, it tends to be in the form of general allusions to fairy tales, fairies and the supernatural (see also Ingman 2009). This provides an opportunity, in this chapter, to discuss the strong tradition of storytelling in Ireland, and the transition from oral tales to written text. Herein lies the key to the success of Irish contemporary fiction. Just like a storyteller in the past knew how to spellbind an audience for hours on end, contemporary Irish writers know how to keep a reader reading. Despite the fact that far from all, contemporary Irish writers use folklore in their fiction, not even most of them, it is yet a significant and distinguishing trait of contemporary Irish fiction. It was even more common in classic Irish fiction, poetry, and plays by writers such as John M. Synge, Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, Lady Augusta

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Gregory (who also was a folklorist), Maria Edgeworth, Patrick Kavanagh, Flann O’Brien and James Joyce. In this book, it is crucial to connect folklore with its storytelling tradition, folktales and legends as it is a social analysis of writing as a craft and career. It is precisely this tradition of storytelling that explains why the Irish continue to be such great writers.

Folklore and Literature Going back to the very beginning, the term folklore was coined by William Thoms in 1846 in a letter to an English magazine, Ó Giollaín (2000: 45–​8) tells us, while the Irish translation béaloideas most likely came about during the early years of the Gaelic League (an organization of politicians and artists that was set up to work towards political independence) in the 1890s. Ó Giollaín (2000: 4, 182–​3) goes on to note that: ‘Locating Irish folklore is the task of situating folklore within Ireland’s history, geography and research traditions. Of necessity, the perspective is comparative. The concept of folklore developed in Europe partly as a “nationalist” reaction to a metropolitan culture with universal pretensions,’ and describes eighteenth-​and nineteenth-​century European ideas in England, France, Germany and Finland. But it was not until the 1970s that folklore courses were offered at universities in Ireland. The Department of Irish Folklore (which replaced the Irish Folklore Commission) was established in 1971, and chaired by Bo Almqvist at University College Dublin. A few years later, a folklore department hosted by the Department of History was set up at University College Cork, with Gearóid Ó Crualaoich as chair. For Ó Giolláin, ‘the future of folklore scholarship seems to be the maintenance of its decentered academic tradition along with wider and deeper international cooperation and continued drawing on other disciplines’. It is interesting to note that Ó Giolláin suggests ‘a closer relationships between the two ethnological traditions that have long worked in Ireland, folklore and anthropology’. As to folklorists, in 2013 Ó Giollaín observed two types of folklorists: those who identify as cultural historians who document disappearing traditions, and those who identify as ethnographers and work with living culture. His preference would be that folklorists find ways of combining these research tasks. Discussing the development of the Irish Folklore Commission in the 1940s, and its remit to preserve the oral tradition in literary texts, Ó Giolláin (2012: 411) sees ‘a key feature of Irish Gaelic Culture since the seventeenth century:  the symbiotic relationship of the literary and the oral traditions’. With the foundation of Irish folklore studies, oral traditions became so much more than just popular culture –​they were a central force in the formation of a national tradition. There were similar movements in other countries such as Germany where Herder aimed to ‘create an authentic German literature’ by providing ‘writers who had no native literary models access to literary resources of their own’. Here Ó Giolláin quotes Pascale Casanova (2004:  224–​5) when she observes that ‘the popular tales collected, edited, reworked, and published by patriotic writers  . . . became the first quantifiable resource of a nascent literary space’.

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As the Encyclopedia of Folklore and Literature (1998) edited by Brown and Rosenberg shows, the field juxtaposing folklore and literature is vast. Bacchilega’s (2012: 448, 457) review article ‘follows the critical tradition of mapping the field as constituted by the analysis of folklore in literature, folklore as literature, and folklore and literature’. Her objective is to contextualize folklore and literature in cultural politics while relating to intertextuality, commodification and issues of translation. And both ‘scholars of folklore and literature seek to recognize a web of intertextuality where folklore is not set apart from literature and, at the same time, their differences are not erased’. Ranging from the mid-​tenth century to the present, Folklore and Modern Irish Writing (2014) edited by Anne Markey and Anne O’Connor, include contemporary Irish writers such as Éilis Ní Dhuibhne and Anne Enright. Ní Dhuibhne figures both as folklorist contributor and as fiction writer, and Enright as fiction writer. It is Margaret O’Neill (2014:  15)  who analyses Enright’s novel The Gathering (2007a) in terms of a modern death lament (of the traditional Irish caoineadh) from a psychanalytical point of view in relation to ‘the institutional culture of child abuse that characterized Ireland for so much of the twentieth century’.

Storytelling: Skill and Source The memoir Angela’s Ashes (1996, 2005a) by Frank McCourt is structured as a seamless story of interrelated stories. This format of colloquial language that turns into meandering musical sentences suggests that these stories have been told over and over again by McCourt and his family, and by other people McCourt has met and listened to. But in one instance, McCourt is distressed when he finds that his brother has ‘stolen’ a story he sees as ‘his’ property. This can be understood in relation to folklore studies where the structure of stories and storytelling, and questions of ownership are central topics. A story can be borrowed, shared and developed further. And there are these occasions of alleged theft sometimes referred to as appropriation of stories. According to Zimmerman (2001), urban legends that evoke strong emotions and are characterized by otherworldly aspects, are first, not owned by anyone. Second, there is not one single version that is the correct one. In the social world of Irish contemporary fiction writers, it is the writers who have the legal ownership of their published stories. If they are copied by someone else, this is plagiarism. Still, fiction is full of such borrowings. It is, however, often difficult to determine whether a story or a sequence of a story is borrowed or stolen, or just the outcome of a coincidence. During my research, I only met one writer who claimed that another writer, a more famous one, had stolen her story. Despite being quite depressed about it, she never took legal action. The pervasive practice of storytelling in Ireland has a long history. In his comprehensive The Irish Storyteller (2001) literary scholar Georges Denis Zimmerman presents Irish literature in English through a folklore perspective with a wide scope spanning elite storytelling and popular traditions, oral accounts as well as fiction over the centuries. Now there is a recent revival in storytelling at international

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festivals and sessions in pubs (Ó Giollain 2000). But it was the Gaelic League that first found traditional illiterate storytellers and made them known to a wider audience. This became a part of the nation-​building project as these storytellers contributed a wealth of stories to the Irish Folklore Collections at University College Dublin.3 In an account of oral storytellers in rural Ireland, Angela Bourke (2003:  33–​4), who is emeritus professor of Irish-​language studies at University College Dublin, recognizes the prestige of these storytellers, especially in Irish-​ speaking areas (that only recently has changed). Seen as an entertainer, yet primarily ‘the skilled story-​teller was valued as outstandingly wise, thoughtful, and knowledgeable’. In Bourke’s (2003: 27, 28, 30, see also Bourke 1999) captivating chapter ‘The Virtual Reality of Irish Fairy Legend’, she describes how Irish fairy legends are short and thus ‘connect with one another in reticulated systems that are both elegant and economical’. Disagreeing with the idea that fairy legends are ‘less valuable, less important, than other kinds of narrative, notably the long, episodic hero-​tales and the international folktales’ whether in their story-​telling contexts or in connection with collecting and scholarship, Bourke argues for the importance of fairy legends. Following Bo Almqvist (1991), she points out that in light of fairy legends being ‘so ubiquitous and so tenacious, and ultimately so consistent’ they are an obvious object for scholarly study.4 Fairy legends tell stories about encounters between humans and other creatures so-​called ‘good people’, ‘little people’ or ‘fairies’. Starting in the ordinary, in the everyday or on journeys, all of a sudden, something extraordinary  –​good or bad  –​takes place. The legends tend to end in the ordinary. So do people really believe in these stories, even momentarily? ‘People can both believe in them and disbelieve’, according to Bourke. In line with metanarratives of folklore, some stories do make listeners suspend their disbelief. As Bourke points out, this requires that the storyteller has an ability ‘to reconcile the impossible with the unexceptional’. For it is the betwixt-​and-​between nature of fairy legends that make them attractive and useful. Fairy legends are ambiguous. Bourke also mentions that Irish poets such as classic W. B. Yeats and contemporary Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill have included references to fairy legends in their work, and this is importantly one instance of how this oral tradition is translated into a written fictional tradition (see also Wulff 2007a). Moving over now to how storytelling is learnt in contemporary Irish society, not just by a professional storyteller, but by anyone, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne (1999b: 53) in her chapter on ‘The Irish’, singles out loquacity as a core characteristic of the Irish, and that a ‘high opinion of the Irish gift for writing and talking is shared by many, especially the Irish themselves. That the Irish are verbally gifted is a sine qua non of the image we sell to tourists, but it is probably based on truth. Ireland has produced a high proportion of internationally renowned writers, such as the verbally generous James Joyce and the verbally frugal Samuel Beckett’. And not only literary authors or playwrights, but also most Irish people are ‘talkative’, Ní Dhuibhne points out. Creative wit is highly valued in Ireland, but as Ní Dhuibhne says there is a gender difference: men are wittier than women, men excel at telling jokes, their conversation is characterized by funny comments and anecdotes. This is especially the case when they are drinking. Then Irish men are at their best in being amicable,

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funny and talkative. They have had many opportunities to practice this skill that they start to learn at puberty not least by competing with one another. While collecting a repertoire of entertaining stories and phrases, joking often becomes a lifestyle. The drive to cheer things up is also evident in Irish plays, ‘the literary form which is most closely modelled on conversation’, Ní Dhuibhne (1999b: 54) goes on. That is the reason why most Irish plays are tragicomedies rather than entire comedies or tragedies. For there is, Ní Dhuibhne (1999b: 54) remarks, ‘a moroseness which lurks not far beneath the skin of many Irishmen’ and this has to be balanced with witty wordings (see also Wulff 2007a). It thus makes sense that jokes and anecdotes in the form of the local character anecdote, abound in Ray Cashman’s (2011: 7, 6, 256) folkloristic account of contemporary (male) storytelling in Aghyaran, a northern Irish border community. Inspired by Glassie’s Passing the Time in Ballymenone (1982) on storytelling in the rural north two decades earlier, Cashman did ethnographic fieldwork in the late 1990s, and discovered that ‘the people of Aghyaran clearly invest a lot of thought and energy in this seemingly modest speech genre when socializing’ in particular during wakes, that occurred often enough, and ceilis, gatherings of neighbours in someone’s house in the evenings. Local character anecdotes ‘are brief and often humerous biographical sketches of local individuals, living or deceased, especially those affectionally referred to as “characters” ’. In the anecdote, ‘people are transformed through short narratives into exemplars of certain behavioral types, such as nosey gossips or picaresque drunks’ while ‘some types are clearly worthy of emulation. These include the modest saintly bachelor, the good mother, and the “man of words” who is always quick with a clever comeback’. As Cashman concludes: ‘Imagining community while enacting it, anecdote tellers and audiences accomplish the crucial social work of reckoning personal and collective identity in midst of socioeconomic change and sectarian division.’ It is folklore that provides a sense of community.

‘Hardcore Storytelling’ In an article in The Guardian, Anne Enright (2010a) looks back at her selection of short stories for The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story (2010b) that she edited (the article is a slightly revised version of her introduction 2010c), she mentions folklore and folktales: It is interesting to test that sense of ‘the Little Man’ against a new, more confident, Irish reality; one in which good writing continues to thrive. Is ‘submerged’ just another word for ‘poor’? Is the word ‘peasant’ hovering somewhere around? There is so much nostalgia about Ireland –​especially rural Ireland –​it is important to say that this is not the fault of its writers. They may be closer to the oral arts of folktale, fable, gossip and anecdote, but speech is also a modern occupation. Irish novels may often reach into the past, but the stories gathered here show that the form is light and quick enough to be contemporary.

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Moving on to the idea of folk traditions as ‘harmless’, Enright notes: If you want to see life as it is lived ‘now’ (whenever the ‘now’ of the story might be), just look at the work of Neil Jordan, Roddy Doyle or, indeed, Frank O’Connor. Meanwhile, whoever thinks the short story harmless for being closer to a ‘folk’ tradition has not read John McGahern, whose stories are the literary equivalent of a hand grenade rolled across the kitchen floor.

One of the short stories anthologized by Anne Enright in The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story (2010b) is Roddy Doyle’s ‘The Pram’. It was first published in the collection The Deportee and Other Stories (2007a) and had rave reviews where the critics identified this particular story as a horror story framed by folklore in multicultural Celtic Tiger Ireland. In The Guardian, Kate Kellaway (2007) starts out by acknowledging the entire collection and that ‘the stories were first published in Metro Eireann, a multicultural newspaper aimed at Ireland’s immigrant audience, edited by two Dublin-​based Nigerian journalists. Impressed by a piece about the duo in the Irish Times, Doyle volunteered as a contributor. What a coup for Metro Eireann. Doyle proves a brilliant, offbeat Dublin diplomat. He imagines, with humour and humanity, the difficulties involved in being Irish and in being foreign and unassimilated in Ireland. He has the sharpest eye, the wildest sense of humour and the most benevolent heart.’ Going through the stories one by one, Kellaway is still impressed when she gets to ‘The Pram’, but points out: ‘Not all the stories are feelgood, though. “The Pram” is the darkest of vehicles, a story in a category of its own. It is about Alina, a Polish au pair girl, who murders her coarse Irish boss, known by her surname of O’Reilly. The au pair girl tells her charges a revenge fairy story using a pram as a terrifying prop . . . Children would be best advised to steer clear of “The Pram.” ’Also the review by Erica Wagner (2008) in the New York Times was appreciative, especially about ‘The Pram’ as she also commented on its folklore motif in terms of a horror story: ‘Sad to acknowledge, perhaps, that it’s the darker stories that work best. One of the strongest is “The Pram,” in which Doyle shifts away from Dublin demotic toward chilling, modern-​day folk tale.’ The title ‘The Pram’ refers to a haunted pram with a baby brother that Alina is pushing during her walks, but there is a pram in the Polish story, as well. We come back to it soon. Let us pause for a moment and consider another twist on folklore in relation to the collection. Molly Ferguson (2009: 53) applies a postcolonial framework, finding that the metaphors of ghosts and haunting suggest structures of oppression and xenophobia. But more to the point here, she explains that ‘a critical foundation to my analysis is to identify Doyle’s work in the volume as inherently folkloric, since it was designed as a neutralizing response to oral stories he heard circulating in Dublin’. As Doyle (2007e: xii) makes clear in the foreword to the The Deportee and Other Stories (2007b): The words ‘racist’ and ‘racism’ were being flung around the place, and the stories were doing the rounds. An African woman got a brand new buggy from the Social Welfare and left it at the bus stop because she couldn’t be bothered

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carrying it onto the bus, and she knew she could get a new one. A man looked over his garden wall and found a gang of Muslims next door on the patio, slaughtering an Irish sheep. A Polish woman rented a flat and, before the landlord had time to bank the deposit, she’d turned it into a brothel, herself and her seven sisters and their cousin, the pimp. I heard those three, and more, from taxi drivers. I thought I’d like to make up a few of my own.

The stories Doyle heard would be classified as a type of urban legends in folklore studies. In her capacity as a folklorist, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne suggests ‘distinctions between informed recourse to specific legend and more general allusions to folktales’ in modern Irish writing (Markey and O’Connor 2014: 16). As to oral narrative, Ní Dhuibhne (2014:  206–​7) points out that there are two types:  folk tale and the legend. In her close folkloristic reading of ‘The Pram’, she notes that Doyle creates a fairy tale atmosphere by including international motifs such as forests and evil stepmothers rather than relating to one traditional tale. But there is a Polish story-​in-​the-​story, the one told by Alina to the two girls she is minding, Ocean and Saibhreas, as the revenge, again, of their mother’s bullying of her. O’Reilly is a sort of evil step-​mother figure. Ní Dhuibhne links the story back to ‘the international fairy tale, “Hansel and Gretel”  . . . best known in the version of the Brothers Grimm’.5 The story is a ghost story about a wicked old lady who takes girls from a village in a pram to the forest: -​Why? Ocean asked. -​Why? Alina asked back. -​Why did the old lady take girls and not boys? -​They probably taste better, said Saibhreas. -​Yeah, Ocean agreed. –​They’d taste nicer than boys, if they were cooked properly. -​And some girls are smaller, said Saibhreas. –​So they’d fit in the oven. -​Unless the old lady had an Aga like ours, said Ocean. -​Then boys would fit too. Alina realized: she would have to work harder to scare these practical little girls . . . It is not to be thought, said Alina, that the old lady simply ate the little girls. -​Cool . . . What did she do to them? (Doyle 2007d: 162–​3)

It turns out that she was skinning them alive. As Ní Dhuibhne points out, Alina has to increase the horror in order to frighten contemporary children. Later they start retelling O’Reilly the story about ‘the wicked old lady and her pram full of kidnapped babies, and how the wicked old lady had pushed the pram all the way to Ireland’. But O’Reilly stops them, taking Alina to task: ‘That’s some hardcore story-​ telling, Alina’ (Doyle 2007d: 170). Burcu Gülüm Tekin (2015:  92–​3) has identified not only Irish myths, but also Polish in ‘The Pram’ as she sees the wicked old lady to be a combination of ‘the Polish mythological figure “Boginka” ’ and ‘the Old Hag of Beara (Caileach Bhéarra), the goddess of prosperity in Celtic folklore’. The image of O’Reilly as a negative creature of a contemporary Irish woman who prioritizes her career at the expense of her family, is brought up by Ní Dhuibhne

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(2014: 205) in passing in terms of ‘working mothers and successful women’ and by Tekin (2015: 90) as more of a major point in terms of ‘a dark representative of the new Irish woman’. Rather than any working mother, it is a particular type of ‘dominant business woman who has no time to spend with her children, and is thus compelled to bring up her spoiled daughters with the help of her maid’ that Doyle is caricaturing here.

Making Political Points through Folklore Recall Anne Enright’s (2010a) earlier argument about the impact of short stories from folk traditions –​especially John McGahern ‘whose stories are the literary equivalent of a hand grenade rolled across the kitchen floor’. There is no doubt that Roddy Doyle’s intention is to make a political point in ‘The Pram’ (2007d): it is a scalding critique of abusive treatment of immigrant child minders and hence of immigrants in Ireland, but also of career women who neglect their children. And he is using folklore to make these political points. So does Éilís Ní Dhuibhne in the short story ‘Midwife to the Fairies’ (2003, 2010), which has been anthologized, for instance, in The Granta Book of Irish Short Stories (2010b) by Anne Enright. In her fiction, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, is associated with using folklore references with great insight. As mentioned in Chapter 2, this is an important part of her writer’s profile. It was never a strategic career move, a planned profiling, but came quite naturally as she had trained as a folklorist and spent so much time with folktales and legends. This aspect was brought out by the novelist and poet Martina Evans (2015) as she was writing about how she discovered Ní Dhuibhne’s work: It was when I read Anne Enright’s Granta Book of Irish Stories (my primer for teaching) that I discovered Éilís Ní Dhuibhne and she knocked Elizabeth Bowen off my number one spot. I  read Midwife to the Fairies to my Londoners in a Covent Garden classroom. They knew nothing about Irish fairies but they were gripped. The force of the story struck me anew when I  read it aloud because every word hovered in the air, pitch-​perfect. The effect was uncanny.

And Evans goes on to describe how she continued reading other writings by Ní Dhuibhne: I’ve been working my way through her backlist ever since. Apart from Midwife to the Fairies, I  especially recommend The Dancers Dancing, The Inland Ice and The Shelter of Neighbours. Ní Dhuibhne has spoken of ‘poetic subsoil’ in the work of Alice Munro and, like Munro, Ní Dhuibhne is a funny, original and brave chronicler of the lives of women. For me, Ní Dhuibhne has more poetic subsoil. Her gift for marrying folklore to contemporary narratives creates a hair-​ raising effect, opening a seam between worlds where the truth is around the corner and the reader is compelled to follow.

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The truth in ‘Midwife to the Fairies’ is the law against abortion in the Republic of Ireland which forces women to give birth to unwanted babies. The story is about a midwife in Dublin who is called at night at her home to assist a young woman in labor, in a house on the other side of town. The woman gives birth to a small baby, an unwanted baby. The midwife tells the woman that the baby has to be in an incubator, or it will not survive. Then she leaves and tries to put the incident out of her mind. But it does not take long before she happens to read an article in the newspaper about a baby that had been found ‘dead in a shoebox, in a kind of rubbish dump they had at the back of the house’, and the woman had been arrested by the police (Ní Dhuibhne 2003: 28; see also Wulff 2009a). The fairy legend which is included into the short story in italicized sections ‘in fact, transposes and retells it’, Anne Fogarty (2003: xi) notes. She adds that incest and infant death that occur in the story are connected to fairy activities in the realm of folklore. In Ní Dhuibhne’s collection The Inland Ice and Other Stories (1997), the folktale ‘The Search for the Lost Husband’ is weaved in through the entire book, appearing between the other stories, connecting them, and illuminating them. In a review of Pelan’s (2009b) volume on Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s work, Sealy Lynch (2009) highlights Jacqueline Fulmer’s (2009) chapter: Both Fogarty and Fulmer celebrate a key change in Ní Dhuibhne’s The Search for the Lost Husband, her updated tale of the goat husband and his bullied, demeaned bride: here the wife walks away from her abuser, declaring that she is ‘tired of all that fairy-​tale stuff ’. Stressing that Ní Dhuibhne makes her changes based on her ‘extensive knowledge of where these stories come from’, Fulmer argues that such cross-​contamination offers a commentary upon contemporary and continuing oppression in women’s lives and ‘inequitable relations between men and women’.

Sealy Lynch appreciates that Fulmer has noticed the political engagement that drives Ní Dhuibhne in her use of folktales: Fulmer further points to ‘the postmodern emphasis on questioning received narratives’ as evidenced in Ní Dhuibhne’s reworking of women’s responses to physical and emotional violence. Fulmer sees the interleaving technique as a consciousness-​raising strategy. As she puts it, ‘In The Search for the Lost Husband and Midwife to the Fairies, funny and appealing female characters express themselves on tension-​filled topics’.

So folklore from the past can help explaining the present. In Ní Dhuibhne’s science fiction novel The Bray House (1990) about a nuclear disaster in Ireland, folklore can be said to reach into the future, helping to anticipate future events, yet offer little comfort. In her substantial study of Irish literature in the Celtic Tiger years, Susan Cahill (2011) analyses The Bray House (1990) as a commentary on contemporary Ireland where the present is moved to the past, as seen from the future (see also Tallone 2008, 2009). In an interview, Ní Dhuibhne told me that it was Chaucer’s

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folktale ‘The Friar’s Tale’ about a quest for the truth that inspired her to write The Bray House (1990) where ‘a woman archeologist from Sweden travels to Ireland with the purpose of reconstructing its culture by carrying out a dig in a countryside devastated by nuclear meltdown’ but has to face failure (Fogarty 2003: xi; Wulff 2009a). This is a chilling story that poses poignant questions about the accuracy of scholarship. In the process, it accentuates ‘one of Ní Dhuibhne’s central concerns: where is the true story –​in fiction or in scholarship?’ (Wulff 2009a: 251).

The Power of a Peacock’s Feather Discussing writing as a process, especially the issue of writer’s block and how to get over it in Chapter  1, I  mention the woman playwright narrator in Deirdre Madden’s novel Molly Fox’s Birthday (2008: 53). Again, it was her memory from a tram in Munich where ‘a man standing near to me was holding in his arms what I at first took to be a large rabbit and then realised was a hare’ that finally released her writing ability after struggling to get going on her new play. With some theoretical imagination, this could be taken back to the Irish legend about the hare as a symbol for an old woman characterized by strength and creativity (Ní Dhuibhne 1993; Wulff 2009b). Experiences from Deirdre Madden’s childhood and youth in Northern Ireland inevitably come up in her writings. Just like Madden, the narrator in Molly Fox’s Birthday (2008) was born in Northern Ireland, and just like Madden, she moved to the Republic of Ireland to study at Trinity College Dublin. The novel is built on momentous events from the past that define the present relationships of the three characters: the narrator who remains unnamed, her friends Andrew, a Protestant from the north, now an art historian who left Ireland for Cambridge University, and Molly Fox, an actress whose house in Dublin the narrator has borrowed. The narrator and Andrew were students at Trinity College Dublin, and it was during this time that Andrew’s brother Billy, a Loyalist paramilitary, was shot and killed. Despite her big, compassionate Catholic family in the rural north, the narrator is only close to her brother Tom, who is a priest. The reader learns that the brothers of the narrator and Andrew are central characters in the story, and so is Molly Fox’s brother Fergus who is struggling with drinking and depression. As Molly takes care of him, it is understood that it is because of him she stays in Dublin, rejecting offers to work abroad. Eventually, it is disclosed that their mother left her family when they were both young –​on Molly’s birthday. This is why Molly is away in New York, avoiding celebrations. Except for what could be interpreted as a brief reference to the hare in the beginning of the novel, it is not until the last part of the novel that folkloric beliefs start steering the plot. In her review of the novel, Pauline Hall (2010: 183) identifies one such aspect: It would spoil the enjoyment of the last third of the novel to say more than that, as in fairy-​tales, the narrator receives three visitors, none of them expected. Each

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opening of the front door in its way disrupts the mood of the day, and counterpoints the memories she has wound and unwound. Each encounter functions as a discovery, forcing the narrator to revise her assumptions, and forcing readers to revise their assumptions about her story.

It is also towards the end of the novel that an unsettling element is introduced, in the form of a peacock’s feather. One of the three visitors is an elderly woman neighbour who admires Molly Fox, and has learnt that it is her birthday. The neighbour brings a box with herbs and plants as a present for her, and says to the narrator: ‘In the bottom of the box there’s another thing too, a little token that I hope will please her’ (Madden 2008: 214). When the neighbour has left, the narrator starts to lift each of the plants from the box, and ‘as I removed the last little pot, I saw with dismay what it was’: ‘A feather. A peacock’s feather of all things. There it lay, with its air of evil glamour, its glossy black eye and jewel colours, as though precious stones, sapphires and emeralds, had been transformed by some dark art into this weightless veil of mobile life’ (Madden 2008: 216). Not sure if the neighbour knew the superstitious fear that peacock feathers will bring bad luck in the theatre, and thus in the house of an actress, the narrator is still in shock and throws the feather over the fence to another garden. Joseph O’Connor (2008) wrote an appreciative review of the novel in The Guardian where he also noted this aspect of it: ‘Like many actors, Molly is superstitious. She has a neurosis about peacock feathers, won’t say the name of “the Scottish play” aloud and has a penchant for outlandish remarks intended to unbalance the listener.’ When I first wrote about this in 2009, I sent an email to Deirdre Madden asking her to comment on my ideas about her use of the hare and the peacock’s feather in the novel. Here is her reply: As regards the peacock feathers, this is a common and very old theatrical superstition (and as you know already, actors tend to be very superstitious, like many people in high risk occupations). It is also an old rural superstition in Ireland –​ lots of people in the country here would be uneasy with the idea of having peacocks around a house or peacock feathers in a house. I was aware of all of this when I was writing Molly Fox’s Birthday. However as regards the hare, I have to tell you that I did not have any mythic aspects in mind. The hare is more concerned with the idea of how writers (sometimes) begin a project. They see something out of context, and/​or something puzzling, potent or exotic, and it sets off questions in their mind, and starts a chain of thoughts. In this instance the hare would also have reminded the narrator of the place she was from, where she no longer lives, and with which she has a somewhat complex relationship.

So what Deirdre Madden said about the peacock’s feather confirmed my interpretation. I could take it further by suggesting that the peacock’s feather was a bad omen not as much for Molly Fox’s near future career as an actress, but rather for

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the play the narrator was about to write. Madden thus connects the extraordinary with the everyday, past beliefs with future real events, as this event might anticipate what could happen after the novel has ended. As to the idea about the hare as old woman, I would take the liberty to suggest the possibility of interpreting the hare as a reminder that Molly Fox on her birthday is getting older, possibly this is the momentous fortieth birthday. It might after all, be a woman actor’s fear of old age that is revealed by the narrator in her memory of the hare on the tram in Munich. Both the hare and the peacock’s feather in Molly Fox’s Birthday can thus, in my view, be seen as traces of folklore tradition, as old beliefs that live on in modern reality. In his Irish Times review of Molly Fox’s Birthday titled ‘Write Back into Reality’, Bernard O’Donoghue (2008) notes that Deirdre Madden ‘starts with an event which does have an element of the extraordinary to it, and works to a conclusion which is a triumph of the ordinary’. The memory of the man holding a hare in the beginning ‘carried to the heart of the city a sense of wild places, of exposed moorland where there was heather but no trees’, writes Madden (2008: 53) and adds the crucial observation: ‘It reminded me of home.’ Molly Fox’s Birthday shows how events from the past, such as the brother who was shot and the mother leaving her family, influence present relationships –​but in the spirit of O’Donoghue, it is the folklore events that seem to point further, into the real future. As these events are foreboding bad luck, they have to be controlled. This is why the narrator throws the peacock’s feather over the fence, and perhaps an additional reason why Molly Fox is away on her birthday. Then all is well in reality.

Traditional Tales into Contemporary Text Having lost some of its prestige for a while, there is a renewed interest in Irish folklore. When it comes to literature, Angela Bourke (1999: 206), again, emphasizes: ‘Fairy legends have been denigrated as superstition, and trivialized in ethnic stereotypes; like any other art form, however, they carry the potential to express profound truth and intense emotions  . . . they are particularly well-​suited to express ambivalence and ambiguity.’ This complements Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s (2014:  215)  view that folktales and legends ‘enhance and deepen the texture of contemporary life. I see them as a poetic thread in the tapestry of the thing I am trying to make’. In addition, this chapter has discussed instances of contemporary Irish fiction that rely on folklore references in order to make political points about acute issues such as integration, careerist women and abortion in Ireland. Importantly, this chapter has shown how the storytelling tradition is the source of the continued success of contemporary fiction writers in Ireland. Paradoxically perhaps, tradition has to change in order to survive. In Ireland ‘the idea of Irish tradition is cherished because of the memory of the long colonial history when expressions of Irishness often were suppressed, and it is contested because of recent European integration and globalization. In these processes

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Irishness sometimes is reformulated, which may be experienced as a threat to authenticity and independence. However, tradition relies on transmission between generations or cohorts when it is bound to change somewhat, otherwise it will not survive in the long run’ (Wulff 2007a:  18). It is well-​known that traditional oral tales change in various ways when they are told over and over again, and that an oral tale changes when it is written down (‘transcribed’ or ‘translated’, cf. Chapter 7). As Anne Fogarty (2003: xi) observes about the rhythmic inclusion of the folk tale in ‘Midwife to the Fairies’ by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne: ‘The double-​levelled structure makes us aware of the different modes of narration that typify the oral composition and its modern analogue.’ In light of Irish loquacity and the tendency to tell long stories –​when does a story end?6 The constant telling and retelling of a folk tale, in various versions, on and on over many years, and generations, has interesting similarities with how certain successful contemporary novels are published in one sequel after another over a number of years and sometimes translated into other media such as television series or films. Certain successful television series run weekly, even daily, in hundreds of episodes year after year, in some cases for decades. There is now a sense that stories never end. We live with them for years. J. K. Rowling’s seven books about Harry Potter (this far in 2016) is but one example of a book in many sequels, another one is Elena Ferrante’s four big Neapolitan novels. Big books and two or three sequels with a plot taking place over a long period of time are, of course, nothing new: there are classics such as Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (2010 [1869]) and Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers (2014 [1844]). What is new is that stories that originate in fiction can grow and go on for years even decades. These stories can continue in an unpredictable number of episodes, not least in the form of television series. This can be conceptualized in terms of a fiction flow. We come back to this in Chapter 7 on Irish fiction in film and television. But first, Chapter 6 provides a layout of the publishing market.

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Chapter 6 S EL L ING S TOR IE S:  T H E P UBLI SH I NG  M A RKET

Writing fiction is only the first step in a writer’s career: promotion is pivotal for success. Yet there is a recent literary phenomenon that contradicts this idea. It is the novels by the Italian fiction writer Elena Ferrante, or rather the writer behind this pseudonym most famous for her four Neapolitan novels. They were first translated into English by Ann Goldstein in 2012, but it would take a few years before ‘the Ferrante fever’ was raging in Europe, the United States, Australia and elsewhere across the world. Starting as a private stance, Ferrante’s refusal to take part in promotions and to disclose her real identity, has turned into a brand on the international publishing market. It goes against the logic of contemporary publishing, but does most likely play some small role in her extraordinary success. This is definitely above all produced by her rich, yet precise prose that holds the reader in a rapturous grip throughout these epic stories. Ferrante does the occasional email interview with journalists and literary scholars via her Italian publisher. Literary critic James Wood (2013, see also Ferrante 2016: 15) did get access to a letter that Ferrante sent to her publisher just before the publication of her first novel back in 1991. In the letter, she sets the terms that she has kept since then: I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors. If they have something to say, they will sooner or later find readers; if not, they won’t . . . I very much love those mysterious volumes, both ancient and modern, that have no definite author but have had and continue to have an intense life of their own . . . True miracles are the ones whose makers will never be known . . . Besides, isn’t it true that promotion is expensive? I will be the least expensive author of the publishing house. I’ll spare you even my presence.

In October 2016, an Italian investigative journalist Claudio Gatti (2016) published the article ‘Elena Ferrante: An Answer?’ in the New York Review of Books (it was simultaneously published in Italian and German) where he claims to have found out that Ferrante’s real identity is Anita Raja, a translator living in Rome. Gatti had been able to trace financial accounts from Ferrante’s publisher, Edizioni E/​O, to real estate records of Anita Raja and her husband. The alleged revelation was met with a certain dismay as many people in the literary world in Italy and elsewhere, not least devoted readers, actually preferred to respect Ferrante’s wish to be

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anonymous. What worked unintentionally for Elena Ferrante would not work for most other writers today, and certainly not for the Irish fiction writers. This chapter tackles the publishing markets, the Irish market with its small independent ‘boutique publishers’ on the one hand and the British and American markets of ‘global conglomerates’ on the other. Publishing is what drives a writer’s career, not the actual writing process itself. As to promotion, Ferrante is clearly correct when she says that it is expensive, but it is taken for granted that it is necessary for fiction to sell. And the idea is, of course, that promotion will bring back a profit. All publishers work with promotion, but the Irish publishers do it to a considerably lesser extent, as their market is relatively small and nearby, while the major British and American conglomerates have a global reach. As the latter also publish far more books, they invest more money in a particular book. In his sociological study of the publishing business in the twenty-​first century, John B. Thompson identifies the increasing impact of the literary agent. We come back later to the ascent of this figure. Just like many art schools and colleges (in Europe, the United States and elsewhere) provide training in promotion and the economic side of an artist’s career, university programmes in creative writing offer coaching in how to get published and in handling promotion.1 It is a small but crucial part of these programmes. Publishers and literary agents are invited to speak to students on this topic. It was in a course on the MA in creative writing at University College Dublin that a woman literary agent who was good humoured, unpretentious and informative, emphasized the importance of making the right contacts: ‘Your chances of getting an agent, or a publisher, are much better if some established writer puts in a good word for you. If they use their influence. Networking is really important. If you just send your work cold to an agent, chances are they won’t pay any attention to it.’ This confirmed my observations of younger writers and my reconstructions of established writers’ career paths in the Irish literary world. If networking can get a book published, it is promotion that might get it sold. So publishers rightly argue, and not only through traditional advertising, readings and public interviews, but also now equally importantly through social media and other digital channels. Word of mouth is, of course, linked to media promotion such as feature articles and book reviews, yet word of mouth can define the fate of a book. Word of mouth is an enigma with an unpredictable energy as Roddy Doyle’s breakthrough shows. It was in the 1980s, he had started teaching and ‘I loved it and loved the contact with the kids. I started writing at around the same time’ he recalls in an interview feature (Freyne 2013). After failing to get a publisher for his first novel, he decided to self-​publish his next novel The Commitments (1987) that turned out to become a remarkable success. ‘We found out that the whole shebang would cost about the same as a second-​hand car. My wife was the publicist, my students were on the cover, Derek Speirs took the photo and Charlie O’Neill, another friend, designed it. Easons (the Irish book seller chain, HW) took it. There was very little fiction published here then, so it got reviewed in all the papers. Hot Press’s Bill Graham wrote a really scathing review. Then Elvis

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Costello wrote a piece that said, “If you want to know what being in a band is like, read The Commitments,” so it became a talking point.’ This lead to a contract with a publisher, Random House, and its editor Dan Franklin, with whom Doyle still works. In 1991, The Commitments was made into a film, and in 2013 into a London West End musical (cf. Chapter 7). The preoccupation with promotion for publishing of fiction is relatively new, and seems to have expanded in response to the growth of media technologies and publishing as big business. By way of contrast, and as an example of a strong-​ headed individualist who refused to accept the rules of competition for literary prizes, David Lodge (2014: 18–​19) writes about Graham Greene: Graham Greene’s career as an author mostly predated our modern publicity-​ driven literary world of book tours, literary festivals and gladiatorial prize competitions, and in later years, apart from giving an increasing number of press interviews, he generally kept clear of it. Towards the end of his life, however, he did get involved in one very typical manifestation of this new literary culture. In 1989 the Guinness Peat Aviation Company founded a prize worth a record 50,000 Irish punts for the best book written by an Irishman or estabished resident in Ireland in the last three years, and invited Greene to choose the winner from a shortlist to be drawn up by a panel of distinguished judges, who laboured for many months sifting the works submitted. Greene, however, sought to overrule the judges and award the prize to a book not on the shortlist, The Broken Commandment by Vincent McDonnell, which he himself had helped to get published after it had been sent to him in manuscript by McDonnell’s wife. This casued huge consternation, anger and embarrassment, and the crisis was only resolved by giving a special prize (in fact funded out of Greene’s pocket) of 20, 000 punts to McDonnell, while John Banville received the main prize for The Book of Evidence, but the controversy and recriminations continued for some time.

My very first live contact with an Irish writer was when Seamus Heaney received the Nobel Prize for Literature from the King of Sweden in Stockholm in 1995. The Swedish Academy’s reason for awarding Heaney the prize was ‘for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past’. I was in the audience and later at the glorious banquet that evening, but it would take until the Poetry Now Festival in Dún Laoghaire outside Dublin in 2008 before I would be able to hear him do a reading, and to talk to him in person. He had a kind, yet humble warmth, and, of course, an extraordinary way with words. Some of the writers who are in focus in this study have been mentioned in connection with the Nobel Prize and are allegedly on the very long and highly confidential list of nominated names that the Swedish Academy has to make their selection from every year. The Nobel Prize is the true top prize an Irish writer can get, but as it is awarded to a writer regardless of nationality or country of residence, it reaches across the globe and the chances of getting it are very slim. On the other hand, since 2013, the Man Booker Prize has a smaller market as it is selected annually among English language novels published in the United Kingdom. While the Man

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Booker Prize moreover is awarded to one single book, the Nobel Prize covers an overall literary achievement. When I was interviewing editors and publishers, they started talking about the literary prizes that their books and writers had been awarded, before I had even asked about them. It was obvious that they saw prizes as a push in the promotion of a book, and consequently an expectation of sales. But I  also got a sense that prizes were important for the publishers as a recognition by the literary establishment that their work was of high quality. This was one sign I encountered of the tension between art and the market. For small Irish publishers, the primary goal was survival, for the global conglomerates increasing their profit. Yet every one of them I met, did express an interest in literature, a few of them even confessed to me that they were if not ‘frustrated writers,’ that they had been doing creative writing on some level. Now they were passionate about discovering new writers.

The Short Story as a Stepping Stone Set up in 1998, the Stinging Fly in Dublin is a very small, not-​for-​profit, thrice-​ yearly literary magazine that also publishes books. In January 2009, I  did an interview with Declan Meade, one of the founders, and editor at the time. To my question on why he started this avant-​garde magazine, this young, energetic and friendly editor replied: ‘Because I’m interested in writing myself. I’m not writing anymore. I’m doing this, it keeps me more than happy. I write short editorials.’ It was when he went to writing classes and groups, and the discussion was always about how difficult it was to get published, that he and his friend, Aoife Kavanagh (who had taken a course on publishing in Galway) who shared this concern, made the momentous decision: ‘Let’s start a magazine!’ They were backed up by the late David Marcus, prominent editor of Irish fiction, especially short stories. And, Meade said: ‘Our main motivation was to give new emerging writers new ways to publish.’ He was driven by the search for new work: ‘What has sustained me is always the new writers, the new work coming in. Because we helped writers publish short stories in the magazine we could help them to the next stage.’ This is the explanation to their success: both the magazine and the Stinging Fly Press specialize in the short story. Having published a great many anthologies with stories by different writers, as well as by a single writer, the Stinging Fly has been the first step for numerous writers who then move on to larger presses in Ireland, as well as internationally. Even Roddy Doyle’s Fighting Words centre for creative writing for schoolchildren has published an anthology with the Stinging Fly Press titled Fighting Tuesdays: Stories by Fourth Year Students from Larkin Community College (2010) with an introduction by Hugo Hamilton and a foreword by Roddy Doyle. ‘Our function is to give people a start,’ Meade continued. ‘It would be unrealistic to expect an ambitious and talented writer to stay here. In terms of literary fiction, most writers go and publish in England,’ Meade noted. A couple of years later, I would be able to observe exactly that with Kevin Barry, whose first collection of stories There Are Little Kingdoms (2007) had been published by the Stinging Fly.

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It put him on the literary map in Ireland and paved the way for his international breakthrough a few years later. We come back to that soon. Yet Meade talked about the importance of ‘getting published in your own country. It should mean something that they have appeared in the Stinging Fly’. It also turned out that ‘most writers who are now in their 40s, 50s or 60s started with me, publishing short stories or poems in the magazine’. These ranged from Evelyn Conlon, Mary Costello and Emma Donoghue to Anne Enright, Colum McCann (who again grew up in Dublin but lives in New York) and Deirdre Madden as well as Medbh McGuckian, the poet, from Belfast. In my search for his selection criteria, I asked Meade: ‘What is good writing?’ His reply came quickly but well prepared: ‘You read something you have an emotional response to. You believe in it. You get some sense it’s new, it hasn’t been done before.’ After a short pause, he added: ‘Is the writer succeeding in doing what he, or she, they are saying they are doing?’ But it is the ‘rewriting that is the real test, finding the rhythm’. Here, at that level, Meade puts in quite a lot of work ‘to bring out the full potential of the piece’. As a promotion for the Stinging Fly as well as a confidence boost for writers, Meade set up the Davy Byrnes Short Story Award. This prize of a large sum of money is awarded every fifth year by the legendary Dublin literary pub Davy Byrnes. In 2004, when Anne Enright was the recipient she said in her acceptance speech that ‘I never thought I would get money out of a pub!’ Then she went away with the EUR 25,000 prize money and wrote The Gathering (2007a) which, as Meade, reminded me, won the Man Booker Prize. When it came to the issue of survival as a small press and how to ‘sustain a life’, Meade mentioned that they get support from the Arts Council of Ireland. It was a watershed when the magazine started being used in creative writing classes at Trinity College Dublin and at University College Dublin. Referring to the need for more publishing opportunities for new writers  –​not least for short stories –​he made the pivotal point: ‘If the publishing system worked –​I don’t think I would be publishing books.’ Even though he found publishing ‘a fairly strong industry here, there is a good number of presses, most are fairly small. But there is a negativity about the whole publishing market at the Irish Book Publishers’ Association, with many complaints about the low level of funding.’ In an interview for the online literary magazine writing.ie, Alison Wells (2012) asked Meade about the challenges for print journals such as the Stinging Fly and what had been his particular challenges: Essentially it comes down to resources –​human, time, money –​making those stretch. There is the frustration of never having enough time to do everything you might want to do. That’s hardly a unique complaint though. Funding has been a big issue for us. The early days of having no money at all, and then very gradually building up the amount we receive from the Arts Council. Now trying to maintain it at a level that will allow us to continue to develop. Distribution remains a big challenge too –​getting the journal to places around the country

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Wells also talked to Meade about ‘the viability of short stories’ and that ‘we often hear that short stories in collections don’t sell’. She then brought up the idea of short stories ‘as the ideal consumable bites for devices like the eReader’. Meade did not want to listen to any comments about the lack of viability of short stories: ‘I think we should have a moratorium on discussing the fate or the viability of the short story for a while.’ As a matter of course, he was in favour of the short story in any form, mentioning reading platforms and apps such as the South and Ether Books that are dissiminating stories to mobile phones and eReaders: ‘All of this is good –​it strengthens my contention that the short story is grand!’

Boutique Publishing It was the development of printing technology in the late nineteenth century in combination with growing literacy that ‘had helped to create an expanding market for newspapers, periodicals and books’ Thompson (2011) tells us, seemingly above all referring to London even though this was taking place elsewhere in Europe and the United States, as well. Ireland had a relatively lively publishing industry until the early nineteenth century, when the Irish parliament was abolished and Irish MPs had to go to London. This was a matter of provincialization, and it reduced the Irish publishing industry that since then has not regained its previous position.2 As Éilís Ní Dhuibhne noted: ‘The important locus of publishing is still London . . . Success happens in England, it is perceived’ (Wulff 2017). Publishing internationally with British, American and Australian imprints of global corporations was indeed regarded as the most prestigious. At the same time, giving your work to Irish presses could be seen as a political act, yet another brick building the Irish independence project. Well into my research, I realized that writers who published with international publishers often had more of a detailed interest in other countries and cultures than those who stayed with Irish publishers. Usually they had lived abroad for extended periods of time, immersing themselves in foreign places. And they addressed an international (as well as an Irish) readership by avoiding certain references to Irish history and culture that foreigners would not necessarily be familiar with. The publishing market in Ireland also included small branches of global corporations such as Penguin, Transworld and Hodder. One publisher in Dublin noted, however, that ‘a lot of corporations owned by English people come here with a lot of money, set up for five years, and go away again’. They compete with a few university presses and about half a dozen small independent Irish publishers, sometimes called ‘boutique publishers’. This was how Antony Farrell, the founder of Lilliput Press, referred to his small publishing house. Learned, with a strong personality, now in his middle age, he had a special interest in history which goes back to his

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student days at Trinity College Dublin: ‘I did history in college. I was hungry for knowledge about my own record.’ Just like Declan Meade, Farrell was very pleased with his job –​‘it’s enjoyable! Ireland is quite the land of books’ –​where he could meet and befriend writers, and make their names. ‘The excitement of finding new books is what makes me get up in the morning!’ Farrell exclaimed when we met for an interview in his Dublin office one wet autumn afternoon in 2008. Lined with book shelves from floor to ceiling in an old, well-​kept building, the office had an inviting cultured atmosphere. Lilliput is a prominent press with a robust reputation, not least because of its Irish profile which includes work by classic writers such as James Joyce and Flann O’Brien. But, again, Farrell also makes a point of spotting young talents with new manuscripts. It was Farrell who first found Donal Ryan’s fierce, short The Spinning Heart (2012). Ryan managed to tell the much-​ told recession tale, in yet a new way, and in a rural town setting, which attracted not only an Irish readership, but also an international one. He was soon declared a noteworthy debutante among the writers in Dublin, I noticed on a field stint in early 2013. Irish and international critics all agreed that The Spinning Heart (2012) was a remarkable book. As James Walton (2013) wrote in The Spectator: ‘Of course, the traditional epithet for a good first novel is “promising”. The Spinning Heart, however, is far more than that. Instead, it’s the unambiguous announcement of a genuine and apparently fully-​formed new talent.’ Starting his review in the Irish Times of Ryan’s follow-​up book (which, as usual, did not get quite as much attention as a first book did, yet was positively received), John Boyne (2013) reminded the readers: Is there anyone in Ireland who has not yet heard the story of Donal Ryan and The Spinning Heart? Narrated by 21 victims of the property crash, it won widespread praise, garnering the Irish Book of the Year Award before being longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and topping the bestseller lists. In a time when debut authors often engage in excessive self-​promotion and publishers splash half a dozen endorsements on a book jacket, The Spinning Heart achieved its success through the quiet brilliance of its writing and its forensic and utterly human dissection of a national disaster.

Looking into the success story of this book, the Man Booker Prize nomination in 2013 was clearly crucial for its quick rise to international renown. Talking about acceptance rate and how to make a living, even make a profit, in publishing, Antony Farrell told me: I publish good books that I like! I like good writing. Irish history, Irish literature. Of about 100 book manuscripts in one year –​three get published. I scan them all! Our job is to limit publishing. It is an elitist activity. If we are not elitist –​who would be? I’m a talent snob! Of 5–​6 books, one loses money. There is more corporate publishing now. There are 3–​4 literary agents in Dublin. They are practical relationships in many ways. We have always been small, no big business. Three-​four people work here. It’s good to have a small company. We

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Rhythms of Writing try to maintain books we believe in. A good writer can create his or her market. The Irish have a bigger marketing reach than most because of the English language. As a publisher, you can make a lot of money selling rights. We sell rights to Picador, Penguin, Farrar Straus, university presses in America, translation rights to an Italian press.

In The Spinning Heart from 2014a, it says ‘DOUBLEDAY IRELAND. An imprint of the Random House Limited’ and ‘First published in 2012 by Doubleday Ireland, a division of Transworld Ireland as a co-​publication with The Lilliput Press, Dublin. Doubleday Ireland Paperback edition published 2014.’ The same year an edition (Ryan 2014a) by Steerforth Press ‘for a first United States edition’ was reviewed in the New York Times (Kalotay 2014). Some of Lilliput’s books such as Kevin Power’s Bad Day in Blackrock (2008), about a murder and questions of truth, and Colm Tóibín’s biographical essay ‘Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush’ (2011b) mention ‘financial assistance’ from the Arts Council of Ireland. Both those books also went on to be published by major publishers in Britain and the United States. As is the case with quite a few of Tóibín’s publications, a short version of his essay about Lady Gregory was published in the New York Review of Books (Tóibín 2001) a decade before the book came out. Because of this long time span between the New York Review version and the book, the first one probably did not work as a promotion ‘trailer’ for the latter. Otherwise, this is, again, a rather common promotion practice for Irish writers who publish internationally (Anne Enright, John Banville, Colum McCann among others) to have an abridged version of a new book in literary magazines, primarily in the New York Review of Books or the New Yorker, published shortly before the book appears. Antony Farrell started Lilliput Press in County Westmeath (in the centre of Ireland) in 1984, which is where he comes from. Jonathan Swift was a regular visitor there in his time, and that is where he came up with the name Lilliput (for Gulliver’s Travels (2014 [1726]). In the 1990s, Farrell moved the Lilliput office to Dublin, with his home on the upper floor of the building. With a pronounced Irish profile, most of the over 500 books published by the press, are on Irish history, but there is also a variety of topics from art, music and environment to literary criticism, current affairs and popular culture. Fiction and poetry are not major genres: ‘We publish 2–​3 novels per year. I would like to publish more new fiction,’ Farrell remarked. He also publishes biographies, drama and memoirs, and this is where two of the writers already discussed in this book come in. Ross Skelton’s memoir Eden Halt (2013) was published by Lilliput. Contrary to a common assumption that new writers are young people, Skelton shows that they can be in their sixties. Colm Tóibín was already an established fiction writer when his debut play came out, Beauty in a Broken Place (2004b). The title is a quote from W. B. Yeats who allegedly said to his co-​founder of the reputed Abbey Theatre, Lady Gregory: ‘We have created beauty in a broken place,’ referring to the Abbey Theatre in the midst of political unrest leading to the formation of the Irish Free State. Tóibín wrote his play for the centenary of the Abbey Theatre. This topic requires a familiarity with Irish history, or at least an urge to learn about it, but it is in line with Lilliput’s Irish profile.

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Towards the end of the interview, Antony Farrell considered what Irish genres Irish publishers focus on, and noted that: ‘A lot of publishers publish their own work, they are frustrated writers.’ Not that he is one of them himself: he co-​edited an anthology My Generation:  Rock ’n’ Roll Remembered, an Imperfect History (1996) with Vivienne Guinness and Julian Lloyd (from the worlds of publishing and media). The anthology has an original format. It features personal reflections, essays and poems by more than fifty contributors on formative rock music albums. Among them are Joe (Joseph) O’Connor, Fintan O’Toole, Anne Enright, Roddy Doyle and Colm Tóibín, as well as artists, musicians, record-​producers, film-​ makers and others. The contributors are all connected to Ireland through family or residence, while the albums were made by many different musicians ranging from Van Morrison to the Beatles and Elvis Presley.

Going with a Global Corporation In the spring of 2011, at the annual Cúrt International Festival of Literature in Galway, a ‘Publishing Discussion’ was on the programme. The topic of the discussion was ‘Poetry and Fiction: Publishing, Ireland and the UK’. It was followed by ‘What Does It Take to Become a Published Writer? We ask four major publishers of poetry and fiction what advice they can give on writing.’ There were the editors Jessica Lendennie, representing Salmon Publishing (a small publisher in the west of Ireland specializing in Irish women’s poetry) and Neil Astley, from Bloodaxe Books (a British poetry publisher). Two young male editors from different imprints of publishing corporations, Penguin Ireland in Dublin and Jonathan Cape in London, were also on the panel. They had an air of urban coolness. The panel was chaired by Jonathan Williams, the Dublin-​based literary agent who was the only Irish person on it. He started by asking that perennial question: ‘Can writing be taught?’ To which Jessica Lendennie replied that ‘it happens that young people learn the form of creative writing, but the content is not there, yet, as they have not had enough life experience’, and she went on: ‘You can teach how to write, but not the creativity.’ The British Poetry publisher, Neil Astley, spoke very well about how not to get published:  ‘I get 5,000 submissions every year, 100 per week!’ They all agreed that ‘workshopping’, that is taking creative writing workshops, is useful before submitting to journals and online magazines as that is a way to get comments from editors and thus keep improving writing skills. It is also, they all agreed nodding to each other ‘a way for agents and publishers to find you!’ The young editor from Penguin Ireland introduced himself by asserting that ‘I am more interested in the literary, than the market’. He apologized, jokingly, for coming from ‘an evil global conglomerate’ (without going into details about why a corporation would be ‘evil’). Like most other editors, he worried about the future of publishing, but took comfort in the fact that ‘we will still be needed, editors and publishing houses, even though e-​books and the Internet are changing the business in many ways’. As to publication formats, the panelists were united in their

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view that collections, or literary anthologies, do not sell. None of them, nor anyone in the audience, made a comment about the short story as a strong, renowned Irish format that does need to be published in collections, not only in magazines. Finally, the agent talked about the publishing process in terms of ‘a collaboration’ between agent and writer, and then between publisher and writer. When the panel finished, the agent rushed off; which might well have been a way to shake off the many aspiring writers who had been in the audience, and were looking more or less fiercely for a publisher. The young editor from London –​I call him Peter Larkin here –​was hanging around, talking to some of the aspiring young writers, mostly unpublished it seemed, as well as a woman who wanted to work in publishing. I asked if I could do an interview with him, so we walked out in the sun. ‘Let’s go for a beer!’ he suggested. As we walked up a pedestrian street lined with shops and crowded outdoor cafés, the air filled with the catching rhythms of an Irish traditional tune played by a fiddler standing outside Dubray Books, the Irish bookshop. ‘Can we just go in there and see what they have made of my book?’ Larkin asked. The book was Kevin Barry’s debut novel City of Bohane (2011), a burlesque depiction of the decline of a fictitious gangland city in the west of Ireland. This would become Barry’s international breakthrough, winning awards and critical acclaim. The next day Barry would do a very well-​attended reading from the book in his loud forceful rap style. For now, it was obvious that the editor had enjoyed working on the novel; he felt it was very much ‘his own’. As we entered the bookshop, we first saw a big spread of Roddy Doyle’s new book Bullfighting (2011), (incidentally) a collection of stories, and a poster announcing it with a picture of Roddy Doyle, his characteristic bald head looking out through his round glasses. To the left was a shelf with Barry’s book which incidentally had an endorsement by Doyle on the back cover, pouring praise: ‘Kevin Barry is unique –​one-​man school. His work is hilarious and unpredictable and always brilliant!’ Later I discovered a note inside the book where Barry acknowledged the support of the Arts Council of Ireland, perhaps surprisingly for a book with a global conglomerate. ‘Aah,’ Larkin exclaims. ‘Advertised as Number 2! Second place! Second place of the staff choices.’ He was excited. We continued to the pub for the interview. As a teenager, Larkin had not had any particular plans for his future, or what to do. ‘I had not found my direction, but then a teacher, a remarkable teacher, gave me a copy of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It was a revelation! From then on I was focused on literature: I went to King’s College in London and studied literature and languages, then after my degree I did various jobs.’ He paused and looked into the distance, back in time as it were, and said: ‘I spent a couple of years in wilderness, worked in rock music etc. I read The Corrections [by Jonathan Franzen, 2002, HW], and thought “this is the right book!” Asked around for jobs, applied, got an internship at Jonathan Cape, and later was offered a job!’ He was a bit concerned about his young age, he told me, he was in his late twenties, and had only been working as an editor for five years. Radiating a mesmerizing enthusiasm for his job, it was obvious that he worked hard and was doing very well. A sign of Larkin’s conscientiousness was that he worried about ‘factual mistakes’ and that they might be mentioned in reviews in the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review

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of Books. These were the most prestigious journals as their reviews were important to quote for marketing even though Larkin claimed that ‘people don’t read reviews, they’re boring! I think they are in danger of disappearing’. Peter Larkin talked at length about what it was like to edit senior famous writers such as Martin Amis and Ian McEwan versus young debutantes such as Kevin Barry: ‘I have edited one book by Ian McEwan, Solar. I only had a few comments that Ian thought were fine. He was very pleasant to work with.’ Talking about Irish writers and an Irish writing style, including Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea (2002), he noted:  ‘They think orally, these are writers who see things, these are writers who hear things.’ Larkin had also enjoyed commissioning and working with Kevin Barry: ‘I edited four drafts. I made changes such as having one of the characters die –​he didn’t die before. I was trying to change the plot!’ He went on to talk about Kevin Barry’s love of films so ‘I told him that the plot is flat. It’s all about speed, immediacy, it’s an imagined story about making that city as real as possible. It was important, I thought, that we had a map, that we made looking older. That’s entertainment! A passport to fun!’ He paused again and leaned back in his chair saying with great engagement: ‘You know, Helena, trade publishing is entertainment! We’re up against film, gaming!’ As to the actual acquisition of books, Larkin explained that ‘we are looking for new writers who have published with Irish presses such as Lilliput, and short stories and poems in Irish literary journals, The Stinging Fly, for instance. Prizes are so important for us to find writers.’ This is how they, or rather one of his agents, had found Kevin Barry: he won the Rooney Prize for Irish Fiction in 2007 for his debut collection of short stories There Are Little Kingdoms (2007). The agent had contacted Larkin offering the book. Then there had been an auction.3 This is done in different ways, on the phone or on email about the advance, often two or three rounds: ‘At Random House you have to watch each other, it’s quite nasty, you’re not allowed to compete with another imprint of Random House. With Kevin we matched on the money. We had to do a “beauty contest” –​that’s what it’s called –​ over the phone!’ Biddings often take place at or in connection with book fairs, such as the major one in Frankfurt and at the London Book Fair, but should be avoided between different imprints of the same press. Before a bidding starts, certain ‘hot books’ have been marketed to potential publishers in France, the United States and Britain. ‘There is lots of sales bidding at book fairs. I think people want to get rid of their “ok books” at book fairs and make more money on their best books elsewhere.’ Larkin said with a sigh: ‘Book fairs are insane experiences.’ A vital part of his job was to ‘sell’ books to his sales department, and to his boss: ‘The sales department would say “we already had 35 masterpieces this week, what’s new with this one?” They look for a new style, a new voice, a new take!’

Scouting, Liaising, Advocating: Agents and Super-​Agents Peter Larkin works with about fifteen agencies and a number of agents within them: ‘For me, they’re good friends. I get my books. They’re my friends.’ Changing

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his tone of voice, he added matter-​of-​factly: ‘The agent’s job is to make money to themselves.’ Comparing with the United States, he remarked that ‘there an agent can get GBP 1 million per year, if you’re good you can get a lot of money for two books per year, especially in the 1990s you could’. Here Larkin is referring to what Thompson (2011: 70–​3) calls ‘the super-​agents’. They first appeared on the literary scene in the 1970s New York ‘as outsiders and developed an approach to the advocacy of their clients’ interests that was much more assertive and aggressive than the approach that had been adopted by many agents in the past’. This new breed of agents was not always appreciated by writers, editors, let alone the original agents who more often than not had a genuine interest in literature. This old type of agent, which had existed since the mid-​nineteenth century, is described by Thompson (2011) as defining their job as one of liaising between writer and publisher. But in the 1980s, there was ‘an explosion in the numbers of agents operating in the metropolitan centres of English-​language trade publishing –​in New York and London’. The need for agents grew exponentially because of the expanding publishing market, where large scale and big money reigned. With the mergers between publishing houses, editors’ workload increased and they became more mobile, staying only for short periods of time on the same position. This meant that it was ‘the agent who increasingly, became the writer’s primary point of contact with the publishing world’, even eventually ‘a necessity’ for a writer who wanted to publish with a major publishing house. As Thompson (2011: 74–​5) points out, even though the ‘interests of publishers and agents would seem to be diametrically opposed, in practice they are locked together in a system of reciprocal interdependencies and mutual benefit that has certain advantages for both’. Also, editors ‘can rely on agents to do the initial scouting for new talent by scoring the pages of the literary magazines, travelling to conferences and literary festivals, visiting college campuses and so on’. And then they are expected to work with these writers ‘to turn an idea or a draft manuscript into something an editor or publisher would recognize as an attractive project’. Jonathan Williams, the agent for some of the writers in my study, confirmed Thompson’s analysis when he told me pithily in a conversation: ‘An agent sees to the writer’s rights, keep them out of trouble, makes life easier for them.’ There were about ten literary agents in Ireland during the time of my research, they were small agencies that mostly worked with publishers in London and New York. Those writers who published with Irish publishers did in most cases not go via an agent, but worked directly with their editors. Agents not only sell book manuscripts, but also translation rights, media (film and television) as well as digital rights, and rights for stage productions. They even organize lectures and readings on promotion tours for new books. Writers such as John Banville, Roddy Doyle, Anne Enright, Colum McCann, Joseph O’Connor and Colm Tóibín had several agents based in London, New York and Dublin dealing on their behalf with these different issues that could be extensive and complex. In an interview with me, Paul Feinstein, who runs a small literary agency in Ireland, reminisced about doing a BA in literature before setting out on a publishing career:

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I have worked in the book trade for over 35 years, and early in my career I veered toward sales, marketing, finance and management. My real passion and initial intent was to discover and work with new writers, and in 2000 I  finally had the opportunity to do so by setting up the agency with my wife Susan. We find books either from reading the submissions we receive or through working with contacts to originate book projects and ideas. We work with the author to make the manuscript pitch the best it can be before submitting to what we hope are the right editors at the right publishers in Ireland, Great Britain and the U.S. Once we have offers we negotiate the publishing deal. Having been in the business for so long we both have extensive contacts on both sides of the Atlantic and have created an extensive database of editors at hundreds of publishers.

When I asked about the challenges an agent faces, Feinstein pointed out: ‘As an agent, we don’t earn until we are successful in placing our clients’ works with a publisher, so there is much work done on spec, which can obviously be challenging, so we have to be very selective on what we take on and be reasonable confident that we can place every project with a publisher.’ Feldstein’s account exemplifies that small agents have a genuine interest in literature, and that they work with the writer to edit a manuscript before submitting it to a publisher. In other words, a book manuscript (especially by young, new writers) usually go through a number of editing rounds, first by the agent, and later by the editor before entering the production phase. Feinstein also mentions that he would be ‘negotiating the publishing deal’. Money was not mentioned in this interview, but this is without doubt what he was referring to. Not only agents and editors are dependent on each other, as Thompson (2011) rightly notes, but it also goes without saying that writers are dependent on publishers and the publishing market for their career. This chapter has portrayed the publishing market in Ireland and beyond, also appropriately referred to as a business or an industry. Two issues have kept reappearing: first, Ireland versus the world, and second, art versus the market. When it comes to Ireland versus the world, or in other words, whether to publish in Ireland or internationally, it has many dimensions for an Irish writer. Writing a history of the Irish novel, Derek Hand (2011b: 291–​2) remarks dryly: ‘More so than ever the Irish novel, particularly, seems to be in the grasp of vulgar fiscal forces dictating what will sell in the literary marketplace.’ He goes on to say that it is now ‘easier than ever’ for Irish writers to publish internationally, which not every writer, internationally published or not, in my study would agree with. While acknowledging the importance of literary prizes, Hand is not impressed by them: Indeed, that one of the main indicators of success in contemporary Irish writing is the literary prize awarded from Britain or America (for example the Booker Prize, the American Fiction Prize, the Whitbread Award, the Impac Award and the Irish Book Award) signals not only how the act of novel writing has entered into the realm of show business, with the emphasis on business, but also how pervasive the provincial mindset still is in Irish culture. The continuing need for approval from elsewhere remains a constant.

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In light of the fact that Hand’s book is published by Cambridge University Press, could not this critique be levelled at Hand himself as a literary scholar? But his concern is the way Ireland is presented for an international readership in novels. More precisely he worries that there is a risk of simplification, even stereotypification. Exemplifying with writers such as Colum McCann and Colm Tóibín, Hand assumes that all stories are the same in the global literary marketplace. He is convinced that ‘the Irish writer is not only burdened with telling his or her own story but also with telling everyone else’s story too’. (This idea incidentally fits with my field experience of writing short stories at a creative writing workshop –​I did set them in Dublin, but they were taken to be about Stockholm.) It is true that Irish writers who succeed internationally do not use very specific Irish references in their fiction, as they aim for a non-​Irish readership. Nonetheless, there is absolutely no question that it is their Irish stories that make their names in the global literary marketplace. Again, Thompson’s substantial book is tellingly titled Merchants of Culture (2011), a reference to the tension, yet mutual dependency between art and the market. From the artistic camp, there is the fear that the market will reduce the quality of art. Yet artists, and writers among them, would not survive without the market. We have seen different sizes and types of markets where the Irish writers publish. They often start in the Stinging Fly, move up to boutique publishers such as Lilliput Press, and then might be ‘discovered’ by a global conglomerate, or ‘sold’ to it. In Ireland, the issue of national identity always comes back –​the urge to celebrate a still relatively new political independence, evolving out of the dark Irish history. This is what Derek Hand’s strong critique of international publishing expresses. And Irish presses do support the nationalist agenda with their Irish profiles. As I interviewed editors and publishers who have a certain freedom to publish their favourite books, one of them yet admitted to me that: ‘We publish a lot of bad books!’ While editors embraced the new digital technology, one of them did confess that ‘My big worry is the tablet –​as soon as books are there –​we’re finished!’ It does, however, not seem to be happening in the near future. And even though some bookshops, independent as well as major chains, do disappear, also in Ireland, bookshops (both traditional and online) are still there. John Thompson (2011: 399–​400) ends quite hopefully saying that ‘it seems to me likely that the book, both in its traditional printed form and those electronic formats that turn out to be sufficiently attractive to readers to be desired and used by them, will continue to play an important role as a means of expression and communication in our cultural and public life for the foreseeable future’. While not ruling out change in ‘how books will be produced and delivered’ Thompson believes in the book.

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Chapter 7 V AR IETIE S OF T R ANSL AT ION : W ITH IN AND A CROSS   M EDIA

To have fiction translated into other languages has been a crucial step in the career of an Irish writer. They have all had at least a few novels translated into a number of other languages. In line with the logic of the publishing market as discussed in Chapter 6, it was mostly Irish fiction that was published in Britain and the United States that was widely translated into many languages. One outcome of international literary prizes such as the Man Booker Prize is that it generates translations. The fact that translations was prominent in the promotion of the writers and their work is exemplified on Joseph O’Connor’s website where it says that Star of the Sea (2002) ‘has been published in dozens of languages and was the highest selling literary novel of 2004 in the UK’.1 This indication of ‘dozens’ of translations is common in promotion. Prolific writers with international reputations tended to have most of their books translated into many languages. While being available in other languages was important to the writers, there is also a certain opacity built into this, as the writers on the whole were unable to read the translations of their work, or participate in public activities in foreign languages. Unsurprisingly, they would take more interest in the outcome of translations of their work into other world languages such as German, French, Spanish and Chinese as that would entail larger readerships, than for example the Swedish market. There was also the exception with small language markets: especially in younger generations, readers there would more likely know English well enough to have acquired a habit of reading Irish fiction in that language. For the Irish writer, to have a novel translated, or to translate it yourself, into film, a stage production, or a television series was even more momentous than just having it translated into another language in a book. Film and other visual media provided visibility on a grand scale. It also entails a different process, and a widening audience for the story as well as for the novel as a social product. Not only might people who have read the novel be inclined to go and see the film, but also other people may be inspired to read the novel after having seen the film. This exposure thus has both commercial and fame-​building consequences for the writer. In this chapter, I scrutinize two cases of translation: of an image into text in the form of a short story, on the one hand, and of fiction that is translated into film as well as a musical show that I have been able to see, on the other hand.

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Before moving on to these cases that illuminate the rhythms of translation across media in different ways, let us have a brief look at organizational funding of translation of books from English into other languages in Ireland. There is the non-​profit Literature Ireland (which was named Ireland Literature Exchange when Colm Tóibín gave his speech there in 2010 as referred to in Chapter 3) with the remit to promote Irish literature abroad by offering translation grants to international publishers of Irish literature, and to Irish publishers for translations of foreign literature into English as well as into Irish. Moreover, Literature Ireland is present at international literary events, festivals and book fairs. Literature Ireland was set up in 1994 and in July 2016 the organization had supported the translation of almost 2,000 works of Irish literature into fifty-​five languages.2

Intermedial Translation As this is an anthropological study, the concept of translation is closer at hand than for example that of transposition sometimes used especially in the humanities to denote transmission of art work from one medium into another. But because of the wide range of media, the shifting relationships between them, and the social context perspective, it is more helpful to situate this chapter in theories of translation.3 Mieke Bal and Joanne Morra’s (2007: 7; see also Apter 2006, Zeitlyn 2014) concept ‘intermedial translation’ sets the larger theoretical perspective while capturing my core concerns when they say: We are using the term ‘intermedial translation’ to mean, quite simply, translating across media. To ‘translate across’ is to work within discourses and practices of intertextuality, intersemiotics and interdisciplinarity, which can lead to movements across genres, media, bodies of knowledge and subjects. More figuratively, translating across is concerned with the marginal, the gaps, fissures and contradictions of working in the interstices between these various boundaries. As will become clear, these issues are intimately connected with matters of intercultural translation, and require us to think and work across nations, ethnicities, subjectivities, histories, politics and ethics.

In a similar spirit, and putting the concept of translation above ‘transmission, communication, or mediation’ James Clifford (2013: 48) suggests that unlike the other concepts, translation ‘brings out the bumps, losses, and makeshift solutions of social life’. Writing about the role of the translator, Ulf Hannerz (1993: 45) sees ‘two main ideas of the translator’s role, when we think of translation in its ordinary sense’: one type of translator is supposed to transfer the meaning of a language in an exact, literal way, ‘impartial’. The other type of translator has more leeway, even the liberty of being creative, as this translation is ‘to be responded to in aesthetic and intellectual terms both as a reflection of the original work and as a work in its own right’ (see also Wulff 2016). As Clifford (2013: 48) notes: ‘The theory/​ metaphor of translation keeps us focused on cultural truths that are continuously

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“carried across” transformed and reinvented in practice.’ It is Hannerz’s type of creative translation and Clifford’s idea of reinvention that are involved here. When Irish fiction is translated into another medium, this is also a form of cultural translation, often of certain elements of Irish culture into a Euro-​American or even global culture. Two points are driving this. First, it tends, again, to be novels that already have had some global success that are made into films or musical shows. Second, these novels offer certain themes that are associated with Ireland on a general global level: emigration, Catholicism, poverty, unemployment. Here, again, Ireland is the fragile country (as discussed in Chapter  3) with a beautiful landscape. This parallels to some extent imagery in tourist advertising where ‘images of Irish journeys stand out for their particular combination of portraying hospitality, traditional culture in music and dance, wit and loquacity. There is an abundance of pastoral landscapes and dramatic cliffs along the coast’, as well as romantic ‘dreams of peaceful country life, childhood summers and a happy, old-​fashioned past (Wulff 2007b: 532–​3). But even though the representativity of these themes can be discussed (they exclude the dark aspects of Irish culture), the point is that they attract a wide audience outside Ireland because they appeal to archetypical emotions of nostalgia, longing and displacement that many people who know something about Ireland can relate to in one way or another.4 As I have argued (Wulff 2015), in the anthropology of Ireland, certain similar stereotypes have defined the field over the years. This can be understood through the idea of ‘gate-​keeping concepts’ as put forward by Arjun Appadurai (1988) referring to ‘concepts that restrict theorizing an anthropological region to certain themes, such as caste in the anthropology of India’. Quite contrary to early anthropological studies of Ireland that were expected to focus on themes such as arcadia and anomie, and decline, contemporary studies focus on the ‘huge Irish diaspora keeping links to Ireland, emigration and exile, and immigration’ and an awareness that ‘today’s Ireland is a cosmopolitan society’ (Wulff 2015: 142–​3). It is noteworthy that there is some overlap here with the storylines discussed in earlier chapters.

Image into Text An account of intermedial translation of Irish fiction would probably be expected to start out with the literary text and then follow its new format as a film or any other media that it might take. I come to that soon. First, however, I consider a case where the process was reverse: the production of a literary text inspired by a painting. This accentuates Grasseni’s (2009) notion about skilled visions building on John Berger’s (1972) idea that there are different ‘ways of seeing’: the photographer and the painter –​they watch in different ways, even the same image, but in line with the requirements of their respective profession. We see what we believe, Berger goes on, belief and knowledge define ways of seeing. So how does a writer who was trained to work with words, look at a painting? This was the topic of the popular and well-​attended exhibition Lines of Vision: Irish Writers on Art at the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin, running from October 2014 to April 2015

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in celebration of the gallery’s one hundred and fiftieth anniversary. The popularity of the exhibition was definitely enhanced by the catalogue-​cum-​anthology edited by the curator Janet McLean (2014a). Entering the big building of the National Gallery, located in Merrion Square at the centre of Dublin, is a reminder of Ireland’s strong creative vein, not only in visual arts, but also in literary arts. (A few years before going to the Lines of Vision exhibition, I had participated in a book launch there.) The gallery was opened in 1864, and as Janet Mclean (2014b: 8) points out in the preface to the catalogue-​ cum-​anthology, ‘from that day forward, the National Gallery has come to figure prominently in Irish literary life’. Both Yeats and Samuel Beckett drew on the collection in their writings. And the playwright George Bernard Shaw who was born in Dublin in 1856 and lived in England for most of his life, wrote in 1944 to the former director of the National Gallery, saying that as the gallery had provided him with ‘much of the only real education I  ever got as a boy in Eire’, he had included in his will that ‘one third of the royalties from his work would fund new acquisitions’. McLean adds that fifty-​six writers had been invited to contribute essays, stories or poems to the amply illustrated catalogue. Because of the social depth in Donal Ryan’s (2014b) response to the invitation to pick a picture (that would be included in the exhibition) in the National Gallery’s collection and write a short story about it, I was particularly drawn to his story. Ryan appreciated this task. For it is the case that writers cannot help themselves from seeing stories in pictures. We must note that Ryan’s story is not the story of the painting, the content, or its internal narrative according to the concept that Banks and Zeitlyn (2015: 11) identify –​Ryan’s story is a part of the painting’s external narrative. This complementary concept is defined by Banks and Zeitlyn as ‘the social context that produced the image, and the social relations within which the image is embedded at any moment of viewing’. Now the internal narrative of the painting, its own story, does not have to be the story the painter had in mind. The oil painting that Ryan selected is from 1853, and titled ‘An Ejected Family’. It is the work of the Scottish artist Erskine Nicol who lived in Ireland periodically. According to the National Gallery’s website, ‘this is one of very few paintings executed at that time to specifically address contemporary events such as the Great Famine, evictions and emigrations. Nicol presents a family of three generations who have been evicted from their cottage. In the background, a bailiff (enforcement officer, HW) confiscates their cattle. The mother and child look up to the father imploringly, while the grandfather hangs his head. The dark sky adds to the desolate mood’.5 So this is one way of seeing the painting: the curatorial way, which is a reflection of art history yet accessible enough for a general non-​specialist audience that would go to see the exhibition. Not least because Nicol ‘identified with the oppression of the Irish people and much of his work portrays the injustices inflicted upon the Irish population during the 19th century’, he would most likely have appreciated this description of his painting.6 Yet what he in his artist capacity would see in this painting, once it was a finished product, would inevitably be different, as he would remember the process of technique and creativity that had included

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stretches of struggle, but also flow (Csikzentmihalyi 1975).7 Ryan’s (2014b) story which is titled ‘Grace’ is yet another translation of the painting. Written in 2014, it addresses a 2014 context. As I stood in the middle of the spacious white exhibition hall, contemplating the painting, it made me think of the recent refugee crisis in Europe, and media images of masses of people in desperate flight across the sea or walking long distances along motorways. There was the iconic image of three-​year-​old Alan Kurdi, who drowned in the Mediterranean Sea as he and his family tried to flee from Syria. This image was a turning point as it raised awareness of the refugee crisis among politicians as well as ordinary people. But as this happened in September 2015, a year later, it cannot have been on Ryan’s radar when he wrote his sad story, told by Grace who grew up in a village in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Before leaving the gallery, I watched a fifteen-​minute film where six of the writers talked about their work for the exhibition. Among them was Donal Ryan who said about the painting: ‘The scene that is being fed out in the painting is an age old story. In Erskine Nicol’s time it would have been fairly ubiquitous, and it’s definitely the same kind of ubiquity now because we saw, we see the same kind of stories, we hear the same stories of people in serious default, pretty much being uprooted, cast out of their homes.’ In the film, Ryan comes back to seeing a defiance in the father against the landlord, which he claims he should not: you should side with the victims, the family. This is an instance of when intermedial translation can reveal ‘the marginal, the gaps, fissures and contradictions of working in the interstices between these various boundaries’ as identified by Bal and Morra (2007: 7) earlier. Here is how Ryan’s story goes:  Grace and her family had to leave the village as, she recounts, ‘my father refused to pay a tribute to the elders from our harvest’ (Ryan 2014b:  198–​200). Their neighbours disapproved and did not ‘help with the saving of our crop. The rains came while we laboured and washed our wealth away . . . The elders decreed that we were to be shunned’. They travelled to Kinshasa, where Grace’s father left her with her mother’s cousin. She never saw her family again. After having had to receive men who ‘paid handsomely’, Grace ran away, eventually ‘across the world’, and ended up in an asylum centre in Ireland. There she was offered a job as a cleaner by a shady man. But Grace has a friend, Zody, who, she tells us, ‘is a citizen of Ireland now’. One day they went to the National Gallery together and found ‘An Ejected Family’: We stood looking at this painting for a long time. It is you, Grace, and your family, Zody said. She did not mean to be unkind but her words wounded me. Rain falls behind the people in the painting, as though driving them from their home.

So Ryan’s translation of the painting into text includes both his contemporary story, the external narrative, which is enacted against a backdrop of a historical story, and the internal narrative of the painting. As Banks and Zeitlyn say about the two types of narratives, ‘in practice they are of course intertwined’, and here the external narrative of the Great Famine, evictions and emigrations was simultaneously

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also ‘the social context that produced the image’ (Banks and Zeitlyn 2015: 11). You do not have to be an historian of Ireland to realize that the elders in Ryan’s story symbolize the English colonizers, and the rains that destroyed the crop would be the fungus that destroyed the crops which led to the mid-​nineteenth century Great Famine in Ireland (Wulff 2007a). It is significant that Ryan’s story adds new dimensions to this historical painting, as it connects these momentous historical events with contemporary ones: evictions and forced emigrations are still happening. In line with Clifford’s (2013:  48)  argument about translation, Ryan has transformed and reinvented a historical context. There was an expectation that he, as a writer, would illuminate the painting in a new way, add something that had not been seen in it before. This fits with translation theory that shows that things do not only get lost in translations, but things can also be found in translation.8 Ryan’s story also exemplifies what Hannerz (1993: 45) suggests about translation as an aesthetic response that both takes the original work into account and takes it further into a ‘work in its own right’. What about the rest of the stories and poems by the writers who were invited to write in relation to pictures in Dublin’s National Gallery? In a rave review of the anthology, critic Peter Murray (2015) notes in the newspaper the Irish Examiner: ‘In a universe of daunting tasks, that of assembling a group of writers and asking them to respond to works of art in a museum must rank amongst the highest. Assembling writers for any compendium is akin to herding cats, as they (writers and cats) are inclined to dart off in any direction.’ It is interesting, as Murray says, that ‘many of the contributors, even the avowed atheists, chose religious works of art’. It is also interesting to follow Murray when he reflects over the fact that ‘in many of the paintings chosen, faces are averted, heads bent, or figures are depicted in silhouette, as if the writers are uncomfortable with direct eye contact’. Some of the writers provide detailed descriptions of the pictures including its history as well as the reasons they were attracted to them. Others barely mention the picture, just taking it as a starting point for their creative writing. When I read the stories and poems, and also watched the film, two points emerged often enough: colours and emotions. This was what most of the writers saw in the pictures. While colours do appear in their other writings, and emotions even more so, here it was the sight of colours and emotions that got them going –​perhaps because it was an opportunity for them to delve deeper into topics they had not explored all that much before, at least not in this way.

The Task of the Translator So this was the writers doing the translation, and in many cases it is they who translate their own fiction into film or stage production. Roddy Doyle thus translated his novel The Commitments (1987) into a musical show that opened in London’s

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West End in 2013. And the screenplay for the 1991 film, Doyle co-​wrote with Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais. When it comes to textual translation of fiction from one language into another one in Hannerz’s (1993: 45) ‘exact, literal way’, I did not come across any by the writers. As far as I know, this type of translation was left for professional translators. In his classic essay ‘The Task of the Translator’, Walter Benjamin (1969a: 76) points out:  ‘As translation is a mode of its own, the task of the translator, too, may be regarded as distinct and clearly differentiated from the task of the poet.’ With a background as editor at major publishing houses in Stockholm, Swedish Ulla Danielsson is a seasoned translator from English into Swedish. Among the numerous novels she has translated are Anne Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz (2011) and The Green Road (2015a). When I interviewed her one summer evening in 2016, she told me how much she enjoyed her work, and that it has occurred to her that she could write the novels herself: I prefer translating so much to cleaning and cooking. I can sit here and translate, and it’s getting to be dinner time. Then I say to my husband: ‘No, we have to go out for dinner again!’ Sometimes I have been thinking like this: ‘What if I stop translating and start writing novels!’ But I have no imagination!

She talked appreciatively about Enright as an excellent writer, and that it is easier to translate good writing while bad writing is indeed difficult to translate. ‘The task of the translator,’ according to Benjamin (1969a:  76)  (mentioning men but most likely including women translators), ‘consists in finding that intended effect [Intention] upon the language which he is translating which produces in it the echo of the original.’ While the translator is working with ‘the specific linguistic contextual aspects’, Benjamin continues, the poet is aiming for ‘language as such, at its totality’. This difference between the author and the translator is identified also by Ann Goldstein, who has translated Elena Ferrante’s novels from Italian into English, when she says that ‘I don’t think I become the writer, but I think in some sense I inhabit the writer’s words’ (Bhandari 2016). It should be noted that Danielsson has made Enright’s novels, who already were acclaimed, accessible for the small readership that only reads Swedish. In contrast, because the English language market is huge, it was Goldstein’s translations that brought global fame to Ferrante. It also brought a global fame to Ann Goldstein herself which is unusual for a translator: because of Elena Ferrante’s refusal to disclose her identity or meet the media in person, Goldstein gets the attention instead. The fact that English is a world language (some would say the world language) is important too. Goldstein is an editor and head of the copy department at the New Yorker. In an article about Goldstein, Michelle Langstone (2016) thus points out: ‘An art form in itself, translation carries an air of studiousness; it requires precision and mastery of both language and intention, and the translator seldom receives public attention.’ Goldstein does not know the real Ferrante, but does not see this as a problem. ‘I have actually translated a lot of dead writers,’ she says with a laugh, ‘so it is not that different from translating from a writer I don’t know.’ Working on Ferrante’s books, it has

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happened that Goldstein has asked the Italian editors for clarifications, and they have in turn asked Ferrante (Bhandari 2016). Ulla Danielsson has only met Anne Enright once, at a dinner in Stockholm in connection with the launch of the Swedish translation of The Forgotten Waltz (2011), literally titled Den glömda valsen (2012). Not knowing the writers she translates is nothing unique for Danielsson either, but she told me that occasionally she emails the writer and asks, ‘What do you mean by this?’ Sometimes it is not the writer who has obscured things, but ‘it can be bad editors, sections that don’t fit together, for instance’. For the translation of The Green Road (2015a), also with a literal title in Swedish, Danielsson wrote to the publisher and asked for permission to translate the poem ‘Oh Rough the Rude Atlantic’ by Emily Lawless. An obvious linguistic talent, Danielsson’s focus is on the Swedish language and the necessity to know Swedish very well –​‘other languages you can learn!’ The task of the contemporary translator can thus be defined in different ways. The level of engagement with the cultural and social context of the texts varies. In line with Benjamin’s view, contemporary translators seem to converge on aiming to find the writer’s voice, and this requires not only linguistic competence, but also a certain cultural and historical knowledge. Without being too creative, a translator is required to contextualize circumstances and concepts. This entails a certain flexibility after all –​even in a literal translation. As to finding the voice of a writer, Ulla Danielsson succeeds in conveying the ‘grain’ of Anne Enright’s voice. When Roland Barthes (1979: 181) wrote about the grain of the voice, he had the live performance of a song in mind, and ‘the very precise space (genre) of the encounter between a language and a voice’, a core quality that distinguishes some performances (dance, music) from other ones. Barthes discusses how to capture this quality in words, orally as well as written (cf. Wulff 1998, 2006 on watching versus writing dance). As writing about a performance is one type of translation –​and an original literary text also can be distinguished by a typical tone –​the idea of the grain of the voice is useful for an understanding of the process of the translation of Irish fiction. A crucial task of the translator of Irish fiction would thus be to look for this typical texture of a tone of an individual Irish writer, and then convey it in a translation. It is, however, rather rare that a translator is aware of this, or let alone able to transfer this quality successfully to another text or media. It also takes some special sensibility and cultural competence in the reader to distinguish this quality.

Brooklyn on the Big Screen As films based on books seldom manage to convey this quality, at least in my experience, I  had not expected the film Brooklyn (2015) adapted from Colm Tóibín’s (2009) novel, to do so. After having seen trailers on television, I went to see the film in Stockholm in March 2016. But I was pleasantly surprised, and quite frankly touched as well as entertained by the film. The Irish atmospheres and mores of the 1950s, the colors, the clothing –​it was spot on from the novel. The acting was excellent. Even that texture of the tone was intact. Watching a

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novel being enacted on the big screen means among other things that movement and faces are added, but not least importantly sound. There is the music that the protagonist, Eilis, dances to in Ireland, but even more momentously in Brooklyn, as that is where she meets her husband-​to-​be. Then there is the background music that drives the story emotionally which did have an element of Irish traditional music. How could it not? My worry that the film would exaggerate the emotional drama of the novel turned out to be unfounded. It was perfectly pitched. This Irish-​Canadian-​British film production premiered in 2015 in the United States at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.9 What Ramin Setoodeh (2015) wrote in his enthusiastic review in the online magazine Variety would soon come true: ‘Brooklyn’, a drama about an Irish immigrant’s journey to America, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Monday night without much advance buzz. But when the lights at the Eccles Theatre in Park City came up two hours later to a rapturous standing ovation, it was clear that Sundance had just screened one of the best films of the year. Within 24 hours, Fox Searchlight defeated its rivals (including the Weinstein Co. and Focus Features) in a heated bidding war and landed ‘Brooklyn’ for $9 million. That deal, the biggest at this year’s festival, also kicked off the Oscars 2016 race.

Directed by John Crowley, Brooklyn did get three Oscars nominations in 2016: for Best Picture, Actress in Leading Role (Saoirse Ronan) and Adapted Screenplay. The screenplay was written by Nick Hornby, the English writer, who, again, got the texture of the tone exactly right. Brooklyn was nominated for a large number of other international film awards in Europe, North America and Australia, as well as in Ireland, and won quite a few, not least for Saoirse Ronan. On the trailer for the film, Eilis dressed in her green coat, disembarks from the ship on Ellis Island against a backdrop of big American flags, and walks wearily through the customs carrying her brown suitcase, looking more worried than expectant. This scene at this legendary entry point to the United States is likely to strike a chord both among those who have had this experience themselves entering the United States, or any other country as an immigrant, and among those who have only heard or read about it. This theme is thus one reason why Brooklyn did so well in the United States with its long history of welcoming immigrants. (Cf. Chapter 8 on America as hope.) As the International New York Times’ film critic Scott points out about Eilis in his very appreciative review: ‘She leaves home not to flee political violence or desperate poverty –​as millions of earlier immigrants from Ireland and other parts of Europe did –​but to escape the narrowness and limited opportunities of her hometown.’ The fact that this is an integral part of life in the United States that goes back generations was also referred to in the review when Scott says that: ‘Many American families cherish faded memories of the Old Neighborhood and the Old Country, places that help supply both a sense of identity and a story of progress –​complementary answers to the question “Where do

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we come from?” ’ Scott also has interesting things to say about the intermedial translation of the book into film: On the page, Eilis comes alive through the fineness of Mr. Toibin’s prose. A devotee of Henry James, he registers the fluctuations of the character’s inner weather with meteorological precision. Inwardness is a great challenge for filmmakers. The human face is a wall as well as a window. Words lose their power. Everything depends on the ability of actors to communicate nuances of feeling and fluctuations of consciousness.

Saoirse Ronan, the actress, is highly acclaimed by Scott for using ‘her posture, her eyebrows, her breath, her teeth, her pores  –​to convey a process of change that is both seismic and subtle’. In the end ‘she is no longer who she was, even as she seems like someone we have always known’. That is what sparkled the success of the film. As we saw in Chapter  3, Colm Tóibín frequently writes opinion pieces and reviews in his capacity as a public intellectual. It was thus close at hand for him to comment on the translation of his novel into film in The Guardian, under the headline ‘Everyone in My Home Town Wanted to Be an Extra’. Tóibín says that he had hoped the scenes from his home town Enniscorthy, where Eilis lived in the novel, would really be shot there: The whole town, it seemed, once the film was announced, wanted to be extras. The film people built a shop. They made a former bank building into a post office. But there are some scenes that are pure, authentic Enniscorthy, especially the streets where Eilis walks. These streets  –​John Street, Court Street, Lower Church Street  –​have not changed much. No new buildings have been added or demolished there since the 1950s. They have a lovely timeless feel to them, a timelessness disrupted by the arrival of a girl home from America wearing sunglasses, causing every head to turn. The town is given a glamour and sometimes a sort of darkness in the film, but more than anything it seems real, exact, true. Whereas words slip and fail, and the power of words lies in their ambiguity, visual images are sharp and exact. In the film of Brooklyn, Enniscorthy is transformed, but it is also captured.

This must be an appreciative observation, that ‘Enniscorthy is transformed’ as well as ‘captured’, it suggests that Tóibín was pleased with how the film came out. He recognized the texture of his tone in the film.

The Commitments: Live in London Clearly an important part of the major success of Roddy Doyle’s novel The Commitments (1987) was the film with the same title released in 1991. It is probably

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safe to say that the film remains more known than the novel, even though there is an awareness among many people who have seen the film that it was based on a book. Almost thirty years later, the book was translated into what actually was a ‘smash hit’ musical show in London’s West End for three years in 2013 until 2015, and subsequently on tour in the United Kingdom and Dublin. In the spring of 2013, Roddy Doyle was interviewed in The Irish Stage by Steve Cummins (2013) about his thoughts on The Commitments (1987) as musical show. Just like Colm Tóibín’s response to the film based on his novel Brooklyn (2009), Doyle was very pleased but had some initial reservations that then proved to be unfounded: ‘I was a bit worried about dialogue because the way people speak changes subtly. . . But actually I was quite surprised that there was a timeless element to the dialogue, that actually most of the lines you could almost superimpose today and they’d work.’ As to the casting, Doyle had nothing to do with that. He trusted the director and the musical director with finding suitable actors who could also sing. It happened that he went to watch auditions that were held in Dublin, and to rehearsals in London, and he enjoyed them. When Doyle says that ‘it seems to me that the spirit of the original work is there’ he, too, has found the texture of his own tone conveyed in the show version of the written story. Then he has an important comment on the success of the film: ‘One of the reasons that I think the film became popular was that it didn’t have well-​known faces pretending that they were kids from Dublin –​ and not all of them were from Dublin. But they did a good job. I think that this will be the same. I think that it would be a mistake if you had a whole rake of familiar people from shows or from television.’ As to his adaptation of the book –​that he wrote when he was twenty-​seven years old –​into the musical show, Doyle notes that ‘I have no idea what I was like back then. I have no idea what made me write an individual line. I hadn’t read the book in more than two decades’. But then he was going to London for a meeting about the show ‘and so I thought I should read the book. So I read it on the plane, because it’s pretty short. And I was laughing in a way that I don’t usually do with my own work. But it didn’t feel like my own work because it was so long ago. The characters just seemed so different’. It worked extremely well. The critics raved, and the audience kept coming. In his review in The Telegraph, Charles Spencer (2013) was pleased with how the show ‘remains faithful to a novel that is in any case largely written in demotic Dublin dialogue’. The headline ‘Roddy Doyle’s Stage Version of the Commitments at the Palace Theatre Is a Vibrant, Raucous Joy’ opens the review. It goes on ‘the biggest compliment I can pay Jamie Lloyd’s production is to say that it really has got soul. It’s memorably gritty at times (the swear-​word count is exceptionally high) and also proves wonderfully funny and touching’. Spencer (2013) is impressed by the dialogue for its ‘splendid sarky wit’ and ‘the exhilaration of the music making is beautifully caught’ as ‘these kids –​living in bleak council estates and struggling along in dead end jobs or on the dole –​being in a band offers the one real chance of hope and escape’. It was in March 2015 that I  saw The Commitments as a musical show at the Palace Theatre, in London’s West End. The theatre was packed with people as I made my way to the front of the stalls. I was struck by a pronounced presence of

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Irish accents. It did not take long before we were all clapping and dancing. And it stayed like that throughout the whole show. The famous soul hits such as ‘Mustang Sally’, ‘In the Midnight Hour’ and ‘Try a Little Tenderness’ (about twenty of them) made the show into a concert with a story, but the success had not been as overwhelming without the singers-​actors remarkable performances. As Roddy Doyle had said, it mattered that the actors were not really household names but more or less just like anyone of us, at least for two hours in that thumping theatre.

Rhythms of Translation Discussing translations of Irish fiction from the writer’s point of view in an article in the Irish Times, Anne Enright (2015b) ‘considers the reach of Irish books abroad –​and what gets lost in translation’. She starts out by noting that ‘English is a greedy language, and Irish writers, however keen they are to harness its colonising power, are always aware of other shifts and possibilities’, she moved on to quoting John Banville, who is concerned about ‘the business of translation as a two-​way street’. While books by Irish writers ‘go everywhere’, ‘there is a world of literature out there’ that hardly ever gets translated into English anymore ‘because publishers won’t risk it’. Colum McCann is most grateful to the French as his novel This Side of Brightness (1998) was very well received in France: ‘I don’t think I could have made a decent living without the French.’ Irish writers such as Keith Ridgway, Hugo Hamilton and Nuala O’Faolain have been awarded the Prix Femina Étranger, the most prestigeous prize for books translated into French. As to Irish fiction translated into German, Enright mentions Hans-​Christian Oeser, a translator who importantly has lived in Ireland for many years and thus ‘has a keen ear for the vernacular’. Oeser is renowned for ‘capturing the cadences of Irish speech; he somehow keeps the rhythms despite what is for us the unwieldy nature of the German sentence, which stacks all the verbs just before the full stop’. Enright also writes about the Chinese market where ‘Colm Tóibín’s books have sold nearly 100,000 copies’. But she hastens to add: There is nothing, on those pages, that he might recognise as his own. And what on earth, you might wonder, do the Chinese make of him? In fact, Tóibín says, a new generation of readers there ‘take the availability of foreign fiction in translation for granted. They are curious and open and they notice everything’. The Chinese laughed when he told them to Google something, and then they laughed again at his discomfiture.

Enright concludes by referring to her own experience of doing readings in China: ‘In fact, there is nothing opaque or odd about the Chinese reader’s response to an Irish book, as authors who have given readings in China soon realise.’ For ‘this is a different kind of strange: stories travel. Fiction is held together by its own internal tensions and laws, and these laws are universally understood’.

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In this chapter I  contextualized cases of intermedial translation from novels into film and musical show respectively, as well as the other way around from image into text. There are also cases of television series, such as the BBC One miniseries, Quirke, from 2013, that was adapted from crime novels by John Banville writing as Benjamin Black, and starred Gabriel Byrne. Significantly, the rhythm of intermedial translation can include translations across a number of media of the same novel. The Commitments had a momentous life as a film before it became a musical show  –​but via the book again. This trajectory across more than one medium is not so unusual even though the level of success tends to vary between different media. In Chapter 4, I describe how Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary (2012a) first was a monologue titled Testament performed at the Dublin festival in 2011. Then he translated it into a novella, and in 2013 it premiered as a play on Broadway, and later in London, as well as in Catalan in Barcelona. Moreover, it is available as a podcast read by Colm Tóibín himself on The Guardian’s website (as a Guardian Review Book Club Podcast) and recently as an audiobook on CD read by Meryl Streep.10 The film Brooklyn was nominated for an Oscar for Best Picture. So was the film Room, based on the novel by Emma Donoghue (2010) with the same title. This prompted Donald Clarke (2016) to discuss in the Irish Times a number of films that had been adapted from Irish literature in terms of ‘a grand tradition’ –​‘Irish cinema is passing through an unprecedented period of fecundity’. Yet Clarke is not sure that it is time for the Irish to ‘finally set aside the stubborn notion that our sensibilities are more literary than visual’. He goes on to note that ‘we can’t quite escape our engagement with books. Still prisoners of the northern Atlantic, we need to fall back on words when the evenings darken’. Clarke is impressed with both Brooklyn and Room as ‘stout cinematic achievements, but they also register as two of the nation’s greatest-​ever literary adaptations’. This is an insight with wider implications: Irish films (usually in collaboration with British and/​or American producers) that make it big tend to build on books. Clarke mentions The Commitments, and in passing the film Angela’s Ashes. However, this has to do with two palpable characteristics of Irish fiction that make it suitable for film: first, it is quite visual in itself, and second, it is strong on dialogue. With the emergence of new world literature studies, translation theory is accentuated again such as in Rebecca Walkowitz’s (2015) idea of born-​translated novels that are simultaneously published in different languages.11 This is one aspect of temporality in translation. Another goes back to Walter Benjamin’s (1969a) notion of the afterlife of an original. In the past, with weaker technology and communications, translations would by necessity be made quite sometime after the original had been published. Benjamin (1969a: 73) took an interest in the fact that the original changes when it is translated into a new version: ‘For in its afterlife –​which could not be called that if it were not a transformation and a renewal of something living –​the original undergoes a change.’ When it comes to Irish fiction in intermedial translation, for our purposes here, this change (which can come soon after the film or the show have appeared) has two sides: aesthetically it entails that a novel is enriched by new perspectives of vision, colour, movement, the presence of people,

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and not least sound, primarily of music, while career wise for the writer it entails more exposure, with increasing sales and promotion. Here is thus what is found in intermedial translation, and it concerns the writer, readers as well as media and literary markets. What then gets lost in this translation? It may be a matter of sensibility and cultural capital, but the act of reading fiction is more controlled by the specific details of a text, some of which are untranslatable into other media, while because of the combined visual and aural experience a film or a musical show is more open to individual imaginations. And even though distinguishing the grain of a writer’s voice in a translation can be experienced as a miracle, the debate over faithfulness to the original versus creativity in its own right continues.

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Chapter 8 A MERICA AS H OPE :  L E GACY OF L E AV I NG

For centuries, millions of people from across the globe have emigrated to America, among them Irish people.1 As emigration from Ireland to America has characterized Irish life for long, it is an obvious topic in Irish fiction.2 Sparkled by hope for a better life in America, novels and short stories feature loss and longing on both sides of the Atlantic, but also happiness as well as hardships in the new country. In the American context, Irish ethnicity is diversified and has been changing over time. Compared to other European immigrant ethnicities such as Swedish-​ American and German-​American that have mostly vanished, Irishness is still evident in America. According to the American Community Survey in 2013 (made by the US Census Bureau), about 33.3 million Americans, or 10.5 per cent of the total population, claimed Irish ancestry.3 This is a considerably larger number of people than the few million that make up the population of the Republic of Ireland. In line with Andre Gingrich and Ulf Hannerz’s (2017) introduction to the anthropological study of small countries, the Republic of Ireland is in two ‘binary constellations’, two big others; with Britain, the ex-​colonizer, in many ways still constituting a hegemony, while America keeps representing hope (Wulff 2017). By relating Irish fiction that features America as hope to anthropological investigations into the nature of hope, home and diaspora, as well as the Irish in America (Byron 1999), this chapter shows that this fiction, which tends to be set in the past, explains why the idea of America as hope lingers on in contemporary Irish life and literature. The emigration to America has been massive, with a peak in the mid-​nineteenth century when two million people fled the Great Famine (Whelan 2005). But hope can also help coming to terms with the past. In a recent interview about his work on hope, Vincent Crapanzano (Kirksey and LeFevre 2015) notes: ‘The area that I find most interesting still is the relationship between hope and the process of creating possibility –​or a certain stance toward possibility. Hope is reconstituting the present and, even more interestingly, the past.’ He goes on to talk about the relationship between hope and anticipation, which points to the future where hope is supposed to be realized.4 And even though fiction on America as hope also deals with drawbacks, the idea of a great country of hope continues as emigration waves keep recurring. In the end, however, numerous literary cases surface about how life as Irish emigrants in America produces a certain refigured hope –​that

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of going home to Ireland. Disappointingly, if these literary characters are able, or forced, to go back, they might well find that not only have they changed, which means that they do not really fit in any more, but Ireland has also changed. The return can be traumatic. For many, the Ireland they left and remember is not there anymore. This is, of course, a common experience among members of diaspora communities in general: a return in that sense is not possible. Not only are the stories discussed in this chapter set in America or en route to America, but the writers also spend a lot of time there themselves, especially in New York. This is an important part of their global success, as well as a consequence of it. New York is a major stop on tours launching new books published by American and British publishers, and for networking. As we have seen, the Irish writers often appear together on literary panels and festivals in New York (cf. Chapter 6 on the publishing market.) Colum McCann, again, lives in New York where he teaches at Hunter College. He has kept close connections with Ireland for family and career reasons. Colm Tóibín has had several visiting appointments as writer and professor in America:  at Stanford University, University of Texas at Austin, Princeton University and Columbia University. Also Fintan O’Toole has been a visiting lecturer at Princeton University, and enjoys visiting New York. Joseph O’Connor has lived for periods of time in New York as a research fellow at the New York Public Library, and visiting professor at Baruch College. When she was the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction, Anne Enright taught for a semester at New York University. In addition to being a central place for book promotion and networking, New York also provides time for writing. And not least significantly, New York provides ideas for fiction. Spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in his book Irish America (1999: 1), Reginald Byron suggests: Irish America is an amalgam of images drawn from Irish and American history and popular culture, the product of two worlds in two centuries: Irish nation-​ building in the old world in the nineteenth century, and American pluralism and multiculturalism in the new world in the twentieth century. Interpretations of the past have merged into the present and have come to colour our understandings of social memory, self-​image, and ethnic identity among current generations of Americans who are descendants from Irish immigrant ancestors.

Byron (1999:  51)  notes that ‘most Irish emigrants to America left their native country at a time of agrarian upheaval and economic depression’ and that ‘the arrival of large numbers of Famine immigrants in the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century had far-​reaching consequences for the ethnic composition of many American cities, not least because the great preponderance of Famine immigrants were Catholic; they were the first Catholics to arrive in the United States in large numbers’. He continues, ‘Much scholarly and popular writing has focused on Irish enclaves in America’s larger industrial cities.’ This ‘has had far-​reaching implications about the way we understand the immigrant experience,

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what is characteristic of Irishness, and the place occupied by the Irish in American society’ (Byron 1999: 16).

Leaving Home When your land has been occupied by a foreign power until rather recently, the idea of home is especially significant. This is certainly the case in Irish culture, where the idea of home is much revered. In addition, exile and emigration accentuate the prominence of the idea of home back in Ireland. As Fintan O’Toole (1997b: 81, 86–​7) observes, this idea is formed through a combination of cherished memories and the continued predicament of emigration that ‘has been the overwhelming fact of Irish life for the last 150 years’. He goes on to say that ‘home comes into focus only when one is away from home’, and that ‘it is particularly true of Irish culture that the imagination itself is inextricable from the idea of home, usually made powerful by the act of leaving it’, and adds that ‘in the network of recollection and imagination –​remembering the past and inventing the future –​that makes a culture, there’s no place like home’. There is indeed a strong commitment to Ireland as a home among Irish people, in Ireland as well as in the diaspora. While in Ireland, people and events can be said to be engraved in the Irish landscape, but they are leaving empty spaces after those who have moved away. Yet there is also the notion of the Irish landscape reaching abroad. As Eric Hirsch (1995: 22) sees landscape as process, he connects ‘a “foreground” everyday social life with “a background” of potential social existence’. The Irish diaspora communities live their everyday social life in such a foreground, at a great distance from Ireland, yet being aware of Ireland as a background of ‘potential social existence to which one may return’ (Wulff 2007a: 66). The novel Brooklyn (2009) by Colm Tóibín is, again, about Eilis who reluctantly goes to America during the 1950s unemployment in Ireland. Lonely at first, she meets an Italian man at a dance. Life takes a happy turn. Then she is suddenly called back to Ireland as her sister dies. And it is because she is married in America that she and her widowed mother have to face the fact that they will never meet again. On the last night, epitomizing the pain of parting, her mother says goodbye and goes to her bedroom; refusing to get up in the morning as that would be too difficult for her. So Eilis has to pack on her own, and the next morning she finds that as she had not drawn the curtains she was woken by the morning light. It was early and there was no sound except for birdsong. She knew that her mother would be awake too, listening for every sound. She moved quietly, carefully, putting on the fresh clothes she had left out for herself, going downstairs to stuff the old clothes and her toiletries into the suitcase. She checked that she had everything –​money, her passport, the letter from the shipping company and the note for Jim Farrell. (Tóibín 2009: 251)

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Jim Farrell was an admirer who later that day, she thought, would go to her mother’s house and her mother ‘would stand watching Jim Farrell with her shoulders back bravely and her jaw set hard and a look in her eyes that suggested both an inexpressive sorrow and whatever pride she could muster. “She has gone back to Brooklyn,” her mother would say’ (Tóibín 2009: 252). In Ireland, in the past, there used to be parties with dancing and singing arranged the night before someone was emigrating. The parties were chillingly called ‘American wake’, or Australian wake’, depending on where the emigrant was heading. The notion of ‘wake’ was present, as Fintan O’Toole (1999: 10) says because of the assumption that the emigrant was ‘passing away to another side, probably for ever’ (see also Wulff 2007a). During fieldwork for my study of dance in Ireland (Wulff 2005a: 45), I met an old man in a pub in Connemara in the west of Ireland who told me about American wakes: My sisters were dancing all night. When someone was going to America, my sisters were dancing all night. I remember once, when our aunt was going, my sisters were 15–​16 years old. Our aunt left on the bus to Galway at 7. When the bus came back the next day –​my sisters were still dancing!

As the sisters really did not want their aunt to leave, they tried to hold on to her for as long as they could, by being in motion when she was in motion, at least in the beginning of her journey to Galway and then by ship all the way across the ocean. There was also singing at American wakes, with the same function as dancing. This is described in Frank McCourt’s account in Angela’s Ashes (2005a) of the American wake held the night before he was leaving his big impoverished family in Limerick to go to New York: Mam says this is the first time we ever had a party and isn’t it a sad thing altogether that you have it when your children are slipping away one by one, Malachy to England, Frank to America. She saves a few shillings from her wages taking care of Mr. Sliney to buy bread, ham, brawn, cheese, lemonade and a few bottles of stout. Uncle Pa Keating brings stout, whiskey and a little sherry for Aunt Aggie’s delicate stomach and she brings a cake loaded with currants and raisins she baked herself. The Abbot brings six bottles of stout and says, That’s all right, Frankie, ye can all drink it as long as I have a bottle or two for meself to help me sing me song. (McCourt 2005a: 419)

And so the Abbot sings the sad song ‘The Road to Rasheen’ which he explains, while wiping his eyes, is about ‘an Irish boy that went to America and got shot by gangsters and died before a priest could reach his side and he tells me don’t be getting’ shot if you’re not near a priest’. On the ship the next day, Frank thinks about this and other songs: ‘It’s late in the day when the Irish Oak sails from Cork, past Kinsale and Cape Clear, and dark when lights twinkle on Mizen Head, the last of Ireland I’ll see for God knows how long’ (McCourt 2005: 419–​20). Frank’s homesickness on the ship is mellowed by a priest from Limerick who lives in Los Angeles. They spend the journey together, and stand next to each other

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on deck at dawn when they sail into New York. Frank is overwhelmed and thinks he is in a film: I can pick out the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the Brooklyn Bridge. There are thousands of cars speeding along the roads and the sun turns everything to gold. Rich Americans in top hats white ties and tails must be going home to bed with the gorgeous women with white teeth. The rest are going to work in warm comfortable offices and no one has a care in the world. (McCourt 2005b: 422)

In the sequel to Angela’s Ashes (1996, 2005a) titled’Tis (1999), McCourt is a young man in New York. He works at a hotel where he realizes that there is a class system even in America. With the Korean war going on, he is drafted and has to go to Germany, where he is assigned to train dogs and type reports. On his return to America, he gets a job on the docks. But his lack of education from already leaving school at fourteen, takes him to New York University. That is where he meets a long-​legged blonde, and he is finally starting to settle down. Eventually, it is his job as a teacher that really changes his life. From his account in Teacher Man (2005b), the third memoir in the trilogy, it is clear that he has a remarkable pedagogical talent. He teaches writing for thirty years to boisterous teenagers in an underprivileged area of New York. Honest about his setbacks, he explains how he slowly was able to relate to his students and make them interested in storytelling. This was also how he became a writer himself. When it comes to our central topic of writing as craft and career, Frank McCourt was just one of the many Irish writers who moved to America and became a writer, a memoirist. It was thus obvious that he would focus on Irish concerns. But so does other Irish writers living in America, those who write fiction as they mostly or partly relate to Irishness. Irish connections range from entire novels devoted to Irish people to one or two passing Irish characters, events or places. Like in Brooklyn (2009), much Irish fiction is located both in Ireland and in New York, going back and forth.

Crossing the Ocean Following a new, emerging format of the novel, a number of the novels that engage with the Irish emigration to America consist of what at first seems to be separate short stories with unique plots, but as the novels unfold it turns out that these are plots-​within-​the plot, as the different plots weave together into one singular plot.5 Such plots-​within-the plot are used by Colum McCann in his Let the Great World Spin (2009) and TransAtlantic (2013), Star of the Sea (2002) by Joseph O’Connor and by Anne Enright in The Green Road (2015a). All four novels were written with a global readership in mind, rather than an Irish only. These writers have an interest in places such as New York, a knowledge and experience, even love of them. Crossing the ocean is key in these novels, either once for a dramatic emigration move, or back and forth more or less frequently, for the characters’ family or work.

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In Let the Great World Spin (2009: 341) by Colum McCann, the narrator Ciaran starts out as a hippie, but leaves for New York in a sudden flash after having survived an IRA bomb in Dublin. He had been caught, too, with a small possession of hash, but allowed to go without charge. The focal point of this acclaimed novel is a real event: Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the original Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in August 1974. Opening and closing in Dublin, the novel mainly takes place in New  York. It describes fictional characters from different vantage points in the social structure, whose lives are linked together through the tightrope event, some just in passing by standing in the same crowd in the street one hundred and ten floors below, while others form close relationships. There is the Irish priest Corrigan, the protagonist’s brother who works with prostitutes in the Bronx, one of them is the awesome Tillie, and Claire, a housewife on Upper West Side whose son has been killed in Vietnam, as well as the teenage photographer Fernando in search of graffiti in subway tunnels. It was 9/​11 that sparked Let the Great World Spin (2009), as a way ‘to talk about these things’ according to McCann –​the novel ‘functions as a 9/​11 allegory’. And that ‘9/​11 is certainly part of the book’s construction’ yet he is keen to make clear that ‘it is not limited to that. But in this sense it is very much a book of hope and in some ways it’s an anti-​9/​11 novel’.6 The tightrope walker brings back the original Twin Towers, and the Vietnam war represents the Iraq war. This resonates with what George O’Brien (2012:  179–​80) summarizes in a chapter on Let the Great World Spin (2009): ‘The sky is the limit for connectivity’s permutations and combinations’, and that ‘appalling as the attacks of September 11 were, faith in the potential of interconnectedness embraces it, as well’. In McCann’s own words: The book follows the intricate lives of a number of people who live on the ground, or rather, people who walk the ground’s tightrope . . . The lives braid in and out of each other. It’s a collision, really, a web in this big sprawling complex web that we call New York. And maybe it’s just a novel about the polyphonic city . . . my love letter to old New York in all her clothes, shabby and dignified both.7

As O’Brien (2012: 179) notes, the tightrope event is ‘a curtain raiser’. Yet as the plot unfolds in, and from, various directions, the tightrope event is not constantly at the centre. O’Brien identifies this technique in terms of how ‘this narrative strategy foregoes the narrowness of conventional plotting in favour of a looser structure which facilitates a multiplicity of perspectives on the ups and downs of a large cast of characters but which also articulates an economy of possibility’. And O’Brien goes on: ‘such an economy –​a system whereby values are traded –​envisages its most significant activity to be the reconciliation of differences’. It is well-​documented that most Irish migrants to America, also in fiction, have left famine, poverty, unemployment and recently austerity measures. This would be forced migration. A less common, yet pertinent reason for leaving, is Ciaran who escapes the Troubles, not from Northern Ireland as one would have thought, but from its extended violent activity in Dublin in the early 1970s. To leave Dublin because of the Troubles has obviously not been as common as leaving Belfast, but

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McCann recurrently makes a political point about the Troubles through his fiction. A university dropout who was ‘catching the tail end of the hippie years’, Ciaran had not paid much attention to ‘what happened up north’. One Friday night in the spring of 1974, he went to the Dandelion Market in Dublin where he ‘bought half an ounce of Moroccan hash at a stall for secondhand records’, and ‘I was walking along South Leinster Street into Kildare Street when the air shook. Everything went yellow for an instance, a perfect flash, then white. I was knocked through the air, against a fence. I woke, panic all around. Shards of glass.’ He is bleeding from a wound in his left ear, and faints, so he is taken to the hospital. He is found to be fine –​but as a routine procedure at the hospital the police looked in his pockets for identification. Soon he is ‘arrested for possession and brought to the court house, where the judge took pity and said it was a wrongful search, gave me a lecture and sent me on my way. I went straight to the travel agency in Dawson Street, bought my ticket out’. As he arrived at Kennedy Airport dressed in an Afghan coat and a long necklace, ‘the customs men sniggered’. But his brother, Corrigan, who had confirmed in a postcard that he would be there to meet him, was not there. ‘It was eighty-​seven degrees in the shade. The heat hit me with the force of an ax. The waiting area pulsated.’ Watching families unite and menacing looking taxi drivers roaming about, he had waited for an hour sitting on his rucksack when a policeman pushed his side. So Ciaran ‘boarded a bus amid the swelter and noise’, and then got on the subway to the Bronx where his brother lived. Like many reviewers of TransAtlantic (2013), Erica Wagner’s (2013) review in the New York Times identifies a number of structural similarities between this novel and the previous Let the Great World Spin (2009), as she says: Weaving invented characters’ lives into the events of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, it is very much a companion piece to McCann’s last novel, ‘Let the Great World Spin’, which won the National Book Award in 2009. As in that book, the narrative here doesn’t run clean from start to finish, like the pilots’ flight across the sea; rather, it’s a series of linked stories joined over time by a common thread. In ‘Let the Great World Spin’, that thread was a wire, a crossing made between the two towers of the World Trade Center one August morning in 1974.

Then Wagner moves on to what distinguishes TransAtlantic (2013): Here the bond is also a crossing, but one that’s broader and deeper through history and time. Over the course of seven chapters, each quite distinct yet integrated with the rest, McCann takes on the lives of men and women who have chosen to leap across the ocean from Ireland to the New World or back again.

Also TransAtlantic (2013) seems at first to consist of separate stories, told in different authorial voices, but it turns out that historical people (all men) and events forming the basic structure are connected over time and across the Atlantic, through a family of women protagonists that McCann has invented. There is the first transatlantic flight that Arthur Brown and Jack Alcock undertook from

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Newfoundland to the west of Ireland in 1919, and in 1998, Senator George Mitchell commuting between New York and Belfast in charge of making peace in Northern Ireland. Already in 1845, the eloquent abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who had escaped slavery, went to Ireland on his mission for freedom and equality for all people. He is dismayed by the Famine. A  young maid is enthused by Douglass’s ideas and goes to New York in search of this free new world, but has to deal with disappointments. Many years later, it is finally her daughter who is able to go back to Ireland. The issue of not only how the past forms the future runs through the novel, but also how fiction can help understand reality. As Erica Wagner (2013) notes: ‘Ireland’s past haunts and shapes this novel, yet McCann’s stories offer us hope. When Arthur Brown first spies the Irish coast “rising up out of the sea, nonchalant as you like: wet rock, dark grass, stone tree light”, he knows he’ll remember this simple sight forever. “The miracle of the actual,” he thinks. No small wonder, that.’ In her review, Wagner (2013) also compliments McCann on his ability to refresh a historical event as ‘making an oft-​told tale seem newly minted is a rare and wondrous gift’. And in a New York Times Magazine feature article on McCann, Joel Lovell (2013) recognizes in TransAtlantic (2013) how McCann’s recurrent ‘storytelling emerges from his obsession with actual people and events’. What interests him increasingly, McCann told him, are the blurred spaces between fiction and nonfiction, the ‘real that’s imagined and the imagined that’s real’. When asked about his fictionalizing of historic people ranging from Rudolf Nureyev in the novel Dancer (2003), who died in 1993, to George Mitchell who is still living, McCann replies, ‘But did I feel trepidation?’ and confirms: No. I  feel no trepidation whatsoever. I  like the idea  –​(Clifford) Geertz talks about it  –​that the real is as invented as the imaginary. William Maxwell has this idea that memory is mostly lies anyway and it’s how we choose to invent it. I don’t believe a poet has a better hold on truth or morality than a fiction writer has. And I don’t think a fiction writer has anything over a journalist. It’s all about the good word, properly inserted. (Hoby 2013)

Joseph O’Connor’s bestselling novel Star of the Sea (2002), a tapestry set on an overloaded famine ship in 1847 that carries starving people away from Ireland to New York, has a different relationship with reality. This meticulously researched book is inspired by extensive archival sources and historical documents. These are carefully made account of (including some minor poetic license) in the acknowledgements that is organized under the headlines: background, eye-​witness account of the famine, shipboard experiences, illustrations, quotations, acknowledgements, history, music. With the plot mostly chronological focusing on the month-​long journey across the ocean including briefer subplots before the journey located in Ireland and England as well as upon arrival and many years later in America, Star of the Sea (2002) is more conventionally structured than the intricate plots-​within-​ plots in Let the Great World Spin (2009) and TransAtlantic (2013).

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Paraphrasing the legendary inscription on the Statue of Liberty that welcomed immigrants sailing into New York,8 the headline of James Kincaid’s (2003) very appreciative review of Star of the Sea (2003) in the New York Times was ‘Keep Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses’. As Kincaid says, there is ‘a reluctantly intertwined collection of characters’: The most noteworthy is an Irish aristocrat, David Merridith, Lord Kingscourt, whose Oxford training has shown him ‘how to put on like a cheerful idiot’ while he’s got his ‘hands sliding around your neck’. Merridith and his family are being stalked by a man named Pius Mulvey, who has been charged, on pain of death, with executing the aristocrat before he reaches America. Mulvey’s orders issue from a group of Irishmen who resent Merridith’s eviction of his tenants, leaving them to starvation as he takes his bankrupt but very comfy self off to the New World.

A lead character is the American journalist Grantley Dixon who reports to the New  York Tribune. He is ‘a man possessed of a self-​congratulatory voice of confident compassion. He records the horrors of the Irish potato famine and its million dead –​from starvation and from the callousness of Anglo-​Irish landowners and English politicians’. Advertised as a historical novel, this is also how Joseph O’Connor has categorized Star of the Sea (2002) in interviews. Yet it hinges so much on a murder mystery that it is also a thriller, an Irish crime story (as discussed in Chapter 4) with the difference that both the killer and the victim are introduced already in the beginning of the novel. Kincaid (2002) notes: This is a brave and artful novel disguised to appear safe and conventional. One can read on for some time as if it were simply a ‘terror stalks the high seas’ thriller, but one would be an uncommon fool to do so for very long. Joseph O’Connor, an Irish critic and playwright who is also the author of several previous novels, lures us into an easy read that, before we know it, becomes a chilling indictment not of a murderer but of us. As a London publisher says midway through the book, advising a writer unsuccessfully peddling his fiction, this is ‘a good old thumping yarn’, the sort of thing a reader can ‘sink his tusks into’.

‘But,’ Kincaid (2003) points out, ‘ “Star of the Sea” is also an agonizing inquiry into the nature of abandonment and the difficulty of finding anyone who will truly care about the fate of others.’ The fact that English landlords and colonizers did little to stop the Great Famine in time is a lingering agony for people in Ireland. There has been a silence about this in Ireland, but with its 150th anniversary, it became more obvious. Star of the Sea (2002) is one of few fictional accounts of the Great Famine.

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Diaspora Stories of Solitude The scholarly definition of diaspora has, of course, changed over time, from first representing the Jewish experience only, into a variety of experiences. Sociologist Robin Cohen (2001) has identified four forms of diapora: diaspora as social form, consciousness, mode of cultural production and as political orientation. As Cohen (2001:  3644)  states:  ‘The enduring logic is that the term conceptually connects home and abroad. The conflicting claims on group loyalties have been given an added emphasis in an age of global networks and the changing role, some would argue the relative decline, of the nation-​state as a focus for group identification.’ And Rogers Brubaker (2005:  13)  reminds us that ‘rather than speak of “a diaspora” or “the diaspora” as an entity, a bounded group, an ethnodemographic or ethnocultural fact, it may be more fruitful, and certainly more precise, to speak of diasporic stances, projects, claims, idioms, practices’.9 A prominent part of Irish literature fictionalizes diaspora stance and idiom in America, addressing homesickness and solitude. Colm Tóbín’s (2010b: 2,4) short story ‘One Minus One’ is a fictional monologue told to an ex-​boyfriend, whom the narrator is not in touch with anymore, six years after he first arrived as a visiting university professor in New York. Cut off from the rest of the world and Ireland, he starts settling down in his rented apartment. This was before mobile phones, and the phone in the apartment was not yet connected. After days of buying furniture including ‘a big bed from 1-​800-​Mattress; a table and some chairs from a place downtown; a cheap desk from a thrift shop’ he goes into a Kinko’s and checks his email. There were several emails from his sister, about their mother being in a critical condition in the hospital. So he hurries back to Ireland for his mother’s last days and funeral. On the way back, he reflects on what it is like to live abroad. He declares that he does not believe in God, not even in Ireland: ‘But you know, too, that in these years of being away there are times when Ireland comes to me in a sudden guise, when I see a hint of something familiar that I want and need. I see someone coming towards me with a soft way of smiling, or a stubborn uneasy face, or a way of moving warily through a public place, or a raw, almost resentful stare into the middle distance.’ Writing about ‘One Minus One’ and the novel Brooklyn (2009), literary scholar Eibhear Walshe (2013b: 143) sees that ‘exile and the permeable, interchangeable and transferable nature of home and of Irishness continues to be the focus of his work here’. Walshe also notes that it is through his current exile that the narrator finally realizes the emotional impact of his mother’s death.10 The short story ‘Orchard Street, Dawn’ (2012:  39)  by Joseph O’Connor is a heart-​breaking mid-​nineteenth-​century tale about a destitute Irish woman in New York who loses one child after another, and is more and more miserable. The depth of the woman’s isolation in her new city, far away from home, is revealed to the reader when it turns out that Bridget Moore cannot write, and her mother cannot read, but Joseph sometimes helps his young wife to write a letter, and the schoolmaster back in Ireland helps

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her mother understand the news. So it will be the voice of the elderly schoolmaster, whose name Bridget cannot now remember, that will pronounce the words of the terrible letter: that Agnes Mary Moore, who lived only five months, has lost her life in New York.

In his learned survey of The Irish Novel 1960–​2010 (2012:  xxi), literary scholar George O’Brien notes that it is quite recent that diaspora lives have been included on equal grounds in the Irish experience:  ‘The representation of Irish abroad  –​ in Colum McCann’s America and Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn (2009)’ among others ‘imparts some of the imagination’s saving grace to worlds hitherto treated with a strange, if not total, silence’. He goes on to say that not only abroad, but also at home, ‘protagonists of the contemporary Irish novels share one condition: an apparently inescapable solitude affects them’. This pertains in particular to motherless Tess, the protagonist in the sad but exquisite Academy Street (2014:  141, 143) by Mary Costello. Tess moves from a big house, Easterfield, in the west of Ireland to New York in the 1960s. Desperately lonely, she works as a nurse and becomes a single mother. When her son has grown up and left home, she is at a loss: ‘The evenings of that first winter alone, and of the winters following, had a denser darkness. In the streets she was assailed by glances, light strobes, flashing neon lights.’ After having met her son’s parents-​in-​law to-​be at a function where she feels remote, ‘she returned home after midnight. She stepped inside and stood still, alone again. She had left the radio on all day. Others had people waiting’. But there are also literary cases of mixed fates. The young woman Sophie is the protagonist of the short story ‘The Pale Gold of Alaska’ (2001: 3) by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne. Sophie emigrates from Donegal to New York planning to get a job as a housemaid, and as she is about to disembark: ‘America.’ It was a word she had carried in her head for a long time. A word, a dream and a hope, shining in her eyes, encouraging her heart. But it was not something her mind could encompass, now that the moment of landing was drawing so close. America. The word becoming land and lights and buildings in front of her eyes. Too abruptly it had appeared, in the end, after all the voyaging and imagining. She felt as if she had awoken suddenly from a vivid dream. She tried, briefly to cling to it before it vanished completely, before reality rushed in and blotted out the picture she had carried in her head for most of her life.

It does not take long before Sophie finds herself locked in a loveless marriage far away in Alaska. When her husband ‘hit gold’, ‘his joy was boundless. “By summer we’ll be rich enough to go back home. We’ll buy a good big farm in Derry and live like gentry,” he exclaimed’ (Ní Dhuibhne 2001: 33). The harrowing isolation of Bridget Moore who could not read or write in New  York in the mid-​nineteenth century, that of Tess on her own a century later in the same city, or Sophie alone in Alaska does not quite happen anymore.

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Communications technology such as skype and WhatsApp and cheap travel have changed things, and made Irish America less far away from Ireland.

Reasons for Returning With new immigrants and political refugees seeking safety in Ireland in growing numbers, Ireland is becoming an immigrant country, yet its ethos as an emigrant country keeps being strong. There is a legacy of leaving which includes a fear that loved ones will move to places far away. Families and friends are torn apart. Even now there is a sense of distance and displacement. In the appropriately titled book chapter ‘Perpetual Motion’, Fintan O’Toole (1997b: 77) comments: To hear in the word Irish the shape of a foot in motion is to catch the true note of a culture that is not just marked but actually defined by the perpetual motion of the people who bear it. Emigration and exile, the journeys to and from home, are the very heartbeat of Irish culture. To imagine Ireland is to imagine a journey. And in the last few decades the ways of measuring the distances traversed in that journey have been changing.

As O’Toole says, the journeys have intensified. It is common, even expected that members of the enormous Irish diaspora go back to Ireland to visit, and in some cases, stay on. Importantly, return migration has expanded (Tovey and Share 2000). Novels that feature emigration to America often end with a visit to Ireland, or even a move back. We should keep in mind that returning to Ireland is a common theme in contemporary fiction, more so than in Irish classics simply because travelling was more expensive and rather rare in the past, compared with modern mobility. People rarely returned back then. The reasons for returning now range from looking for roots to family crises, often funerals. A  family crisis can take place in Ireland as well as in America yet be the push to return. Going back does not necessarily have anything to do with whether the hopes of America had been fulfilled or failed. Nominated for the Man Booker Prize, Anne Enright’s The Green Road (2015a) was well received. Alex Preston (2015) wrote a positive review in The Guardian with the sub-​headline:  ‘A reunion dominates this moving family drama but it’s the distinct individual stories that fascinate.’ The novel circles around an elderly mother in a small town in Ireland who has decided to sell her house, and thus writes to her children. Except for one daughter who lives close by, they are scattered in Dublin, Mali and Canada. Now she invites them to spend a last Christmas in their childhood home. According to Preston: ‘Enright often feels as if she’s playing with our expectations of what an Irish novel should do –​the boxes that must be ticked in order to satisfy some Anglo-​American dream of Ireland.’ The son Dan first moved to New York where he narrowly escaped AIDS, and now lives happily with his well-​to-​do male partner in Canada. It is easy to agree with Preston when he points out:

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In many ways, The Green Road works best if we think of it as a series of short stories (Enright is feted in the shorter form). The section about Dan in New York stands on its own as a masterful evocation of time and place –​the moment I finished the novel, I went back and re-​immersed myself in the art and the sex and the melancholy of Dan’s early life.

America is thus visible both in the novel and in the context this reviewer sees for the novel. Mary Costello’s Academy Street (2014) was received as a breakthrough for her. In an interview for writing.ie, Costello said that ‘I, like almost everyone else I know, grew up fascinated and intoxicated by New  York. I’ve never lived there but I’ve visited many times’ (Fox O’Loughlin 2014). One such visit took place in the summer of 2011. She stayed on ninetieth street and York, and this was when the novel started taking shape. Costello went to Inwood, on the northern tip of Manhattan, which was an Irish neighbourhood in the 1960s, and also where her aunt had lived. Walking in the streets and the park, and visiting the church and the library, and one day seeing parents picking up their children from school, Tess’s life came to her. In Academy Street (2014: 175–​6), Tess’s quiet life was marked by unexpected happiness over having her son (even as an Irish Catholic single mother) and brutal tragedy when he dies in the 9/​11 attack. After forty years in New York, she goes back to Ireland for her brother’s funeral: She returned once, to Easterfield. It was May and she went back for Denis’s funeral. His son Michael met her at Shannon and swept her along newly built motorways, through towns and villages whose names she could barely recall. He turned onto the avenue at Easterfield and they drove slowly in dappled light under the trees. She would know this place anywhere on earth. She would feel it forever in her bones, every stick and stone of it.

But then she sees what she already knew: the old derelict house had been replaced by a bungalow. There she meets the rest of her big extended family including grandchildren of her siblings. ‘They all embraced her’ but at first ‘she felt herself among strangers, kind curious strangers’. Trying to recall the past and those long dead, all she can think of is that the past ‘what, if anything remained of it, apart from the pain, the memory of pain’. Her sister Evelyn talks about her other two siblings who went to America. One died, the other disappeared:  ‘Do you know what? All America ever brought this family was misfortune.’ In Let the Great World Spin (2009: 341) by Colum McCann, Ciaran spends a number of years in New York as a hippie, but eventually returns when his brother, Corrigan, is killed in a car accident. This is how Ciaran meets and marries, Lara, an aspiring artist, who was the passenger (but importantly not driving) the car that killed his brother. Ciaran moved back to Ireland with Lara. As the novel concludes with a jump forward in time to October 2006, Ciaran is ‘the CEO of an Internet company in the high glass towers along the Liffey’ and has a second office in Silicon

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Valley. This is the years of Dublin as the ‘boomtown’. In his early sixties now, Ciaran is ‘impeccably dressed in a suit and an expensive open-​neck shirt. Gray chest hair peeking out’. He had bought back his childhood home, a whitewashed house with roses and an iron fence just off the sea. Having once sold the house, he had paid over a million dollars for it. If there is a social critique in the account of Dublin during the economic boom, the novel has a kind of happy ending there with Ciaran and Lara living in the whitewashed house, with roses, by the sea. In this chapter our literary cases have started out as hope but often turned into hardships, at least temporarily. Grief and solitude recur in Irish fiction, and these literary states of mind reflect social realities in connection with emigration to America  –​there would just not be any profound literature on these themes without them. Also, the idea of hope seems to prevail as emigration waves keep replacing each other. Frank McCourt, as a person and with his memoir trilogy, would offer the happiest endings here. At the same time, I mentioned briefly the man who was striking gold in Alaska. This is a fine example of how experience of emigration to America generates another hope –​the hope of returning home to Ireland.

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Chapter 9 I RI SH L ITE R ATUR E AND T H E   W ORLD

Ireland has been closely connected to the rest of the world through its large diaspora for centuries, and now the world is coming to Ireland with the new immigration. Throughout this book we have seen a number of literary reflections on emigration as a defining feature of Irish culture since the Great Famine that allegedly forced two million people to leave Ireland in the mid-​nineteenth century. Many went to America which has been, and continues to be, the major symbol of hope in Ireland, a circumstance I explored in the previous chapter. Of those who remained in Ireland during the Famine, about 1 million people starved to death. The population was reduced by almost 25 per cent and has, in the twenty-​first century, not recovered from this loss numerically (Whelan 2005). Also unemployment has pushed people away from Ireland (Brown 1985), and keeps doing so in emigration waves. Most recently young people have left because of the economic downturn in the early twenty-​first century, the so-​called generation emigration. Yet return migration is expanding, and, again, there is the new immigration including political refugees (Tovey and Share 2000; Titley, Kerr and King O’Rian 2010). While concluding the book, this chapter widens the horizon to the world. Despite the long-​term presence of the world in Ireland, there is a certain reluctance in facing the world out there, often conceptualized in terms of globalization as threat. This is most likely going back to the relatively recent political independence of the Republic of Ireland, a circumstance which breeds a need to nourish national identity. A case in point from my earlier research in Ireland, which was in a momentous moment in the country’s history, took place when the Irish dance show Riverdance first broke through as the seven-​minute interval entertainment in the Eurovision Song Contest, when this was broadcast from Dublin in 1994 (Wulff 2007c). While mesmerizing millions of viewers in Europe, the show was a unifying moment in Ireland’s history, epitomizing a new era of economic prosperity. A  year later Riverdance was expanded into a full-​length show. It opened in Dublin to standing ovations. This continued at the Apollo Theatre in London, and Radio City Music Hall in New York. Riverdance became an extraordinary hit touring across the world for over twenty years. But with the global success came a heated critique among public intellectuals in Ireland around issues of ‘who among the Irish should have the right to represent Ireland abroad, and what this representation should look like’ (Wulff 2007a: 110). Fintan O’Toole (1997c: 144, 152) was

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unimpressed with the show, seeing that ‘the razzle-​dazzle and the spectacle, the sexiness and the celebration, are inextricable from a narrative of emigration, displacement and loss’. He regrets the lack of a ‘dramatic coherence’ and the ‘narrative point that Irish culture has taken its place in the international melting pot’. Not only was Riverdance lighthearted entertainment, but it was also commercial, and this combination was not always appreciated. The sharp tone of the debate most likely came about because Riverdance touched a national nerve: it had evolved out of Irish dancing, the traditional (folk) dance which was ‘invented’ as a part of the movement towards political independence in the late nineteenth century. One internal Irish critique of the Riverdance ‘phenomenon’ was in line with the view in globalization debate that local cultural form would inevitably be appropriated by the global marketplace and thus lose its authenticity. With Riverdance, a new genre, the Irish dance show, was established. Some of the more elaborate steps in the traditional dance were not included in the show, as they did not work in the long line of dancers pounding out their steps in total unison. Or the steps would not be visible on the big stages where Riverdance performed. Yet, as I observed, ‘the intricacies of Irish dancing were, however, still intact in the traditional and competitive dancing community’ (Wulff 2007c: 116). In fact, Irish dancing experienced a major boost because of Riverdance. As the show became more widely known, Irish dancing grew and this generated a professionalization of the dance form. The fear of extinction proved to be groundless. Instead, Riverdance turned out to be an instance when globalization strengthened a local cultural form. Included in the emigration waves from Ireland have been both writers-​to-​be and established writers. Many Irish writers have lived in exile in Europe, North America, Australia or New Zealand for economic, religious-​political and/​or family reasons. As Declan Kiberd (2005b: 1) observes: Although Ireland has produced many authors, it has on its own land-​mass sustained less writing than one might be led to believe. Even a great national poet like Yeats managed to spend more of his life outside the country than in: and the list of artists-​in-​exile stretches from Congreve to Edna O’Brien . . . It is almost as if Irish writers found that they had to go out into the world in order to discover who exactly they were.

James Joyce also spent more of his life outside Ireland than in it. While he lived in exile with his wife Nora in Trieste, Paris and Zurich, he kept writing about Dublin and its people. In a classic biography, Richard Ellman (1982) takes an informed interest in Joyce’s collection Dubliners (2012a [1914]) that contains fifteen naturalistic short stories about life in Dublin in the early twentieth century when the debate over Irish nationalism was running high. The city of Dublin is depicted in great geographical detail, and the stories include recognizable characters that Joyce knew, both friends and foes. This played some role, together with issues on morality, in the fact that it took almost fifteen years before the book was finally published in London –​after Joyce had submitted it nineteen times to fifteen publishers. In

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Dubliners (2012a [1914]), Joyce applied a chronological multiple perspective from childhood and adolescence to adulthood and old age, finishing with the story ‘The Dead’ (2012b [1914]). Dubliners (2012a [1914]) is also renowned for Joyce’s use of the idea of epiphany as a moment of revelation. Dubliners (2012a [1914]) may not have been as widely influential as the magistral Ulysses (2010 [1922]) and Finnegans Wake (2012 [1939]), but it was the most important book by Joyce for this study, as it was the reference point for a number of books that were published during the time of my research celebrating the centenary of the publication of Dubliners (2012a [1914]).1 There was, for instance, New Dubliners (2005a) edited by Oona Frawley, a collection of short stories by well-​known Irish writers. This was published already in 2004, marking the centenary of when Joyce started writing Dubliners (2012a [1914]). With his collections of stories about Dublin, Joyce was eager to introduce his home city to the world, as this had not been done before. This has certainly been accomplished since then, in many different areas, but not least through its literature. As Frawley (2005b: v) points out ‘Ireland, Irish identity and Irish literature have undergone so many multifarious changes over the century, so too, we might imagine, have Dubliners’. One obvious change is that the world is being taken into much more account in Dublin in the twenty-​first century, reflected in New Dubliners (2005) through stories about immigrants and return emigrants. Yet Joseph O’Connor’s (2005) ‘Two Little Clouds’ about a return migrant from London who meets up with an old friend in Dublin is written in response to Joyce’s (2012c [1914]) ‘A Little Cloud’ on a similar topic. After all, Joyce was a traveller who lived abroad. Frank McGuinness’s (2005: 123–​5) tragicomic story ‘The Sunday Father’ is similarly about a return visit by an Irishman who lives in London. He goes home to Dublin, reluctantly, for the funeral of his father who had once left him and his mother:  ‘His distraught wife rang to tell me the news. I  was not distraught but I did offer her my condolences’, while feeling emotionally distanced from her, this ‘stranger’. So this is new Dublin with second marriages, made possible with the divorce legislation in 1997. There is also the dwindling influence of Catholicism, which McGuinness (2005: 136) illustrates with his description of Father Gerard who comes to the traditional wake held in the house of the deceased: No one, as I’ve said, could lay a finger on him or kick the shit out of him because the bastard is both a priest and old man. Changed times though in Dublin. Neither age nor dignity might spare him in this country where they’ve begun to hate the old and have always hated the clergy but were too tongue-​tied, too servile, too superstitious to admit it.

The protagonist’s lack of grief for his dead father, which is somewhat unusual but not unheard of in Irish fiction, is juxtaposed against the death of Princess Diana, which happened on the same Sunday as that of the father, and the ensuing public manifestation of grief for her. Hinting at the lingering postcolonial situation, McGuinness writes: ‘The mourning for the dead princess I expected in London, but the Irish surprised me. It was all I  heard them talk about in the airport  . . .

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What’s happened to the Irish, why have they stopped hating?’ In his story ‘As if There Were Trees’, Colum McCann (2005) writes about a racist attack at a construction site in the inner city of Dublin, an economically deprived area. An Irish worker, who has lost his job because of drug use, knifes a Romanian working on the site. Daniel Zuchowski’s debut book, The New Dubliners (2014), is ‘a collection of true stories from multicultural Dublin’ as it says on the back cover. In her brief, but appreciative notice in the Irish Times, Lorraine Courtney (2014) identifies the book as belonging to a ‘new category of Irish literature’, and continued: ‘Our narrator tells his story as an upwardly mobile migrant negotiating life in Dublin and we also get a deftly woven tapestry of other narratives.’ Joyce is nowhere to be seen except in the title. This is how young migrants arriving without much money manage contemporary Dublin:  ‘The dreams of the newly arrived, being exploited and having to work for a pittance, what it feels like not to belong.’ As Courtney concludes:  ‘Bawdy and boisterous, it’s an important book by a writer perfectly tuned into the experience of the new Irish.’ And she acknowledges that ‘these tales also have a universality about them’, which should be a selling point for the Dublin-​published book. In line with contemporary mobility patterns among professionals, again, a number of the writers in the study spent recurring periods of time abroad on writing residences or teaching assignments. Some also had university degrees from the United States or Britain. In addition, there were the global book tours for launching new books that include readings and participation in panels at literary festivals. This has been commented on by Anne Enright (2015b), saying that readers of fiction are drawn to ‘elsewhere’, and that “ ‘elsewhere’ has always been important for writers, too. Not only is there the kind of intellectual engagement that informs and sustains a writer’s work; there is also income, and great praise.” But like so much in Irish culture, she identifies an arc that leads back to Ireland: ‘And although you may think it good for the country to get our writers into foreign markets, I think it is good for Irish readers to have a group of writers who come home to them with the smell of fresh air still trapped in their coats, who write for the whole world, starting here.’ Enright (2015b) explains the allure of ‘elsewhere’, by saying that ‘it is this mixture of estrangement and recognition that makes for a sense of wonder’. Yet her stance reveals an ambiguity of ‘elsewhere’ which is common enough among the writers, as in Ireland on the whole. This duality can be productively pursued by way of applying Walter Benjamin’s (1969b:  84–​6) notion of the two archaic storytellers (Wulff forthcoming), on the one hand ‘the resident tiller of the soil’ who ‘knows the local tales and traditions’, and on the other hand, the traveller ‘who has come from afar’, offering ‘the lore of faraway places’. Apposing the resident storyteller with the traveller, Benjamin (1969b) discovers that their stories are actually rather similar: the traveller was most likely resident before starting to travel, while the resident storyteller might well have returned from travels. Fintan O’Toole (1997b: 83) interestingly identifies both types of stories in the same literary works by James Joyce, for instance, but admits that this is rare. There tends to be a competition between the two types of stories, and thus their authors. This has been evident in this book where the division between writers who write for an

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Irish readership versus those who aim for a global one (and succeed in publishing in Britain or the United States), determines a writer’s career.

Stories from Afar This book has provided many cases of fiction set in the United States: entire novels and short stories, parts of them about people or travelling there, even back and forth between Ireland and the United States. This is, again, a major topic in Irish literature. For now, I have Benjamin’s idea of stories from afar, illuminating fiction by Irish writers in relation to other places, less common, yet significant. It was during the research for my study of dance in Ireland that Seona MacReamoinn, dance and theatre critic in Dublin, first brought my attention to the biographical novel Dancer (2003) by Colum McCann. It begins in the Soviet Union, when Nureyev was a child, and Leningrad, where he went to ballet school and danced with the Kirov Ballet. It continues in Paris and London, after his defection, with his rise to global stardom, then his move on to New York and his glitterati gay life. So it was a story about the dancer Rudolf Nureyev that opened up Colum McCann’s work for me, long before I had formulated my research on writers. At the time, I  was impressed with McCann’s extraordinary insight into the closed world of ballet, which I was familiar with. I started ballet training at an early age, but had to stop dancing prematurely as a teenager because of an injury. When I was still dancing intensely and my life was focused on ballet, Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn came to the Stockholm Opera House. They danced the classic ballet Giselle: Fonteyn was a delicate dancer, but it was Nureyev who gave an explosive performance of extraordinary technique and artistry. I was in the audience that was ‘exalted, unusually loud for a Stockholm audience, and demanded no less than sixteen curtain calls’. Later as an anthropologist, my dancing experience was a great asset when I did an extensive study of ballet as a transnational occupation (Wulff 1998: 4). Having known about Rudolf Nureyev as a legend, and also having been able to see him dance, I certainly agreed with McCann that Nureyev’s life as a defector dancer was an important topic for a novel –​not only for depicting a unique talent and temperament, but also for the wider historical and political interest of the cold war context. Well into my research on Irish writers, I would note that Colum McCann continued using the technique of fictionalizing historical people, in Let the Great World Spin (2009) and TransAtlantic (2013). As he says in a short (unpaginated) section at the beginning of Dancer (2003):  ‘This is a work of fiction. With the exception of some public figures whose real names have been used, the names, characters and incidents portrayed are the work of the author’s imagination.’ In the acknowledgements, he (McCann 2003: 341) specifies that he has made changes in ‘names and geographies’ in order ‘to protect people living and also to give a shape to various fictional destinies’, and that he has ‘on occasion, condensed two or more historical figures into one, or distributed the traits of one person over two or more characters. Some of the attributions made to public figures are exact, others are

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fictional’. He also refers to having ‘read a great deal, fiction, non-​fiction, journalism, poetry and internet material’, and not least biographies of Nureyev. Among the many people McCann is thanking in the acknowledgements, is the translator he worked with in Russia. While doing research for Dancer (2003), McCann was living in Russia teaching English (Cusatis 2011). The novel was a huge critical success. But how come an Irish writer who knows nothing about dance or Russia, set out on this writing project? After all, fiction by Irish writers tends to be on an Irish topic, or at least have an Irish connection somewhere. So does Dancer (2003). But it was not until I started looking for comments, reviews and interviews about the book that I discovered that connection. In an interview with Joseph Lennon (2003) for the online magazine Poets&Writers, McCann recalls an epiphany encounter in Dublin, starting out with the background about Jimmy who was living in the city’s housing projects in the 1970s: A guy named Jimmy one night was telling me this great story of when he was living in the flats at Ballymun. And, well, his father used to come home and knock the kids around more or less every single night. But one night he comes home carrying this television set, and he plugged it in, but all he got was gray snow. He moved around the aerial, got no response, and sent the kids off to bed with another beating.

But ‘later that night Jimmy got up –​it must have been before twelve because (nothing was on after that in) the early 70’s –​he must have been getting in a beam from the BBC or somewhere’: ‘He went and plugged it into an extension cord and carried the TV around the room in his arms. The very first thing that came on the television was Rudolf Nureyev dancing, and he sort of fell in love with him.’ McCann continues in a way that can be related to the issue of stories of the soil versus stories from far away: At that time I had just finished Everything in This Country Must, which is a really tight sort of border-​bound book. Consciously stripped down, narrow parameters, nothing moving, not much outside these little townships, these stories about glancing blows that children get from politics. So I  wanted to spread out. I started thinking about that story that Jimmy told me . . . I wanted to write an international book that broke all boundaries, borders, all places, and even people.

In her appreciative review in The Telegraph, Lisa Allardice (2003) writes about the opening of the novel ‘startlingly on the Russian battlefields of the Second World War. Nureyev, known simply as Rudik, gives his first public performance at the age of five to a ward of injured soldiers –​a world away from the Paris Opera House’. Allardice describes how McCann tells the tale of Rudik’s poor childhood in ‘hidden smaller stories:  the elderly exiled couple, a writer and former ballerina, who risk their lives to give him his first dance lessons; their intellectual daughter, trapped in a loveless marriage, who offers him shelter in

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Leningrad; his embittered sister condemned to a life of penury’. And later, after the defection to the West, how ‘the older Nureyev hung out with Warhol, partied with Jagger and took tea with Jackie Onassis’. There was also the stormy love story with Erik Bruhn, the Danish dancer, and ‘one long, breathlessly unpunctuated chapter revels in the orgiastic excesses of a 1980s New York gay club, the Everard, in graphically expansive detail’. Rudolf Nureyev died of AIDS in January 1993. At the end of Dancer (2003: 339–​ 40) is a list of the Rudolf Nureyev Collection, sold in January and November 1995 in New York and London. By the time of his death, Nureyev who was ‘born a poor Tartar in Stalinist Russia’ had amassed a vast amount of wealth. At the Christie’s auction in New York, art works and furnishings from his New York flat, as well as jewellery and costumes he had worn, were sold for $7,945,910, regarded as an extraordinary amount even by the chairman of Christie’s America (Wulff 2012b: 53). As I happened to be in New York doing fieldwork for my study of the ballet world, I was present at the auction at Christie’s in Park Lane where antique dealers, art collectors, fans and dancers were in the audience. The crier dressed in a tuxedo entered and began the auction with a modest head-​band resting on a cushion. Then followed a jacket that Nureyev had worn when he was dancing in the ballet Don Quixote. The atmosphere was getting excited now and when ‘one pair of pink wornout ballet shoes was sold for $8,000’ the woman next to me, an ex-​ dancer, was in shock, whispering ‘Amazing for somebody else’s.’ But it was when the caller held up the jacket from Giselle (that he probably wore in Stockholm) that ‘a flicker went through the audience’. We all remembered being touched by Nureyev’s dancing, both those who had danced with him, and those who had just watched him dance. With ‘the hidden smaller stories’ in Dancer (2003) comes multiple points of view perspective and non-​linear narrative, which would be characteristic of McCann’s novels. But also exile –​typically an Irish storyline. Despite his extraordinary success and flamboyant life, Rudolf Nureyev kept being haunted by his exile. Multiple viewpoints and exile are to be found in McCann’s novel Zoli (2006), as well, about a woman gypsy poet, also drawing on the life of a real person, Papusza. This is another story from afar, mainly being enacted in the 1930s until the 1960s in Czechoslovakia, England, Hungary and Austria, and finishing in the early twenty-​first century in northern Italy, Paris and Slovakia. In my endeavour to trace Irish connections in stories from afar by Irish writers, it is interesting to note that Irish connections have been identified in Zoli (2006) by McCann himself as well as by critics, especially ‘the plight of Zoli and the plight of the Irish’ (Cusatis 2011:155). ‘It takes an Irishman,’ according to June Sawyers (2007), ‘to tell a very powerful story about community, assimilation, and the pain of exile as well as the joy and anguish of being different.’ Without reducing ‘the plight of the Irish’, which has been considerable, this analogy is perhaps somewhat exaggerated. Compared to the Irish, Roma people is a small group that on the whole has been kept on the margins of society while the Irish are now a part of the mainstream. But the analogy is useful for our purposes here, as it indicates the pervasiveness of the idea of Irish people in exile.

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Most of the writers in the study did some archival research before starting a novel, especially historical and biographical ones. Some even did interviews. But Colum McCann did not stop there. When he did research for Zoli (2006), he went to live with gypsy people in Slovakia, just like an anthropologist doing participant observation: I have to do research generally  –​with this book I  had to go away for two months, to Europe, and that was tough. And of course I went to the camps in Slovakia –​see these horrible trousers with these zips and all these pockets? I bought these because I knew I was going to get robbed, so I could hide my passport in here and money down here. But of course I didn’t get robbed at all. I was treated really well in the settlements. They took me in. They guided me around.

As Cusatis (2011: 150) continues, he did not get robbed or beaten ‘instead McCann returned from his adventure stripped of only his prejudices and began writing his most socially conscious novel, aiming to stir even a little empathy for the perennially persecuted Roma’. And the novel was very well received, also among Romani scholars and critics. It did please McCann that quite a few Roma people told him how much they had enjoyed reading the novel. One of the writers that Derek Hand (2011b) is concerned with for being ‘not only burdened with telling his or her own story but also with telling everyone else’s story too’ (that I quoted in Chapter 6) is Colum McCann. This is how McCann relates to other people’s stories in the acknowledgements to the novel Zoli (2006: 355) We get our voices from the voices of others. I  am enormously indebted to a number of people who have helped me research, refine and radically change the structure of this novel over the past few years. I can claim no familial link with the Romani culture  –​it is, I  suppose, the novelist’s privilege to play the fool, rushing in where others might not tread.

Zoli (2006) starts out in the 1930s Czechoslovakia where fascism is beginning to get its grip over the country. The young woman poet Zoli Novotna, who was brought up in the travelling gypsy tradition, escapes with her grandfather to a clan of Romani harpists. Alerted to new ideas through the world of books, not always appreciated among the Romani people, Zoli becomes a symbol for modernity. She reformulates ancient songs to fit her times. She is courted by an English expatriate. As her reputation grows, she is being used by the Communists in power. In the end, Zoli’s family throws her out, and she leaves for the West and another exile. It is unusual that fiction by Irish writers is not set in Ireland or feature Irish characters and concern, so I have painstakingly been searching for Irish connections in these two novels. But they really are stories from afar, by an Irish writer.

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With the ‘New Irish’, a New Storyline Immigration is slowly transforming Ireland. This was evident from the collections of short stories that were written in response to James Joyce’s Dubliners (2012a [1914]) discussed earlier. In light of the Irish being a ‘traditionally diasporic people’, Pilar Villar-​Argáiz (2014b: 7), in the introduction to her substantial edited volume Literary Visions of Multicultural Ireland (2014b), points out that ‘they have also experienced the realities of displacement, rootlessness, and racist discrimination’. This fosters empathy, but, unfortunately, it does not always work. Discussing integration in Ireland in the early twenty-​first century, based on their anthropological study of African immigrants there, Mark Maguire and Fiona Murphy (2012: 139–​40) conclude that ‘integration was never seen as a priority in Ireland’, only by immigrants themselves and those who were close to them. Theirs is a dark analysis of the lack of integration in Irish institutions, ranging from the lingering ‘largely denominational’ education system to neoliberal EU policies on immigration. But there is a light in this. They find that immigrants integrate informally in their everyday lives. After all as Declan Kiberd (2005c: 312) notes, in his article ‘Strangers in Their Own Country: Multiculturalism in Ireland’, it is the case that ‘Ireland itself was always multicultural, in the sense of eclectic, open, assimilative’. There are indeed many factors such as economy, traditions and language at stake that can cause delays in the integration process. Kiberd (2005c: 312) refers very wisely to ‘the best definition of a nation was that given by Joyce’s Leopold Bloom: the same people living in the same place but not necessarily all one thing’. African immigrants in Ireland tend to come from Nigeria. Other big immigrant communities are Chinese and Polish, while the Latvian and Lithuanian communities are smaller. They all appear in fiction –​protagonists from the bigger communities, especially the Polish, more often. But there are other literary examples of the immigrant in contemporary Irish literature, as explored by Villar-​Argáiz (2014a, b) and her contributors. Importantly, it is not only Irish-​born writers such as Roddy Doyle and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne who include immigrants in their fiction as discussed in earlier chapters of this book, but also immigrant writers, ‘the so-​ called “new Irish” ’ as Villar-​Argáiz (2014b: 3) says somewhat carefully. It really must only be a matter of time before this notion is established in Ireland, just like in other countries in Europe. Paddy Indian (2001) by Cauvery Madhavan is often mentioned as an early literary work by an immigrant writer in Ireland. It is the story about a young Indian doctor from a well-​to-​do family in Madras, who experiences prejudice in a Dublin hospital. The novel was published by BlackAmber books in London that specializes in debut work of young second and third generation immigrant writers. Villar-​Argáiz (2014b) writes about successful integrationist theatrical work by ‘new Irish’ playwrights, sometimes in collaboration with Irish-​born writers. As to literary texts by Irish writers on ‘the effects of Ireland’s multiethnic reality’, Villar-​Argáiz (2014b) points out that those are written by both male and female writers. As early as 1994, the play Asylum! Asylum! by Donal O’Kelly was set up at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, and since then the idea of the

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migrant other in Irish culture has been increasingly visible in stage productions and literary work. In her review of recent literary work on the cultural effects of migration, Villar-​Argáiz (2014b) includes Hugo Hamilton’s memoir The Speckled People (2003) which was greatly acclaimed when it appeared, and talked about with much appreciation in the Dublin literary world. As Arminta Wallace (2003) wrote in the Irish Times: How many memoirs have been published in or about Ireland in the past five years? Hundreds, maybe. Maybe more. But Hugo Hamilton’s searingly honest, beautifully-​written account of growing up dressed in lederhosen and Aran jumpers in a house in Dún Laoghaire where only German and Irish –​no English –​ could be spoken is, quite simply, the best. Quite apart from the brilliance of the telling, his strange, moving, bittersweet story speaks for the child in all of us.

In a 2004 paperback edition published by Fourth Estate in New York, the poignant subtitle A Memoir of a Half-​Irish Childhood was added. This memoir depicts a serious situation not of two conflicting cultures which may be what most immigrants encounter, but this is a story about growing up in the 1950s Dublin with a German mother and an Irish father who disagreed about language and values. The protagonist also had to deal with a tough street culture where other children punished him as they cruelly associated him with Nazi Germany. But as Hermione Lee in The Guardian concludes her review ‘A Tale of Two Tongues’: ‘He works out his own understanding of a mixed, “speckled”, multiple, modern society: “Ireland has more than one story.” ’ The Speckled People (2003) is thus not about the new immigration to Ireland (not many Germans move to Ireland) but about growing up with a different mother tongue and set of customs that collide both at home and in the street. In my capacity as an anthropologist with an interest in immigration research –​ my first field study was on the so-​called second generation in London in the 1980s (Wulff 1988, 1995) and my next study focuses on migrant writers in Sweden2 –​ I  took some special note of Dublin’s immigrant groups during my many field stints over the years. I  found the sight of African women carrying their babies in a colourful cloth on their back in the chilly city centre of Dublin, striking. With time, the presence of Polish waiters and shop assistants would be noticeable. I read about immigration in the Irish Times and other newspapers, but I did ponder over the lack of literature on the topic. When I asked some of the Irish writers in my study about this, they told me: ‘It’s the second generation that will write about the immigrant experience in Ireland. It will take time.’ Then fiction on immigrants started appearing, by the first generation and also by Irish-​born writers. The idea that ‘it will take time’ to make artistic accounts of the impact of Ireland’s sudden major economic and social changes, was actually what Declan Kiberd (2005d: 276) referred to in his essay ‘The Celtic Tiger: A Cultural History’ (first published in 2003) where he said: ‘The pace of change may be just too fast for most, for it is never easy to take a clear photograph of a moving object, especially when you are up close to it.’ As Villar-​Argáiz (2014b) observes, what was a

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moving object of a presence in the early twenty-​first century is now making it into fiction. In his foreword to Villar-​Argáiz’s (2014a) volume titled ‘The Worlding of Irish Writing’, Kiberd (2014: xiv) describes multicultural Ireland as a place where even the lowly Evening Herald issued every Tuesday afternoon a Polish supplement; evangelical churches for Nigerians opened their doors across the inner suburbs of Dublin; the country came to a regular standstill celebrating the Chinese New Year; and a grand-​daughter of one of the Vietnamese ‘boat people’ took first place in Irish in the country’s Leaving Certificate Examination.

According to Kiberd (2014: xv) this new social reality in Ireland has resulted in younger novelists having ‘abandoned the attempt to describe a whole society (despite that society being rather small) and prefer to focus on this or that sub-​group’. He exemplifies with ‘a graduating class from a college, the workers in a restaurant, the members of a musical group, and so on’. Whether this view, that a literary work can capture a whole society, but not if it focuses on immigrants, will change with time remains to be seen. For now, let us listen to Kiberd’s (2014: xv) praise of Keith Ridgway, ‘one of the best novelists’ who, Kiberd (2014: xv) finds, has solved this problem by calling his novel The Parts (2003). One part is Muslim Dublin, the other parts are ‘working Dublin, queer Dublin, junkie Dublin . . . mother Dublin, culchie Dublin’ (meaning a person from outside Dublin, often rural Ireland, HW), as Jordan (2003) explains in her review, and ‘their Dublin, drawn by Ridgway with a precise urban poetry, is a city of many moods and faces’. It is true, as Villar-​Argáiz (2012b: 5) says, that the past has been the overarching theme in Irish literature. But there is now ‘a gradual moving away’ from it towards ‘Ireland’s multiethnic reality in the twenty-​first century’.3 So how far away is actually the past? In the immigrant novel Flight (2016) by Oona Frawley, the past is the recent boom years in Ireland. Writing about representations of the immigrant in contemporary Irish short stories, Anne Fogarty (2014:  123)  takes Ingman’s (2009:  255–​66) idea of the adaptability of the short story as a point of departure, when she notes that ‘the short story is a more flexible form than the novel and that as a consequence it has the capacity to register the effects of social change more rapidly than longer narratives’. What immediately comes to mind is that a short story is written much more quickly than a novel. But Fogarty (2014: 123) considers the possibility that ‘the suspensions and open endings peculiar to the modern short story’ would make it especially suitable for ‘contemporary flashpoints’. Referring to the renowned short story writer Frank O’Connor’s (1962: 13–​45) influential observation that the short story often includes ‘the portrayal of submerged populations’, Fogarty (2014:  123)  says that it makes a lot of sense that immigrant characters appear in contemporary short stories by Irish writers. Yet, importantly, her argument is that ‘a depiction of the immigrant never occurs in isolation in fictional renderings of contemporary Ireland’ as ‘such portrayals are always coupled with a scrutiny of Irish return migration and with a probing of the transnational dimensions of current Irish identity’. It is clear that the presence of immigrants in Ireland accentuates the impact of emigration

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as well as return migration on the country both on an institutional level and an interpersonal one. When it comes to the ‘transnational dimensions of current Irish identity’ this ties into the rather heated debate, again, in the Irish literary world among literary scholars and writers about the local versus the global. My task is simply to report from an anthropological point of view on this, not to celebrate one at the expense of the other. Yet from my research it seems likely that Irish literature will combine an increasing focus on the global with a sense of a new local storyline, the one on immigrant Ireland. Developing Anne Fogarty’s (2014: 123) stance further, I can see the immigrant storyline together with the traditional ones on the Great Famine, emigration and exile, the legacy of colonialism, the post-​Troubles, the Celtic Tiger, with its downturn in the early twenty-​first century. One issue, again, is how well the immigrant storyline will work in the publishing markets, not only in Ireland, but also in the global publishing landscape, where the traditional Irish storylines have been well-​established for a long time. It is possible, however, that the 2015 refugee crisis in Europe, and changing perceptions and policies, will open the eyes also of those fiction writers, publicists and readers, who did not already see that the increasing diversity around us all, is here to stay. This raises questions about the relationship between fiction and reality.

Coda: Telling the Truth through Irish Fiction In this book I have quoted fiction as ethnographic evidence. Like in any anthropological study, I have taken the words of my interlocutors, in this case written words by writers, seriously. But is not fiction just fantasy? Except for fantasy as a literary genre in itself which these writers do not engage in, fiction does reflect, negotiate, critique its society. Contrary to the line of thought represented by literary critic James Wood (2008) in How Fiction Works (2008), my argument is that much fiction is indeed inspired by real social, political and historical events –​admittedly to varying extent, but still: fiction cannot be detached from society. Even style and structure of a text are shaped by social circumstances, and a particular period of time. Irish literature once contributed to the development of Ireland into an independent nation at the turn of the previous century, and for political reasons it was thus taken to represent Ireland as a whole. This nationalist agenda has lingered on. With fiction on immigrants, which was a new topic, came the notion that this was a partial view of Ireland. Still, a novel about immigrant life in Ireland might actually reveal wider societal structures, and thus not be quite as partial as it might seem at first. In a sense like all fiction, contemporary Irish fiction is more or less partial, as it pursues perspectives defined by ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class and/​ or the urban-​rural divide in Ireland. When it comes to fiction capturing social reality, it is not just any description of society. As Didier Fassin (2014: 40–​1, 52–​3) points out in his article ‘True Life, Real Lives: Revisiting the Boundaries between Ethnography and Fiction’:4

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Social scientists have recently expressed their admiration for authors of fiction, whether novelists or directors, not only in relation to their art but also –​and this is what seems relatively new –​because of their capacity to depict the real and unveil truths. Even more significantly, distinguished anthropologists and sociologists have admitted that they find, in the works of these authors, more compelling, more accurate, and more profound accounts of the social worlds they explore than in those proposed by the scholars who study them.

As Fassin states: ‘prima facie, authors of fiction create a world and give it the form they wish, whereas social scientists interpret the one they study and sometimes inhabit.’ Including the notion of imagination, Fassin concludes:  ‘If the fictional imagination lies in the power to invent a world with its characters, the ethnographic imagination implies the power to make sense of the world that subjects create by relating it to larger structures and events.’5 This has indeed been my mission with this book on writing as craft and career in Ireland, understood in terms of both the rhythms of long hours writing in the private sphere alternating with promotion appearances in the literary public sphere and a distinctive rhythm of an Irish literary style.

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NOTES Prologue  1 While inspired by Jürgen Habermas’s influential ideas of public sphere as a space outside state control where individuals can meet for critical debate (including such fora as newspapers, journals and other media), my usage of public sphere focuses on the making of a literary career and includes not only the literary and journalistic texts by the writers, but equally importantly their public appearances, usually in connection with promotion. See also how literary scholars Forslid and Ohlsson (2010: 432) define the notion of ‘literary public spheres’ as a way ‘to broaden the scope of literary studies by exploring how writers and different categories of readers employ literature for a variety of purposes –​some explicit, some only vaguely defined –​in a wide range of public settings’. The aim is ‘to explore how literary texts become the subject of debate, negation or dialogue centered on contemporary values and opinions of popular concern’. Forslid and Ohlsson also ‘consider the public conversation –​the debate –​ about literature, as a crucial part of literature itself ’.  2 Following the practice in The Anthropology of Ireland (2006) by Wilson and Donnan, ‘Ireland’ and ‘Irish’ are primarily used in this book in relation to the whole island. ‘The Republic of Ireland/​the South’ and ‘Northern Ireland/​the North’ pertain to its two constituent policies. Even though there are many connections between the literary worlds in the south and the north (as the latter also is a part of United Kingdom), they differ to some extent. There is a focus on the literary world in the south in this book. In addition, ‘Irish’ also refers to the Irish diaspora.  3 Diarmuid Ó Giolláin (2000) considers the impact of folklore and mythology on the literary movement. Writing about the Irish storyteller, Zimmerman (2001: 32), Ó Giolláin notes that it was in the seventh century that ‘networks of monasteries were established, and that it was in this milieu that Irish written literature developed’. More extensive writing was thus brought to Ireland with Christianity. It would take until the thirteenth century before the English language was first brought to Ireland.  4 Starting at the end of the nineteenth century with the ‘invention’ of a ‘traditional’ Irish dance form and concluding with the global success of the Irish dance show Riverdance, dance in Ireland has been closely connected to the continued development of the country into an independent nation (Wulff 2005a, 2007a).  5 For a volume by literary scholars on connections between anthropology and literature, see Ashley (1990).  6 Publications such as Dawson, Hockey and James (1997) were critical of the writing culture perspective, whereas the volumes edited by Barton and Papen (2010) and by Zenker and Kumoll (2010) can be regarded as evidence of its importance.  7 Among other volumes juxtaposing anthropology and literature are Dennis and Aycock (1989), Benson (1993), Daniel and Peck (1996) and De Angelis (2002).

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 8 See also Braided Worlds (2012) by Gottlieb and Graham.  9 The anthropology of Ireland goes back to the classic community studies in the 1930s by Arensberg (1959 [1937]) and Arensberg and Kimball (2001 [1940; 1968]). Messenger (1983 [1969]) tried to capture the ‘true’ nature of people in the west of Ireland, Fox (1978) saw a dying society, Brody (1986 [1973]) change and decline. As Brody’s partner in the field (but not yet trained in anthropology) Okely’s (2005: 16) experience was different from his as she identified ‘resistance and continuity’. Scheper-​Hughes’s (1979) study of mental illness in the west of Ireland was in line with the idea of this region as a dismal place in decline. The tendency in the twentieth century to present Ireland in exaggerated terms as either an ‘arcadian’ or a ‘pathogenic’ society has been refuted by Wilson (1984), Peace (1989), Wilson and Donnan (2006) and Murphy and Egan (2015), among others. Taylor (1995) examines Catholicism in the Republic of Ireland while Curtin, Donnan and Wilson (1993) turn to urban everyday life. Peace (1997, 2001) investigates environmental politics and local identity and modernity in an Irish village. McLean (2004) is a postmodern study of the Great Famine. Gmelch (1985 [1977]) focuses on Travellers, Salazar (1996) on rural economy, Kaul (2009) on tourism and traditional music. A volume edited by Garvey, O’Siochan and Drazin (2012) discusses material culture and exhibitions. Maguire and Murphy (2012) detail African migrants in Ireland. Ó Giolláin (forthcoming) is a contemporary statement combining the anthropology and folklore of Ireland (see also Ó Giolláin 2000). Like many social relationships and institutions, Wulff ’s (2007) study of dance, memory and cosmopolitanism moves between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Also Northern Ireland has generated a thriving anthropological literature. Donnan (2010) analyses everyday life in the contested zone along the Irish border and Cashman (2009) storytelling on the border. An early study was Harris (1972) on prejudice and tolerance in a rural border community, followed somewhat later by Donnan and MacFarlane (1997) on policy, Glassie (1982) on storytelling and music, Sluka (1982) on popular support for the IRA and INLA, Jenkins (1983) on youth, Feldman (1991) on violence and narrative, Aretxaga (1997) on violence and women, Jarman (1997) on parades and visual displays, Buckley (1998) on symbols, Nic Craith (2002) on plural identities, Lanclos (2003) on children’s folklore, Kelleher (2003) on the Troubles and social memory, Finlay (2010) on the conflict and the peace process and Zenker (2013) on language and ethnic identity.

Chapter 1  1 There is now also a Writers in Schools Northern Ireland scheme funded by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.  2 Drawing on his own experience as editor and of being edited by academic colleagues, Brian Moeran (2016) is aware of the importance of editing in the writing process, but points out that editing is not writing. It is rewriting, which sometimes can be hard as it might entail a reconceptualization of a narrative.  3 It does not reduce the cruelty or absurdity of this atrocity, but there was a similar incident in California in the 1980s when a student who had failed a course in another discipline shot his professor dead. This is a very small sample indeed, but shooting professors may be regarded as more of a possibility in the United States, with its widespread violence than in Ireland.

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Chapter 2  1 Even though this study is not a Bourdieu-​inspired analysis, let me note that Bourdieu (1993) deconstructed the literary field in terms of power struggles and ideas about strategies for recognition, including a belief in its legitimacy.  2 Hannerz’s (2004) conceptualization of career follows Howard S. Becker (1963: 24–​39) and Everett C. Hughes (1971: 124–​31).  3 For literary scholarship on Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Anne Enright and Colum McCann in relation to gender, bodies and memory, see Susan Cahill (2012b).  4 The Man Booker Prize is the most renowned literary prize for original fiction in English published in the United Kingdom only. It is presented at a black-​tie event at the Guildhall in London, and broadcast also live. The winner receives GBP 50,000, and the book is guaranteed global marketing. Just like at the Oscars ceremony and other award ceremonies in entertainment, art and literature, the short-​listed writers are invited to attend, but they do not know who will win the prize until the exact moment when this is announced.  5 Éilís Ní Dhuibhne has actually yet another name. It is her married name Almqvist, which she has added for her academic work on folklore: Éilís Ní Dhuibhne-​Almqvist.  6 This is a reference to Colum McCann’s novel This Side of Brightness: A Novel (1998), which is also the title of the volume co-​edited by Susan Cahill and Eóin Flannery (2012b).  7 Among the many volumes engaging with women writers in Ireland and their work from scholarly and literary perspectives are Madden-​Simpson (1984), Smyth (1989), Owens Weekes (1990), Moloney and Thompson (2003), Pelan (2005), Gonzalez (2006), Boyle Haberstroh and St. Peter (2007), as well as D’hoker, Ingelbien and Schwall (2010). It is interesting to note that quite a few of them are titled Irish Women Writers.  8 In line with this, Siobhán Parkinson who has written more than twenty books for children talked about the literary establishment’s lack of recognition of children’s books –​which means, she added when I interviewed her, that ‘I can do what I want!’

Chapter 3  1 Among the pioneers of the anthropology and sociology of journalism were Tunstall (1971) and Gans (1979). A selection from this approach now includes studies of the social practice of reporting (Hannerz 2004; Pedelty 1995), and the social processes of writing and editing (Peterson 2001; Ståhlberg 2002) evoking questions about the relationship between journalism and social knowledge (Boyer 2000). Bird’s edited volume The Anthropology of News and Journalism (2010) discusses local and global news-​making, also photo-​journalism and digital news-​making. The latter has been examined separately by Boyer (2013), as well. As to the role of writing in anthropology itself, and the anthropologist as writer (Wulff 2016), some of the thoughtful considerations over the forms and techniques of anthropological writing point at both parallels and contrasts with journalism and other reportage as shown by Gottlieb and Graham (1993) as they juxtapose a novelist’s and an anthropologist’s written reflections on a joint journey in West Africa.  2 For earlier studies of intellectuals in Ireland, see for instance O’Dowd (1996) and Meagher (2001).

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 3 The Great Famine ravaged Ireland between 1845 and 1848. It was the fungus Phytopthora infestans that destroyed one potato crop after another. As a major part of the population depended on potatoes for a living, starvation was massive. According to historian Kevin Whelan (2005: 137), the Great Famine was the defining event in Ireland in modern times. The fact that the British did not intervene has caused much grievance among the Irish: the chilling circumstance that food and grain kept being exported to Britain during the Famine, even more so.  4 In 2013, Evelyn Conlon who mostly writes fiction, novels and short stories, had a six-​ essay series What’s That, on Public Art for Sunday Miscellany, RTÉ Radio One.  5 Writing as public intellectuals for a global audience, Irish writers often make use of more or less subtle references to classic Irish literature, or their editors might if they write the headlines. The headline ‘The Debtor of the Western World’ is, of course, a reference to the classic play ‘The Playboy of the Western World’ by John Millington Synge that premiered in 1907 in Dublin. The play famously caused riots by Irish nationalists who saw its story as immoral and disloyal to Ireland. This also applies to the headline ‘Spreading the real news from Ireland’ of Colm Tóibín’s speech below. It is undoubtedly a reference to the one act comic play Spreading the News by Lady Augusta Gregory which was first performed at the opening night of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1904.

Chapter 4  1 American choreographer William Forsythe, who worked in Frankfurt-​am-​Main for many years, is an example of an opinionated artist who disliked being put into categories such as minimalism or postmodernism by critics and scholars, as he felt restrained by them. He spoke his own original mind through choreography, often in combination with other art forms and architecture, constantly searching for new possibilities (Wulff 1998, 2001).  2 In the introduction to the volume The Anthropologist as Writer: Genres and Contexts in the Twenty-​First Century (Wulff 2016), I argue for the benefits of anthropological writing across and within genres in new ways. This is exemplified by Anette Nyqvist (2016) in her chapter where she develops the concept of cross-​writing and by Ulf Hannerz (2016) in the concluding chapter where he urges anthropologists to write otherwise.  3 For an account of immigrants in Irish crime fiction, see Clark (2014).  4 http://​www.cormacmillar.com/​Link-​IrishCrimeWriters.html  5 John Banville a.k.a. Benjamin Black Interview. YouTube.  6 This brings to mind marianism which has been written about in the anthropological literature on Europe, as have vernacular forms of Catholicism. In my experience these areas are not particularly visible in the fiction of these writers. Religion is not an influence on most Irish writers of the second half of the twentieth century. They are secular, mostly agnostic or atheist.  7 Howes (1991; 2004) and Classen (1997) applied this approach to the varieties of sensory experience cross-​culturally, and to hierarchies of senses and multisensorial contexts.

Chapter 5  1 This is the same stance as two other folklore authorities Regina F. Bendix and Galit Hasan-​Rokem (2012a: 2) take in their ‘Introduction’ to their co-​edited standard reference

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work A Companion to Folklore (2012b): ‘The volume has grown out of our conviction that there is not one unambiguous way of defining what folklore is and what its study comprises.’ They go on to talk about the large size of folklore as ‘there is hardly a facet of cultural practice that is not in some way shaped by expressive forces’ and how this is ‘a field that may stretch from interpreting Homeric texts to investigating immigrant gardening in a Scandinavian capital’. Barbro Klein (2001: 5711), yet another leading folklorist, does provide a comprehensive definition of folklore, or at least encircles its four basic meanings: ‘First, it denotes oral narration, rituals, crafts, and other forms of vernacular expressive culture. Second, folklore, or “folkloristics”, names an academic discipline devoted to the study of such phenomena. Third, in everyday usage, folklore sometimes describes colorful “folkloric” phenomena linked to the music, tourist, and fashion industries. Fourth, like myth, folklore can mean falsehood.’ This overlaps to some extent with Ó Giolláin’s (2000: 5) description of folklore mentioned previously.  2 As much of Irish folklore takes place in the Irish (Gaelic) language (not least historically), I should repeat that I do not know this language. I do not have any Irish. What follows here is thus, like everything else in this book, written in relation to English language sources (that in some cases have been translated from or inspired by Irish language sources).  3 In The Gaelic Story-​Teller (1969), James Delargy describes the leading role of Swedish folklorist Carl Wilhelm von Sydow in training collectors and calling for the importance of massive collection of stories in Ireland which was eventually further developed by Séamus Ó Duilearga.  4 See also Glassie (1985) on encounters with fairies, fairy traits and treasure in Irish folktales.  5 Ní Dhuibhne (2014: 206) provides the reference number (ATU tale type 327A) for ‘Hansel and Gretel’ from the classification system of types of folktales in Uther et al. 2004.  6 See Becker, Faulkner and Kirchenblatt-​Gimblett (2006).

Chapter 6  1 See Wulff (2005b) on the uneasy partnership of ballet and the market.  2 At the time of my research, there were altogether about fifty publishers listed on service sites for writers in Ireland. Most of these publishers were even smaller than the ‘boutique publishers’, consisting of all of one person. Some of them were kept on the lists despite having closed down.  3 The sums in such biddings can be astronomical. According to Larkin, Zadie Smith’s novel White Teeth (2000) was bought at GBP 100,000. It is likely that the buyer was Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin in Britain, and thus not Jonathan Cape that Larkin worked for. (See also Thompson 2011 on bidding.) The story may also be a bit of an urban legend in the publishing business. As to advances, Larkin said they could range between GBP 1,000 and 100,000 until that is paid back, then they get a royalty, but ‘the agent takes 10%, most authors would never get royalties’.

Chapter 7  1 See http://​josephoconnorauthor.com/​novel-​star-​of-​the-​sea.html. According to Literature Ireland in July 2016, Star of the Sea (2002) had been translated into Croatian, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Serbian, Czech, Greek, Latvian and Estonian.

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http://​www.literatureireland.com/​author-​database/​author-​holder/​show/​39 But the list is actually longer with Swedish among other additional languages.  2 See http://​www.irelandliterature.com/​contact-​us/​  3 It is noteworthy that ‘already Evans-​Pritchard (1965) identified anthropology as cultural translation, a notion that has been influential in the discipline, as well as debated. For what is it exactly that is translated? Cultural conceptualization can obviously get lost in translation, or be misunderstood. There is a risk that we look for cultural units that are actually incomparable. What does a dance anthropologist, for example, study in a culture where there is no word for dance? Anthropologists are acutely aware of this problem’ (Wulff 2016: 8; see also Rubel and Rosman 2003; Severi and Hanks 2015 among others).  4 For an Irish critique of such themes in tourist advertising, see, for example, the volume edited by Cronin and O’Connor (2003) which shows that because of Ireland’s recent social and economic changes, tourism brings out questions of identity, postcolonialism and how to handle the past.  5 See http://​www.nationalgallery.ie/​en/​Exhibitions/​Lines_​of_​Vision/​Donal_​Ryan.aspx  6 https://​en.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​Erskine_​Nicol  7 On artistic creativity and technique, see Bensman and Lilienfeld (1991) and Wulff (1998) on dancers. The novel The Blue Guitar (2015) by John Banville portrays a painter who has lost his ability to paint, but keeps thinking about the creative process.  8 David Damrosch (2003) refers to this as ‘gained in translation’.  9 Robert Redford founded this non-​profit film festival ‘celebrating independence, creativity and risk-​taking: the Sundance Film Festival plays a vital role in identifying emerging international talent and connecting them with audiences and industry in the United States’. https://​www.sundance.org/​festivals/​sundance-​film-​festival/​about 10 See https://​www.theguardian.com/​books/​audio/​2013/​mar/​29/​ colm-​toibin-​testament-​mary-​podcast 11 For literary studies of translation in relation to new world literatures, see also Apter (2006) on the translation zone, and Helgesson and Vermuelen (2015) on institutions, translation and markets.

Chapter 8  1 I use the designation ‘America’ here as this is the one most often found in Irish fiction (which tends to portray the past). The country is, of course, increasingly referred to as ‘the United States’ in contemporary scholarship and media.  2 Migrant experience in America is, of course, the topic of fiction in relation to many ethnic and migrant groups, such as the four books in the emigrant series by Vilhelm Moberg (1949) about Swedes emigrating to America in the nineteenth century. These have been translated into several languages and were also made into two films by Jan Troell. Just like their Irish counterparts at the time, the Swedes were fleeing from a famine.  3 This should be related to the population on the island of Ireland which in 2013 was estimated to 6.4 million.  4 The anthropological engagement in hope is now more visible than it used to be. The interview with Vincent Crapanzano was published in Cultural Anthroplogy’s curated collection on ‘Reclaiming Hope’ by Eben Kirksey and Tate LeFevre. There Crapanzano

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is asked to reconsider his 2003 article ‘Reflections on Hope as a Category of Social and Psychological Analysis’ in the journal. Having found the work on hope, exchange and knowledge by Hirokazu Miyazaki when the article was finished, Crapanzano (2003: 26) mentions him (and his at the time, forthcoming The Method of Hope [2004] in a note). Agreeing with Miyazaki, he continues: ‘Hope has at some level, to be related to faith, trust, risk, and expectation, among other things; each requires explication. Certainly, even in the most secular exchanges, an element of trust is required if there is any expectation that the exchange will be fulfilled.’ A few years later, Miyazaki (2006: 149) takes up the dialogue with Crapanzano by pointing out that after having introduced hope as a culturally and historically specific phenomenon, he turns around and says that hope is ‘what unites us all’. This goes against much debate in social theory where there is a consensus about the loss of hope (in politics, academia, etc.) that Miyazaki relates to the dominance of capitalism –​as he argues, the latter is driven by a particular type of hope. In the growing literature on hope, see also the volume edited by Liisberg, Pedersen and Dalsgård (2015) where hope is juxtaposed with trust, in a conversation between anthropologists and philosophers.  5 Literary scholar Alexander Beercroft (2015) has discussed this in terms of parallel narrative as a characteristic of the global novel.  6 http://​www.colummccann.com/​interviews/​LTGWSinterview.php  7 http://​www.colummccann.com/​interviews/​LTGWSinterview.php  8 The original was a sonnet by Emma Lazarus displayed on a bronze plaque on the Statue of Liberty from 1903 to 1986. Now it can be seen in the Statue of Liberty Museum: Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses, yearning to breath free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-​tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door. https://​en.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​Statue_​of_​Liberty#Dedication   9 Avtar Brah’s (1996) idea of ‘diasporic spaces’ has also been used quite widely. 10 See also Matthew Ryan’s (2008) article on ‘abstract homes’ in Tóibín’s work.

Chapter 9  1 See, for instance, the recent collection Dubliners 100: 15 New Stories Inspired by the Original edited by Thomas Morris (2016) that is carefully crafted as ‘covers’ of songs meaning Joyce’s original stories.  2 The project ‘Cosmopolitanizing from Within: Migrant Fiction and Journalism in Sweden’ is a part of the programme Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics in World Literatures funded by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation (Riksbankens Jubileumsfond) 2016–​2021.  3 Villar-​Argáiz (2014b: 5) exemplifies, again, with Roddy Doyle’s The Deportees and Other Stories (2007), and mentions other genres than fiction such as the three plays in The Ballymun Trilogy (2010) by Dermot Bolger and Michael O’Loughlin’s poetry collection, In This Life (2011).  4 Fassin (2014) compares, first, his own work on the embodiment of history in South Africa with J. M. Coetzee’s novel Life & Times of Michael K (1998 [1983]) and, second, his work on urban policing in France with David Simon’s television series The Wire.

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Elaborating on Marcel Proust’s way of ‘distinguishing true life from real lives’, he (2014: 41) uses ‘the two words –​reality and truth –​not as equivalents but as concepts in profound and permanent tension: the real being that which exists or has happened and the true being that which has to be regained from deception or convention. Reality is horizontal, existing on the surface of fact. Truth is vertical, discovered in the depths of inquiry’.  5 See also Peter Kloos (1990: 5), who early identified the novelist as a skilled observer of social life when he said that ‘novelists have something to offer that is often sadly absent in scholarly work: a sensitivity to important currents and values in actual life . . . why is it that scholars often fail to notice these things?’ This is different from the scientist, who according to Kloos presents ‘systematic and explicit description . . . and explanation . . . general statements that explain what can be observed: theories, if you like’.

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Wulff, Helena (2007b). ‘Longing for the Land: Emotions, Memory and Nature in Irish Travel Advertisements’. Identities 14(4): 527–​44. Wulff, Helena (2007c). ‘The Riverdance Moment’, in Dancing at the Crossroads: Memory and Mobility in Ireland, 109–​23. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Wulff, Helena (2008). ‘Literary Readings as Performance: On the Career of Contemporary Writers in the New Ireland’. Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, 17: 98–​113. Wulff, Helena (2009a). ‘ “Ethnografiction”: Irish Relations in the Writing of Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’, in Rebecca Pelan (ed.), Éilís Ní Dhuibhne: Perspectives, 245–​65. Galway: Arlen House. Wulff, Helena (2009b). ‘Traces of Tradition: Myth in the Modern Reality of Molly Fox’s Birthday by Deirdre Madden’. Paper for the conference Myth and Reality: Language, Literature, and Culture in Modern Ireland, DUCIS, Dalarna University, 29–​30 October 2009. Wulff, Helena (2010). ‘Colm Tóibín as Travel Writer’. Nordic Irish Studies, 9: 109–​16. Wulff, Helena (2011). ‘Histoires de Terroir: Les Écrivains contemporains et l’Irlande Nouvelle’. Ethnologie française, Avril, 2: 301–​8. Wulff, Helena (2012a). ‘An Anthropological Perspective on Literary Arts in Ireland’, in Ullrich Kockel, Máiréad Nic Craith and Jonas Frykman (eds), Blackwell Companion to the Anthropology of Europe, 537–​50. Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell. Wulff, Helena (2012b). ‘Ballet Culture and the Market: A Transnational Perspective’, in Hélène Neveu-​Kringelbach and Jonathan Skinner (eds), Dancing Cultures: Globalisation, Tourism and Id entity, 46–​59. Oxford: Berghhan. Wulff, Helena (2013). ‘Ethnografiction and Reality in Contemporary Irish Literature’, in Marilyn Cohen (ed.), Novel Approaches to Anthropology: Contributions to Literary Anthropology, 205–​25. New York City: Lexington Books. Wulff, Helena (2014). ‘Anthropologist in the Irish Literary World: Reflexivity through Studying Sideways’, in Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Christina Garsten and Shalini Randeria, (eds), Anthropology Now and Next: Essays in Honor of Ulf Hannerz. Oxford: Berghahn. Wulff, Helena (2015). ‘Ireland in the World, the World in Ireland’, American Anthropologist, 117(1): 142–​3. Wulff, Helena (2016). ‘Introducing the Anthropologist as Writer: Across and Within Genres’, in Helena Wulff (ed.), The Anthropologist as Writer: Genres and Contexts in the Twenty-​First Century, 1–​18. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Wulff, Helena (2017). ‘Greater Than Its Size: The Impact of Ireland’s Small Scale in Life and Literature’, in Ulf Hannerz and Andre Gingrich (eds), Small Countries: Structures and Sensibilites, 301–​16. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Wulff, Helena (Forthcoming). ‘Stories of the Soil: In the Irish Literary World’, in Diarmuid Ó Giolláin (ed.), Irish Ethnologies, 141–​57. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Young, Michael and Willmott, Peter (1975 [1957]). Family and Kinship in East London. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Zeitlyn, David (2014). ‘Anthropological Translation’, in David Zeitlyn and Roger Just (eds), Excursions in Realist Anthropology: A Merological Approach, 99–​119. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Zenker, Olaf. (2013). Irish/​ness Is All Around Us: The Language Revival and Irish Identity during the Northern Irish Conflict. Oxford: Berghahn. Zimmerman, Georges Denis (2001). The Irish Storyteller. Dublin: Four Courts Press. Zuchowski, Daniel (2014). The New Dubliners. Dublin: Literary Publishing.

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Online Sources http://​www.poetryireland.ie http://​www.fightingwords.ie http://​www.826national.org http://​berattarministeriet.se www.colummccann.com www.colmtoibin.com www.evelynconlon.com http://​www.irishtimes.com/​profile/​fintan-​o-​toole-​7.1010663 http://​en.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​Fintan_​O%27Toole http://​en.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​Declan_​Kiberd http://​www.benjaminblackbooks.com/​BBworld.htm http://​www.cormacmillar.com/​Link-​IrishCrimeWriters.htmlen.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​Irish_​ American. American Community Survey in 2013 Selected Social Characteristics in the United States (DP02): 2013 American Community Survey 1-​Year Estimates’. U.S. Census Bureau. Retrieved 11 December 2014. http://​www.writing.ie/​interviews/​mary-​costello-​academy-​street/​ ‘Interview with Vincent Crapanzano about “Reflections on Hope” ’ Curated Collections, Cultural Anthropology Online, 29 July 2015, http://​www.culanth.org/​curated_​collections/​20-​reclaiming-​hope/​discussions/​23-​ interview-​with-​vincent-​crapanzano-​about-​reflections-​on-​hope’ http://​www.colummccann.com/​interviews/​LTGWSinterview.php https://​en.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​Statue_​of_​Liberty#Dedication Wikipedia (2011). 100 Public Intellectuals Poll.

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YouTube Colum McCann Uses Fiction to Access Texture of History 7:15

157

INDEX abortion 32, 67, 70 Academy Street 12, 111, 113 ‘A Little Cloud’ 117 All Names Have Been Changed 3 Allardice, Lisa 120–​1 Almost There 38 Almqvist, Bo 60, 62 Angela’s Ashes xx, 19, 52, 53, 61, 104–​5 Angela’s Ashes (film) 99 An Irish Solution 49 anthropology and literature 129 anthropology of literature xiv, 130 anthropology of Ireland xvi, 130 anthropology of writing xvii Aosdána (academy of writers and artists) 19, 23, 27–​8 Appadurai, Arjun 89 Apter, Emily 88, 134 Archetti, Eduardo P. xv Are You Somebody? 38 ‘As if There Were Trees´ 118 auction 83 Bal, Mieke 88, 91 Banks, Marcus 90, 91 Banville, John xiii, xviii, xix, xx, xxi, 1, 15, 31, 34, 40–​1, 42–​3, 45, 47, 48, 58, 75, 80, 84, 98, 99, 134 Barry, Kevin 76–​7, 82, 83 Barthes, Roland 94 Bauman, Richard 45 Beauty in a Broken Place 80 Beck, Fr. Edward L. 52 Becker, Howard xiii, 11, 15 editorial moments 11 Beckett, Samuel xiii, 48, 62, 90 Beercroft, Alexander 135 Behar, Ruth xv Bendix, Regina F. 132–​3 Benjamin, Walter 93, 94, 99, 118, 119 Berger, John 89 Bhandari, Neena 93–​4

Binchy, Chris 57 Binchy, Maeve 27 Black, Benjamin 40, 47, 48, 99 see John Banville Blacking, John 11–​12 Bourke, Angela 27, 62, 70 Boyer, Dominic 31, 36 Boyne, John 79 Bracken, Claire 37, 38, 53 breaking through (breakthrough) xix, 13, 17, 19–​22, 29, 36, 74–​5, 77, 82, 113 Brettell, Caroline B. xv Brooklyn 24, 25, 94, 97, 103–​4, 105, 110, 111 Brooklyn (film) 94–​6, 97, 99 Brown, Terence 115 Brubaker, Rogers 110 Bullfighting 82 Byron, Reginald 101, 102–​3 Cahill, Susan 26–​7, 37, 38, 53, 67, 131 Casanova, Pascale 60 Cashman, Ray 63 Catholicism 41, 51, 89, 117 Catholic Church xix, 34 Celtic Tiger xix, 29, 32, 33, 36, 41, 57, 64, 67, 124, 126 Chandler, Raymond 48 Christensen, Bo T. 11 Christine Falls 48 City of Bohane 82 Clarke, Donald 99 Classen, Constance 54, 132 class background xix, 28 Clifford, James xiv, 88–​99, 92 see writing culture Cohen, Marilyn xv Cohen, Robin 110 colonization xix, xxii, 11, 35 colonialism 4, 126 Conlon, Evelyn xiii, 17, 23–​4, 77 Corcoran, Mary 33, 43

158

158

Index

cosmopolitan society xvi, 89 Costello, Mary 2, 77, 111, 113 Courtney, Lorraine 118 Cowboys and Indians 36 Crapanzano, Vincent 101, 134–​5 creative writing x, ix, 1, 3, 81, 92 evaluated 2 grading 10 learning 1 master’s programme 1–​2 non-​academic workshop 2 PhD programme 2 teaching 1–​3 creativity 1, 6, 7, 10–​16, 43, 68, 81, 90, 100 see also writing technique crime fiction xxi, xx, xix, xvi, 2, 14, 40, 45, 47, 48, 49, 57, 58, 99, 109 Csikzentmihalyi, Mihaly 91 Cuddon, J.A. 46 Cummins, Steve 97 Cunningham, Peter 14 Cusatis, John 26, 120, 121, 122, 120, 121, 122 Damrosch, David 134 Dancer 108, 119–​21 Danielsson, Ulla 93, 94 Dawe, Gerald 2 Deane, Seamus 27, 34 diaspora xvi, xxii, 20, 89, 101, 102, 103, 110–​12, 115, 129 Donoghue, Emma 39, 55–​6, 77, 99 Donnan, Hastings xvi, 129 see anthropology of Ireland Douglas, Mary 36 Doyle, Roddy xiii, 3, 7–​8, 12, 17, 26, 49, 57, 59, 64–​6, 74–​6, 81, 82, 84, 92, 93–​4, 96–​8, 123, 123, 135 Dubliners 116–​17, 123 Dubliners 100: 15 New Stories Inspired by the Original 135n. 1 Eagleton, Terry 35 economic crisis 36, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43 Edgeworth, Maria 27, 60 Eden Halt 53, 80 editing 6, 9, 15, 32, 85, 130 Elegy for April 48 Ellman, Richard 116 emigration xxii, xvi, xix, xxi, xxii, 26, 32,

43, 57, 89, 90, 91–​2, 101, 103, 105, 112, 114, 115, 116, 125, 126 Enright, Anne xviii, 20, 31, 32, 34, 37–​8, 39, 53, 61, 63–​4, 66, 77, 80, 81, 84, 93, 98, 102, 105, 112, 118 ethnographic writing xv Evans, Martina 66 Evans-​Pritchard, E.P. 134 Everything in this Country Must 120 eviction 90, 91, 92, 109 exile xiii, xvi, xix, xxii, 51, 57, 89, 103, 110, 112, 116, 120, 121, 122, 126 famine xix, xxi, xxii, 24, 34, 36, 90, 91, 92, 101, 102, 106, 108, 109, 115, 126, 132 Farrell, Anthony 78–​81 Fassin, Dider xv, 126–​7, 135–​6 Feinstein, Paul 84–​5 feminism 14, 39 Ferguson, Molly 64 Ferrante, Elena 71, 73–​4, 93–​4 fiction flow xx, 49, 71 Fighting Words (creative writing centre) xviii, 3, 6, 7, 8, 15, 26, 76 see Roddy Doyle film (novels as) 87, 94–​6, 99, 100 Finnegan’s Wake 117 Fishing the Sloe-Black River 26 Flannery, Eóin 26–​7 Flight 125 Fogarty, Anne xix, 2, 23, 51, 67, 68, 71, 125, 126 Folklore (Irish) xx, 14, 22, 23, 46, 59–​71, 129, 132–​3 folktale(s) 59, 60, 62, 63, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70 Forslid, Torbjörn 129 Foster Wallace, George, xvi–​xvii Fox O’Loughlin, Vanessa 113 Fox, Swallow, Scarecrow 29 Frawley, Oona 117, 125 Fulmer, Jacqueline 67 Gaelic League 60, 62 Gatti, Claudio 73 Geblér, Carlo 50 Geertz, Clifford xiv, 46, 108 gender xix, 17, 24, 27–​8 generation xix, 27–​8

159

Index genres xiii, xiv, xv, xviii, xix, 2, 3, 10, 13, 35, 37, 41, 43, 45–​7, 49, 57, 63, 80, 81, 88, 94, 116, 126, 132 blurred 46 Ghodsee, Kristen xv Ghostlight 56 Gibbons, Luke 34–​5 Gingrich, Andre xxi, 101 Glassie, Henry 11, 66, 133 Gleeson, Sinéad 28 globalization 70, 115, 116 Goldstein, Ann 73, 93–​4 Gosh, Amitav,  xv–​xvi Gottlieb, Alma 130 ‘Grace’ 91–​2 Graham, Philip 130 Grasseni, Cristina 89 Greene, Graham 46–​7, 75 Greenland, Colin 3 Gregory, Lady Augusta 27, 59, 60, 80, 132 Hall, Pauline 68–​9 Hallam, Elizabeth 13 Hamilton, Hugo 76, 98, 124 Hand, Derek 57, 85–​6, 122 Hannerz, Ulf xvi, xvii, xix, xxi, 17, 31, 88–​9, 92, 93, 101, 132 Hasan-​Rokem, Galit 132–​3 Heaney, Seamus xiii, 13, 17, 35, 75 Helgesson, Stefan 134 Hirsch, Eric 103 Hoby, Hermione 108 Holmes, Douglas xvii home xxii, 16, 26, 36, 70, 91, 96, 101, 103, 110, 111, 112, 114 hope 101–​14, 115, 134–​5 Hornby, Nick 95 Howes, David 54, 132 images (into text) 89, 97, 99 immigration xiii, xvi, xix, xxii, 32, 57, 89, 115, 123, 124–​5, 126 In an Antique Land xvi Ingman, Heather xiv, 59, 125 Ingold, Tim 13 interface, xvi–​xviii Iowa Writers’ Workshop 2 Ireland Literature Exchange 41

159

Irish Folklore Collections 62 Irish mother 50, 51–​3 Irish Noir 45, 47–​51 Jordan, Justine 125 journalism xiii, xii, xix, 1, 31–​43 anthropology and sociology of 131 Joyce, James xiii, 34, 48, 60, 62, 79, 82, 116, 117, 118, 123 Kavanagh, Patrick 60 Kellaway, Kate 64 Kelly, John 47 Kenny, John 40 Kerr, Aphra 115 Kiberd, Declan xiii, 31, 34, 35, 42, 116, 123, 124–​5 Kilroy, Claire 3 Kincaid, James 109 King O’Rian, Rebecca 115 Kirksey, Eben 101, 134–​5 Klein, Barbro 133 Kloos, Peter 136 Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush 80 Lalor, Kevin 33 Langstone, Michelle 93 Lave, Jean xix, 16 Lee, Hermione 124 Lefevre, Tate 101, 134–​5 Leith, Sam 37–​8 Lennon, Joseph 120 Let the Great World Spin 15, 26, 27, 105, 106–​7, 108–​9, 119 Lilliput Press 78–​9, 80, 83, 86 literary agents 74, 79, 81, 82, 83–​5 super-​agents 84 Literature Ireland 88 Lodge, David 46–​7, 75 Lovell, Joel 108 Lynch, Sealy 67 McCann, Colum xii, xiii, 15, 26, 31, 34, 42, 55, 77, 80, 84, 86, 98, 102, 105, 106–​8, 111, 113–​14, 118, 119–​21, 122 non-​linear narrative 27, 121 Narrrative4 (creative writing centre) 26 story exchange 26 McCourt, Frank xx, 19, 52, 61, 104–​5, 114

160

160

Index

McGahern, John 52 McGuinness, Frank 117–​18 McGurl, Mark 1–​2 McKeon, Belinda xiii, 20–​2, 45, 48 McLean, Janet 90 MacReamoinn, Seona 119 Madden, Deirdre xiii, 2, 3, 13–​14, 15, 54, 59, 68–​70, 77 Maguire, Mark 123 Making Babies 39, 53 Man Booker Prize 20, 25, 38, 40, 48, 51, 75–​6, 77, 79, 85, 87, 112, 131 Mankell, Henning 47 Marcus, George E. xiv, xvii see writing culture Markey, Anne 61, 65 Meade, Declan 76–​8, 79 media 87–​100 mediation 31, 32, 42, 88 Memoir 52 memoirs xix, xv, 20, 45, 38, 51–​2, 53, 54, 55, 57, 58, 80, 124 Merriman Summer School 39 ‘Midwife to the Fairies’ 59, 66–​71 migration xvi, 106, 124 return migration xxii, 112, 115, 125, 126 Millar, Cormac 49 Miyazaki, Hirokazu 135 Moeran, Brian 11, 130 Molly Fox’s Birthday 13, 59, 68–​70 Morra, Joanne 88, 91 Morris, Thomas 135 Morrissey, Mary 9–​10, 39 Mother Ireland 50 multiple viewpoints 121 Murphy, Fiona 123 Murray, Peter 92 musical show (novels as) 87, 92, 96–​8, 99, 100 My Generation 81 narrative external 90, 91–​2 internal 90, 91–​2 non-​linear see McCann, Colum parallel 135 Narayan, Kirin xv New Dubliners 117 New Ways to Kill Your Mother 49

Ní Dhomhnaill, Nuala 62 Ní Dhuibhne, Éilís xiii, xiv, xix, 2, 8, 14, 15, 22–​3, 27, 29, 37, 39, 57, 62–​3, 65–​8, 70, 78, 111, 123, 133 Nightspawn 40 Nobel Prize (for Literature) 35, 46, 75–​6 Nora Webster 25, 51 Not the Same Sky 24 Nyqvist, Anette 132 O’Brien, Edna 27, 50, 116 O’Brien, Flann 60, 79 O’Brien, George 106, 111 O’Connor, Anne 61, 65 O’Connor, Frank 125 O’Connor, Joseph xii, xiii, 19–​20, 31, 34, 35–​6, 56, 69, 81, 83, 84, 87, 102, 15, 108–​9, 110–​11, 117 O’Donoghue, Bernard 70 O’Dowd, Liam 33, 34 Oeser, Hans-​Christian 98 O’Faolain, Nuala 38–​9, 98 Ó Giolláin, Diarmuid 59, 60, 62, 129, 133, Ohlsson, Anders 129 O’Neill, Margaret 61 ‘One Minus One’ 110 Openhanded 57 oral (tradition, culture, narrative) xiv, 3, 9, 11, 15, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 71, 83, 94 ‘Orchard Street, Dawn’ 110–​11 Ortner, Sherry xvii O’Toole, Fintan 25, 31–​3, 34, 35, 43, 81, 102, 103, 104, 112, 115–​16, 118 ownership of stories xx, 61 Paddy Indian 123 Park, David xiii Parkinson, Siobhán 4, 5, 7, 8 peace process xix, 42, 43 Pelan, Rebecca 23 PEN dinner xii, 20 Pierce, David 27 Pinsker, Joe 51 plots-​within-​plots 105, 108 Poetry Ireland 3 Preston, Alex 112–​13 Preston, John 49–​50 private sphere xii

161

Index promotion xiii, xvi, 9, 19, 74, 75, 76, 77, 80, 84, 87, 100, 102, 127 self-​promotion 79 public intellectual xiii, vii, xix, 26, 31–​43, 115 public sphere xii, xvi–​xvii, 127 literary public sphere 127, 129 publishers boutique 74, 78–​81, 86 global conglomerates 74, 76, 86 global corporations 74, 78, 81–​3, 84 publishing market xiii, ix, xx, 11, 46, 71, 73–​86, 87, 102, 126 Quirke 48 Quirke (television series) 99 Rapport, Nigel xv reading xv, xvii, 4, 6–​7, 9–​10, 14–​15, 26, 54–​5, 59, 65–​6, 87, 100 recession 32, 34, 39, 40–2, 79 religious background 28–​9 returning (to Ireland) 112–​14, 117, 125, 126 see also migration Ridgway, Keith 125 Room 55–​6 Room (film) 99 Royal Irish Academy 19 Ryan, Donal 79, 90, 91–​2 Said, Edward 34–​5 Sawyer, Keith 11 Sawyers, June 121 Schillinger, Liesl 53 Schneider, David 51 Scott, A. O. 95–​6 senses, the xx, 45, 53–​6 driving senses 55 plot-​turners 55–​6 Setoodeh, Ramin 95 Share, Perry 112, 115 Shaw, George Bernhard xiii, 90 short story xiv, xv, 1, 8, 12, 22, 23, 24, 36, 38, 46, 57, 63, 64, 66, 67, 76–​8, 82, 87, 90, 110, 111, 125 Sister Caravaggio 14–​15 situated learning 16 Skelton, Ross 53, 80

161

small countries 18, 43, 101 Small, Helen 33 Solace 20 Songdogs 55 Spencer, Charles 97 Star of the Sea 19, 36, 83, 87, 105, 108–​9, 133 Stoller, Paul xv, 54 story exchange 26 storyline xix, xx, 4, 9, 32, 34, 42, 45, 57, 84, 89, 121, 123–6 storytelling xiii, xiv, 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 11, 15, 16, 27, 48, 57, 59, 60, 61–​3, 65, 70, 105, 108, 130 studying sideways xvii Synge, John M. 34, 56, 59 Tallone, Giovanna 67 Teacher Man 20, 52, 105 Tekin, Gülüm Burcu 65, 66 Tender 21 Testament 52 The Blackwater Lightship 25 The Book of Evidence 47, 75 The Bray House 22, 67–​8 The Blue Guitar 134 The Commitments 74–​5, 92, 99 The Commitments (film) 99 The Commitments (musical show) 96–​8, 99 The Dancers Dancing xiv, 22 ´The Dead´ 117 The Deportees and Other Stories 57, 64–​5, 135 The Drivetime Diaries (radio programme) 36 The Forgotten Waltz 93, 94 The Gathering 20, 38, 53, 61, 77 The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story 63–​4, 66 The Green Road 93, 94, 105, 112–​13 The Heather Blazing 55 The Inland Ice 66, 67 The Master 25 ‘The New Dubliner’ 118 ‘The Pale Gold of Alaska’ 111 The Parts 125 The Portable Virgin 38 ‘The Pram’ 59, 64–​6 The Sea 40, 48

162

162 ‘The Search for the Lost Husband’ 67 The Secret World of the Irish Male 36 The Shelter of Neighbours 66 The Speckled People 124 The Spinning Heart 79, 80 The Stinging Fly Magazine 76–​7, 83 The Stinging Fly Press 76–​7, 86 ‘The Sunday Father’ 117 The Testament (novella) 99 The Testament of Mary 25, 51, 99 The Testament of Mary (play) 99 The Wig My Father Wore 38 The Woman Who Walked Into Doors 49 There Are Little Kingdoms 76, 83 Thirteen Ways of Looking 27 Thompson, John B. 84, 85, 86, 133 ‘Tis 20, 52, 105 Titley, Gavan 115 Tóibín, Colm xiii, 24–​6, 31, 32, 34, 35, 41–​2, 43, 49, 50, 51–​2, 55, 80, 81, 84, 86, 88, 96, 97, 98, 99, 102, 103–​4, 110, 111 Tovey, Hilary 112, 115 TransAtlantic xii, 27, 42, 105, 107–​8, 119 translation 87–​100, 134 cultural 89 intermedial 88–​9, 91, 96, 99 Troubles xix, 34, 35, 42, 106, 107, 126 post-​Troubles 126 Turner, Victor xiv ‘Two Little Clouds’ 117 Vermeulen, Pieter 134 Vesperi, Maria xv Villar-​Argáiz, Pilar 57, 123, 124, 125, 135 Voices on the Wind 27 Wagner, Erica 64, 107, 108 Wallace, Arminta 124 Walkowitz, Rebecca 99

Index Walshe, Eilbhear xix, 2, 25, 51, 110 Walton, James 79 Waterston, Alisse xv Wells, Alison 77 Wenger, Etienne xix, 16 Whelan, Kevin 115 Wilde, Oscar 25, 59 Willmott, Peter 51 Wilson, Thomas M. xvi, 129 see anthropology of Ireland wit xiii, 35–​7, 43 humour 10, 54 jokes xxii, 9, 37, 62, 63 women writers 17, 23, 27, 28, 38, 39, 50, 131 Wood, James 73, 126 world literatures 134 writer’s block 12–​13, 68 Writers in School Scheme 3 writing culture xiv, xv writing technique xviii, 1, 12, 13, 16, 38, 46, 47, 67, 90, 106, 119, 134 longhand xii, xiii, 54 Wulff, Helena xiii, xiv, xvi, xvii, xviii, xix, 1, 3, 11, 14, 15, 20, 23, 25, 27, 29, 41, 46, 51, 57–​8, 62, 63, 66, 68, 71, 78, 88, 89, 92, 94, 101, 103, 104, 115, 116, 119, 121, 124, 129, 132, 134 Yeats, W. B. xiii, xiv, 27, 34, 50, 59, 62, 80, 90, 116 Young, Michael 51 yo-​yo fieldwork xviii Yurchak, Alexei 36 Zeitlyn, David 88, 90, 91 Zimmerman, Georges Denis xiv, xx, 61, 129 Zoli 121–​2 Zuchowski, Daniel 118