Technology in Irish Literature and Culture 1009182870, 9781009182874

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Introduction

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T E C H N O L OG Y I N I R I S H L I T E R ATU R E A N D CU LT U R E

Technology in Irish Literature and Culture shows how such significant technologies – typewriters, gramophones, print, radio, television, computers – have influenced Irish literary practices and cultural production, while also examining how technology has been embraced as a theme in Irish writing. Once a largely rural and agrarian society, contemporary Ireland has embraced the communicative, performative, and consumption habits of a culture utterly reliant on the digital. This text plumbs the origins of the present moment, examining the longer history of literature’s interactions with the technological and exploring how the transformative capacity of modern technology has been mediated throughout a diverse national canon. Comprising essays from some of the major figures of Irish literary and cultural studies, this volume offers a wide-ranging, comprehensive account of how Irish literature and culture have interacted with technology. margaret kelleher is Professor and Chair of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at University College Dublin. She is Board Member of the Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI), former Chair of the Board of the Irish Film Institute (IFI) and a member of the Royal Irish Academy (RIA). See https://people.ucd.ie/margaret .o.kelleher james o’sullivan lectures on digital arts and humanities at University College Cork. His publications include Towards a Digital Poetics: Electronic Literature & Literary Games (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) and The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Digital Humanities (ed., Bloomsbury Academic, 2022). Visit jamesosullivan .org for more on his research.

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cambridge themes in irish literature and culture Series Editor Ronan McDonald, The University of Melbourne By putting an idea, topic, or theme at the forefront of each volume, this series opens fresh perspectives on past and present, affording a rich conceptual exploration of the relation between literature, culture, and history. Titles in the Series Transnationalism in Irish Literature and Culture Edited by Cóilín Parsons, Georgetown University Race in Irish Literature and Culture Edited by Malcolm Sen, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Julie McCormick Weng, Texas State University Religion in Irish Literature and Culture Edited by Willa Murphy, Ulster University, and Christopher Murray, Monash University The Revival in Irish Literature and Culture Edited by Gregory Castle, Arizona State University

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TECHNOLOGY IN IRISH LITERATURE AND CULTURE edited by MARGARET KELLEHER University College Dublin

JAMES O’SULLIVAN University College Cork

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Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge cb2 8EA, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009182874 doi: 10.1017/9781009182881 © Cambridge University Press & Assessment 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2023 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data names: Kelleher, Margaret, editor. | O’Sullivan, James, editor. title: Technology in Irish literature and culture / edited by Margaret Kelleher, University College Dublin ; James O’Sullivan, University College Cork. description: Cambridge ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2023. | Series: Cambridge themes in Irish literature and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. identifiers: lccn 2022029007 | isbn 9781009182874 (hardback) | isbn 9781009182867 (paperback) | isbn 9781009182881 (ebook) subjects: lcsh: Literature and technology – Ireland. | English literature – Irish authors – History and criticism. classification: lcc pr8722.t43 t43 2023 | ddc 809/.933560417–dc23/eng/20220913 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022029007 isbn 978-1-009-18287-4 Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Code An Ode to Grace Murray Hopper 1906–88 maker of a computer compiler and verifier of COBOL Poet to poet. I imagine you at the edge of language, at the start of summer in Wolfeboro New Hampshire, writing code. You have no sense of time. No sense of minutes even. They cannot reach inside your world, your grey workstation with when yet now never and once. You have missed the other seven. This is the eighth day of creation. The peacock has been made, the rivers stocked. The rainbow has leaned down to clothe the trout. The earth has found its pole, the moon its tides. Atoms, energies have done their work, have made the world, have finished it, have rested. And we call this Creation. And you missed it. The line of my horizon, solid blue appears at last fifty years away from your fastidious, exact patience: The first sign that night will be day is a stir of leaves in this Dublin suburb and air and invertebrates and birds, as the earth resorts again to its explanations: Its shadows. Its reflections. Its words. You are west of me and in the past. Dark falls. Light is somewhere else. The fireflies come out above the lake. You are compiling binaries and zeroes. The given world is what you can translate. And you divide the lesser from the greater. Let there be language – even if we use it differently: I never made it timeless as you have.

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I never made it numerate as you did. And yet I use it here to imagine how at your desk in the twilight legend, history and myth of course, are gathering in Wolfeboro New Hampshire, as if to a memory. As if to a source. Maker of the future, if the past is fading from view with the light outside your window and the single file of elements and animals, and all the facts of origin and outcome, which will never find their way to you or shelter in your syntax – it makes no difference to us. We are still human. There is still light in my suburb and you are in my mind – head bowed, old enough to be my mother – writing code before the daylight goes. I am writing at a screen as blue, as any hill, as any lake, composing this to show you how the world begins again: One word at a time. One woman to another. Eavan Boland

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Contents

List of Contributors Series Preface Acknowledgements

page ix xiv xv 1

Introduction Margaret Kelleher and James O’Sullivan

part i genealogies 1

Print as Technology: The Case of the Irish Language, 1571–1850

11

Marc Caball

2 Printing and Publishing Technologies, 1700–1820

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Máire Kennedy

3 The Optical Telegraph, the United Irish Press, and Maria Edgeworth’s ‘White Pigeon’

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Joanna Wharton

4 Technologies of Sound: Telephone/Gramophone

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Christopher Morash

part ii infrastructures 5 Electric Signs and Echo Chambers: The Stupidity of Affect in Modern Irish Literature

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Barry Sheils

6 Literature and the Technologies of Radio and Television

99

Robert J. Savage

7 ‘The Re-Tuning of the World Itself’: Irish Poetry on the Radio Ian Whittington vii

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Contents

viii part iii invention

8 Technology, Writing, and Place in Medieval Irish Literature

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Máire Ní Mhaonaigh

9 The Critique of Sola Scriptura in A Tale of a Tub and STEM in Gulliver’s Travels

154

Sean Moore

10 Technology and Irish Modernism

168

Kathryn Conrad

11 W. B. Yeats, the Revival, and Scientific Invention

186

Aoife Lynch

12 James Joyce, Irish Modernism, and Watch Technology

201

Katherine Ebury

13 Technology, Terminology, and the Irish Language, Past and Present

217

Sharon Arbuthnot

part iv the digital 14 Irish Literary Feminism and Its Digital Archive(s)

235

Margaret Kelleher and Karen Wade

15 Consoling Machines in Contemporary Irish Fiction

253

Claire Lynch

16 ‘At Me Too Someone Is Looking’: Staging Surveillance in Irish Theatre 267 Victor Merriman

17 Technology in Contemporary Irish Poetry: Data at ‘the Edge of Language’

284

Anne Karhio

18 Irish Digital Literature

308

James O’Sullivan

Index

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Contributors

sharon arbuthnot is a historical linguist and lexicographer, currently based at the University of Cambridge and at the University of the Highlands and Islands. In the period 2009–19, she worked as a researcher and editor on the electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language (eDIL), based at Queen’s University Belfast; previously, she held lecturing and research posts at the Universities of Aberystwyth, Aberdeen, and Cambridge. Her publications include a two-volume edition of the medieval Irish text Cóir Anmann, and numerous articles and chapters on etymological glossing, manuscript studies, and Irish vocabulary associated with the supernatural, medieval medicine, and the natural world. marc caball is associate professor at University College Dublin School of History. His research centres on the cultural history of early modern Ireland and the history of the British Atlantic world. Among his recent publications are ‘Transforming Tradition in the British Atlantic: Patrick Browne (c.1720–90), an Irish Botanist and Physician in the West Indies’, in Early Modern Ireland and the World of Medicine, ed. J. Cunningham (2019); and ‘Munster and India: the Local and Global in Early Modern Ireland’, in Early Modern Ireland: New Sources, Methods, and Perspectives, ed. S. Covington, V. Carey, and V. McGowan-Doyle (2019). kathryn conrad is Professor and Chair of English at the University of Kansas. She is contributor and co-editor, with Cóilín Parsons and Julie McCormick Weng, of Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism (2019). She has published on Irish literature and culture as read through several critical lenses, including public sphere theory, cultural geography, affect theory, and surveillance studies. Her first book, Locked in the Family Cell (2004), examined how gender and sexuality impacted Irish and Northern Irish national identities, particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her most recent scholarship focuses on the role of ix

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technology in mediating human experience and shaping political and ethical relationships. katherine ebury is Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature at the University of Sheffield. She is the author of Modernism and Cosmology: Absurd Lights (2014) and of Modern Literature and the Death Penalty, 1890–1950 (2021), and the editor of Joyce’s Nonfiction Writing: Outside His Jurisfiction (2018). She has written articles and chapters on topics including modernism, science and technology, representations of law and justice, and animal studies. anne karhio is a lecturer in Contemporary English Literature at the National University of Ireland, Galway. She has previously worked as Associate Professor in English literature at the University of Stavanger and Inland University of Applied Sciences in Norway, and held research positions in Finland, Ireland, Norway, and France. She is the author of ‘Slight Return’: Paul Muldoon’s Poetics of Place (2017) and co-editor of Crisis and Contemporary Poetry (2011). Her publications also include a number of literary essays and journal articles on contemporary Irish poetry, digital literature and art, and space and landscape in literature across media. She is also Chair of the Nordic Irish Studies Network. margaret kelleher is Professor and Chair of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at University College Dublin. Her book The Maamtrasna Murders: Language, Life and Death in Nineteenth-Century Ireland was published in 2018. Other publications include The Feminization of Famine (1997), The Cambridge History of Irish Literature, 2 vols., edited with Philip O’Leary (2006), and a special issue of the journal ÉireIreland on the topic of ‘Ireland and the Contemporary’, edited with Nicholas Wolf (2017). She is UCD academic lead for the Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI), a public humanities project and collaboration between UCD and the National Library of Ireland, and has developed a number of digital humanities projects, including the Contemporary Irish Writing digital platform, hosted by MoLI. ma´ ire kennedy worked as Divisional Librarian with Dublin City Public Libraries in charge of Special Collections, Early Printed Books, and Manuscripts. Her PhD (National University of Ireland, 1995) examined Irish print culture of the eighteenth century. She is author of French Books in Eighteenth-Century Ireland (2001) and two chapters in The Oxford History of the Irish Book: The Irish Book in English, 1550–1800 (2005). She has published widely in Irish and international journals, and

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writes a blog on book history at mairekennedybooks.wordpress.com. She is currently Visiting Research Associate, Centre for Early Modern History, Trinity College Dublin. aoife lynch obtained a PhD on the poetry of W. B. Yeats and the prose of Samuel Beckett and science from University College Dublin in 2013. She has published in journals (including the Irish University Review, Irish Studies Review, and Études irlandaises) and essay collections on both the poetry and plays of W. B. Yeats and the prose, poetry, and plays of Samuel Beckett. She is a member of the UCD Humanities Institute of Ireland. claire lynch is a Professor of English and Irish Literature at Brunel University London. She is the author of two monographs, Irish Autobiography (2009) and Cyber Ireland: Text, Image, Culture (2014). Her personal essays have appeared on BBC Radio 4 and in the Washington Post. Her latest book, Small: On Motherhoods, a work of creative non-fiction, was published in June 2021. victor merriman is Professor of Critical Studies in Drama at Edge Hill University. His monographs include Because We Are Poor: Irish Theatre in the 1990s (2011) and Austerity and the Public Role of Drama: Performing Lives-in-Common (2019). He has edited and co-edited special issues of the online journal, Kritika Kultura (2010, 2013, 2018) and published postcolonial theatre and cultural criticism. Keynote lectures include for the International Association for Ethical Literary Criticism (University of Santo Tomas, Manila, 2019). He chaired the Review of Theatre in Ireland (An Chomhairle Ealaíon/Arts Council of Ireland, 1995–6). He is a founder-director of One Hour Theatre Company. sean moore is Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. He is author of Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries: British Literature, Political Thought, and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1731–1814 (2019). He is also author of Swift, the Book, and the Irish Financial Revolution: Satire and Sovereignty in Colonial Ireland (2010), which won the Murphy Prize for Distinguished First Book from the American Conference for Irish Studies (ACIS). He is the former Editor of Eighteenth-Century Studies and has held two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and others from the Newport Mansions, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Folger Library; he was also a Fulbright Scholar to the Republic of Ireland as a doctoral candidate from 2001 to 2002.

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christopher morash is the Seamus Heaney Professor of Irish Writing at Trinity College Dublin, where he was Vice-Provost from 2016 to 2019. His books include Writing the Irish Famine (1995), A History of Irish Theatre, 1601–2000 (2002), A History of the Media in Ireland (2009), Mapping Irish Theatre (with Shaun Richards; 2013), and Yeats on Theatre (2021); other publications include an essay on the transatlantic telegraph that formed part of Entanglement, the Irish entry in the 2021 Venice Biennale. In 2021 he curated a series of plays for binaural microphone for the Abbey Theatre. He is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. ma´ ire nı´ mhaonaigh is Professor of Celtic and Medieval Studies at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St John’s College. She has written widely on medieval Irish literature and history and on relations between medieval Ireland, Britain, Scandinavia, and the wider world. She was involved in the revision of the electronic Dictionary of the Irish language (eDIL 19, www.dil.ie) and is one of three authors of A History of Ireland in 100 Words, which was shortlisted for the An Post Irish Book Awards in 2019. She is currently leading a project funded by the Leverhulme Trust on medieval narratives of place (dindshenchas). james o’sullivan lectures in the School of English & Digital Humanities at University College Cork. He is the author of Towards a Digital Poetics (2019), and the editor of Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities (2021), Digital Art in Ireland (2021), and Reading Modernism with Machines (2016). His scholarship has appeared in a variety of international publications, including Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Digital Studies/Le champ numérique, and Digital Humanities Quarterly. He has also published in The Guardian, The Irish Times, and LA Review of Books. See jamesosullivan.org for more on his work. robert j. savage directs the Boston College Irish Studies Program and is a member of the History Department faculty. His books and articles explore contemporary Irish and British history, and include Northern Ireland, the BBC, and Censorship in Thatcher’s Britain (2022), The BBC’s Irish Troubles: Television, Conflict and Northern Ireland (2015), and A Loss of Innocence? Television and Irish Society, 1960–1972 (2010). He has been awarded Visiting Fellowships at the Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin; the University of Edinburgh, where he held a Leverhulme Professorship; Queen’s University Belfast; and the National University of Ireland, Galway.

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barry sheils is Associate Professor of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature at Durham University, where he is also Associate Director of the Centre for Cultural Ecologies. He has written the monograph W. B. Yeats and World Literature (2015) and co-edited two volumes: Shame and Modern Writing (2018) and Narcissism, Melancholia and the Subject of Community (2017). In 2022, he co-edited a special issue of Textual Practice on the problem of style in contemporary literary studies. karen wade is Assistant Professor of Cultural Analytics at the University College Dublin School of English, Drama and Film, specialising in digital humanities and nineteenth-century literature and publishing cultures. Since the completion of her PhD thesis on online social networks and Irish national culture, she has been involved in the creation and running of a number of major digital humanities projects within the School of English and the Centre for Cultural Analytics, including Contagion, Biopolitics and Migration in European Cultural Memory, the Nation, Genre and Gender Project, and the Digital Multimedia Edition of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. joanna wharton is a Research Associate at the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, University of York. She is the author of Material Enlightenment: Women Writers and the Science of Mind, 1770–1830 (2018) and several articles on Anna Letitia Barbauld, Maria Edgeworth, and, more broadly, literary and scientific culture in eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland. She has recently co-edited special issues on ‘The Sexes and the Sciences’ and ‘Worlds of Maria Edgeworth’, and is currently developing a second monograph project on optical telegraphy and British colonialism in Ireland and India. ian whittington is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Mississippi, where his research and teaching focus on the intersection of mass media and twentieth-century anglophone literatures. His book Writing the Radio War: Literature, Politics and the BBC, 1939–1945 (2018) addresses the balance of aesthetic and political imperatives that drove the wartime broadcasts of British, Irish, and late colonial writers including Louis MacNeice, Una Marson, James Hanley, Denis Johnston, and J. B. Priestley. His writing has appeared in Modernist Cultures, Safundi, Modernism/modernity, and Literature Compass.

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cambridge themes in irish literature and culture Series Editor Ronan McDonald, The University of Melbourne Series Preface Each volume in Cambridge Themes in Irish Literature and Culture analyses a compelling theme in Irish literary studies. That theme is examined by an international cast of established scholars. Each volume offers a critique of literary history and an intellectual genealogy of our current condition. The aim of each book is to reveal fresh perspectives on past and present through a combination of literature, history, and conceptuality. The collections in this series trace a theme in literary texts not as a static object of concern, but as a dynamic idea that needs to be detected, interpreted, and critiqued. The series aims to offer a critical archive that records in rigorous and scholarly detail a theme in Irish literature across authors, genres, and historical periods, and also to reflect upon and recognise the force of this theme in contemporary society.

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Acknowledgements

General Acknowledgements As editors, we record our thanks to series editor Professor Ronan McDonald for commissioning this collection, and to our contributors for their insightful and stimulating chapters, completed during challenging and demanding times. Our thanks to Dr Ray Ryan and Edgar Mendez of Cambridge University Press for seeing this volume from idea to publication, and to Dr Jennifer Preston for her very valuable editorial assistance. Eavan Boland’s poem ‘Code’ is reprinted by kind permission of Carcanet Press, Manchester, UK (from the collection Code, 2001), and W. W. Norton, United States (from Against Love Poetry, 2001). Seamus Heaney’s ‘Colum Cille Cecinit’ (from the collection Human Chain, 2010) is reproduced with kind permission from Faber & Faber and from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Individual Acknowledgements Kathryn Conrad wishes to thank her KU colleagues Professors Phillip Drake, Randall Fuller, Jonathan Lamb, Laura Mielke, Anna Neill, and Paul Outka for their support and input. Anne Karhio wishes to acknowledge the support of the Irish Research Council and the European Commission via Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions. Her research draws on previous work in two research projects, funded under the IRCMSCA ELEVATE scheme and the IRC Laureate Awards scheme. She also acknowledges the support of the Moore Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway; the Digital Culture and Electronic Literature research groups at the University of Bergen; and her research team members Rióna Ní Fhrighil (PI) and Laoighseach Ní Choistealbha (RA) at NUI Galway. Aoife Lynch wishes to thank Professor Margaret Kelleher and Professor Declan Kiberd for their generous help. Claire Lynch wishes to thank xv

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Acknowledgements

Elaine Feeney whose (virtual) visit to London as part of the Brunel Writers Seminar Series was essential to the shaping of her chapter. Victor Merriman wishes to express his gratitude for the opportunity to act as dramaturg on David Lloyd’s The Press (2009) and The Pact (2021). James O’Sullivan wishes to thank Doireann Ní Ghríofa for generously taking the time to confirm the details of his essay. Much of his essay was written during a fellowship at NOVA University, Lisbon, with thanks to Daniel Alves, Teresa Araújo, and Joana Paulino for facilitating his visit. He also acknowledges the College of Arts, Celtic Studies & Social Sciences at UCC, who further supported his recent work, including this project, with a research sabbatical. Robert J. Savage wishes to thank Lance Pettitt and Vera Kreilkamp for their comments on his chapter. Joanna Wharton wishes to acknowledge that this chapter was completed during a research associateship at the School of English, University of St Andrews, and expresses gratitude to Susan Manly for sharing ideas during this time, and to Harrie Neal for her reading of drafts and helpful comments. Ian Whittington wishes to acknowledge Tina Byrne, Senior Archivist at the RTÉ Document Archives, for her help in sourcing materials related to Austin Clarke’s career at Radio Éireann.

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Introduction Margaret Kelleher and James O’Sullivan

In editing this volume of essays, Technology in Irish Literature and Culture, for the Cambridge Themes in Irish Literature and Culture series, we are pleased to accept the dual invitation delivered by series editor Ronan McDonald: in his words, ‘to choose a significant issue that animates or perplexes contemporary Irish culture, and use it as an aperture through which to examine the literature of previous eras’. Our choice of subject is technology, a subject of fundamental significance to our current condition, and central to very many of our contemporary concerns, vexations, pleasures, and opportunities. Ireland is a place of beeps and whirs, of machines and screens. While the electrification of Ireland’s urban spaces did not begin in earnest until 1929 – and indeed, rurally some two decades later in 1946 – electricity, or rather, the electronic, now operates as a symbol for this island’s contemporary situation. Digital technologies dominate Ireland’s public and private spheres, permeating all aspects of cultural and socio-economic activity. Such circumstances should not be dismissed as merely the western world as it exists in late capitalism: it is especially significant that Ireland, functioning as a largely rural, agrarian, ecumenical society for much of its history, now sees its public and private spheres dominated by modern technologies and the entities which determine the conditions through which they are shared and experienced. Crucially, technology shapes personal interactions, public spaces, institutions, and politics. It is a subject, then, whose temporal frame can appear mostly contemporaneous and occasionally prospective: that of discovery, innovation, and rupture. Yet, as this volume demonstrates throughout, its literary genealogy is long and varied: technological opportunity is a subject plumbed and probed in the earliest of Irish literary works, just as technological inventions themselves have enabled Irish literature and its creative practitioners to adapt, diversify, experiment, and flourish, both in their choice of subject and in their public reach. 1

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margaret kelleher and james o’sullivan

It is a curious feature of Irish literary scholarship, however, that relatively few comprehensive treatments of the subject of technology exist at present. Literature has long functioned as a tool for social understanding; turning its lens on technology can tell us much about Irishness in the context of the machine-induced cultural upheavals that formed and reformed our past and present, and that remain intrinsic to possible cultural futures. As demonstrated in Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism (2019) – one of the few such studies of the topic of technology – there has been substantial engagement between scientific and technological change and twentiethcentury Irish literature, particularly modernism.1 But examining how authors have embraced technology as a theme is only part of the dynamic: it is important also to look at how technology operates on literature, acting as an inherent part of literary process, form, and aesthetic. This book does just that, analysing technologies which appear in Irish literature (theme), but also technologies of literature (technê), rearticulating the genealogical significance of technology to both the form and content of Irish writing: technology as material instrument and technology as thematic symbol. For us as editors, curating this volume is also an act of recovery, an attempt to reclaim cultural authority from a simplistic ‘progress’ narrative and from the narrow prioritisation of disciplines of science and engineering without reference to, or recognition of, their humanistic core. In terms of historical antecedents, it is not surprising that a number of essays in this volume concentrate on the period of the Irish Literary Revival, when comparable debates occurred as to the relevant standing of art, science, technology, and creativity. But the genealogies traced in this volume are longer and often unpredictable: the advent of new technologies can involve continuity as well as rupture, for example the long coexistence of script and print in modern Irish-language culture (Chapter 1 of this volume), or the overlapping histories of orature and technologies of sound (Chapter 4). Conversely, the valorisation of narratives of technical progress and electronic connection by state and industry can be resisted powerfully and effectively by literary representations of disconnection and crisis, in a long tradition ranging from Jonathan Swift (Chapter 9) to Edna O’Brien, Stewart Parker, and Mike McCormack (Chapter 5). The purpose of this book is not to rearticulate the importance of ‘the digital’ in an age and academy where computer-assisted ways of doing and being are becoming increasingly fetishised. Our aim as editors 1

Kathryn Conrad, Cóilín Parsons, and Julie McCormick Weng, eds., Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2019).

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of Technology in Irish Literature and Culture is to show instead how technology has long – even in pre-digital contexts – had a major influence on the form and content of Irish writing, and to demonstrate how our present situation and literary storehouse is enabled by a long lineage of technological advancements and thematic assessments. The structure of the volume reflects this lineage, transitioning from print, the optical telegraph, and gramophone to electricity and broadcasting, from science and invention to data and the digital, reckoning with the productive and social consequences of each new mode for Irish literature and culture. While ‘technology’ might at times be awkwardly expansive as a term, the emphasis in this collection is largely on communication and media technologies and related infrastructures, along with the cultures that surround their emergence and advancement. Through a historical lens that spans over a thousand years of artistic production, and that addresses the future – whether digital or post-digital – as imagined and foretold in literary works, our volume offers fresh perspectives on the discourses and modes through which technological impact is comprehended and deployed, interpreted and critiqued, feared and used. The eighteen essays are arranged in four thematic clusters: ‘Genealogies’, ‘Infrastructures’, ‘Invention’, and ‘The Digital’. ‘Genealogies’ begins with two essays on the history of print and how its advent impacted writing in the Irish and English languages, respectively. Marc Caball explores the overlapping and intersecting modes of communicative interchange which characterised Gaelic cultural expression in the long early modern period. Caball delineates an often elusive but nonetheless intellectually dynamic interplay between print technology and communication in Irish down to the nineteenth century. Máire Kennedy looks at the period 1700 to 1820, and at how innovations and developments in printing, typefounding, papermaking, and marketing contributed to the advancement of literary culture and also to the expansion of its audiences and markets through newspaper and print advertising. Moving beyond print, Joanna Wharton and Christopher Morash, respectively, look at the optical telegraph and technologies of sound. While the electrical telegraph is often credited with having revolutionised global communications, the imaginative potential of its predecessor, the optical telegraph, was profound. In her essay, Wharton examines the role that the optical telegraph played in competing ideas of Irish nationality, security, and surveillance during the intelligence wars of the 1790s, and similarly elucidates the role of literary production in the cultural brokering of this technological innovation. Morash’s essay on ‘Technologies of

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Sound’ resituates the relationship between orature and modernity in Irish culture in the context of technology, noting how the Revival coincides exactly with the period that saw the emergence of key technologies of sound, namely the telephone, the gramophone/phonograph, and later radio. While Kennedy historicises how print transformed writing and communication in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Morash argues that, by the early twentieth century, the innovatory promise of print had been usurped by technologies of the spoken word, specifically the telephone and phonograph. Yet, for Revival writers such as J. M. Synge, Lady Gregory, and W. B. Yeats, as Morash illuminates, the history of technologies of sound includes also the ghost of oral culture in which ‘the present is perennially a moment of disappearance’. ‘Infrastructures’ is comprised of three essays which explicate the cultural and literary dimensions of some major state investments and national projects considered foundational to the Irish literary and cultural landscape, both then and now. In the face of a state-led dedication to electrification, and more recently digitalisation, Irish literature, as Barry Sheils observes, has consistently restored ‘materiality’ – and a related emphasis on embodiment and lack of connection – to the semiotic field. More specifically, he explores the three themes of emigration, constitutional politics, and ecology to show another networked imaginary distinguished by disconnection and crisis. Robert J. Savage outlines the history of state broadcasting from the 1920s to the present, while addressing how literary forms of culture encountered and adapted to the new technologies of radio and television, and how individual authors (for example, the dramatist Máiréad Ní Ghráda) engaged with these technologies in their professional and writing lives. Ian Whittington examines the history of Irish poetry from the perspective of broadcast radio, considering the traces of the medium that appear in poetry and prose by Louis MacNeice, Eavan Boland, Leontia Flynn, Seamus Heaney, and others, and by examining the cultural role and aesthetic qualities of works produced for radio, with particular attention to the work of Austin Clarke. The third cluster of essays, ‘Invention’, privileges the making-new over a millennium of Irish literary production. It begins with Máire Ní Mhaonaigh’s chapter on medieval Irish literature and its writing of Ireland’s past as a story of connections, one in which the technology of writing itself functioned as process and as theme. And, as she illustrates, by explaining the past and shaping the present, the technology of writing presented a richly informative story of technologies of other kinds. Sean Moore examines the scepticism with which Jonathan Swift viewed the

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Introduction

5

printing press as the new information technology of his day, extending his vein of criticism to new digital humanities platforms which incorporate Swift’s texts. In ‘Technology and Irish Modernism’, Kathryn Conrad traces the etymological shift in the term ‘technology’ from its ties to language to those of science, and relatedly the critical interaction by the first wave of Irish modernists (from Bram Stoker to Elizabeth Bowen) with technological forms. Irish modernism’s engagement with the concepts of space and time, she argues, is framed by its explicit engagement with technologies, but differing perspectives on the success or failure of new technologies result: for Stoker, the disruptive force of a new sound technology like the phonograph, for example, lies in its removal of the mediating quality offered by textual forms. In her essay on ‘W. B. Yeats, the Revival, and Scientific Invention’, Aoife Lynch illuminates the scientific foundations of Yeats’s work, highlighting his dual attitude to science: his repudiation of Newtonian science as overly deterministic while deploying in his esoteric writings the world view made possible by the new physics of his day. James Joyce’s reflections on a changing landscape of time in response to Einstein’s ‘new physics’ is the context for Katherine Ebury’s essay, in which she focuses on the watch, and Joyce’s concerns with watch technology, to provide new textual insights into Joyce’s attitudes to time. And returning to the field of Irishlanguage studies, to conclude this section on ‘Invention’, Sharon Arbuthnot charts the emergence and development of a selection of technological terms in both medieval and modern Irish. Such terms for inventions and innovations serve as fascinating case studies in language change and resilience: as she discusses, some medieval words for still common devices have inexplicably fallen out of use; some early terms have been recorded again after long periods of silence; some words have manifested twice, hundreds of years apart. This volume concludes with ‘The Digital’, a group of essays reflecting on contemporary matters. In ‘Irish Literary Feminism and Its Digital Archive(s)’, Margaret Kelleher and Karen Wade address directly the current state of the field in digital humanities, and how ‘presence’ is only the first step in securing real engagement with the literary archive of women’s writings. They argue that the facilitation of new forms of interaction between digital, creative, and critical practice, and of collaborations that enable participation by those previously marginalised or excluded from technological innovation, can lead to a more dynamic and sustainable future for the feminist digital archive. Claire Lynch’s essay draws on a series of contemporary Irish novels, charting the way everyday devices – such as

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phones, laptops, and computers – do more than simply sit alongside fictional characters. Using examples from authors such as Sally Rooney, Elaine Feeney, and Eimear McBride, Lynch describes how these ‘consoling’ machines bring support, comfort, and distraction for their users. In his chapter on Irish theatre, Victor Merriman argues that Samuel Beckett’s plays function as a kind of fulcrum in a theatrical history of staging and thematising surveillance, and extends this history from Dion Boucicault and Augusta Gregory to Enda Walsh and David Lloyd. While surveillance agencies rely heavily on technology to gather information, but depend on human beings to store, order, and interpret it, dramatic narratives – Merriman demonstrates – exploit inconsistencies and injustices arising from slippages between data and its application. The final two essays in this volume consider contemporary Irish poetry and Irish digital literature. Anne Karhio considers Irish poets’ responses to emerging digital technologies and networked communication, particularly in the context of data, data infrastructures, and various platforms of information exchange. Her essay examines poems by Paula Meehan, Paul Muldoon, Billy Ramsell, Peter Sirr, Derek Mahon, Randolph Healy, Justin Quinn, and Eavan Boland, and their addressing of the interrelated (if not identical) concepts of ‘data’, ‘information’, and ‘knowledge’. James O’Sullivan presents a brief history and critique of born-digital literature in Ireland, its emergence and present state. Focusing on the work of Doireann Ní Ghríofa, whose film-poems are less widely known than her print-based poetry and prose, O’Sullivan contends that film-poetry is the dominant form of digital writing in Ireland, and, following a comparison of Irish digital literature with its international counterparts, reflects on the relative dearth of digital fiction and digital poetry within the Irish canon. ‘We are still human’: so writes Eavan Boland in her poem ‘Code’, a tribute to Grace Murray Hopper, a pioneer of computer programming and a ‘Maker of the future’. This is a welcome reminder for the Ireland of today, an island which displays the communicative, performative, and consumption habits of a culture that is utterly reliant on the digital. But Boland’s poem also stages a valuable and rare connection between the creative practitioner as literary artist and computer pioneer. This volume, we hope, will stimulate for readers the recognition of similar networks of connection and lines of enquiry. Many of contemporary Ireland’s most essential cultural matters – the self, language, communication, surveillance, ecology, socio-economics, gender, and recovery – can, we suggest, be considered anew when viewed through the aperture of those technologies that determine much of our existence: both new, emerging

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Introduction

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technologies and, just as importantly, technologies from earlier times, along with the material conditions and cultural contexts that brought them to prominence. Returning to Boland, such an approach allows for a historically reciprocal appreciation of how the ‘past is fading’, and some small sense of how the ‘world begins again’.

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part i

Genealogies

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chapter 1

Print as Technology: The Case of the Irish Language, 1571–1850 Marc Caball

No doubt unwittingly, an eighteenth-century harper has left to posterity a highly revealing artefact which enshrines within its own materiality the textured ecology of early modern communicative practices in the Irish language. Sometime shortly in advance of the Belfast Harp Festival of July 1792, an elderly harper dispatched northwards from Kerry a printed broadsheet to Robert Bradshaw, whom he styled as secretary and treasurer of the festival. The harper, an elusive individual called Thomas O’Shea, then in his eightieth year, evidently had a quantity of bespoke broadsheets printed for his personal use in the manner of a calling card or publicity flyer. The broadsheet was printed in the first instance with spaces for the later manuscript inclusion of content. The extant document opened with four lines of script where O’Shea addressed his broadsheet to Bradshaw and somewhat generically to his fellow Belfast inhabitants. Curiously, given his harper’s avocation, he dedicated to them ‘this small piece of penmanship’. This handwritten opening section consisted of four lines each written in a different fashion. The printed text is grandiloquent in its claims for the achievements of O’Shea in matters of harp design. Furthermore, he was available to teach this ancient instrument as well as ‘Old Irish, (which is quite forgot) to any gentleman in order to establish the old heavenly music and language once more in this kingdom’. When he started to learn to play the harp in 1717, O’Shea claimed that ‘there were upwards of one hundred harps kept in order in the county of Kerry’ and now ‘there is not one harp kept in order in this county’. Moreover, O’Shea adduced an antique lineage for the harp on the basis of a reference from the poetry of Virgil which he translated to Irish in script. This vibrant interplay of print and script in the document was further elaborated when a later hand wrote an English translation beside the printed Latin couplet. Indeed, O’Shea’s broadsheet is emblematic of the overlapping and intersecting modes of communicative interchange which characterised the Gaelic cultural continuum in the long early modern period. 11

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However, comments written by O’Shea himself on the left margin of the broadsheet are especially informative in relation to the complementarity of script and print technology in Gaelic cultural expression from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.1 The aged harper sought the indulgence of his addressee in respect of the somewhat less than pristine appearance of the broadsheet. In fact, O’Shea reported that ‘this dirty scrole’ was ‘a remnant left by the printer Mr Busteed’. The Busteed family was involved in the printing, bookselling, and newspaper business in Tralee from the 1780s onwards.2 Apparently, Busteed’s printers had used this particular sheet for ‘trying their types’. Originally, O’Shea had ‘thirty sheets of fine large paper printed’ and over the previous four years ‘sent them thro’out the kingdom’, except for one sheet which he intended to send to the Earl of Westmorland, lord lieutenant of Ireland from 1789 to 1794. More prosaically, O’Shea admitted to Bradshaw that ‘the printer could not spare time to print a fresh one’. Interestingly, the interconnection of O’Shea’s Gaelic perspective with an Anglo-Protestant sphere is further evident when he references a range of character witnesses who might be called on to attest to his integrity.3 Importantly, Gaelic intellectual production was not hermetically sealed within a self-referential sphere; rather it was open to and informed by a range of cultural and social currents. It is instructive to look at one more such emblematic layering of print and script before proceeding to a review of the argument proposed in the present essay. A copy of the first printed dictionary of the Irish language, 1

2

3

By way of an overview of print in the Irish language, see E. W. Lynam, ‘The Irish Character in Print, 1571–1923’, The Library, Fourth Series, 4 (1924), 286–325; P. J. Madden, ‘Printing in Irish’, An Leabharlann: Journal of the Library Association of Ireland 12:3 (1954), 74–85; Niall Ó Ciosáin, ‘Printed Popular Literature in Irish, 1750–1850: Presence and Absence’, in The Origins of Popular Literacy in Ireland: Language Change and Educational Development, 1700–1920, ed. Mary Daly and David Dickson (Dublin: Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin, 1990), pp. 45–57; Niall Ó Ciosáin, ‘Print and Irish, 1570–1900: An Exception Among the Celtic Languages?’, Radharc: A Journal of Irish and Irish-American Studies 5–7 (2004–6), 73–106; Marc Caball and Benjamin Hazard, ‘Dynamism and Decline: Translating Keating’s Foras Feasa ar Éirinn in the Seventeenth Century’, Studia Hibernica 39 (2013), 49–69; Éamonn Ó Ciardha, ‘The Irish Book in Irish in the Early Modern Period, 1691–1800’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland/Iris an dá chultúr 28 (2013), 13–36; Richard Sharpe, ‘Manuscript and Print in Gaelic Scotland and Ireland, 1689–1832’, in Rannsachadh na Gàidhlig 8: Language and Culture, ed. Wilson McLeod, Anja Gunderloch, and Rob Dunbar (Edinburgh: Dunedin Academic Press, 2016), pp. 31–53. John Lloyd, A Short Tour; or, An Impartial and Accurate Description of the County of Clare (Ennis, 1780), p. 66; The London and Country Printers, Booksellers and Stationers Vade Mecum (London, 1785), p. 56; Browne’s General Law List; for the year 1789 (London, 1788), p. 259. Alf Mac Lochlainn, ‘Thomas O’Shea, a Kerry Harper’, Journal of the Kerry Archaeological and Historical Society 3 (1970), 81–3. O’Shea alluded to local gentry such as Robert Day, Sir Barry Denny, and Thomas Stoughton as well as grand aristocrats like Thomas Browne, Lord Kenmare, and John Crosbie, Earl of Glandore, and worthies of the Church of Ireland such as the Deans of Limerick and Ardfert and Aghadoe, respectively.

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Mícheál Ó Cléirigh’s (c.1590–1643) Foclóir nó Sanasán Nua, published at the Irish Franciscan College at Leuven in 1643, provides a not dissimilar material testimony to O’Shea’s broadsheet. Descended from a Gaelic learned family associated with north-west Ulster, Ó Cléirigh had travelled to the Continent sometime before 1621, and by 1623 had become a lay brother of the Franciscan order. Although Ó Cléirigh is best known for his monumental collection and collation of materials relating to Irish hagiography, his sole printed work is a modest guide to what were considered difficult words in the Irish language. A copy of the Sanasán held at the Newberry Library at Chicago, like O’Shea’s printed broadsheet, reflects the complex interplay of print and script so characteristic of the early modern Gaelic literary tradition. While there are no scribal notes or annotations on the volume itself, the endpapers of the binding are liberally annotated. These scribal notes were apparently written by Michael Cunneen of the barony of Islands in county Clare who it seems was the book’s owner in April 1828. Among these written texts are a copy of a poetic warrant (‘Agso barántas an hata’) attributed to the poet Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin (c.1748–1784), a poem from the Fiannaíocht corpus, a folk charm, and an explication of the early medieval Irish alphabet known as Ogham. Evidently, such was Cunneen’s attachment to Ó Cléirigh’s volume that he considered it an appropriate repository for valued lore and texts. It is arguable that the Newberry copy of Ó Cléirigh’s dictionary constitutes a material embodiment of the fortunes of print technology in respect of the Irish language over la longue durée. Another hand, probably that of a nineteenth-century antiquarian book dealer, glossed the printed text as follows: ‘This so scarce that a copy of it was sold at General Vallancey’s for £6:6. It is indispensable to the student of ancient Irish literature.’ A bookplate pasted underneath this entry declared the identity of its subsequent owner: ‘Ex Bibliotheca Ludovici Luciani Bonaparte’.4 Louis Lucien Bonaparte (1813–1891) was a philologist who researched Basque-language dialects and who was known also to have an interest in Celtic languages. During the course of his linguistic investigations, he assembled an extensive library of books printed in less widely spoken languages. Among the books amassed by Bonaparte was a comprehensive collection of early modern printed volumes in Irish. Printed in the context of sustained religious controversy, this particular copy of Ó Cléirigh’s work constitutes a symbolic palimpsest which is 4

Newberry Library, Chicago, Bonaparte 7181; Victor Collins, Attempt at a Catalogue of the Library of the Late Prince Louis-Lucien Bonaparte, 2 vols. (London: H. Sotheran, 1894), vol. i, p. 370.

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indicative of an encounter between the technology of print and a venerable literary culture which had traditionally been enmeshed within an ecology of script and orality. For a variety of complex reasons, print failed to supplant script as a communicative mode in Irish until arguably late in the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth century. The present essay is therefore concerned with the delineation of an often elusive but nonetheless intellectually dynamic interplay between print technology and communication in Irish down to the nineteenth century. Of course, Gaelic Ireland was no exception in this regard, as other European cultures in the early modern period were also characterised by the three media of speech, script, and print which informed and influenced each other.5 The fact that the first book printed in Gaelic in 1567 intended for circulation among readers in both Scotland and Ireland was printed in Edinburgh is illustrative of the polemical and sectarian conflict which inaugurated the use of print in Irish and which sustained early modern interest in print as a means of evangelisation and catechesis on the part of advocates of both reformation and counter-reformation. John Carswell (c.1522–1572), superintendent of Argyll and bishop of the Isles, translated the Calvinist Book of Common Order under the title Foirm na n-Urrnuidheadh.6 Indeed, Carswell was anxious to invoke Gaelic cultural authority for his translation in a poem of five quatrains composed in a bardic metre which was appended to his translation by way of introduction. Crucially, he diverged from exemplary precedent in one critical material and visual respect in the use of roman type to print the text, in what was a distinct departure from venerable custom whereby manuscripts in Irish were traditionally written in a gaelicised form of the roman alphabet. The use of roman type in this instance was certainly determined in large measure by the fact that a Gaelic-style font was not then available and, as a result, the Edinburgh printer Robert Lekprevik was obliged to print the work in roman type. Moreover, Carswell’s readiness to proceed with the printing of his translation using a nontraditional visual format also reflected less formal scribal practices in Gaelic Scotland and a greater fluidity of engagement with elite Gaelic cultural expression than in Ireland itself, where bardic cultural authority was very much entrenched. It is a matter of cultural significance, therefore, that

5

6

For further reading, see Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 5. R. L. Thomson, ed., Foirm na n-Urrnuidheadh: John Carswell’s Gaelic Translation of the Book of Common Order (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd for the Scottish Gaelic Texts Society, 1970).

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in 1571 the first work in Irish was printed in Ireland using a Gaelic-style type.7 The innovative technology of print had spread rapidly from its locus of original application in Mainz in the mid-fifteenth century, and by 1490 printing presses had been established in more than 200 cities across Europe.8 Indeed, the early expansion of print was intimately linked to larger urban centres of commerce and trade which were often the location of universities and a large book-buying cohort. The absence of substantial centres of urban settlement in Gaelic Ireland surely inhibited the inauguration of print in Irish and arguably curtailed its consolidation down to the early twentieth century. The translation and publication of the 1571 Irish primer of religion was undertaken by a Cambridge-educated clergyman called Seaán Ó Cearnaigh.9 The Aibidil is a relatively slim volume consisting of fifty-six pages with five principal sections: an opening address to the reader; an introduction to the Irish alphabet and orthography; a catechism; a section containing ten prayers; and a translation of a declaration on the Articles of Religion first promulgated at Dublin in 1566/7 by the Lord Deputy Sir Henry Sidney. It is necessary to take into consideration Ó Cearnaigh’s background and formation in the context of the publication of the catechism and the deployment of a Gaelic fount to print the text. In the record of his 1561 matriculation at Cambridge, and in a letter from the English administration in Dublin to the royal minister William Cecil, Lord Burghley, Ó Cearnaigh was described as a native of Connaught. It has been proposed that he was born to a Sligo family traditionally linked to the church in the diocese of Achonry. Certainly, a lineage such as this would partly explain his decision to seek ordination in the Protestant state church.10 Although embedded within Gaelic tradition, Ó Cearnaigh was also committed to innovation in so far as he embraced an English 7

8

9

10

Marc Caball, ‘Print, Protestantism and Cultural Authority in Elizabethan Ireland’, in Elizabeth I and Ireland, ed. Brendan Kane and Valerie McGowan-Doyle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 286–308. Andrew Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. xiii–xiv. Nicholas Williams, I bPrionta i Leabhar: Na Protastúin agus Prós na Gaeilge, 1567–1724 (Dublin: An Clóchomhar, 1986), p. 21. For catechisms in Elizabethan England, see Ian Green, The Christian’s ABC: Catechisms and Catechizing in England, c.1530–1740 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 188–9. Katharine Simms argued that the Protestant Reformation proved attractive to some Gaelic ecclesiastical families on account of the new bishops’ control of church lands and its endorsement of clerical marriage. See Simms, ‘Frontiers in the Irish Church: Regional and Cultural’, in Colony and Frontier in Medieval Ireland: Essays Presented to J. F. Lydon, ed. T. B. Barry, Robin Frame, and Katharine Simms (London: Hambledon Press, 1995), pp. 177–200 (p. 199); Caball, ‘Print, Protestantism and Cultural Authority’, p. 293.

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university education and ministry in the reformed church. It seems appropriate, therefore, that an otherwise obscure Gaelic Protestant clergyman should seek to align the technology of print with the dynamic message of the Protestant Reformation in the Irish language.11 On the basis of the suggestive evidence of a summary overview of Irish letters in the primer, Brian Ó Cuív speculated that Ó Cearnaigh was initially educated at a bardic school.12 Importantly, Ó Cearnaigh concluded his introduction to the Irish alphabet with a recommendation to readers in search of further knowledge in this respect to seek the counsel of Gaelic praise poets. The elite cohort of bardic poets were established arbiters of linguistic expertise and cultural authority in Gaelic society. This acknowledgement of bardic scholarship in the transformative context of print and Protestantism is indicative of how Ó Cearnaigh seamlessly blended continuity with innovation (‘Fághbhadh fóghluim óna fileaghuibh. Oír is lé na n-ealádhain bheanas sin do thráchdadh go hínntleachdach éolusách’). In a deceptively modest declaration, Ó Cearnaigh avowed that he simply wished to clear a pathway previously closed to people and to present the Irish language in an appropriate form of print in a manner similar to every other language in Christendom (‘in teanguidh ghaóidhelge do chur ann a cló dhíleas fén mar tá gach teanguidh ele sa chríosduigheachd’).13 Such cultural patriotism and its concomitant commitment to the cultural integrity of the Irish language surely informed Ó Cearnaigh’s print project. Indeed, Ó Cearnaigh’s opening address to his readers further elaborated on his motivation in this regard. He emphasised that the provision of print in Irish would enable access to knowledge previously denied to the speakers of that language. Indeed, such was their putative state of ignorance, Ó Cearnaigh claimed that the Gaelic Irish were more backward in their ways and customs than any other people in western Europe. It is implicit in his diagnosis of the supposed predicament of his fellow countrymen that the absence of print in their language was a critical impediment to civility and progress.14 Now, however, the message of true religion and legitimate governance was available to them in their vernacular. Redemption in a textual format was to hand in the ‘natural language’ of the people, and this text was made available in its ‘own appropriate dress’ or fount (‘ar ná chur a mach ann do theangaidh nádúra 11

12

13

Marc Caball, ‘Gaelic and Protestant: A Case Study in Early Modern Self-Fashioning, 1567–1608’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 110C (2010), 191–215. Brian Ó Cuív, ed., Aibidil Gaoidheilge & Caiticiosma: Seaán Ó Cearnaigh’s Irish Primer of Religion Published in 1571 (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1994), pp. 3–4. Ibid., p. 67. 14 Ibid., p. 53.

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agus ann a haibhíd díles féin’).15 Crucially, Ó Cearnaigh admitted that in the absence of any other person willing to assume the task, he had undertaken the arduous process of having the work in hand printed. In this regard, he acknowledged the financial support of Queen Elizabeth, Lord Deputy Sir Henry Sidney, and his administration in Dublin. Curiously, on the title page of the Aibidil, the financial contribution of the Dublin merchant Alderman John Ussher alone was acknowledged.16 The reference to Elizabeth’s support may well have been generic in nature, given that she had previously fruitlessly sanctioned payment of a not inconsiderable sum of £66 12s 4d for the manufacture of type to enable a Gaelic New Testament to be printed.17 Nonetheless, these somewhat vague references to the provision of financial support towards the cost of production serve as a reminder of the capital-intensive nature of print technology. Moreover, while Ó Cearnaigh was evidently motivated by a degree of cultural patriotism in his undertaking, he was also simply following a key precept of the Reformation in its commitment to the provision of scriptural, liturgical, and catechetical access in the vernacular. Yet the production of Ó Cearnaigh’s volume was as much a technical as a cultural achievement. In October 1570, Ó Cearnaigh was reimbursed by the Tudor authorities for expenses (£22 13s 4d) incurred by him in regard to the manufacture of an Irish type required for the subsequent printing of 200 catechisms in Irish.18 It is not clear how or where this Gaelic-style type was designed and produced. Given that Ó Cearnaigh was personally reimbursed for monies dispensed in the acquisition of ‘stampes, formes and matrises’, it is not unlikely that he was responsible for the appearance of the fount, which was evidently designed by an individual with a knowledge of Irish scribal conventions.19 Ó Cuív noted that while many of the letters, inclusive of capitals and lower case, were of the regular roman type, others were distinctive in their appearance and ‘reminiscent of letters found in Irish manuscripts’.20 However, Ó Cearnaigh was unlikely to have possessed the technical knowledge to oversee the casting of the Irish type. It is significant that Hugh Brady, bishop of Meath, and Adam Loftus, archbishop of Armagh, were obliged in 1567 to return monies to Queen Elizabeth previously allocated for the creation of type for an Irish New Testament. 15 18 19

20

Ibid., p. 55. 16 Ibid., p. 51. 17 Caball, ‘Print, Protestantism, and Cultural Authority’, p. 294. Ó Cuív, Aibidil, p. 5. Charles McNeill, ed., ‘Fitzwilliam Manuscripts at Milton, England’, Analecta Hibernica 4 (1932), 287–326 (p. 300); Dermot McGuinne, Irish Type Design: A History of Printing Types in the Irish Character (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1992), pp. 7–8. Ó Cuív, Aibidil, p. 10.

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In this regard, Brady may have initially been an intermediary in a putative attempt to procure the manufacture of a Gaelic-style type. Brady was an Irish speaker, born in Dunboyne around 1527, who was appointed bishop of Meath in 1563. He had previously served as rector of a London parish, and his residence there would have enabled him to become familiar with the city’s book trade.21 However, it is not clear who oversaw the manufacture of the 1571 type. Only two printers were known to have operated in Dublin in the sixteenth century: Humfrey Powell and William Kearney.22 Originally active in London, Powell was responsible for printing the first book in Dublin when in 1551 he produced the Book of Common Prayer.23 Crucially, Ó Cuív proposed that William Kearney was a key figure in both the design of the Irish fount of 1571 as well as being responsible for its printing.24 He was described contemporaneously as a kinsman of Ó Cearnaigh. It is known that Kearney was working as a printer in London in 1590, and that by 1592 had returned to Ireland where subsequently he was responsible for typesetting the Irish New Testament up to the sixth chapter of the gospel of St Luke in 1597.25 Moreover, on the basis of a book he printed in London in 1590 about various styles of handwriting, it may be assumed that Kearney was interested in the design of different founts and scripts.26 Crucially, Kearney was apparently a committed evangelical in matters of faith. For instance, also in London in 1591, he printed a sermon by a Church of England clergyman and popular preacher, Henry Smith (d.1591).27 While it is not possible to determine with certainty who designed the 1571 Irish type, it is remarkable that these Gaelic Irish kinsmen, one educated at Cambridge’s Magdalene College and the other who practised the craft of printing in London’s Cheapside, should both seek to combine Protestantism with print technology to inaugurate what they must have envisioned as a dynamic new era in Gaelic literature and scholarship.28 21 22 23

24 25

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27 28

Caball, ‘Print, Protestantism, and Cultural Authority’, p. 292. M. Pollard, Dublin’s Trade in Books, 1550–1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 2. Reginald M’Clintock Dix, ‘Humfrey Powell, the First Dublin Printer’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy: Archaeology, Culture, History, Literature 27 (1908–9), 213–16 (pp. 213–14). Ó Cuív, Aibidil, p. 8. Ibid., p. 8. See also R. B. McKerrow, ed., A Dictionary of Printers and Booksellers in England, Scotland and Ireland, and of Foreign Printers of English Books, 1557–1640 (London: Printed for the Bibliographical Society by Blades, East & Blades, 1910), p. 162; Robert Munter, A Dictionary of the Print Trade in Ireland, 1550–1775 (New York: Fordham University Press, 1988), p. 153. A New Booke, Containing All Sortes of Handes Usually Written at This Daie in Christendom (London, 1590). Henry Smith, The First Sermon of Noah’s Drunkenness (London, 1591). Marc Caball, ‘The Bible in Early Modern Gaelic Ireland: Tradition, Collaboration, and Alienation’, in The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England, c.1530–1700, ed. Kevin Killeen, Helen Smith, and Rachel Judith Willie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 332–49 (p. 336).

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If Ó Cearnaigh’s print initiative was highly innovative in its deployment of print and Protestantism, it also deferred to tradition in its acknowledgement of the cultural authority of the bardic elite. A graphic manifestation of deference to tradition is evident in a broadsheet printed in 1571, which has traditionally been interpreted as a printer’s trial piece produced in the context of the printing of the Aibidil. Its connection with Ó Cearnaigh’s primer was evident from the declaration at the foot of the broadsheet that it was printed in the house of Master John Ussher at Dublin in 1571. The broadsheet contains the earliest printed example of a bardic poem composed in strict metre (‘dán díreach’). This poem, beginning ‘Tuar feirge foighide Dhé’ (‘God’s patience is an augury of anger’), was attributed to Pilib Bocht Ó hUiginn (d.1487), a quondam Franciscan friar and noted religious poet. The poem was prefaced with a brief prose introduction to its theme which described the harrowing omens of doomsday and the manner in which Christ would accordingly pronounce judgement.29 In terms of its content, notwithstanding its Franciscan authorship, the poem aligned thematically with an apocalyptic strand in Protestant thought. Indeed, it is probable that a broadsheet such as this was conceived as a costeffective mode of dissemination of the evangelical message, and that this example was produced by way of prototype for further such ephemeral publications.30 However, as with many such early modern printed ephemera, it is difficult to evaluate their scale of dissemination or impact given how few copies, if any, in some cases, remain extant today.31 Only one copy of the 1571 broadsheet has survived, and its conservation was made possible because of contemporary interest in its contents as an example of Gaelic script. The extant broadsheet was acquired for the extensive library of printed books and manuscripts assembled by Matthew Parker (1504–1575), antiquarian and archbishop of Canterbury, and which he gifted to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.32 An inscription on the broadsheet, possibly in the hand of Parker’s son, John, suggests why it was of interest to his father: ‘this Irishe balade printed in Irelande who belike use the olde Saxon carecte’.33 Its acquisition for the Parker collection was certainly linked to contemporary sectarian polemical debate in England and a contemporary

29 30

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Ó Cuív, Aibidil, pp. 191–212. Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 76–7. Green, The Christian’s ABC, p. 332. V. J. K. Brook, A Life of Archbishop Parker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 341. McGuinne, Irish Type Design, p. 12.

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quest for a historical validation of ecclesiastical innovation and unparalleled disruption. In fact, questions of typography were key to assertions of cultural and ecclesiastical legitimacy in the early modern period. Matthew Parker was keenly interested in the articulation of an ancient English ecclesiastical lineage by way of exemplar for prevailing reformed practices.34 In this regard, the Anglo-Saxon church was benignly viewed as being unmarked by overt Roman influence.35 Committed to demonstrating that Protestant practices had been prefigured by those of the ancient English church, Parker, who employed a group of historians and textual scholars to edit and publish documents pertaining to medieval ecclesiastical history, nurtured a politicised interest in Saxon letters. The London printer and bookseller John Day, acting under the auspices of Parker, commissioned the design and casting of the first Anglo-Saxon fount around 1566, and it was used by Day in the printing of Aelfric’s A Testimony of Antiquitie. In 1570, a second Anglo-Saxon fount was cast. The casting of these types and the publication of historical texts were central to Parker’s project, centred on the delineation of a ‘Protestantized antiquity, an ancient precedent for the institutionalization of the English church under Elizabeth’.36 It is evident that Ó Cearnaigh’s decision to use a Gaelic-style fount was not simply an act of disinterested recognition of a venerable cultural patrimony. Moreover, as Parker’s interest in Anglo-Saxon letters indicated, questions of script and design were inflected with contemporary ideological imperatives. Importantly in this respect, D. F. McKenzie has argued for ‘heightening our sensitivity to the printed book as a physical form in order to refine our notions of the historicity of printed texts’. In the context of the 1571 Gaelic-style fount, it is instructive to reflect on McKenzie’s contention that the ‘physical evidence makes it clear how the book as physical object becomes the book as expressive form’.37 In fact, Ó Cearnaigh’s deployment of a Gaelic-style type was partly motivated by a commitment to securing cultural legitimacy for his publication and 34

35 36

37

Felicity Heal, ‘Appropriating History: Catholic and Protestant Polemics and the National Past’, Huntington Library Quarterly 68:1–2 (2005), 109–32 (p. 113). Caball, ‘Print, Protestantism, and Cultural Authority’, p. 300. Benedict Scott Robinson, ‘“Darke Speech”: Matthew Parker and the Reforming of History’, Sixteenth Century Journal 29:4 (1998), 1061–83 (pp. 1061–2); John N. King, ‘John Day: Master Printer of the English Reformation’, in The Beginnings of English Protestantism, ed. Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 180–208. D. F. McKenzie, ‘The Sociology of a Text: Orality, Literacy and Print in Early New Zealand’, The Library, Sixth Series, 6:4 (1984), 333–65 (p. 334); D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (London: British Library, 1986), p. 8.

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Gaelic culture more broadly in the context of a move to religious reformation essentially derived and imposed from England. Viewed from the perspective of Ó Cearnaigh, a putative historic link between Irish and Anglo-Saxon letters would surely have implied a historic cultural affinity between the English and Irish, which might have partly undermined traditional English ascriptions of barbarity to Gaelic culture. Interestingly, it was commonly assumed down to the eighteenth century that there was a connection between Gaelic and Anglo-Saxon letters, notwithstanding polemical disagreement as to whom was indebted to whom in the first instance. For instance, the distinguished historian and antiquary William Camden (1551–1623) stated in his famous and frequently republished work, Britannia (1586), that the Anglo-Saxons had acquired their characters from the Irish.38 The Gaelic antiquarian Conall Mac Eochagáin, in his 1627 translation of the ‘Annals of Clonmacnoise’, claimed that both the AngloSaxons and Welsh were indebted to the Irish for their alphabets.39 Geoffrey Keating, in the introduction to his magisterial history of Ireland titled Foras Feasa ar Éirinn, completed c.1634/5, claimed not a little maliciously that since the English had not only borrowed their letters from the Irish, they must likewise have acquired their knowledge of literature from their western neighbours.40 Michael Kearney, in a highly rebarbative introduction to his 1635 English translation of Keating’s history, also referred to English indebtedness to the ancient Irish in the matter of the ‘architipe of their letters’ in the course of his defence of the antiquity of the Irish language.41 Given the potent cultural and historical resonance of Gaelic script, it is likely that Ó Cearnaigh was acutely aware of the ideological implications of his decision to align venerable practice with print technology in his presentation of a new and radical religious programme. The mutual influence of the Gaelic and Anglo-Saxon alphabets continued to be debated into the eighteenth century. On the one hand, such claims of a Gaelic lineage for the Anglo-Saxon character were dismissed out of hand in the late seventeenth century by the Cork Protestant lawyer Richard Cox in his Hibernia Anglicana (1689). In a pejorative attack on the linguistic purity of the Irish language, Cox claimed that ‘the Irish use the 38

39 40

41

‘And from thence it may seeme our forefathers the ancient English learned the manner of framing their letters, and of writing; considering that they used the selfesame character, which the Irish commonly use at this day’: William Camden, Britain . . . written first in Latine by William Camden (London, 1610), p. 68. British Library, Additional MS 4817, fol. 4r. Geoffrey Keating, Foras Feasa ar Éirinn le Seathrún Céitinn, D.D., ed. and trans. David Comyn and Patrick S. Dinneen, 4 vols. (London: Irish Texts Society, 1902–13), vol. i, pp. 65–7. Royal Irish Academy, MS 24 G 16, fol. 34r.

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Saxon character to this day’.42 However, on the other hand, as late as 1748, the Mitchelstown-based Church of Ireland clergyman and naturalist John Keogh, in a work dedicated to demonstrating that ‘the native Irish were not that rude, savage, and ignorant people, which the English and others were pleased to call them’, emphasised what he presented as the exceptional nature of Gaelic script (‘The Irish characters are to be seen in printed books, which differ from those of all other languages’). Quoting the testimony of the Antwerp cleric and ecclesiastical historian Aubertus Miraeus (d.1640), Keogh wrote that the ‘English Saxons took the formation of their letters from the Irish’. Furthermore, Keogh argued that the ‘Irish had the knowledge to draw characters or letters to signify their thoughts’, and in this regard they were to be contrasted, implicitly favourably, with their Pictish neighbours in the north of Scotland who reproduced ‘on their bodies the various forms of the sun, moon, stars, beasts, birds, &c’.43 However, Keogh’s intervention came late in a prolonged debate which had effectively been concluded by the Welsh philologist and keeper of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, Edward Lhuyd. In his pioneering study of Celtic philology entitled Archaeologia Britannica (1707), Lhuyd made a credible case for an ancient British provenance for Anglo-Saxon characters.44 Seemingly arcane at first glance, this debate was acutely ideological in its nuance as it touched on matters of cultural integrity and authority essential to the vitality of an embattled Gaelic culture. Early modern sectarian and cultural conflict continued to find its material and visual expression in matters of typography. The Gaelic New Testament which was eventually published in Dublin in 1602 under the direction of another Irish graduate of Cambridge, Uilliam Ó Domhnuill, was partly printed initially by William Kearney and completed by John Franckton, whose imprint featured on the title page. The type used for the New Testament and the 1608 Gaelic Book of Common Prayer was the same as that used for the Aibidil.45 Significantly, Ó Domhnuill, in his epistle dedicatory to the Tiomna Nuadh, acknowledged the patronage of Queen Elizabeth in the Gaelic Protestant print initiative when he wrote that she 42

43 44 45

Richard Cox, Hibernia Anglicana: or, the History of Ireland from the Conquest thereof by the English to this present time, 2 parts (London, 1689–90), part 1, sig. f. John Keogh, A Vindication of the Antiquities of Ireland (Dublin, 1748), pp. 9, 65. Edward Lhuyd, Archaeologia Britannica (Oxford, 1707), p.225. Fearghus Ó Fearghail, The Irish Testament of 1602 (Dublin: National Bible Society of Ireland, 2004); R. J. Hunter, ‘John Franckton (d.1620): Printer, Publisher and Bookseller in Dublin’, in That Woman! Studies in Irish Bibliography: A Festschrift for Mary ‘Paul’ Pollard, ed. Charles Benson and Siobhán Fitzpatrick (Dublin: Lilliput Press for the Library Association of Ireland, 2005), pp. 2–26.

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had ‘provided the Irish characters and other instruments for the presse, in hope that God in mercy would raise up some to translate the Newe Testament into their mother tongue’.46 A rather late, but nonetheless impressive, programme of Counter-Reformation devotional print in Irish was inaugurated by the Franciscans of St Anthony’s College in Leuven, which had been established in 1607. In 1611 the first printed Roman Catholic Christian doctrine in Irish was published in Antwerp by the printer Jacobus Mesius (active c.1592–1625).47 Crucially, in terms of invoking cultural legitimacy and by way of implicitly emphasising the English colonial timbre of the Protestant Reformation in Ireland, this work was undertaken by a former praise poet and Franciscan friar, descended from an illustrious Fermanagh bardic lineage, called Giolla Brighde Ó hEódhusa. Printed in a wholly Gaelic type, a second edition of An Teagasg Críosdaidhe was reprinted in 1614–15 by the Irish Franciscan community at Leuven utilising the same print type as the Antwerp edition, but on this occasion they produced copies by means of their own printing press.48 In a seamless transition from Gaelic praise poet to Counter-Reformation cleric, Ó hEódhusa used the technology of print to legitimate the notion of an Irish Catholic identity underpinned by faith and fatherland. A series of devotional works in Irish followed from the printing press at Leuven which aimed to reinforce Ó hEódhusa’s animating conflation of Irish identity with allegiance to Roman Catholicism. In this instance, as was the case with their Protestant foes, the Irish Franciscans embraced technology, not as an end in itself, but as a means of securing conformity to their ideology. Of course, books were printed in order to be sold and to be read. A tantalising reference to a bookbinder in late seventeenth-century London called Henry Howard, ‘near the Black Spread-Eagle over against the Three Bell Tavern in Fleet Street’, who sold books in Irish, is suggestive of the presence of an Irish-speaking clientele for books in the English metropolis.49 Little is currently known of readers of early modern books 46 47

48

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Uilliam Ó Domhnuill, trans., Tiomna Nuadh (Dublin, 1602), ‘the epistle dedicatorie’, unpaginated. Anne Rouzet, Dictionnaire des imprimeurs, libraires et éditeurs des XVe et XVIe siècles dans les limites géographiques de la Belgique actuelle (Nieuwkoop: B. de Graaf, 1975), p. 147. Marc Caball, ‘Articulating Irish Identity in Early Seventeenth-Century Europe: The Case of Giolla Brighde Ó hEódhusa (c.1570–1614)’, Archivium Hibernicum 62 (2009), 271–93; Marc Caball, ‘Creating an Irish Identity: Print, Culture, and the Irish Franciscans of Louvain’, in Forming Catholic Communities: Irish, Scots and English College Networks in Europe, 1568–1918, ed. Liam Chambers and Thomas O’Connor (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018), pp. 232–57. See annotated flyleaf on Flaithrí Ó Maolchonaire, Sgáthán an chrábhaidh (Leuven, 1616), Bodleian Library Mar.539; B. F. Roberts, ‘Edward Lhwyd’s Collection of Printed Books’, Bodleian Library Record 10:2 (1979), 112–27 (p. 122).

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in Irish. Surviving early modern books which provide evidence of ownership and marginalia testifying to reading experiences require further investigation.50 Given the largely devotional content of these books, it is not surprising that both Protestant and Catholic clergymen acquired such works. For instance, a copy of Francis Molloy’s Lucerna fidelium (Rome, 1676) was gifted to Father Tadhg Ó Súilleabháin by an individual who signed themselves by their initials only.51 Another example of a gifted book was that of the 1690 edition of Ó Domhnuill’s Tiomna Nuadh, which the Scottish clergyman Mr Bailie, minister of Inverness, presented to John Chamberlayne in 1711.52 An edition of Uilliam Ó Domhnuill’s Tiomna Nuadh, reprinted in London in 1681, was owned by a Protestant clergyman called John Guia in 1695.53 A copy of the 1616 Leuven Sgáthán an chrábhaidh, otherwise known as Desiderius, was once in the possession of a Franciscan called John Barnewall (active 1649), who may have written the annotations in Latin scattered across the margins of the work.54 A copy of Antoin Gearnon’s Parrthas an anma (Leuven, 1645) was added to the collection of the Society of Jesus in Brussels in 1649.55 A rare case of lay ownership is that of Lord Deputy Arthur Chichester’s copy of the 1608 Gaelic Book of Common Prayer. Given the work’s dedication to him by its translator, Uilliam Ó Domhnuill, his possession of this pristine copy is unsurprising.56 In light of their relative scarcity, books in Irish were also a subject of interest to book collectors such as Thomas Grenville (1755–1846), whose copy of the 1611 An Teagasg Críosdaidhe was among the contents of the large library he bequeathed to the British Museum.57 Of course, in the absence of a Catholic version of the Irish Bible, Catholic clergymen availed of the Protestant translation. For instance, Nicholas Foran (d.1855), bishop of Waterford, and a Jesuit priest named Thomas Hennessy, at various times owned a copy of the 1685 Protestant Irish Bible.58 A comprehensive review of book ownership and annotated texts will certainly enhance understanding of the complex dynamic of print as a knowledge vector in Gaelic literary and scribal cultures. Crucially, the collation of details of ownership and evidence of readership will be key to 50

51 53 54 56 58

David Pearson, Provenance Research in Book History: A Handbook (London: British Library, 1994), pp. 12–39; Mary Hammond, ‘Book History in the Reading Experience’, in The Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book, ed. Leslie Howsam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 237–52. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, M2400.5. 52 British Library, 1003 b 8. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, 266122. Newberry Library, Chicago, Bonaparte 7146. 55 Newberry Library, Chicago, Bonaparte 7153. Morgan Library, New York, PML 22709. 57 British Library, G.5485. Newberry Library, Chicago, Bonaparte 7126.

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understanding how readers engaged with printed texts in Irish in terms of a contextualised understanding of the ecology of cultural and literary creation. A further complexity which requires consideration in the study of print technology and the Gaelic tradition centres on the fact that many printed texts in Irish were copied and transmitted via manuscript.59 More generally, a vibrant Gaelic scribal culture was informed and energised by a creative confluence of script, print, and orality.60 Ironically, in a counterintuitive reversal of the impact of technology, print itself was subsumed within the scribal repertoire. It is possible to glimpse something of a samizdat textual approach in the case of a group of Cork Protestant converts in the early nineteenth century. Apparently, such was the desire of these individuals in 1817 ‘to obtain possession of the Scriptures in Irish’ that they petitioned the Anglican bishop of Cork for a loan of a copy of the Irish Bible, which was subsequently deposited in the library of his cathedral. Permitted access to the library, twelve of these converts gathered on Sundays to copy out by hand the printed text, ‘after which the portion copied is read aloud for the information and gratification of the whole body’.61 Of course, only a small minority of Irish speakers was literate in the language. Sometime around 1814, a Protestant clergyman called John Graham, a curate in the parish of Maghera in the diocese of Derry, described how a few copies of Ó Domhnuill’s Tiomna Nuadh were acquired from Dublin and ‘exposed to sale in different shops in Maghera, but none of them were bought’. Furthermore, although ‘many of the inhabitants of the Irish townlands attempted to read them’, they did so without any degree of ease of comprehension.62 While in the early modern period literacy may have been regarded by the colonial authorities as a pathway to obedience and docility, in the nineteenth century its potentially subversive dimension was viewed with hostility by Catholic

59

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Meidhbhín Ní Úrdail, The Scribe in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Ireland: Motivations and Milieu (Münster: Nodus, 2000), pp. 210–11. By way of example of a local scribal milieu, see Eilís Ní Dheá, ‘Peadar Ó Conaill, Scoláire agus Scríobhaí (1755–1826)’, in County Clare Studies, ed. Ciarán Ó Murchadha (Ennis: Clare Archaeological and Historical Studies, 2000), pp. 137–49; Eilís Ní Dheá, ‘Scríobhaithe Lámhscríbhinní Gaeilge i gContae an Chláir 1700-1900’, in Clare: History and Society, ed. Matthew Lynch and Patrick Nugent (Dublin: Geography Publications, 2008), pp. 139–55. See also Breandán Ó Conchúir, Scríobhaithe Chorcaí, 1700–1850 (Dublin: An Clóchomhar, 1982). Pádraig de Brún, Scriptural Instruction in the Vernacular: The Irish Society and Its Teachers, 1818–1827 (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 2009), p. 23. William Shaw Mason, A Statistical Account, or Parochial Survey of Ireland, 3 vols. (Dublin, 1814, 1816, 1819), vol. i, p. 592.

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priests alarmed by evangelical encroachment.63 In 1842, Timothy Sullivan was defiant in his response to a parish priest near Killarney who condemned him and his family from the altar for becoming Protestants and for being under ‘the power and influence of the devil’. Sullivan acknowledged with pride and determination that he was ‘guilty of reading the Holy Scriptures in the Irish language these eighteen years past, and of teaching the language to those around me for many years’.64 Ultimately, the power of print technology when linked to sectarian ideology was deemed inherently subversive by those adversely impacted. Increasingly, print in English became commonplace in nineteenthcentury Ireland while print in Irish was confined to the cultural and antiquarian margins prior to the Gaelic Revival.65 By way of conclusion, it is useful to reflect on the culture of print in the town where the harper Thomas O’Shea had his broadsheet printed in the late eighteenth century. Around 1813, the county town of Kerry, Tralee, supported two newspapers and a circulating library, while it was noted by a traveller that ‘poor Catholics are beginning to look into and read little cheap books’.66 Moreover, as late as the 1840s, Tralee contained a significant Irishspeaking population while Gaelic scribal activity in the locality continued well into the nineteenth century.67 Emblematically, however, an account published in a Tralee newspaper of the death in 1837 of the notable Cork Gaelic scribe Mícheál Óg Ó Longáin situated his work in a somewhat arcane context of cultural preservation in the face of irretrievable loss. In this regard, Ó Longáin was acknowledged to have ‘transcribed near 300 volumes of Irish manuscripts, thus rescuing from destruction several rare and curious specimens of the ancient literature of Ireland’.68 In 1842, Tralee Mechanics’ Institute moved to new premises where a library was ‘supplied with valuable scientific and generally useful works, and the News Room with several newspapers of different politics’.69 In 1847, Andrew Shea, 63

64 65

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Keith Thomas, ‘The Meaning of Literacy in Early Modern England’, in The Written Word: Literacy in Transition, ed. Gerd Baumann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 97–131 (p. 118). Kerry Evening Post, 5 February 1842. Marie-Louise Legg, Newspapers and Nationalism: The Irish Provincial Press, 1850–1892 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999). James Hall, Tour Through Ireland, 2 vols. (London, 1813), vol. i, p. 244. See, for example, the case of the Gaelic scribe and Tralee stonemason, Uilliam Ó Cathasaigh, who was active c.1817: Nessa Ní Shéaghdha, Catalogue of Irish Manuscripts in the National Library of Ireland (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1984), fasciculus viii, 54–7. See also Mary Hickson, ‘The River Lee of Kerry: Its True Course and Its Identity with the Dur of Ptolemy’, Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, Fifth Series, 6:2 (1896), 173–5 (p. 174); Pádraig de Brún, ed., Filíocht Sheáin Uí Bhraonáin (Dublin: Cló Bhréanainn, 1972), pp. 40, 48. Tralee Mercury, 24 May 1837. 69 Kerry Evening Post, 16 November 1842.

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a bookseller in the town, advertised a comprehensive list of works which had been recently ordered by his clients. Among the items in demand were works by Charles Dickens and Walter Scott, as well as almanacs and a series of horticultural and agricultural guides authored by Martin Doyle, the nom de plume of the Church of Ireland clergyman and horticulturalist William Hickey (1787–1875). Shea reminded clients ‘residing in distant parts of the county’ that there was ‘daily communication by cars between the several country towns and Tralee’ should they wish to expedite purchases conveniently.70 Effectively, Tralee, like other similar Irish towns, was by then subsumed within a provincial British culture of print. While print technology had influenced Gaelic literary and scribal cultures in some important respects from the late sixteenth century onwards, the power of print would not wholly transform writing in Irish until the twentieth century.

Select Bibliography Caball, Marc, ‘Gaelic and Protestant: A Case Study in Early Modern SelfFashioning, 1567–1608’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 110C (2010), 191–215. ‘Print, Protestantism, and Cultural Authority in Elizabethan Ireland’, in Elizabeth I and Ireland, ed. Brendan Kane and Valerie McGowan-Doyle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 286–308. ‘The Bible in Early Modern Gaelic Ireland: Tradition, Collaboration and Alienation’, in The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England, c.1530–1700, ed. Kevin Killeen, Helen Smith, and Rachel Judith Willie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 332–49. ‘Creating an Irish Identity: Print, Culture, and the Irish Franciscans of Louvain’, in Forming Catholic Communities: Irish, Scots and English College Networks in Europe, 1568–1918, ed. Liam Chambers and Thomas O’Connor (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018), pp. 232–57. Hunter, R. J., ‘John Franckton (d.1620): Printer, Publisher and Bookseller in Dublin’, in That Woman! Studies in Irish Bibliography: A Festschrift for Mary ‘Paul’ Pollard, ed. Charles Benson and Siobhán Fitzpatrick (Dublin: Lilliput Press for the Library Association of Ireland, 2005), pp. 2–26. McGuinne, Dermot, Irish Type Design: A History of Printing Types in the Irish Character (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1992). McKenzie, D. F., Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (London: British Library, 1986).

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Kerry Examiner, 12 January 1847.

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Ní Úrdail, Meidhbhín, The Scribe in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Ireland: Motivations and Milieu (Münster: Nodus, 2000). Ó Ciardha, Éamonn, ‘The Irish Book in Irish in the Early Modern Period, 1691–1800’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland/Iris an dá chultúr 28 (2013), 13–36. Ó Ciosáin, Niall, ‘Printed Popular literature in Irish, 1750–1850: Presence and Absence’, in The Origins of Popular Literacy in Ireland: Language Change and Educational Development, 1700–1920, ed. Mary Daly and David Dickson (Dublin: Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin, 1990), pp. 45–57. ‘Print and Irish, 1570–1900: An Exception Among the Celtic Languages?’, Radharc: A Journal of Irish and Irish-American Studies 5–7 (2004–06), 73–106. Pollard, M., Dublin’s Trade in Books, 1550–1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). Sharpe, Richard, ‘Manuscript and Print in Gaelic Scotland and Ireland, 1689–1832’, in Rannsachadh na Gàidhlig 8: Language and Culture, ed. Wilson McLeod, Anja Gunderloch, and Rob Dunbar (Edinburgh: Dunedin Academic Press, 2016), pp. 31–53. Williams, Nicholas, I bPrionta i Leabhar: Na Protastúin agus Prós na Gaeilge, 1567–1724 (Dublin: An Clóchomhar, 1986).

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chapter 2

Printing and Publishing Technologies, 1700–1820 Máire Kennedy

The eighteenth century was a pivotal period for the emergence of new literary forms to engage readers of all ages. Imaginative writing developed and attracted new audiences as literacy expanded among different cohorts; poetry became a particular growth area in Ireland.1 In December 1690, five months after the Battle of the Boyne, a little known Dublin printer called John Brett printed the first poem of what was to be a golden age for Irish verse in English; its author was Jonathan Swift, then a twenty-three-yearold graduate of Trinity College, Dublin. Between 1700 and 1740, over 130 printers of verse were active in Dublin.2 The form of the novel developed from short tales and romances to the recognisably modern long prose narrative during the course of the eighteenth century. Multi-volume novels came into their own towards the end of the century, and were available to purchase or to borrow by Irish readers. Religious controversies and political debate continued to be carried out effectively by pamphlet: slim pamphlets were quick to set and print, cheap to produce, and were affordable to many who wished to keep abreast of events. From Swift’s Drapier’s Letters in the 1720s to the range of pro- and anti-Union pamphlets at the end of the century, authors had a ready opportunity to set out their positions and readers enabled to form their own political opinions. Meantime, printed high-profile sermons, plays, librettos, and farces could be produced cheaply to appeal to a large, if not a mass audience; the printing of plays coincided with performances taking place in theatres in London, Dublin, Cork, Belfast, or Waterford. A final category of interest is that of children’s literature, which emerged as a genre in its own right during this period,

1

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Toby Barnard, Brought to Book: Print in Ireland, 1680–1784 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2017), pp. 238–51. See Andrew Carpenter, ‘Poetry in English, 1690–1800: From the Williamite Wars to the Act of Union’, in The Cambridge History of Irish Literature, ed. Margaret Kelleher and Philip O’Leary, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), vol. i, pp. 282–319 (p. 282).

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marketed to a child audience and attracting authors to write specifically for their amusement and moral development. Consumption of literary works increased significantly during the eighteenth century in Ireland and was facilitated by a range of technological, social, and marketing factors. Advanced literacy was the key requirement for a vibrant cultural engagement with literature, and education for the sons and daughters of middle-income families became more affordable and more acceptable from the middle decades of the century. Boys were educated in the classics for university, but practical career subjects, such as mathematics, surveying, accounting, astronomy, navigation, and fortification also equipped them for business and the professions. The education of girls was generally more limited, confined to reading, writing, needlework, dancing, French, and drawing.3 Whyte’s academy in Grafton Street, Dublin, conducted by Samuel Whyte and supported by theatre manager Thomas Sheridan and his family, put a major emphasis on the teaching of literature, encouraging students to write and to perform. Whyte edited an anthology of poems, songs, and epigrams called The Shamrock: or Hibernian Cresses, which was published in Dublin in 1772. Here, poetry in English and Latin was showcased and published by subscription, and the list of subscribers shows wealthy and literary Dublin book buyers supporting his publication.4 Levels of literacy continued to increase in the nineteenth century, and with the establishment of the national school system in 1831, basic literacy became widespread across the country, thus further widening the base of potential readers for literary works.5

The Printing Press Without the printing press it is impossible to imagine the spread and development of literary forms. In her classic work, Elizabeth Eisenstein shows how printing influenced and accelerated social change by enabling the spread of Reformation ideas.6 The invention of the printing press using movable metal type (attributed to Johann Gutenberg in Mainz in 3 4 5

6

Máire Kennedy, French Books in Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2001). Samuel Whyte, The Shamrock, or Hibernian Cresses (Dublin: R. Marchbank, 1772). For more on this topic, see Mary Daly and David Dickson, eds., The Origins of Popular Literacy in Ireland: Language Change and Educational Development, 1700–1920 (Dublin: Trinity College Dublin & University College Dublin, 1990); Niall Ó Ciosáin, ‘Oral Culture, Literacy, and Reading, 1800– 50’, in The Oxford History of the Irish Book, Vol. iv: The Irish Book in English 1800–1891, ed. James H. Murphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 173–91. Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

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Germany in the mid-fifteenth century) was a revolutionary technical step. Printing was possible before this time, using wooden blocks, but the text was static; the revolutionary nature of the invention lay in the ability to print a text using individual letters and to break it up and reuse the same letters in different combinations to create a new text. Printed books could be produced in large quantities, and guaranteed an accurate and uniform text, free of scribal errors. This uniformity, however, is somewhat illusory. Copies of books from the hand press period are rarely identical; printers corrected errors in the text while in the process of printing and did not discard earlier iterations. For a large and complex volume, discrete sections with minor differences could be printed at different times, or even by different printers. A print run, or a portion of it, could be purchased by another printer and issued under his or her own imprint, using a new title page. This technological feature has in turn enabled literary scholars to study minute differences in the texts of different copies of early works in order to trace the evolution of the text and seek to create a definitive edition. The form of the wooden hand press changed very little from its invention up to the advent of the iron press in the early nineteenth century. The press itself was a simple design and could be made by a carpenter: printing was achieved by pulling on the wooden bar which acted on a large screw, the pressure making the impression on the paper. It took two people to operate a printing press, one for inking the letters and the other to place the paper and pull the bar to make the impression. Presses could be purchased relatively cheaply, either new or second-hand; this allowed printing in many small towns to emerge during the eighteenth century, bringing the printed word deep into the Irish countryside. Provincial printers often started their businesses by purchasing a second-hand printing press. Once acquired, a press tended to have a long and fairly trouble-free life: its wooden parts easily repaired or replaced locally. Prosperous Dublin printers renewing their presses would dispose of older models; printers retiring from business or whose business had failed would sell the press and type founts to realise capital. A good second-hand press and chases could be got for about twelve guineas in the 1780s.7 For printing history, the nineteenth century was a time of immense technical invention, when the wooden hand press gave way to the iron press, platen, and cylinder presses. The Stanhope iron press was developed in 7

Robert Herbert, ‘An Eighteenth Century Limerick Printing Venture’, Irish Book Lover 28 (1942), 104–12.

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England in the early years of the nineteenth century,8 its design a template for the Columbian press invented by George Clymer in the United States a decade later. These large iron presses were powerful and robust, with compound levers which increased the force of the bar, doubling the production rate of the wooden press. The Columbian press, with its instantly recognisable bald eagle perched as a counterweight, was manufactured right up to the twentieth century. Examples of this press can be seen in libraries and print museums, as its survival rates are high and its aesthetic qualities make it a prize exhibit. Some Irish printers associated themselves with the new presses; for example, Jeremiah Geary, printer, bookseller, and stationer in Castle Street, Cork, printed at the Stanhope Press Printing Office, and Edward N. Connellan, printer, bookseller, and stationer in Patrick Street, Cork, named his shop the New Stanhope Press Printing Office in 1820. However, Frank Ferguson has shown that Irish printers, especially outside Dublin, were not always in a position to shift to a centralised industrial manufacturing model, due to Ireland’s small capacity as a producer and competition from her more industrialised neighbours.9 While the design of the printing press was not revolutionary in itself – in fact, simple forms of the press had existed for many centuries – it was the invention and use of movable metal type, each letter cast separately from a mould, that made the technology so irresistible and so far-reaching. Since the beginning of letterpress printing, efforts were constantly being made to improve the look and design of the typeface used. Type founding was a specialist skill which involved design as well as the casting of metal to create the letter. Different typefaces were created to make reading easier; specialist typefaces were also needed for certain works. Throughout the eighteenth century, roman typeface was used predominantly in Englishlanguage works. With constant use, a set of type will become worn and blunt, and consequently the replacement of type was one of the largest financial outlays for a printer; it is estimated that type accounted for about two-thirds of the cost of the printing-house plant.10 For works of literature, a handsome, clear, easy-to-read typeface was preferable, and enterprising booksellers drew attention to it in their prospectuses for new books. Firsttime provincial printers often started with used and worn type, and upgraded their stock as the venture became successful. John Veacock, for 8 9

10

Charles Benson, The Dublin Book Trade 1801–1850 (London: Bibliographical Society, 2021) . Frank Ferguson, ‘The Industrialization of Irish Book Production, 1790–1900’, in The Oxford History of the Irish Book, Vol. iv: The Irish Book in English, 1800–1891, ed. James H. Murphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 9–26. M. Pollard, Dublin’s Trade in Books, 1550–1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 120.

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instance, began business in Waterford in 1791 having purchased the printing equipment of Matthew Power, who was forced to sell to meet his debts. The equipment included a large printing press, complete with printing furniture, a range of type founts, and ‘upwards of 100 well executed cuts, for Songs &c.’11 In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, type was usually imported from Holland or England, and from the first decade of the eighteenth century, type began to be cast in Ireland by dedicated type founders.12 Subsequently, a mixture of Irish and imported type founts was used by many printers. By the nineteenth century, iron presses, with their enhanced printing pressure and increased sheet size, allowed major changes in type design. This innovation in type design and format, allowing the use of a variety of styles and oversized letters, can be seen most clearly in theatrical playbills and advertising posters. Books and pamphlets were illustrated from the early days of printing; the wood-block technique predated that of printing with movable type, and paved the way for its invention. Such book illustrations from wood blocks and woodcuts were basic, displaying thick black lines on a white background. As the printing blocks, made of soft wood, were used over and over, the quality of the image deteriorated incrementally. Surviving chapbooks and ballad sheets demonstrate the use of images that were faded and inappropriate to the text, with the loss of sharpness in detail due to overuse and wear. Printing from engraved metal plates, dating from the fifteenth century, was an altogether more sophisticated process, but it was costly. The engraved image, as seen in the best work of Dürer, Holbein, or Rembrandt, could deliver sharpness and detail, displaying a high artistic quality. The technique of copper-plate printing allowed finely detailed images to be used scientifically, notably in botanical and anatomical illustrations, where fine detail distinguished different elements of a plant or organ. In comparison, the techniques of woodcuts and wood engraving which proliferated in book illustration did not have the capacity to show the slight degrees of difference that were essential to a scientific diagram, even though high levels of artistic achievement can be seen in the wood engravings of artists such as Thomas Bewick. Copper plates, and later steel engraving, were techniques also used to illustrate fiction, stories and poetry, and historical and travel works, making them more appealing to their readership. When John Chambers, a bookseller in Dublin, advertised 11 12

Waterford Herald, 6 September 1791; 27 September 1791. W. G. Strickland, Type-Founding in Dublin, Bibliographical Society of Ireland 2:2 (Dublin: John Falconer, 1922), pp. 23–32; Pollard, Dublin’s Trade in Books, pp. 120–3.

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his fine edition of Cervantes’s Don Quixote in four volumes with plates in 1796, he claimed to have taken great care with typography, hot-pressed wove paper, and illustrations.13 Classics such as Gulliver’s Travels (1726) well demonstrate the evolution of the techniques and processes of illustration over the centuries.14

The Newspaper as a Vector of Change The newspaper was one of the most compelling print forms of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and a key vector of social and economic change. Beginning with a single folio printed on both sides and issued twice a week in the late seventeenth century, newspapers became a staple of country printers in the second half of the eighteenth century, with titles printed in most counties; by the nineteenth century consolidation is evident as big-name titles dominated. Apart from some early periodical publishing in mid-seventeenth-century Ireland during the Confederate wars, the earliest regular news-sheets were issued in Dublin from 1685.15 While newspaper publishers were active in Dublin from this period, it was not until the mid-eighteenth century that the conditions were favourable for local newspaper publishing in the country towns to develop.16 During the eighteenth century, improvements in communications facilitated the establishment of distribution networks around the country, resulting in major social and commercial development. The newspaper provided the most comprehensive medium for this dissemination of information and literacy was not necessarily a requirement, as evidence shows that one newspaper could be shared among readers and read aloud to groups of listeners. Readers subscribed to the papers, usually on an annual, but sometimes on a quarterly basis, and newspaper vendors sold individual issues on the streets of Dublin and other cities. Newspapers were made available in coffee houses from the late seventeenth century, and Dublin coffee houses were especially renowned for the range of newspapers which they carried. Coffee houses in the provincial towns followed suit in the second half of 13 14

15

16

Dublin Evening Post, 22 March 1796; 16 April 1796. Valerie Coghlan, ‘Picturing Gulliver’, in Reading Gulliver: Essays in Celebration of Jonathan Swift’s Classic, ed. Máire Kennedy and Alastair Smeaton (Dublin: Dublin City Public Libraries, 2008), pp. 69–95. Robert Munter, The History of the Irish Newspaper, 1685–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967). Máire Kennedy, ‘Eighteenth-Century Newspaper Publishing in Munster and South Leinster’, Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society 103 (1998), 67–88.

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the eighteenth century, making a range of London, Dublin, and local papers available to their customers. By 1720, advertising became a notable feature of the newspaper, starting a trend for print advertising that had long-term effects. Printed advertising, in the form of handbills and posters and later of newspaper advertisements, was one of the most influential developments in the distribution of literary works. Theatrical notices were posted up in public places: a close look at James Malton’s Views of Dublin (1797) reveals the presence of posters on the columns of the Parliament House (now Bank of Ireland) on College Green, and theatrical posters on the wall of the Assembly House in William Street. Newspaper advertising, however, reached a much wider audience, as these were distributed through the countryside. With the benefit of retrospect, it is evident how advertising created a taste and a market for particular luxury items. Inserted by prosperous businesses, especially those dealing in expensive commodities, advertisements covered the sale of wine and spirits, drapery and millinery, books and periodicals, patent medicines, garden plants and seeds, and teas and other luxury foods. Eighteenth-century newspapers were owned and printed by booksellers, and it was in their interest to advertise their own publications and stock; therefore book, periodical, and pamphlet advertising formed a large part of a provincial printer’s newspaper space. Booksellers’ priced catalogues of books were also distributed with their papers, and in this way readers could keep au fait with new publications even without access to bookshops. Newspapers were delivered to agents in surrounding towns: these agents occasionally had bookshops, but more often they kept inns, apothecaries, and grocer’s shops; by the 1790s, a substantial number of delivery centres were post offices. At these centres newspapers were dropped and advertisements and subscriptions were taken in. Edmund Finn, printer and bookseller in Kilkenny, announced the distribution of monthly periodicals such as Exshaw’s Gentleman’s and London Magazine, Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, Town and Country Magazine, and Lady’s Magazine to ‘any part of the Country where this newspaper is usually sent’, at the rate of 8s 8d per annum in the country and 6s 6d in town to subscribers of the newspaper.17 The annual publications, Watson’s Almanack and The English Registry, could be supplied to his country customers by the ‘different Post-boys who deliver the News-paper in the remote parts of the Country’.18

17 18

Finn’s Leinster Journal, 14 September 1768; 1 September 1773; 27 April 1774. Finn’s Leinster Journal, 25 January 1769.

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By the late eighteenth century, many newspapers included a literary section and readers were encouraged to contribute poetry and prose pieces. One example is Finn’s Leinster Journal in Kilkenny, established by Edmund Finn in 1767, which included a literary section called ‘Poet’s Corner’.19 The Hibernian Chronicle newspaper in Cork, founded in 1769, also had a regular literary section: William Flyn, printer and proprietor of the Chronicle, offered the pages of the paper as ‘a rendezvous for volunteer authors of both sexes’, a first, he claimed, for a Cork newspaper.20 Occasionally literary pieces in prose or poetry were inserted to tie in with the publication of a book, or the performance of a play. In 1792, Dr James Saint-John’s Memoirs were published by subscription; in the same year, poems and extracts from his works appeared in the Waterford Herald.21 In the nineteenth century, The Nation newspaper, founded by Charles Gavan Duffy in 1842 and edited by Thomas Davis, famously became an organ of the Young Ireland movement, fostering the idea of Ireland’s separate identity and her right to independence. This influential newspaper carried stories, ballads, poetry, and prose with a nationalist slant contributed by its readers, but less commented upon is its special role in advertising other publications relating to Ireland’s literature, history, and heritage. While newspapers provided information and advertising for new publications, and in some cases a forum for poets and writers, they did not generally provide reviews and recommendations. The growth of general and literary magazines in Britain, and later locally produced in Ireland, created an audience for works of literature, history, and travel. These magazines were issued monthly or quarterly and delivered to readers all over the country. From their foundation in the 1730s, the English monthly magazines the Gentleman’s Magazine (1731–1922) and its rival the London Magazine (1732–85) were imported for Irish readers. Their content was general, focusing on news stories and essays, but they also included original contributions, critical essays, and lists of new publications. Edward Exshaw, printer and bookseller in Dublin, imported the London Magazine from the mid-1730s, but in 1741 he began to issue an Irish edition. This was not merely a reprint of the London edition, but like Irish editions of modern newspapers, involved reprinting most of the original content of the magazine, while including some material of Irish interest such as news items, listings of new Irish books, and notices of

19 21

Finn’s Leinster Journal, 23–26 December 1767. 20 Hibernian Chronicle, 2 January 1772. Waterford Herald, 1 March 1792; 25 October 1792; 27 October 1792; 6 December 1792.

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births, marriages, deaths, and promotions.22 Eventually selections from both magazines were combined in Exshaw’s Gentleman’s and London Magazine (1752–94). Locally produced monthly magazines containing book reviews and excerpts from new publications, based on the English model, began to be published from the mid-eighteenth century. Magazines such as The Dublin Magazine (1762–5), Walker’s Hibernian Magazine (1771–1811), Dublin University Magazine (1833–80), and James Duffy’s series of magazines published from the 1840s to the 1860s,23 gave more space to the appreciation and encouragement of literature. British review journals such as the Monthly Review (1749–1845), Critical Review (1756–1817), or the quarterly Edinburgh Review (1802–1929) and Quarterly Review (1809–1967) were influential not only in guiding readers’ tastes, but also in publishers’ decisions to reprint certain titles and to advertise them.

Circulating Libraries The eighteenth century saw a decisive move from intensive to extensive reading, facilitated by significant changes in book distribution. Up to this time, due to the limited availability of books and low literacy levels, reading for many was confined to a small number of books, such as the Bible, prayer books, almanacs, or chapbooks, read over and over again. The availability of new literary forms and the desire to read them drove this change in reading patterns. A crucial breakthrough was made for readers with the concept of borrowing books from commercial libraries. Borrowing was always a major feature of reading practice, but it was previously from family, neighbours, and friends, which gave limited choice. With the advent of commercial ventures, the very latest and most sought-after titles became available for borrowing. The widespread and intricate networks of book distribution enabled the establishment of circulating libraries in the larger towns and cities and fashionable resorts. Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s much quoted line from The Rivals indicates their importance in the lives of readers, but also points to suspicion in some quarters about the kind of reading offered: ‘a circulating library in a town is

22

23

Geraldine Sheridan, ‘Irish Literary Review Magazines and Enlightenment France, 1730–1790’, in Ireland and the French Enlightenment, 1700–1800, ed. Graham Gargett and Geraldine Sheridan (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 21–46; 235–42. Rolf Loeber and Magda Stouthamer-Loeber, ‘James Duffy and Catholic Nationalism’, in The Oxford History of the Irish Book, Vol. iv: The Irish Book in English 1800–1891, ed. James H. Murphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 115–21.

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as an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge! It blossoms through the year!’24 Currency of titles was a critical factor: so popular were certain threevolume novels that each volume was lent separately to cater to the maximum readership. Robert Darnton points to the frenzy to read Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Heloïse in France as booksellers lent out volumes by the day or even the hour.25 The English translation, Eloisa, was available in a Dublin edition in four volumes duodecimo costing 10s 10d.26 In Ireland in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, novels typically cost from 2s to 3s 3d per volume, while the membership fees at circulating libraries provided good value for readers. When James Williams, bookseller in Dublin, established his circulating library in 1764, his fees were 16s 3d a year, 4s 6d per quarter, or 6d a week.27 A similar range of fees was in place thirty years later when Vincent Dowling conducted the Apollo Library in Suffolk Street, Dublin, in the 1790s: 16s 3d per year, 5s 5d per quarter, or 6½d per week.28 In October 1792 the Apollo advertised 1,000 new volumes just arrived from London: they included multi-volume novels, travel, memoirs, and biographies.29 A year later, with a move to a more extensive premises on Suffolk Street, Dowling promised ‘every new work of merit constantly added to the collection, with all the London and Dublin magazines and reviews’.30 John Connor, printer and bookseller in Cork, conducted his circulating library from 1790, issuing catalogues of library holdings and importing some of his library stock from London (he also published poetry and new novels by Irish authors).31 In 1795 and 1796, respectively, he published by subscription Anna Millikin’s Eva, an Old Irish Story and Mrs Creech’s Mary or, the Uses of Adversity in two volumes, taking 100 copies of each himself for sale and for the library.

Copyright The political and legal changes which came into effect in Ireland in 1801 with the passing of the Act of Union with Great Britain also had long-term publishing repercussions for the next century. The provisions of the 24 25

26 28 30 31

Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Rivals (Dublin: R. Moncrieffe, 1775), Act i, Scene ii. Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (London, Penguin, 1985), p. 235. Dublin Catalogue, 1779. 27 Public Gazetteer, 13 October 1764. Freeman’s Journal, 8 September 1792. 29 Freeman’s Journal, 20 October 1792. Freeman’s Journal, 1 October 1793. Cork Gazette, 17 April 1793; 20 April 1793; 5 September 1795; Cork Advertiser, 16 August 1800.

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Copyright Act, which was extended to Ireland as part of the Act of Union, changed the legal framework in which Irish publishers operated, in particular in relation to reprinting literary works. This, allied to the migration of the parliamentary elite to London, meant a profound change to printing and bookselling in Ireland. Legal protection for literary property was introduced into England in 1709 with the British Copyright Act; however, the act was not considered by the Irish parliament and was not adopted as law. As a result, Irish printers, who were small-scale and under-capitalised at this time, could legally reprint any works first printed in England, Scotland, or Wales without having to pay for copy, or to pay royalties. This became a problem when the Irish book trade began to develop and Irish printers began to undercut London prices, making inroads into the London booksellers’ profits by supplying the important Irish market. As the eighteenth century progressed, Irish printers became more active in reprinting and creating a home market for their publications, and they were classed as ‘pirates’ by the London trade. The reprint business was enormously profitable, and the Dublin book trade flourished by reprinting bestsellers as soon as they appeared in London; Dublin booksellers also undercut the market by producing books in a smaller format, thus reducing the price for the consumer. Popular works of fiction first published in London made their way to Irish readers in the form of cheaper Irish reprints almost as soon as they appeared in British bookshops. Translations of popular continental authors also followed this route.32 The vibrancy of the market meant that it was worthwhile for Irish printers to source new works as soon as, or even before, publication in London or Edinburgh.33 Some printers, such as John Murray, made an accommodation with his Irish counterparts to streamline the process and lessen his losses.34 While the extension of the Copyright Act to Ireland effectively put an end to the lucrative reprint trade, changes in the economics of book production were already noticeable in the 1790s due to punitive taxation on paper.35 32

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Máire Kennedy, ‘Foreign Language Books, 1700–1800’, in The Oxford History of the Irish Book, Vol. iii: The Irish Book in English, 1550–1800, ed. Raymond Gillespie and Andrew Hadfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 368–82. Richard B. Sher, The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in EighteenthCentury Britain, Ireland, and America (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006). William Zachs, The First John Murray and the Late Eighteenth-Century London Book Trade (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1998). Charles Benson, ‘The Dublin Book Trade’, in The Oxford History of the Irish Book, Vol. iv: The Irish Book in English, 1800–1891, ed. James H. Murphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 27–46.

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After 1801, the nature of the book trade changed, contracting and focusing on Irish authors and works of local interest. Certain elements of the trade endured, such as the printing of schoolbooks, books of devotion, chapbooks, and religious tracts; conversely, genres of literature were most affected and the output of fiction from Dublin presses plummeted.36 This change in direction gave an opportunity to local authors to have their works published (John Connor, printer and bookseller in Cork, issued a series of original novels in the early nineteenth century), but many preferred to take their work to London for publication. Printing of local works by subscription, always an element of Irish book publishing, became a noticeable feature of this more restricted market,37 and the market for luxury items shrank as the focus of fashionable life moved to London. This profound change was felt most in Dublin as the centre of power shifted, and many book businesses failed. The aftermath of the 1798 rebellion saw the exile of several radical booksellers; America was the destination of choice, and thriving bookshops and newspapers under the direction of Irish booksellers were founded in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York.38

The Paper Time Bomb New technologies in papermaking in the early nineteenth century meant a moving away from handmade rag paper, which was expensive to produce, to mechanically manufactured paper made from plant-based materials. This allowed a cheaper product to help bring down the cost of printed materials for a wider audience. However, the seeds of destruction were in the paper itself: high concentrations of acid caused it to become brittle over time and to disintegrate. Sales of writing and printing paper had increased steadily through the eighteenth century. Quality white paper was used for writing, and the rise in literacy led to a greater demand for paper for business and correspondence. After type, paper was the most expensive outlay for a printer. Book production increased during the century – the English Short Title Catalogue records 152 titles printed in Dublin in 1700–1701 compared with 1,341 in 1799–1800 – and from mid-century, newspapers were printed

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See Susan Parkes, Kildare Place: The History of the Church of Ireland Training College, 1811–1969 (Rathmines: Church of Ireland College of Education, 1984); Benson, The Dublin Book Trade. Benson, The Dublin Book Trade. Richard Cargill Cole, Irish Booksellers and English Writers, 1740–1800 (London: Mansell Publishing Ltd, 1986); Sher, The Enlightenment and the Book.

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in most major Irish towns. In the early century, the bulk of paper used in Ireland was imported from Great Britain, the Netherlands, and France. By mid-century, several water-powered paper mills were set up around the country. A ring of mills was built around the city of Dublin, with nineteen in counties Dublin and Kildare as identified by Mary Pollard.39 Large concerns in Limerick, Cork, Waterford, Kilkenny, and Galway further supplied the needs of the country, although paper continued to be imported. Technical innovations in the early nineteenth century introduced steam power into the paper mill, replacing water power and making production more streamlined. However, the supply of linen and cotton rags for papermaking could not keep pace with demand, and new methods of papermaking were investigated with some urgency. The discovery of chlorine for bleaching in 1774 by the German chemist Carl Scheele allowed for the use of coloured rags which could be bleached for white papermaking: this increased the supply of basic raw material, but more capacity was needed.40 Subsequently, the development of machines to make paper greatly increased the output and reduced the cost of production: Ireland’s first papermaking machine, a Fourdrinier, was introduced by Bartholomew Sullivan of Golden Bridge Mills, Dublin, in the 1820s. This innovation was so unpopular with workers that Sullivan had to import workers from Scotland, and it operated under police protection for its first three years.41 As the surge in demand for paper continued, new methods of papermaking using wood pulp instead of rags allowed expansion in production. Wood pulp was more readily available and cheaper to source than rags, but the resulting paper had a weaker structure, since wood-pulp paper contains chemicals such as lignin which can become oxidised when exposed to light, causing discoloration. Acidification occurs during manufacture with the use of aluminium sulphate to size the paper: this makes the paper hard and brittle, and it disintegrates easily. Most affected are cheaply produced print materials, such as newspapers, chapbooks, and ephemera, and these items, held in libraries around the world, are now in considerable danger of deterioration and loss unless expensive deacidification interventions are applied.

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M. Pollard, A Dictionary of Members of the Dublin Book Trade, 1550–1800 (London: Bibliographical Society, 2000). Mark Kurlansky, Paper: Paging Through History (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2016). H. Ewen, ‘Paper Making in Ireland’, in Progress in Irish Printing, ed. F. R. Higgins (Dublin: Alex. Thom & Co., 1936), pp. 51–64.

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Impact of Technologies on the Spread of Literature As noted earlier, the advance of print culture was unstoppable by the eighteenth century: the necessary technical expertise was to be found in all the counties of Ireland, and printed items, from advertising and jobbing work to multi-volume texts, could be produced by a skilled workforce. The reprint trade worked smoothly and quickly: a successful new work from London could be reprinted with dispatch, and in many instances could claim to have a more correct text, free of errors. Newspapers and pamphlets were printed locally and the ubiquity of the printed word in all aspects of life provided the environment and cultural context for a sharp rise in writing and reading in Ireland, especially in the second half of the century. Readers became writers and writers spoke to new readers: young people, women, rural dwellers, and those with limited incomes. Before this time books were for the few, available in large format folios and quartos, difficult to source and expensive to buy, and private libraries were largely the domain of well-off and well-educated men. With the development of popular readership through the eighteenth century, the book trade responded to an increase in demand by home production of the most popular titles, supplementing importation from Great Britain and continental Europe. The size and scale of the British book trade was attractive to Irish writers, offering a wider audience and greater financial returns. The proximity of London was a magnet for those wishing to make their names as writers: more prestige accrued to a London publication and an author could hope for greater notice for their work. Some of the best-known Irish authors such as Jonathan Swift, Oliver Goldsmith, Frances Sheridan, John Banim, Elizabeth and Richard Griffith, Regina Maria Roche, Sydney Owenson, and Maria Edgeworth published their early works in London and had subsequent Irish editions. The reprint trade, however, had a transformative effect on readers as the key texts of European thought came within their reach. Eighteenth-century novels were produced in smaller format octavos and duodecimos, and even novelty sextodecimos; Irish printers specialised in the production of these cheaper small format volumes. A tidy duodecimo was ideal for ambulatory reading, easy to fit in the hand or pocket; volumes were portable and allowed reading to be carried on anywhere. Smaller format volumes also changed the way that readers interacted with the texts: reading aloud could be replaced by solitary reading, reading indoors could be replaced by open-air reading, the informal could replace the formal. With cheaper prices, literature was available to a wider audience, and this in turn encouraged authors to envisage

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a new and expanded readership. An examination of these little books shows how they were valued by their readers: many have signatures of a proud owner with the date and sometimes an address; some have personal bookplates; and some have prize labels indicating a school premium awarded for attendance or excellence. As education in grammar schools and private academies became more widely available to the sons and daughters of middle-income families throughout the eighteenth century, literacy rates rose, creating a buying audience for printed materials. The establishment of the national school system in 1831 further increased literacy levels in English among lower socio-economic groups. The bulk of literary works imported into Ireland and printed there were in the English language, apart from a smaller percentage of titles in the classical languages (Latin and Greek), French, and Italian. Locally printed texts in the Irish language were very few: they were predominantly religious and printed using roman typeface (see Marc Caball’s chapter in this volume for the longer history of Irish-language print culture). Most eighteenth-century printers did not invest in a new set of type, although an Irish fount was cut in Dublin in 1787 and used for the Royal Irish Academy’s Transactions in 1788 and for Charlotte Brooke’s Reliques of Irish Poetry in 1789.42 Print hastened the spread of familiarity with the English language and its use, even in areas where Irish had previously dominated.43 Toby Barnard has tabulated the production from Dublin presses by genre for each decade from 1699 to 1789, and he shows the balance shifting in favour of literature, with religious and official titles declining over the century. He illustrates the increase in literary forms from 4 per cent of production in 1699, to over 30 per cent share up to 1789, with peaks of 47 per cent in 1729 and 39 per cent in 1739.44 Literary trends also changed through the century, with poetry as the most popular literary form in the early years, a dominance of plays after mid-century, and the novel beginning to take its place by the end of the century. In 1745, the year of Swift’s death, just under 20 per cent of the 188 titles printed in Dublin count as

42

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Dermot McGuinne, Irish Type Design: A History of Printing Types in the Irish Character (Dublin: National Print Museum, 2010), pp. 72–6. Niall Ó Ciosáin has contrasted the erosion of Irish with the robust state of Welsh in the nineteenth century. Both were non-official languages in their homelands, but in the case of Wales the language was promoted by the clergy and used in religious texts, while in Ireland it was actively discouraged. See Ó Ciosáin, ‘The Celtic Languages: Visible and Invisible’, in Invisible Languages in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Anna Havinga and Nils Langer (Bern: Peter Lang, 2015), pp. 35–50. Barnard, Brought to Book, p. 47.

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literature in the broadest sense.45 The greatest number, sixteen items, are poetry, made up of poetry, satire, songs, and ballads. Next come plays, including oratorios, with ten items; novels and romances with five titles; and criticism and essays with three titles. Forty years later, in 1785 – the year of the first Irish balloon ascent by Richard Crosbie from Ranelagh Gardens in Dublin –46 of the 328 titles printed in Dublin, 27.5 per cent were literary.47 Plays, including operas and farces, were most prominent with forty-seven entries. These were followed by novels, including chapbooks and epistolary narratives, with twenty titles; poetry and songs, eighteen titles; and literary and musical criticism with five titles. The increase in plays printed reflects the vibrant theatrical scene, not just in Dublin, but in other Irish cities and towns.48 Amateur dramatics were a feature of country house entertainments, and printed plays could offer scripts to budding amateur players. Novels were beginning to take their modern form, although it is worth noting that not all texts were termed novels: only five of the twenty printed in Dublin that year used the label. In 1745, Dublin booksellers George Faulkner (Jonathan Swift’s Dublin publisher) and George Grierson, King’s printer, lamented the state of culture and reading in Dublin. They issued a petition to the ‘nobility, gentry and clergy’ drawing attention to the lack of book sales in Dublin, and lamented that ‘they have not for a considerable time past sold any books . . . excepting some few old sermons against Popery, and the newest Country Dances’.49 Despite Faulkner’s pessimistic outlook, which is also discernible in his letters,50 he became inextricably associated with publishing Swift’s works, working with him from about 1728 until Swift’s death. Faulkner was not just a passive publisher, but an active collector of Swift’s stray verses, gathering together anonymous pieces for inclusion in his Collected Works. He worked with Swift to issue as correct a text as possible, allowing the author a significant input into the final form of the text, and

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English Short Title Catalogue can be accessed online at www.bl.uk/projects/english-short-titlecatalogue# (accessed 30 November 2020). Hibernian Magazine, August 1785. www.bl.uk/projects/english-short-title-catalogue# (accessed 30 November 2020). William Smith Clark, The Irish Stage in the County Towns, 1720–1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965). George Faulkner, To the Nobility, Gentry, and Clergy, of Both Sexes in the City of Dublin. The Humble Petition of George Faulkner and George Grierson, Printers and Booksellers (Dublin: James Esdall, 1745). It is notable that at this point such publishers still perceived potential book buyers only in the upper echelons of society. Robert E. Ward, Prince of Dublin Printers: The Letters of George Faulkner (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1972).

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after Swift’s death continued to publish and promote his works.51 The first collection of Swift’s Works was issued by Faulkner in four volumes octavo in early 1735. As proprietor of the Dublin Journal newspaper, Faulkner promoted the writings of Swift, but he also extensively promoted the author, so that readers were aware of his views and his activities.52 As we have seen from the discussion of eighteenth-century newspapers and periodicals, advertising and marketing became an important force in the selling of literature, working in tandem with new forms of distribution. New books were featured in newspaper advertising from the early decades of the eighteenth century, and this advertising penetrated into the countryside; advertised books could be ordered by newspaper subscribers or from local delivery centres or shops, and delivered by the newspaper carriers. Advertisements were often focused, and addressed to the likely interest base for certain titles, such as ‘ladies’ or ‘little masters and misses’. Monthly and quarterly magazines, purveyors of literature in themselves, also provided reviews and recommendations for new books. These magazines were sold unbound and stitched in blue paper wrappers; thus booksellers’ advertising could be carried on the paper covers, as in the case of Walker’s Hibernian Magazine. Booksellers issued catalogues of their stock, and often included lists of new books on the end pages of their publications. In 1770, James Williams, printer and bookseller in Dublin, included a four-page list of ‘Books of Entertainment’ on the final pages of The Hermit: A Novel by Miss Minifie. Novels, plays, poetry, belles-lettres, history, travels, and fairy tales were listed and prices given; among the titles on offer were Swift’s Works in seventeen volumes, for sale for £2 6s. These combined forces of distribution and mass-marketing ensured that more and more readers had access to the printed word, from the latest bestselling novels to the most talked about plays, travel narratives, history, and politics.

Conclusion As discussed here, the growth and democratisation of literary genres was supported by new technical processes, marketing, and education. The spread of literacy itself was facilitated by innovations in technology and marketing, and the eighteenth century was a pivotal point in this process 51 52

Joseph McMinn, ‘Printing Swift’, Eire-Ireland 10:1 (1985), 143–9. Joseph McMinn, ‘Swift and George Faulkner, “Prince of Dublin Printers”’, Linen Hall Review 3:2 (1986), 15–17.

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for Irish audiences. The technical expertise of the printing process, allied to the spread of education among young men and women, the availability of new literary forms, and advertising to encourage readers, combined to create fertile ground for authors and publishers. During the nineteenth century, the printing process, no longer dependent on the strength and speed of two pressmen, went from being a craft to an industry capable of bulk output. While new technologies brought modernisation to the processes involved in the creation of literary materials during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, not all were for the improvement of the lives of workers, for the benefit of authors, nor the advancement of literature. Steam power speeded up the processes of papermaking and printing, but it reduced the number of workers required, causing unemployment among skilled workers, and helped to reduce wages.53 New methods of papermaking reduced the cost and increased the availability of paper, but the long-term survival of the medium itself was compromised. Legal changes brought about by the Act of Union changed the way Irish authors interacted with publishers; a slowdown in printing activity brought a dramatic collapse in the indigenous publishing industry, with Irish publishers poorly placed to avail themselves of developments in mass publishing. This collapse was more pronounced in Dublin as wealthy book buyers transferred their custom to London, and auctions of books and libraries became a prominent feature of the early nineteenth-century Dublin book trade. The work of Pollard for the eighteenth century, and Charles Benson for the nineteenth, has laid a solid foundation for the study of printing and bookselling in Dublin.54 Less work has been done on the provincial aspects of the trade, which varied in many significant ways, though research into the print culture of Ulster and Munster has gone some way to redressing the balance.55 As shown by Niall Ó Ciosáin, Irish-language publishing in 53 54 55

Benson, The Dublin Book Trade. Pollard, A Dictionary of Members of the Dublin Book Trade; Benson, The Dublin Book Trade. J. R. R. Adams, The Printed Word and the Common Man: Popular Culture in Ulster, 1700–1900 (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University of Belfast, 1987); Jennifer Moore, ‘John Ferrar, 1742–1804: Printer, Author and Public Man’, in Periodicals and Publishers: The Newspaper and Journal Trade, 1740–1914, ed. John Hinks, Catherine Armstrong, and Matthew Day (New Castle, DE, and London: Oak Knoll Press & The British Library, 2009), pp. 47–62); Ursula O’Callaghan, ‘Newspapers and Print Culture in Eighteenth Century Limerick’, PhD thesis (Limerick: Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, 2010). See also Máire Kennedy, ‘Eighteenth-Century Newspaper Publishing in Munster and South Leinster’, Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society 103 (1998), 67–88, and Máire Kennedy, ‘William Flyn (1740–1811) and the Readers of Munster in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century’, in

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the nineteenth century has been under-researched.56 A promising development in this area is the work of Richard Sharpe and Mícheál Hoyne on a clóliosta of Irish language texts, a catalogue of books printed between 1571 and 1871; this will provide a framework for historians and literary scholars to study this neglected field. The trade with America and the networks created for the exportation of literary texts to the cities of the East Coast colonies is a further area where new research will be valuable. Exportation of books from Ireland to America was forbidden by English law until 1780, when free trade was allowed with the colonies.57 Fascinating avenues into the subsequent trade in literary and Enlightenment texts between Ireland and America have been opened by the work of Richard Cargill Cole and Richard Sher; more recently Sarah Arndt has researched the movement of print between Belfast and Baltimore, Maryland; while Johanna Archbold has looked at Irish monthly and quarterly magazines, comparing them to their counterparts from Edinburgh and Philadelphia.58 This transatlantic approach gives an added dimension to our understanding of how literary ideas move through the physical movement of texts, and the changing roles of print and publishing technologies.

Select Bibliography Adams, J. R. R, The Printed Word and the Common Man Popular Culture in Ulster, 1700–1900 (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University of Belfast, 1987). Barnard, Toby, Brought to Book: Print in Ireland, 1680–1784 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2017). Benson, Charles, The Dublin Book Trade, 1801–1850 (London: Bibliographical Society, 2021). ‘The Dublin Book Trade’, in The Oxford History of the Irish Book, Vol. iv: The Irish Book in English, 1800–1891, ed. James H. Murphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 27–46.

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Periodicals and Publishers: The Newspaper and Journal Trade, 1740–1914, ed. John Hinks, Catherine Armstrong, and Matthew Day (New Castle, DE, and London: Oak Knoll Press & The British Library, 2009), pp. 73–94. See Niall Ó Ciosáin, ‘Gaelic Culture and Language Shift’, in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: A Guide to Recent Research, ed. Laurence Geary and Margaret Kelleher (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2005), pp. 136–52. Pollard, Dublin’s Trade in Books. For more on this, see Cole, Irish Booksellers and English Writers, and Sher, The Enlightenment and the Book. See S. C. Arndt, ‘Bringing Books into Baltimore: Tracing Networks of Textual Importation, 1760–1825’, Book History 16 (2013), 62–88, and Johanna Archbold, ‘Irish Periodicals in Their Atlantic Context, 1770–1830: The Monthly and Quarterly Magazines of Dublin, with Comparison to Those of Edinburgh and Philadelphia’, PhD thesis (Dublin: Trinity College Dublin, 2008).

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Cole, Richard Cargill, Irish Booksellers and English Writers, 1740–1800 (London: Mansell Publishing Ltd, 1986). Douglas, Aileen, Work in Hand: Script, Print, and Writing, 1690–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Ferguson, Frank, ‘The Industrialization of Irish Book Production, 1790–1900’, in The Oxford History of the Irish Book, Vol. iv: The Irish Book in English, 1800– 1891, ed. James H. Murphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 9–26. Kennedy, Máire, ‘Eighteenth-Century Newspaper Publishing in Munster and South Leinster’, Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society 103 (1998), 67–88. ‘Foreign Language Books, 1700–1800’, in The Oxford History of the Irish Book, Vol. iii: The Irish Book in English, 1550–1800, ed. Raymond Gillespie and Andrew Hadfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2006), pp. 368–82. Kurlansky, Mark, Paper: Paging Through History (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2016). Moore, Jennifer, ‘John Ferrar, 1742–1804: Printer, Author and Public Man’, in Periodicals and Publishers: The Newspaper and Journal Trade, 1740–1914, ed. John Hinks, Catherine Armstrong, and Matthew Day (New Castle, DE, and London: Oak Knoll Press & The British Library, 2009), pp. 47–62. Munter, Robert, The History of the Irish Newspaper, 1685–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967). Ó Ciosáin, Niall, ‘Gaelic Culture and Language Shift’, in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: A Guide to Recent Research, ed. Laurence Geary and Margaret Kelleher (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2005), pp. 136–52. ‘Oral Culture, Literacy, and Reading, 1800–50’, in The Oxford History of the Irish Book, Vol. iv: The Irish Book in English, 1800–1891, ed. James H. Murphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 173–91. Pollard, M., Dublin’s Trade in Books, 1550–1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). A Dictionary of Members of the Dublin Book Trade, 1550–1800 (London: Bibliographical Society, 2000). Sher, Richard B., The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and America (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Strickland, W. G. , Type-Founding in Dublin, Bibliographical Society of Ireland 2:2 (Dublin: John Falconer, 1922), Ward, Robert E., Prince of Dublin Printers: The Letters of George Faulkner (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1972).

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chapter 3

The Optical Telegraph, the United Irish Press, and Maria Edgeworth’s ‘White Pigeon’ Joanna Wharton

Optical telegraphy was a long-distance communications system that came into use at the end of the eighteenth century. It involved the transfer of visual signals along a chain of human-powered machines – telegraphs – with large movable indicators, such as wooden arms, pointers, or shutters. In addition to the signalling apparatuses and the bodies required to operate them, the system relied on further technologies, including telescopes and codebooks, for its rapid conveyance of information. The optical telegraph’s use in Ireland was short-lived. In July 1804, nearly a decade after he first approached the government for sponsorship, Richard Lovell Edgeworth oversaw the opening of a line of machines between Galway and Dublin, but despite the telegraph’s capacity – weather allowing – to transmit messages at unprecedented speeds, operations were halted by the close of the year.1 A far better-known example of this technology is Claude Chappe’s télégraphe; generally credited as the first and most successful of its kind, it remained in use for over sixty years after the 1794 debut of the inaugural line between Paris and Lille. The cultural significance of the optical telegraph in Ireland is less well established than that of its electrical successor. In his History of the Media in Ireland, Christopher Morash connects the advent of electrical telegraphy with the transformation of Irish nationalism in the second half of the nineteenth century. Thanks to the acceleration and proliferation of news enabled by the telegraph’s ‘global informational field’, newspaper readers 1

According to Maria Edgeworth’s biography of her father, ‘messages and answers from Dublin to Galway were transmitted in the course of eight minutes’ during a demonstration for the lord lieutenant Philip Yorke, 3rd Earl of Hardwicke. Maria Edgeworth and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Esq., 2 vols. (London: R. Hunter, 1820), vol. ii, p. 298. Adrian James Kirwan provides further details of the telegraph’s rapid transmission and discusses the probable reasons for its discontinuance, including the building of Martello towers around Ireland’s coast. See Kirwan, ‘R. L. Edgeworth and Optical Telegraphy in Ireland, c.1790–1805’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy: Archaeology, Culture, History, Literature 111C (2017), 232–3.

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in Ireland and the post-Famine diaspora who read Irish émigré newspapers were, Morash suggests, ‘living a mediated life’ across continents. This coincidence of electric telecommunication with mass emigration meant that Ireland ‘ceased to be a nation bounded by geography; instead, it became an idea’.2 The effects of the optical telegraph on daily life in Ireland appear negligible by comparison. Yet, its imaginative potential was profound, especially in its association with the press, and with competing ideas of Irish nationality, security, and surveillance during the ‘intelligence wars’ of the 1790s. As this chapter explores, the history of the Edgeworth telegraph offers valuable insights into the relations between literature and technology in late eighteenth-century Ireland. It has three aims: firstly, to underscore the role of literary production – and mythmaking – in the cultural brokering of the telegraph; secondly, to examine the politics of telegraphy in the context of 1790s Ireland, particularly in relation to the United Irish press; and thirdly, to suggest some points of affinity between Maria Edgeworth’s fiction and her father’s telegraph. My focus here will be on Edgeworth’s allusive technique and encoding of Irish character in ‘The White Pigeon’, a story from the expanded third edition of The Parent’s Assistant (1800).

‘Superlative Contrivance!’ In late August 1795, a series of reports appeared in the Northern Star, the newspaper of the Belfast United Irishmen. The first of these announced that ‘two gentlemen from county Longford’ were ‘making some experiments relative to the establishment of a Telegraphe’ across the Irish Sea, between Donaghadee in the north-east of Ireland and Portpatrick on the west coast of Scotland.3 Three issues later, in a report dated Monday, 17 August 1795, the paper informed its readers that ‘actual communications [had] been made across the channel by means of this wonderful instrument’.4 Further details appeared in the Northern Star’s next issue, including a transcript of the ‘conversation that passed’ between the two ‘Messrs. Edgworths’ via their machines, one of which was painted white, the other black: The gentleman on this side, said – ‘I see you, being white, distinctly.’ The other replied – ‘I see you; I wish your’s was white also.’ The gentleman on 2

3

Christopher Morash, A History of the Media in Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 86–7, 90. Northern Star, No. 379, 17–20 August 1795. 4 Northern Star, No. 381, 24–27 August 1795.

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this side then asked – ‘What o’clock is it?’ – and was answered, ‘six.’ He then said – ‘I will shew lights at nine o’clock, do you attend.’ – He was answered – ‘I will attend; but I have only one light.’ They then made signals of good night, and the communication ended.5

The ‘giant Isosceles’, as Maria Edgeworth would later dub the telegraph, must have made for quite a spectacle.6 According to Richard Lovell Edgeworth, the telegraphs his sons used in the Donaghadee–Portpatrick trial were 30 feet high and 15 feet wide at the base, and a ‘vast concourse of people’ gathered to watch their operation.7 But as visually striking as the machines were, the messages communicated by their rotating pointers were opaque, decipherable only by those who held the ‘Vocabulary’, or codebook. The telegraphic dialogue between Lovell and Richard Edgeworth would initially have been secret – and its divulgence almost certainly intentional. It seems reasonable to suppose that Lovell, the brother on the Irish shore, either provided the Northern Star with the information for the report himself or arranged for this to be done. Indeed, the level of detail the report gives about the telegraph’s operation suggests an intimacy of knowledge, while the hint that it worked ‘on a principle totally different from the French’ indicates a desire to promote the ingenuity of the telegraph’s innovators in Ireland, as well, perhaps, as their ideological distance from revolutionary France. Similar concerns prompted the Edgeworths to name the machine the ‘tellograph’, since, as Maria Edgeworth wrote to her cousin Sophy Ruxton in 1794, ‘both party spirit and national pride dislike the sound of the French telegraph’.8 The association of the Edgeworth name with ideas of Irish genius is more boldly asserted in the anonymous ‘Lines Addressed to Richard and Lovel Edgeworth, Esqrs.’, which appeared in the very next issue of the Northern Star: Basaltic coasts, and giant walls proclaim Majestic nature in great extreme, And your effort, brave EDGEWORTH, doth unite, A grand display of genius and of light, Adding new lustre to Hibernian fame Which will immortalize thy worthy name. Quick at the voice of fortune genius smiles, 5 6 7

8

Northern Star, No. 382, 27–31 August 1795. Valerie Pakenham, ed., Maria Edgeworth’s Letters from Ireland (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2017), p. 76. Richard Lovell Edgeworth [and Maria Edgeworth ], ‘An Essay on the Art of Conveying Secret and Swift Intelligence’, The Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy 6 (1797), 96–139 (p. 138). Pakenham, Maria Edgeworth’s Letters from Ireland, p. 38.

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joanna wharton And joins the Patriot hands and sister Isles. Superlative contrivance! That did raise The Telegraphe and speak across the seas! Holding free converse on a distant shore, What ne’er was aimed at by man before. Hov’[r]ing in air the kindred tidings flew, By thy machine presented to our view; A sight so lovely, surely does express, An image of thy name – That’s Loveliness.* Donaghadee, August 29, 1795.9 *One of the Gentlemen’s christian name is LOVEL.

The ‘Lines’ move from the geological sublime of the Irish coast to develop an aerial sublime, generating awe from the machine’s transcendence of physical boundaries, its astonishing ability to make words fly and vision speak. As Mary Fairclough observes, the telegraph ‘appears to demand recourse to figurative or metaphorical expression in order to describe its effects’.10 Another kind of figuring takes place here, too. While celebrating the telegraphic exchange between the islands, the poem defines their relationship as non-hierarchical: Hibernia is a ‘sister’ rather than a colony, a nation in her own right and with her own right to fame, but one whose ‘Patriot hands’ can be happily joined with those across the Irish Sea. Conspicuously absent, however, is any designation of the ‘distant shore’; neither Scotland nor Britain are named here. In this way, the poem circumnavigates the issue of Scotland’s status within Britain to voice a cosmopolitan nationalism in alignment with ‘improving’ Ascendancy landlords, such as Richard Lovell Edgeworth, and United Irishmen. Albeit with varying attitudes towards England and republican France, both drew on Scottish Enlightenment thought, especially Adam Smith’s theory of political economy, to argue for the industrial development and commercial expansion, or ‘free converse’, of Ireland.11 Moreover, by speaking collectively for the spectators at the event, the poem gives the impression of an Irish public with a united ‘view’, unequivocally delighted by the sight of the ‘lovely’ machine and the ‘Gentlemen’ conversing through it. It is possible that one of the Edgeworths wrote the ‘Lines’. Along with the minor misspelling of Lovell’s name, the poem’s apparent naivety, of 9 10

11

Northern Star, No. 383, 31 August–3 September 1795. Mary Fairclough, ‘The Telegraph: Radical Transmission in the 1790s’, Eighteenth-Century Life 37:2 (2013), 26–52 (p. 26). Nancy J. Curtin, The United Irishmen: Popular Politics in Ulster and Dublin, 1791–1798 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 29, 19; Jane Rendall, ‘Correspondence and Community: Maria Edgeworth’s Scottish Friends’, European Romantic Review 31:6 (2020), 681–98.

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a likeness with much of the popular verse that regularly featured in the pages of the Northern Star, could have been contrived to disguise its origin. Alternatively, the ‘Lines’ may have served as inspiration for the similar (if slightly more sophisticated) telegraph poem that appears in a footnote to ‘An Essay on the Art of Conveying Secret and Swift Intelligence’, which was first published in the Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy in 1797. As I have discussed elsewhere, Maria Edgeworth wrote ‘Art of Conveying’ with her father, originally as a paper that he delivered to the Academy on 27 June 1795.12 It presents Richard Lovell Edgeworth as an exemplary man of literature and science, and the telegraph poem is revised accordingly, to suit its relocation from the popular Northern Star to the polite Transactions. Here, the (unnamed) poet omits the laudatory address to ‘brave EDGEWORTH’ and the final couplet’s play on Lovell’s name; they maintain the vision of an enlightened Ireland but proclaim its allegiances more explicitly. ‘Hibernia’ is now brought closer to ‘Britain’ by the telegraph’s mediating power: Hark from Basaltic rocks and giant walls, To Britain’s shores the glad Hibernia calls; Her voice no longer waits retarding tides, The meeting coasts no more the sea divides. Quick, at the voice of fortune or of fame, Kindles from shore to shore the patriot flame, Hov’ring in air, each kindred genius smiles, And binds with closer bands the sister Isles.13

The footnote in ‘Art of Conveying’ further informs us that the poem was ‘written on the prospect of corresponding between England and Ireland by the Telegraph’. This objective gained importance with the growing naval threat from France, as indicated by another of Maria and Richard Lovell’s co-authored publications, A Letter to the Right Hon. the Earl of Charlemont on the Tellograph, and on the Defence of Ireland (1797).14 Written soon after the Expedition d’Irelande of December 1796, the pamphlet suggests that a telegraphic link between Ireland and England (and thereby to the British 12

13 14

Joanna Wharton, ‘Maria Edgeworth and the Telegraph’, European Romantic Review 31:6 (2020), 749–64. I wish to acknowledge that, contrary to my earlier understanding, Marilyn Butler had already identified Maria Edgeworth as the author of ‘Art of Conveying’. See Butler, ‘Edgeworth’s Ireland: History, Popular Culture, and Secret Codes’, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 34:2 (2001), 267–92 (p. 275). R. L. Edgeworth [and M. Edgeworth], ‘Art of Conveying’, p. 128. On Maria Edgeworth’s authorship of this text and its political significance, see Susan Manly, ‘Maria Edgeworth’s Political Lives’, European Romantic Review 31:6 (2020), 767–86.

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Admiralty) had at one point seemed within reach, and it holds the English lord lieutenant, Lord Camden, to public account for his failure to finance the scheme. With its reproduction of documents sent to and from Dublin Castle, the pamphlet formally discloses Camden’s ‘duplicity’, partisanship, and ‘economic, not to say avaricious’ regard to ‘all that concerns the happiness of a people, and the safety of a kingdom’.15 For the Edgeworths, the telegraph seems to have prompted fresh contemplation of degrees of publicity across different media forms. It also inspired playful experimentation with the possibilities of print. The footnote in ‘Art of Conveying’ containing the above ‘verses’ goes on to state that the line of telegraph signals illustrated in one of the essay’s engraved plates represents the first line of the poem, and it provides the corresponding numbers that make up the code. Such paratextual devices seem to mimic the intermedial workings of the telegraph, with its passage of information between textual and visual forms, while encouraging a sense of readerly participation in the process of translation. After her father’s death, and long after the end of his telegraphic prospects, Maria Edgeworth seems to have taken pleasure from this preservation in print of the telegraph’s ephemeral articulations. In Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth (1820), she reproduces the poem from ‘Art of Conveying’, states that it was ‘written on the occasion’ of her brothers’ conversation across the channel, and adds, ‘[t]o the numerical figures which spoke the first line, the pointers of [the] telegraph remain for ever fixed in their engraved representation’.16 Here, the poem acquires a newly mythical status: Edgeworth implies – or at least allows for the interpretation – that the telegraph’s first message was ‘Hark from Basaltic rocks and giant walls’, a sentence rather less prosaic than ‘I see you, being white, distinctly.’17 Nowhere does she provide the name of the poet, although another, extended version of the lines with the title ‘The Tellograph’ appears in an 1812 anthology, where it is signed ‘R. L. E’.18 15

16 17

18

R. L. Edgeworth [and M. Edgeworth ], A Letter to the Right Hon. the Earl of Charlemont on the Tellograph, and on the Defence of Ireland (Dublin and London: J. Johnson, 1797), p. 43. M. Edgeworth and R. L. Edgeworth, Memoirs, vol. ii, pp. 170–1. The 1859 edition of Martha Cowper Hill’s The Parents’ Cabinet asserts that the lines were written by Richard Lovell Edgeworth and ‘spoken by the telegraph from shore to shore by the young Edgeworths’. Maria Edgeworth corresponded with Cowper Hill from 1833, when she requested that her father’s telegraph be mentioned in future editions of the book. Martha Cowper Hill, The Parents’ Cabinet of Instruction of Amusement, A New Edition (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1859), pp. 69–70; Constance Hill, ‘Some Unpublished Letters of Maria Edgeworth’, The Hampstead Annual, ed. Ernest Rhys (London: The Priory Press, 1897), p. 125. [R. A. Davenport, ed.], The Poetical Register, and Repository of Fugitive Poetry, for 1808–1809 (London: F. C. & J. Rivington, 1812), p. 16.

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Secrecy and Publicity While the Northern Star’s wide circulation made it a powerful medium for promoting the telegraph, its popular radicalism may well have necessitated caution in the political framing of the machine.19 Thanks to the telegraph’s institution in revolutionary France, it quickly became a symbol for Irish republicanism, as suggested by the naming of the Dublin Telegraphic Society, one of three Paineite reading clubs that the United Irishman John Burk formed in 1794, as ‘nurseries from which to procure men of full intellectual growth and patriotism’.20 In Ireland and elsewhere, telegraphy was closely associated with the reformist press; indeed, it was during the 1790s that newspapers began to be nominatively identified with the telegraph. In her discussion of the London Telegraph, Fairclough shows how the editors of this paper, which was connected with the radical London Corresponding Society, developed a utopian political vision by exploiting the idea that, with the dissemination and translation of its code, the telegraph could enable ‘universal communication’ across national and linguistic boundaries.21 As Joseph Drury observes, however, ‘[d]ifferent machines prompt very different concerns in the eighteenth century, while the same machine may have different, even antithetical meanings in different circumstances’.22 Whereas for radicals the telegraph could represent international fraternity, for conservatives it provoked anxiety over illicit correspondence. In the context of Scottish cosmopolitan radicalism, for example, Nigel Leask has discussed how, for British anti-Jacobins, telegraphy was a ‘metaphor for the radical discourse network’ and a ‘sinister form of coded communication’.23

19

20

21 22

23

Gillian O’Brien calculates that ‘up to 40,000 and at least 24,000 people had direct and regular access to the outpourings of the Northern Star’. As O’Brien discusses, the paper and its editor, Samuel Nielson, were ‘pursued by the authorities with a dedication bordering on zealotry’. O’Brien, ‘“Spirit, Impartiality and Independence”: The Northern Star, 1792–1797’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland/Iris an dá chultúr 13 (1998), 7–23 (pp. 16, 17). John Burk, History of the Late War in Ireland, with an Account of the United Irish Association (Philadelphia: Francis & Robert Bailey, 1799), pp. 45–6. Fairclough, ‘The Telegraph’, p. 36. Joseph Drury, Novel Machines: Technology and Narrative Form in Enlightenment Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 10. Nigel Leask, ‘Thomas Muir and The Telegraph: Radical Cosmopolitanism in 1790s Scotland’, History Workshop Journal 63:1 (2007), 48–69 (p. 66). Leask discusses the Rev. George Hamilton’s The Telegraph; A Consolatory Epistle from Thomas Muir, Esq., of Botany Bay, to the Hon. Henry Erskine (1796), a poetic satire on the transportation to Botany Bay of the Scottish radical Thomas Muir after his trial for sedition in 1793. A founding member of the Scottish Society of the Friends of the People, Muir maintained close ties with the prominent United Irishmen William Drennan and Archibald Rowan Hamilton, both of whom were acquaintances of Richard Lovell Edgeworth.

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In Ireland, too, the radical symbolism of the telegraph was connected with what the authorities considered a seditious culture of secrecy. In turn, United Irish publications ridiculed government paranoia about ‘telegraphic’ codes. In December 1797, the Dublin newspaper The Press, the main organ of the United Irishmen after the Monaghan Militia destroyed the Northern Star’s presses in May 1797, ran an article headed ‘Outrage and Conspiracy, Against the Liberty of the Press’. Here, The Press reports that a Dublin printer had been arrested for carrying ‘treasonable’ materials, which were, in fact, a mathematical treatise on logarithms.24 Finding the contents unintelligible, the law officers reportedly surmised that the ‘great number of crosses and significant letters [. . .] might be the concerted signals of a telegraphic communication between the French guards and the United Irishmen’. A few months later The Press baited the government again, with a notice that the ‘United Irishmen are so refined in French mechanism, that they have manufactured several hundred thousand dozen pocket Telegraphs, which enable them to converse without the least danger of discovery’.25 Of course, the government’s fears about secret United Irish communications were not without basis. On 27 February 1798, Arthur O’Connor, one of the founders and editors of The Press, was arrested in Margate, en route to France, with a key for cypher correspondence with Lord Edward Fitzgerald in his razor case.26 The Press was silenced the following month. Before returning to the Edgeworths, a further example of radical print publicity demands notice. In a report to the authorities of 19 August 1796, the government spy Frances Higgins (otherwise known as the ‘Sham Squire’) alleged that the ‘Telegraphic Club’ had a ‘private printing press from whence issue various treasonable productions’ for distribution ‘among the abettors of sedition’. Higgins names one ‘Cox [as] a principal leader’ of the venture.27 This Cox is Walter (Watty) Cox, soon to be manager and editor of the militant Union Star (1797). Printed in Little Ship Street, a mere stone’s throw from Dublin Castle, the Union Star’s stated purpose was to ‘offer to Public Justice [. . .] detestable Traitors, as Spies, and Perjured Informers’ against the Society of United Irishmen.28 The 24 26 27

28

The Press, 2 December 1797. 25 The Press, 8 February 1798. Frank MacDermot, ‘Arthur O’Connor’, Irish Historical Studies 15:57 (1966), 48–69 (pp. 58–9). National Archives of Ireland, Rebellion Papers 620/18/14 Folder 1. Quoted in Patrick Fagan, ‘Infiltration of Dublin Freemason Lodges by United Irishmen and Other Republican Groups’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland/Iris an dá chultúr 13 (1998), 65–86 (p. 80). Brendan Clifford, ed., Walter Cox’s Union Star: A Reprint of His 1797 Paper (Belfast: Athol Books, 2007), p. 10.

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Union Star was, effectively, an assassination sheet, providing targets’ names and additional identifying information, such as physical appearances, workplaces, and regular haunts. It also called for the redistribution of Protestant estates: ‘The Star does not unjustly advise a thought that would injure the Proprietor of an Estate acquired by mercantile or mechanic Industry. The Star only aims at those Properties wrested from our murdered Ancestors by English perfidy.’29 The material form of the Union Star allowed for private circulation and highly public transmission: published both as a small handbill and a single-sided broadsheet, it was passed around and pasted up in and around Dublin. According to Nancy J. Curtin, the United Irish leaders were aghast at the violence encouraged in their name and recognised it as counterproductive to the cause of reform. They publicly denounced the Union Star, and even suggested it was ‘sponsored by the Castle to discredit the cause of virtuous republicanism’.30 Despite such visible threats to the Ascendancy, and even after the turmoil of 1798, Maria Edgeworth maintained a belief in the freedom of the press. In the unpublished essay, ‘On the Education of the Poor’ (c.1800), she argues against the ‘enemies of liberty’ who took advantage of the revolutionary crisis to ‘insinuate that all political power should be taken from the people, & that they should be kept in ignorance that they may be held in subjection’. She continues: it is too late to uphold this system of mental coercion. The printing press is a more powerful engine in society than the Cannon, and all attempts to restrain the freedom of opinion will only endanger instead of preserving public tranquility [. . .] The secret influence of prohibited books is encreased as their public sale is diminished and the question is not how many copies are sold in the booksellers shops, but how much credit the opinions contained in them gain in the minds of the people.31

For Edgeworth, the education of the Irish poor was paramount among the ‘gradual improvements’ that ‘real friends of liberty’ understood to be ‘better than insurrection, and revolution’. Optimistically, she believed that the diffusion of knowledge would eventually ensure the triumph of ‘reason’. In the meantime, however, surveillance networks (telegraphic or otherwise) seem to have been the precondition for a democratic press. The Edgeworths’ promotional and political writings on the telegraph stress its utility in peacetime. They highlight its potential for commercial 29 31

Ibid., p. 18. 30 Curtin, The United Irishmen, p. 225. Maria Edgeworth, incomplete draft of an essay ‘On the Education of the Poor’, c.1800, Bodleian Libraries, Oxford, MS. Eng. misc. e. 1461, fols. 53–5.

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use, gesture towards ‘universal communication’, and speculate on the eventual linking of Britain and the East Indies by telegraph, where they suggest that ‘its effects will be more beneficial to Europe than monopoly or conquest’.32 However, in the exigencies of the moment, telegraphy’s greatest advantage lay in its ability to increase the ‘energy’ of the ‘eye of government’.33 Along with ‘great celerity of communication’ for the mobilisation of troops, the telegraph promised ‘entire secrecy’; even the men who worked the machines along the line would be unable to ‘decypher the intelligence [they were] employed to convey’.34 Moreover, the Edgeworths conceive of the disciplinary effect of the telegraph’s centralisation of intelligence in similar terms to Bentham’s panopticon: they project that the ‘certainty which the people would have of the immediate superintendence of their governors would create confidence in the good, and apprehension in those who are disposed to mischief’.35

‘The White Pigeon’ As I now argue, Maria Edgeworth’s ‘The White Pigeon’ was similarly geared towards security through surveillance. With a ‘swift messenger’ as its central motif, it presents an intelligence war in microcosm, exemplifying what Julia M. Wright calls the ‘hermeneutics of informing’; that is, ‘the interpretive process by which informers’ testimony is to be evaluated and credible evidence extracted from it’.36 In other words, ‘The White Pigeon’ provides a lesson in sorting the trustworthy from the suspicious. Typically for Edgeworth, the story is as much, if not more, concerned with teaching the rich to properly ‘reward’ as it is with teaching the poor to ‘deserve’ reward. We shall see, however, that by modelling the ‘art of deciphering’ Irish character, Edgeworth also demonstrates techniques of discrimination. At the same time, I suggest, her allusions to the telegraph and to Cox’s Star both reveal and enact the fluctuations between union and separation that are continually at play in the dialectics of secrecy and publicity. Edgeworth shows an awareness that, like secrecy, allusion separates the informed from the uninformed, even as it creates a sense of intimacy, inclusion, or 32 33 35 36

R. L. Edgeworth [and M. Edgeworth], ‘Art of Conveying’, pp. 111–16, 118. R. L. Edgeworth [and M. Edgeworth], Letter to Charlemont, p. 7. 34 Ibid. R. L. Edgeworth [and M. Edgeworth], ‘Art of Conveying’, pp. 109–10. Maria Edgeworth, ‘The White Pigeon’, in The Novels and Selected Works of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. x: The Parent’s Assistant and Moral Tales, ed. Elizabeth Eger and Clíona Ó Gallchoir (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003), pp. 157–64 (p. 161); Julia M. Wright, ‘Courting Public Opinion: Handling Informers in the 1790s’, Éire-Ireland 33:1 (1997–8), 144–69 (p. 146).

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community, whereas certain forms of publicity can be violently divisive, even in the name of unity. Scholars of Edgeworth have frequently concentrated on the allusiveness of her fiction.37 For instance, W. J. Mc Cormack observes that Edgeworth uses names with ‘recognisable historical associations’ to ‘address the several different readerships which, in a stratified fashion, constituted her public’.38 As a tale for children, ‘The White Pigeon’ might seem to call for a more superficial approach to communication, but, as with all Edgeworth’s juvenile fiction, it is simultaneously directed towards an adult audience. Similarly, while ‘The White Pigeon’ mobilises on a ‘universal’ level the symbolism of the dove, its local allusions carry urgent messages of Anglo-Irish cooperation to a fractured but necessarily informed Irish readership. In Dermot Ryan’s words, Edgeworth skilfully ‘navigates between her various reading publics (popular/polite; Irish/ English)’; in doing so, Ryan argues, she positions literature as a ‘tool’ that can at once ‘integrate a literate and seditious peasantry into policed textual economies’ and ‘provide Ireland’s emergent middle-classes with privileged access to imperial networks of an expanding Anglophone empire’.39 The manuscript ‘Sketches for the Parent’s Assistant’ show that Edgeworth began writing ‘The White Pigeon’ on 25 May 1798. This puts its composition at the very start of the Rising – the United Irishmen of Kildare, Meath, and Dublin rose in arms on the night of 23–24 May.40 Edgeworth’s notes for the story attest to her fears at this time more explicitly than the published text, and suggest that the United Irish press was an important frame of reference: the villains of the story here are named ‘Cox & O’Connor’. In the published text, ‘Mr Cox’ remains as the principal antagonist, whereas ‘Thady O’Connor’ – possibly an allusion to the more moderate Arthur O’Connor – is mentioned only once. In the notes, the men are ‘defenders & robbers’ (Edgeworth later scrapped the sectarian element), who conspire not only to ‘rob’ (as in the published version) but to ‘burn’ the resident landlord’s big house. The ‘Sketches’, 37

38 39

40

See, for example, Butler, ‘Edgeworth’s Ireland’; James Chandler, ‘A Discipline in Shifting Perspective: Why We Need Irish Studies’, Field Day Review 2 (2006), 18–39 (pp. 30–8); W. J. Mc Cormack, Dissolute Characters: Irish Literary History Through Balzac, Sheridan Le Fanu, Yeats and Bowen (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1993). Mc Cormack, Dissolute Characters, p. 93. Dermot Ryan, Technologies of Empire: Writing, Imagination, and the Making of Imperial Networks, 1750–1820 (Lanham, MD: University of Delaware Press, 2013), pp. 78, 76. Maria Edgeworth, ‘Sketches for the Parent’s Assistant’, 1797–8, Bodleian Libraries, Oxford, MS. Eng. misc. e. 1462, fol. 23v.

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then, help position the didactic ‘White Pigeon’ as an anti-insurrectionary technology. Indeed, Edgeworth’s correspondence at this time suggests that she conceptualised her writing as an alternative to the musket. In a letter to Sophy Ruxton dated 20 June 1798, she tells her cousin: ‘I am going on in the old way – writing stories. I cannot be a captain of dragoons and sitting with my hands before me would not make any of us one degree safer.’41 ‘The White Pigeon’ revolves around three central characters: Mr Somerville, an ‘improving’ landlord who wishes to ‘inspire his tenantry with a taste for order, and domestic happiness’; Mr Cox, ‘an alehouse keeper, who did not bear a very good character’; and Brian O’Neill, a boy of ‘about twelve years old’.42 In his encounters with Cox and Brian, Somerville demonstrates the ‘reading’ of Irish moral character through close attention to speech, appearance, reputation, and conduct. The story begins with Cox asking Somerville to make him manager of the town’s new inn; the landowner observes Cox’s ruddy nose, black eye, and cut chin, deduces that he is a violent alcoholic, and easily exposes his verbal ‘falsehoods’. To amplify the caricature, Edgeworth emphasises Cox’s linguistic and geo-cultural difference from the English. When Cox (falsely) reminds Somerville that he had already promised him tenancy of the inn, he says the occasion of the promise was an encounter with Somerville on ‘coming through the gap in the bog meadows, fornent Thady O’Connor’.43 Cox insists that O’Connor will back him up – hinting at criminal association, if not a radical discourse network – and secretly swears revenge against Somerville for the disappointment of his hopes. Edgeworth next introduces Brian, who, despite disliking Cox, exonerates him from Somerville’s accusation that he had smashed the inn’s newly glazed bow window. It transpires that a white pigeon was the real culprit, and the carpenter at the inn threatens to kill the ‘wicked’ bird.44 Brian saves the pigeon by confessing his own responsibility – while playing ball with his friends, he had accidentally and (at that time) unknowingly broken a small upper window, through which the bird had entered the building – and offers to work to pay for the repairs. Pleased with these proofs of honesty and generosity, Somerville excuses Brian and ‘forgives’ the pigeon. After questioning the carpenter about the O’Neills and receiving ‘an excellent character of the boy’, Somerville resolves to ‘inquire more fully’ into the family and to ‘attend to their conduct himself’; he determines to

41 42

Pakenham, Maria Edgeworth’s Letters from Ireland, p. 56. M. Edgeworth, ‘The White Pigeon’, pp. 157–8. 43 Ibid., p. 158.

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44

Ibid., p. 159.

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‘assist’ them ‘if he should find them as they had been represented’.45 In contrast to Cox, of course, the O’Neills emerge as a transparently honest, industrious, peaceable, and therefore ‘deserving’ family. The story then turns to the pigeon, an animal telegraph that, like its mechanical counterpart, accrues multiple, contextually specific meanings. It belongs to Brian’s neighbour, who gives it to Brian as a present in gratitude for saving its life. The boy domesticates the bird, which learns to eat from the same plate as the dog. A footnote here states that ‘[t]his is a fact’, grounding in material reality the fictional representation of harmony across (species) difference.46 After reading a natural history book where he learns about carrier pigeons, Brian determines to train his own and thereby make his father’s fortune. As the Edgeworths hoped the telegraph would eventually do, Brian uses the pigeon as a ‘swift messenger’ of commercial information: in his first exhibition of its utility, he sends his father the price of beef at the market. The neighbours pay him to send messages with it, and the ‘fame of the white pigeon’ spreads. However, it also gains the attention of Cox’s gang. During a meeting, their ‘discourse [turns] upon the difficulties of sending messages secretly and quickly’; Cox’s son mentions the pigeon, and the group tell him to ‘get it into his possession’.47 Young Cox tries and fails to ‘bully’ Brian into selling the pigeon. He then steals it and brings it to the gang, who ‘rejoiced’ at the acquisition of such a ‘useful messenger’. On one level, the theft of the pigeon fictionalises the radical appropriation of telegraphy; equally, as Aileen Douglas states, the pigeon ‘symbolizes literacy, which makes possible social mobility, but which may also be abused’.48 For Edgeworth, the Union Star would surely have epitomised such an abuse. Thus, while Edgeworth’s choice of title encourages an understanding of the story itself as a kind of telegraph, it also invites parallels with the potent symbolism employed by Cox and other newspaper editors. Comparison with ‘On the Education of the Poor’ further suggests that Edgeworth had in mind the self-defeating tendency of ‘false’ revolutionary transmission: after the pigeon’s theft, the narrator observes that ‘[n]othing can be more short-sighted than cunning. The very means, which these people took to secure secrecy, were the means of bringing their plots to light’.49 ‘Rational’ order prevails: rather than flying to Cox’s cousin, the pigeon returns to Brian, who discovers the conspirators’ billet 45 48

49

Ibid., pp. 160–1. 46 Ibid., p. 161. 47 Ibid., p. 162. Aileen Douglas, Work in Hand: Script, Print, and Writing, 1690–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 158. M. Edgeworth, ‘The White Pigeon’, p. 162.

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under its wing. Again, Irish character is ‘read’ through linguistic and material signs – the paper itself is ‘very dirty looking’, the ‘scrawl’ is ‘scarcely legible’ and had to be ‘deciphered’: ‘Thare are eight of uz sworn; I send yo at botom thare names. We meat at tin this nite at my faders, and have harms and all in radiness to brak into the grate ouse. Mr Summervill is to lye out to nite – kip the pigeon until tomorrow. For ever yours, MURTAGH COX, JUN.’50

Brian and his father take the note to Somerville, who has Cox and his associates arrested, and offers the O’Neills ‘ten bright guineas’ as a reward. In spite of their poverty, they refuse to take the money: Brian says he does not want payment ‘for doing right’ and his father agrees, adding ‘I don’t like to take the price of blood.’ A footnote here tells us ‘[t]his answer was really given upon a similar occasion’, further linking the tale to the world of Irish ‘fact’.51 In her analysis of Edgeworth’s ‘Lame Jervas’ (1804) – a tale which, incidentally, features an optical telegraph – Wright argues that Edgeworth seeks to recruit readers into a ‘new network of “proper” surveillance’, where ‘the public is constructed as part of the network [. . .] rather than the alienated object of its watchful eye’.52 As ‘The White Pigeon’ shows, this requires the discernment of character in the ‘superintendence’ of the poor – the ability to ‘know the difference’, as Somerville does, ‘between vile informers, and courageous honest men’.53 It also demands the precaution of secrecy in the communication of intelligence: before taking the billet to Somerville, Brian and his father hide the pigeon ‘so that he should not be seen by anyone but themselves’, and when Somerville asks to borrow the bird, Brian delivers it to him under cover of darkness. Ultimately, then, secrecy and surveillance are aligned with personal safety and national security. Edgeworth’s liberal attitude towards the press is underwritten by her perception of the need for a national education that would produce virtuous, literate citizens, transforming surveillance from a coercive pecuniary system into a moral economy of care across classes and religious ethnicities. As Somerville moralises, ‘[t]hose who bring up their children well, will certainly be rewarded for it, be they poor or rich’.54 Meanwhile, Edgeworth’s telegraphic allusions seem to multiply perspective; they 50 52

53

Ibid., p. 163. 51 Ibid. Wright, ‘Courting Public Opinion’, p. 147. On the telegraph in ‘Lame Jervas’, see also Wharton, ‘Maria Edgeworth and the Telegraph’. M. Edgeworth, ‘The White Pigeon’, p. 163. 54 Ibid., p. 164.

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highlight plurality and difference, and therefore alert us to the multivalence of all systems of improvement. Allusion could also, of course, be a kind of game. In a final, simultaneously personal and public, serious and playful gesture, Brian climbs up a ladder, where he unveils the sign on the inn, freshly painted with a likeness of the white pigeon and O’Neill ‘in large letters underneath’.55 Brian’s literal and social ascent thus recalls the Northern Star’s ‘Lines’ on the telegraph, uniting ‘lovely’ image with Irish name.

Bibliography Burk, John, History of the Late War in Ireland, with an Account of the United Irish Association (Philadelphia: Francis & Robert Bailey, 1799). Butler, Marilyn, ‘Edgeworth’s Ireland: History, Popular Culture, and Secret Codes’, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 34:2 (2001), 267–92. Chandler, James, ‘A Discipline in Shifting Perspective: Why We Need Irish Studies’, Field Day Review 2 (2006), 18–39. Clifford, Brendan, ed., Walter Cox’s Union Star: A Reprint of His 1797 Paper (Belfast: Athol Books, 2007). Cowper Hill, Martha, The Parents’ Cabinet of Instruction of Amusement, A New Edition (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1859). Curtin, Nancy J., The United Irishmen: Popular Politics in Ulster and Dublin, 1791–1798 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). [Davenport, R. A., ed.], The Poetical Register, and Repository of Fugitive Poetry, for 1808–1809 (London: F. C. & J. Rivington, 1812). Douglas, Aileen, Work in Hand: Script, Print, and Writing, 1690–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Drury, Joseph, Novel Machines: Technology and Narrative Form in Enlightenment Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Edgeworth, Maria, ‘Sketches for the Parent’s Assistant’, 1797–8. Bodleian Libraries, Oxford, MS. Eng. misc. e. 1462, fols. 23–6. ‘On the Education of the Poor’, c.1800. Bodleian Libraries, Oxford, MS. Eng. misc. e. 1461. ‘The White Pigeon’, in The Novels and Selected Works of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. x: The Parent’s Assistant and Moral Tales, ed. Elizabeth Eger and Clíona Ó Gallchoir (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003), pp. 157–64. Edgeworth, Maria, and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Esq., 2 vols. (London: R. Hunter, 1820), vol. ii. Edgeworth, Richard Lovell [and Maria Edgeworth ], ‘An Essay on the Art of Conveying Secret and Swift Intelligence’, The Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy 6 (1797), 95–139. 55

Ibid.

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A Letter to the Right Hon. the Earl of Charlemont on the Tellograph, and on the Defence of Ireland (Dublin and London: J. Johnson, 1797). Fagan, Patrick, ‘Infiltration of Dublin Freemason Lodges by United Irishmen and Other Republican Groups’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland/Iris an dá chultúr 13 (1998), 65–85. Fairclough, Mary, ‘The Telegraph: Radical Transmission in the 1790s’, EighteenthCentury Life 37:2 (2013), 26–52. Hill, Constance, ‘Some Unpublished Letters of Maria Edgeworth’, in The Hampstead Annual, ed. Ernest Rhys (London: The Priory Press, 1897). Kirwan, Adrian James, ‘R. L. Edgeworth and Optical Telegraphy in Ireland, c.1790–1805’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy: Archaeology, Culture, History, Literature 111C (2017), 209–35. Leask, Nigel, ‘Thomas Muir and The Telegraph: Radical Cosmopolitanism in 1790s Scotland’, History Workshop Journal 63:1 (2007), 48–69. Manly, Susan, ‘Maria Edgeworth’s Political Lives’, European Romantic Review 31:6 (2020), 767–86. McCormack, W. J., Dissolute Characters: Irish Literary History Through Balzac, Sheridan Le Fanu, Yeats and Bowen (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1993). MacDermot, Frank, ‘Arthur O’Connor’, Irish Historical Studies 15:57 (1966), 48–69. Morash, Christopher, A History of the Media in Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). O’Brien, Gillian, ‘“Spirit, Impartiality and Independence”: The Northern Star, 1792–1797’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland/Iris an dá chultúr 13 (1998), 7–23. Pakenham, Valerie, ed., Maria Edgeworth’s Letters from Ireland (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2017). Rendall, Jane, ‘Correspondence and Community: Maria Edgeworth’s Scottish Friends’, European Romantic Review 31:6 (2020), 681–98. Ryan, Dermot, Technologies of Empire: Writing, Imagination, and the Making of Imperial Networks, 1750–1820 (Lanham, MD: University of Delaware Press, 2013). Wharton, Joanna, ‘Maria Edgeworth and the Telegraph’, European Romantic Review 31:6 (2020), 747–65. Wright, Julia M., ‘Courting Public Opinion: Handling Informers in the 1790s’, Éire-Ireland 33:1 (1997–8), 144–69.

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chapter 4

Technologies of Sound: Telephone/Gramophone Christopher Morash

‘One Sunday, in summer, a few years ago, I went to the little village of Killeenan, not that many miles from Galway, to do honour to the memory of the poet Raftery’, wrote Yeats in ‘Literature and the Living Voice’, published in the little magazine Samhain in 1906. There, he heard ‘verses of other Gaelic poets sung or recited too, and, although certainly not often fine poetry, they had its spirit, its naïveté – that is to say, its way of looking at the world as if it were but an hour old’. He goes on to contrast this with an experience a few days later ‘in the town of Galway’, where he saw, ‘as I had often seen in other country towns, some young men marching down the middle of the street singing an already outworn London music-hall song, that filled the memory, long after they had gone by, with a rhythm as pronounced and impersonal as the noise of a machine’.1 As is so often the case with Yeats’s essays from those years, the apparently casual, anecdotal tone weaves an influential narrative of Irish literary history. The opposition between Killeenan and London is more than simply the obvious contrast of Ireland and England, familiar to nationalist readers. As the essay goes on, it becomes clear that there is another opposition being constructed here, from orality to print, what Walter Ong once described as ‘a shift from sound to visual space’.2 ‘In Ireland today’, Yeats continues, ‘the old world that sang and listened is, it may be for the last time in Europe, face to face with the world that reads and writes, and their antagonism is always present under some name or other in Irish imagination and intellect.’3 This opposition between speech and writing would continue to haunt Yeats’s work, right up to his radio broadcasts of the 1930s. Indeed, Ronald 1

2

3

W. B. Yeats, ‘Literature and the Living Voice’, The Collected Works, Vol. viii: The Irish Dramatic Movement, ed. Mary FitzGerald and Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 2003), pp. 94–107 (pp. 94–5). Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 115. Yeats, ‘Literature and the Living Voice’, p. 97.

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Schuchard has claimed that this essay, ‘Literature and the Living Voice’, is one starting point for the ‘undying effort to keep poetry in the public imagination’ that Yeats would sustain in various forms for the rest of his life.4 As late as 1937, in an introduction for an edition of his plays, Yeats claims the status of speech for all of his mature work. ‘I have spent my life clearing out of my poetry every phrase written for the eye, and bringing all back to the syntax that is for the ear alone’, he writes, suggesting that in so doing, he altered his ‘intellect’.5 Going beyond Yeats, it would be possible to trace a double helix running through Irish literary history through the twentieth century that would bring us into our own century, where, to take a remarkable example, we find orature claimed as an authentic source in Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s novel A Ghost in the Throat (2020). Here, a woman in the present, obsessed with the author of the eighteenth-century Caoindeadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, imagines the poem passing from oral to written culture via a storyteller who possesses an ‘invisible heirloom, for within her, she holds a vast library of precious antiques. [. . .] People travelled from afar to sit and watch her eyelids drop as she sought the thread with which to begin, and they stayed for hours, listening to her voice, enchanted.’6 As is often the case with such metanarratives, the shape of the story matters more than the historical details. If we go back to Yeats, singling out of the figure of Antoine Ó Raifteirí (or Raftery, as his name was anglicised) was a matter of channelling something current at that moment. Only a few years earlier, in 1903, Douglas Hyde had published his Songs Ascribed to Raftery and Lady Gregory had published Poets and Dreamers, which includes her translation of Hyde’s play about Raftery, An Pósadh, and which opens with Gregory’s own account of ‘sit[ting] by the fire in a ward of the Gort Workhouse’ listening to two old women arguing about the merits of two rival poets they had seen and heard in their childhood7 – one of whom was Raftery. It could just as well have been another. In Yeats’s writing from the 1890s, it is the figure of William Carleton who plays this role of the emissary from the world of the spoken word, with Yeats describing Carleton in an 1896 essay as having lived ‘only just in time’ to 4

5

6 7

Ronald Schuchard, The Last Minstrels: Yeats and the Revival of the Bardic Arts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. xxiii, xxv. W. B. Yeats, ‘An Introduction for My Plays’, The Collected Works, Vol. ii: The Plays, ed. David R. Clark and Rosalind E. Clark (New York: Scribner, 2001), pp. 23–6 (p. 24). Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat (Dublin: Tramp Press, 2020), p. 190. Augusta Gregory, Poets and Dreamers: Studies and Translations from the Irish (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis & Co., 1903), p. 1; Douglas Hyde, Songs Ascribed to Raftery (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1903).

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know ‘the manners and customs’ of ‘this strange Gaelic race [who] lives between two worlds’.8 The fact that both Raftery and Carleton (who started writing in the late 1820s, just as Raftery was coming to the end of his life) can serve the same function in this narrative of orature’s disappearance should alert us to one of its hidden features; it can appear at more than one point in literary history. If Carleton lived ‘only just in time’ in the 1830s to catch the tail end of an oral culture, how, we might ask, is it possible that Lady Gregory can also live ‘just in time’ sixty years later, when she sits listening to the two old women in the Gort Workhouse? Or how can J. M. Synge claim in his 1907 introduction to Playboy of the Western World that its language came from listening to ‘herds and fishermen along the coast from Kerry to Mayo, or [to] beggar-women and ballad-singers nearer Dublin’, concluding that ‘in Ireland, for a few years more, we have a popular imagination that is fiery and magnificent, and tender’?9 The window of ‘a few years more’ is, it seems, always disappearing, but nevertheless always available. In fact, so malleable is this narrative arc that we find a version of it playing out much, much earlier in Standish O’Grady’s History of Ireland: The Heroic Period, where he conjures a ‘bardic golden age’ that had been ‘ruined by the advent of Christianity’ in the fifth century,10 in a work that Gregory Castle and Patrick Bixby have argued ‘addresses the disjunctive forces of modernity, not by fixing the past in some definitive form, but by suggesting the entrelacement of “multiple and often incommensurable temporalities”’.11 It would be possible to multiply examples here almost indefinitely. The point is, whether in Synge’s ‘for a few years more’, or in Yeats’s ‘for the last time in Europe’, the present is perennially a moment of disappearance, a fast-closing window in which it is possible to still hear the voices of a culture of the spoken word; at the same time, paradoxically, that moment has already occurred, over and over again, in the past. At each of these moments, oral culture’s disappearing act is replicated, and that which has disappeared for ever can be made to disappear all over again – almost as W. B. Yeats, ‘William Carleton’, Uncollected Prose, Vol. i: First Reviews and Articles, 1886–1896, ed. John P. Frayne (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), pp. 394–7 (p. 396). 9 J. M. Synge, ‘Preface to The Playboy of the Western World’, The Collected Works, Vol. iv: Plays: Book II, ed. Ann Saddlemyer (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 53–4. 10 Standish O’Grady, History of Ireland: The Heroic Period (London: Sampson Low, Searle, Marston, & Rivington, 1878), p. xv. 11 Gregory Castle and Patrick Bixby, ‘Standish O’Grady and the Historical Imagination of Irish Modernism’, in A History of Irish Modernism, ed. Castle and Bixby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 44–63 (p.59). The final phrase is a quotation from David Lloyd, Irish Times: Temporalities of Modernity (Dublin: Field Day, 2008), p. 6. 8

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if we can simply rewind the tape, or drop the needle on the disc at a different point. It may be time, then, to resituate this foundational paradox by shifting it away from debates about national culture or folklore, placing it instead within the history of technology. We get an indication of what this approach can yield if we go back to Yeats’s essay ‘Literature and the Living Voice’, where we find that his carefully constructed binary opposition – between ‘literature’ and ‘the living voice’ – is troubled by the offstage presence of some unspoken third thing. Consider, for instance, the essay’s very precise use of locations. Opening with Killeeneen (Yeats’s ‘Killeenan’) is straightforward enough; Ó Raifteirí died there, and in 1900, Yeats, Gregory, and Edward Martyn erected a plaque in the village over his grave. However, to counterpose this to Galway (as opposed to, say, London or even Dublin) is surely odd. How do these men in Galway come to be singing ‘an already outworn London music-hall song’? Where have they heard it? Galway did not have a theatre for touring productions at the time, although there was a good trade in sheet music, for those who could read music. However, there is another unspoken possibility here: the young men Yeats heard in the street had been listening to a recording. This suggestion is intimated by what is perhaps the most memorable phrase in the whole essay: the description of the music-hall song as having ‘a rhythm as pronounced and impersonal as the noise of a machine’. If the impersonal and the mechanical – those same qualities that Yeats ascribes to print – can be assumed by a song, then technology is not simply the other of the living voice. The machine can inhabit the living voice and, by the same token, the living voice can inhabit the machine. Once we admit this possibility, it opens up the prospect that the narrative trope of loss and trauma accompanying the transition from the spoken word to print, which runs through Irish cultural histories of the early twentieth century (and, indeed, into the twenty-first century), is, in fact, a narrative of misrecognition. This was certainly the case around 1900. At that point, print was far from new; indeed, it was not new in 1800, and Dublin had had one of the liveliest European print cultures of the preceding century. In the nineteenth century, the advent of cheap paper, steam print, and an increasingly literate population had produced a print culture in Ireland with, for example, more newspaper titles per capita than England, Scotland, or Wales. So, by the early 1900s, print was not only not new in Ireland, it was no longer even particularly non-indigenous. What was new, however, were technologies of the spoken word: the telephone and phonograph. As Friedrich Kittler once put it: ‘The ability to record

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sense data technologically shifted the entire discourse network circa 1900. For the first time in history, writing ceased to be synonymous with the serial storage of data.’12 In Ireland, the alignments between this tectonic technological shift and its misrecognitions are often very precise. Yeats’s essay in which he describes Carleton as having lived ‘just in time’ to capture a dying oral culture was published in March 1896, three months after the first Edison phonographs for home use went on sale. The first catalogue of Edison prerecorded phonograph cylinders and the first low-cost phonograph both became available in 1899, the same year in which Yeats published a pivotal essay, ‘The Theatre’, in which he claims that ‘the audiences of Sophocles and of Shakespeare and of Calderon were not unlike the audiences I have heard listening in Irish cabins to songs in Gaelic about “an old poet telling his sins”’.13 In that same year, 1899, in New York the Irish piper James C. McAuliffe was offering for sale Edison gramophone recordings of his versions of ‘Minstrel Boy’, ‘Miss McCloud’s Reel’, ‘Donnybrook Fair’, and ‘Stack of Barley’.14 Gregory’s Poets and Dreamers, with her account of old women remembering Raftery, and Hyde’s Songs Ascribed to Raftery, both appeared in 1903, the same year in which the first major Irish recording star, John McCormack, cut his first cylinder. In 1907, six months after the premiere of Synge’s Playboy of the Western World (of which the playwright recounts his drawing inspiration from a dying orature), the Gaelic League Oireachtas in Dublin’s Rotunda contracted the Russell Hunting Company to record more than 100 phonograph recordings of stories, songs, and recitations (in both Irish and English).15 That same year, the pre-recorded cylinder business in England peaked (before giving way to the more convenient disc); by July 1907, more than £3 million worth of recordings had been sold in the previous twelve months.16 To put it simply, the Irish Literary Revival, with its foundational narrative of a print literature drawing its vitality from a dying orature ‘for a few years more’, was being produced not when print was swallowing the spoken word, but at the precise moment that 12

13

14

15 16

Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 229. W. B. Yeats, ‘The Theatre’, The Collected Works, Vol. viii: The Irish Dramatic Movement, ed. Mary FitzGerald and Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 2003), pp. 147–52 (p. 148). Richard K. Spottswood, Ethnic Music on Records: A Discography of Ethnic Music Recordings Produced in the United States, 1893–1942, Vol. v (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), Ed7229–Ed7231. Harry Bradshaw and Nicholas Carolan, The Irish Phonograph (Dublin: RTÉ, 1984), p. 2. Oliver Read and Walter L. Welch, From Tin Foil to Stereo: Evolution of the Phonograph (Indianapolis: Howard W. Sams, 1976), p. 150.

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technologies of sound were producing, for the first time ever, a new secondary orality that would operate on a global scale. Nor were the histories of these technologies of sound entirely something developed outside of Ireland. In the same year that W. B. Yeats was born – 1865 – another Yeats, Stephen Mitchell Yeates,17 one of the Dublin family of optical and electrical instrument makers based on Grafton Street, demonstrated to the Philosophical Society his own improved version of a telephone that had been first shown in Hamburg in 1861 by Philip Reis.18 Reis’s telephone had been an improvised contraption of almost comical Germanness, in which ‘the transmitting instrument was a bung of a beer barrel hollowed out, and a cone formed in this way was closed with the skin of a German sausage’.19 Yeates had designed a more efficient electromagnetic receiver, and when presented before the Dublin audience, there was agreement that ‘the articulation of several words was distinctly heard’20 – making them probably the first technologically mediated words ever spoken by an Irish person. Stephen Mitchell Yeates’s brother, Horatio Yeates, was later in correspondence with Alexander Graham Bell in 1877,21 and one or other of the Yeates are almost certainly the ‘Mr. Yates’ that the Dublin newspapers referred to when W. F. Barrett demonstrated an Edison telephone to the Royal Dublin Society later in 1877, the year before the first telephone company in London was established. It is worth clarifying here what kind of history can be produced by placing Irish literary history in this frame. Gabriele Balbi and Christiane Berth have argued in ‘Towards a Telephonic History of Technology’ that histories of the telephone have ‘oscillated between three analytic approaches’, which they summarise as the history of ‘the technical dimensions’ of the telephone, the ‘political economy of the telephone’, and, finally, ‘social and cultural change brought about by the telephone’.22 If 17

18

19

20 21

22

The listing for the family’s firm on Grafton Street in the New City Pictorial Directory spells the family name as ‘Yates’. New City Pictorial Directory 1850 (Dublin: Henry Shaw, 1850), np, s.v. ‘Grafton Street’. ‘Facsimile 1865 homemade telephone, 1888’, Science Museum Group, https://collection .sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co33038/facsimile-1865-homemade-telephone-1888-telephone (accessed 13 November 2020). W. F. Barrett, ‘On the Electric Telephone’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 1877–1878, Vol. i (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1878), pp. 73–82 (p. 77). Ibid., p. 81. Horatio Yeates to Alexander Graham Bell, 29 August 1877; Alexander Graham Bell Papers, MSS51268: Folder: The Telephone, Correspondence, 1875–1918, Library of Congress, http://hdl .loc.gov/loc.mss/magbell.27000107 (accessed 13 November 2020). Gabriele Balbi and Christiane Berth, ‘Towards a Telephonic History of Technology’, History and Technology 35:2 (2019), 105–14 (p. 106).

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we were to trace the first two of these paths in relation to Ireland, Barrett’s demonstration of Thomas Edison’s telephone in 1877 would take us to Dublin’s first telephone exchange, opened by the United Telephone Company (which combined Edison and Bell) from a premises in Dame Street in 1880. By 1881, there were 20 telephones in the city, and by 1888 (the year in which W. B. Yeats was editing Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry), there were 500 telephones in the city. By 1900, there were fiftysix telephone exchanges around Ireland, and the telephone exchange in Crown Alley, which would operate well into the twentieth century, was being built, prior to nationalisation of most of the network in 1905.23 However, if we set out to trace the third kind of history of the telephone in Ireland – the telephone as an agent of social and cultural change – we very soon find that, in Ireland at least, it becomes entangled with a very different kind of history of technologies of sound, which we glimpse at the edges of literary texts. This fourth history of the telephone is entangled with the other technology of sound that grew up with it, the phonograph. The phonograph was originally so named because in 1877, when Barrett was demonstrating the telephone in Dublin, Thomas Edison was bellowing into one in New Jersey to which he had attached a moving stylus to the diaphragm on the receiver. ‘Edison understood’, remarks Kittler: ‘A month later he coined a term for his new telephone addition: phonograph. [. . .] Mechanical sound recording had been invented.’24 From the outset, Edison saw the two technologies as aspects of one another. However, he also foresaw that their impact would be more than simply technological, commercial, or even social. Writing in his essay ‘The Phonograph and Its Future’ in the North American Review a year later, in 1878, he begins by saying that nothing he had hitherto invented ‘has commanded such profound and earnest attention throughout the civilized world as has the phonograph’: This fact he [Edison] attributes largely to that peculiarity of the invention which brings its possibilities within the range of speculative imaginations of all thinking people, as well as to the almost universal applicability of its foundational principle, namely, the gathering up and retaining of sounds hitherto fugitive, and their reproduction at will.25 23

24

25

A. J. Litton, ‘The Growth and Development of the Irish Telephone System’, Journal of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland 20:5(1961/2), 79–115. Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 21. Thomas A. Edison, ‘The Phonograph and Its Future’, North American Review 126:262 (May–June 1878), 527–36 (p. 527).

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In part, what Edison is anticipating here is what media historians Simone Müller and Heidi Tworek have very usefully called ‘imagined uses’, the ways in which, apart from any actual applications, new technologies frequently offer ‘a way to imagine and structure the future’.26 More often than not, these imagined uses tend to be illusory; we are all still waiting for our personal jetpacks. However, in the case of the phonograph, this ‘imagined use’ went to the heart of what it was to be human. We glimpse this in one of the texts that Kittler weaves through the bricolage of Gramophone, Film, Typewriter: Jean-Marie Guyau’s ‘Memory and Phonograph’ (1880). Guyau was a French philosopher, and one of the first to consider the philosophical issues raised by the new technology, coming around to the view that the phonograph could be considered as a kind of prosthetic memory. ‘If the phonograph disk had selfconsciousness’, observes Guyau, ‘it could point out while replaying a song that it remembers this particular song. And what appears to us as the effect of a rather simple mechanism would, quite probably, strike the disk as a miraculous ability: memory.’27 Guyau is thus the starting point for a philosophical discourse of recording technologies, which would take us (as Peter Boxall reminds us in The Prosthetic Imagination) through to Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, where Freud writes that the ‘photographic camera’ allows us to ‘retain fleeting visual impressions; just as the gramophone disc retains the equally fleeting auditory ones’, and ‘with the help of the telephone’, we ‘hear at distances’. ‘All of these technologies’, argues Boxall, are seen by Freud as ‘prosthetic extensions of the human’, and this has an important implication for literature: ‘The development of mechanical technologies over the course of the nineteenth century extends the reach of the human, while also opening distances between mind and body, between consciousness and prosthetically enhanced biomatter.’28 For Boxall, this figures forth in nineteenthcentury realism, where ‘the balance between the real and the artificial – the very texture of fictionality itself – is shaped by those technological and political forces.’29 However, in an Irish context, it also brings us back to Yeats on a Galway street, where technologies of sound recording, and the attendant possibilities of prosthetic memory, function like a kind of 26

27 28

29

Simone M. Müller and Heidi J. S. Tworek, ‘Imagined Use as a Category of Analysis: New Approaches to the History of Technology’, History and Technology 32:2 (2016), 105–19 (p. 105). Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, p. 31. Peter Boxall, The Prosthetic Imagination: A History of the Novel as Artificial Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), p. 151. Ibid., p. 211.

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cultural dark matter, just beyond the field of vision, but whose gravitational field can be heard in the singing human voice that has become ‘as pronounced and impersonal as the noise of a machine’. In Irish literature, then, this fourth history of sound technology appears largely as a series of voices off, or as broken speech. It has come into focus in recent years as accounts of Irish literary modernism have increasingly taken account of technology. An early indication of what this approach could yield came in Jennifer Wicke’s reading of Dracula, when she noted that the 1897 novel uses what were then radically new technologies, including phonograph recordings, to defeat an ancient evil (although the vampire himself is not above using a city directory).30 This in turn can remind us that there has long been an interest in the affinities between sound transmission technologies and the occult, what Alex Goody calls in a wider literary context, ‘the possibility of boundary-crossing communication in electrical and psychical forms’.31 These include the extraordinary episode in which Yeats and Edmund Dulac were involved in an attempt by someone who Roy Foster describes as ‘a mildly deranged chemist (and part-time solicitor) from St. Leonards-on Sea’ to build a speaking robot who could communicate with spirits, the so-called Metallic Homunculus.32 This was just part of a wider interest that W. B. Yeats and George Yeats shared, along with other members of the Society for Psychical Research (founded, it is worth noting, in 1882), in the possibilities for using sound technologies to investigate psychic phenomena. Their interest, Emily Morin has argued, ‘finds many resonances in late nineteenth-century discourses about signal transmission, recording and psychical research’;33 indeed, for Morin, the uncanny qualities of technologies of sound recording constitute one of the links between the occult and literary modernism.34 Moreover, this affinity between sound transmission and the occult continues to operate into the present, and we see it activated in Conor McPherson’s 1997 play, The Weir, where the character of Valerie 30 31 32

33

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Jennifer Wicke, ‘Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and Its Media’, ELH 59:2 (Summer 1992), 467–93. Alex Goody, Technology, Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), p. 9. R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life, Vol. ii: The Arch-Poet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 80. See also Christopher Blake, ‘Ghosts in the Machine: W. B. Yeats and the Metallic Homunculus’, Yeats Annual 15 (2002), 69–101. Emilie Morin, ‘“I Beg Your Pardon?”: W. B. Yeats, Audibility, and Sound Transmission’, Yeats’s Mask: Yeats Annual 19, ed. Margaret Mills Harper and Warwick Gould (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2013), pp. 191–219 (p. 194). In particular, see Pamela Thurschwell, Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); and Helen Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2002).

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tells of hearing her drowned daughter’s voice coming through the telephone: ‘The line was very faint. It was like a crossed line. There were voices, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying. And then I heard Niamh.’35 In short, far from the occult and technologies of sound being at opposite sides of a spectrum, they are often aspects of the same troubled fascination with the disembodied voice. ‘A medium is a medium is a medium’, Kittler puts it succinctly in Discourse Networks, 1800/1900: ‘As the sentence says, there is no difference between occult and technological media. Their truth is fatality, their field the unconscious. And because the unconscious never finds an illusory belief, the unconscious can only be stored.’36 Elsewhere, Damien Keane’s Ireland and the Problem of Information (2014), Emily Bloom’s The Wireless Past: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 1931–1968 (2016), and Jeremy Lakoff’s recent work on Denis Johnston’s radio plays are among those to have situated some of the forms of Irish modernism in relation to sound technologies of all kinds,37 with Bloom arguing that not to take account of radio is to miss out on what she calls ‘radiogenic tropes’ in Irish writing, which include such things as ‘embodiment and disembodiment, communalism and individualism, and ephemerality and permanence’.38 In relation to the gramophone, Susanne Cammack has drawn on Bruno Latour’s ‘thing’ theory to trace its history as an uncanny object in Irish writing, such as that in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September (1929). Here, Cammack argues that a ‘changed relation between “thing” and human subject holds the key to understanding the gramophone as a physical locus of trauma’.39 Likewise, turning her attention to Lennox Robinson’s little-known play Portrait (1925), where a malfunctioning gramophone features prominently on the stage throughout, Cammack suggests that for Robinson (ever the Ibsenite), the gramophone comes to function as a ‘psychological symbol’ for the tensions of post-Civil War Ireland.40 35 36 37

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Conor McPherson, The Weir (London: Nick Hern, 1997), p. 57. Kittler, Discourse Networks, p. 229. Damien Keane, Ireland and the Problem of Information: Irish Writing, Radio, Late Modernist Communication (University Park, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); Jeremy Lakoff, ‘Broadcatastrophe! Denis Johnston’s Radio Drama and the Aesthetics of Working It Out’, in Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism, ed. Kathryn Conrad, Cóilín Parsons, and Julie McCormick Weng (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2019), pp. 160–82. Emily Bloom, The Wireless Past: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 1931–1968 (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 3. Susanne S. Cammack, ‘The Death of a Gramophone in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September’, Journal of Modern Literature 40:2 (Winter 2017), 132–46 (p. 133). Susanne S. Cammack, ‘Gramophonic Strain in Lennox Robinson’s Portrait’, in Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism, ed. Kathryn Conrad, Cóilín Parsons, and Julie McCormick Weng (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2019), pp. 131–43.

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One of the threads connecting this recent work on the gramophone, the telephone, and Irish modernist writing is the frequency with which these technologies, rather than offering a kind of seamless prosthesis, more often obtrude their own materiality by not working as they should. Rather than being robotic limbs, they are more often rickety wooden legs. There is a wonderfully curious letter from George Yeats to W. B. Yeats from 1932, in which she describes ‘a very queer thing that happened’ one day when she answered the telephone in their Dublin house: but instead of a reply I heard Italian opera being sung; I seized a chair and sat and listened. Presently, when I. Op. had ceased, a voice said ‘this is 2 RN’; then an announcement of a pantomime that was to be broadcast. Then a sort of preliminary song and the telephone suddenly cut off.41

As so often when we encounter Yeats face to face with a sound technology, he struggles. Writing to Sir Anthony McDonnell to invite him to the Abbey Theatre in 1907, Yeats begins his note with an apology: ‘At Lady Macdonolds [sic] suggestion I tried to get you on the telephone just now, but I am little familiar with telephones & I put the thing one puts to ones [sic] ear down & got rung off.’42 Writing to Lady Gregory a few years later about Ezra Pound’s attempts to sing, he declared: ‘He can’t sing and he has no voice. It is like something on a very bad phonograph.’43 Earlier, in 1901, Gregory uses the same image in her own diary after seeing an ageing Henry Irving perform, noting that ‘his voice is quite gone, & sounds as if coming from a phonograph’.44 And then there is the possibly apocryphal episode that Emily Morin puts to good use, when Yeats, unable to hear himself clearly on a recorded wireless broadcast, cupped his hand to his ear and brusquely instructed the wireless to ‘speak up, please’.45 All of these moments in Irish literature and literary culture remind us that the early sound technologies of the gramophone and telephone were not simply prosthetic memories or ears. They also produced signatures of their own materiality: noise. From the perspective of our own time, we need to remind ourselves of the sound of static, as ubiquitous technologies 41

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43

44

45

George Yeats, Letter to W. B. Yeats (2 January 1932), W. B. Yeats and George Yeats: The Letters, ed. Ann Saddlemyer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 283. W. B. Yeats, Letter to Anthony McDonnell (11 October 1907), The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, gen. ed. John Kelly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), InteLex Electronic Edition, Accession 677. W. B. Yeats to Lady Gregory (10 December 1909), Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, gen. ed. Kelly, InteLex Electronic Edition, Accession 1239. The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, Vol. iii: 1901–1904, John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 58, n.1. Morin, ‘“I Beg Your Pardon?”’, p. 193.

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increasingly erase traces of their own existence as technology, filtering out the noise. By contrast, we are reminded of the presence of technology as technology by the crackles, hisses, and oscillations of the early recordings and transmissions. The significance of this recognition can be found in Jacques Derrida’s essay on Ulysses, ‘Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce’, in which he focuses on a passage in the ‘Aeolus’ episode in which it is reported that ‘Bloom is at the telephone.’ This becomes a characteristically Derridean riff that carries us to Heidegger: Bloom-is-at-the-telephone. [. . .] It can be read in this particular paradigm: he is at the telephone, he is always there, he belongs to the telephone, he is at once riveted and destined there. His being is a being-at-the-telephone. He is hooked up to a multiplicity of voices and answering machines. His beingthere is a being-at-the-telephone, a being for the telephone.46

In the play here between ‘being-at-the-telephone’ and ‘being-in-theworld’, Derrida brings us towards understanding the place of technologies of sound in Irish culture in the early decades of the twentieth century. In this novel set in 1904, Bloom is not just on the other side of the island from the ghost of Raftery, being memorialised at that same moment in Killeenan. At ‘the heart of the Hibernian metropolis’, where the post, the telegraph, the newspapers, and the telephones intersect in Ulysses, Bloom is, insists Derrida, ‘hooked up to a powerful network [. . .] He belongs in his essence to a polytelephonic structure.’47 Although he does not name it as such, the text with which Derrida is engaging here is a late lecture by Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, from 1955.48 To summarise a complex argument succinctly, for Heidegger, technology provides a way of enframing (Gestell) our being in the world; when we look at a technologised world, we do not simply see things, we see their use value. A forest is not simply a forest, it is so much timber; a river is no longer a river, it is a potential source of hydro-electricity. ‘The essence of modern technology’, writes Heidegger, ‘starts man upon the way of that revealing through which the real everywhere, more or less distinctly, becomes 46 47 48

Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 272–3. Ibid., p. 273. This was originally one of four lectures delivered in Bremen on 1 December 1949: ‘Das Ding’ [‘The Thing’]; ‘Das Gestell’ [‘Enframing’]; ‘Die Gefahr’ [‘The Danger’]; and ‘Die Kehre’ [‘The Turning’]. ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ was an expanded version of ‘Das Gestell’, delivered on 18 November 1955 in Munich. ‘The Turning’ is a necessary counterpart of ‘The Question Concerning Technology’. See Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977).

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standing-reserve.’49 Seeing the world in this way, he suggests, may initially seem to reveal the world (and hence our being in it) more fully. The danger here, says Heidegger, is that this revealing is also a form of concealing, for when the revelations of technology dominate, or ‘enframe’ our being-in-the-world, we cease to see the world as world, but only as extensions of ourselves. ‘The coming to presence of technology threatens revealing, threatens it with the possibility that all revealing will be consumed in ordering and that everything will present itself only in the unconcealedness of standing-reserve.’50 The concept of the ‘standing-reserve’, and the shell game of revealing and concealment in which technology places our being in the world, can tell us something about the danger that Yeats heard on the streets of Galway. ‘The essence of technology’, Heidegger declares, ‘is in a lofty sense ambiguous.’51 Just as trees or rivers are transformed by technology from ‘nature’ to a ‘natural resource’, so too do recordings make a fugitive orature a resource to be mined. An initiative such as the abandoned attempt in 1907 to record the Gaelic League Oireachtas might appear to be an heroic effort to preserve a folk orature, to reveal and make it visible; but it also enframes it, precludes any other possible relationship to it, and thus conceals it. The folk tale or the song becomes just another natural resource to be mined or connected to a turbine, the cultural equivalent of coal, timber, or sunlight. In this respect, in a culture in which a speaking human voice has value, the existence of a technology that takes speech as its content threatens that value. So, when Yeats ‘does honour to the poet Raftery’, or when Gregory hears the women talking in the Gort Workhouse, they are not simply hearing voices speak; they are hearing the world as not-technology. Likewise, hearing noise in the phonograph, or the crackle on the telephone, reminds us of technology’s enframing, opening up the possibility of another relation to the world. ‘The more questioningly we ponder the essence of technology’, Heidegger writes, ‘the more mysterious the essence of art becomes.’52 By adopting a posture of deliberate anachronism, unable to use the telephone and hearing the noise from the gramophone, Yeats defines a position of resistance that addresses the question of technology by bracketing the frame, as it were, hearing the technology as technology. James Joyce (or, at least, Derrida’s Bloom) takes the opposite tack; by immersing himself in the technology, by being-at-the-telephone, his authentic being is produced 49 52

Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, p. 24. Ibid., p. 35.

50

Ibid., p. 33.

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Ibid.

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by his connections – even technologically mediated – with others. Between them, Yeats and Bloom at-the-telephone define two of the poles of possibility of thought that technologies of the telephone and gramophone made possible in early twentieth-century Irish writing.

Select Bibliography Balbi, Gabriele, and Christiane Berth, ‘Towards a Telephonic History of Technology’, History and Technology 35:2 (2019), 105–14. Barrett, W. F., ‘On the Electric Telephone’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 1877–1878, Vol. i (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1878), pp. 73–82. Blake, Christopher, ‘Ghosts in the Machine: W. B. Yeats and the Metallic Homunculus’, Yeats Annual 15 (2002), 69–101. Bloom, Emily, The Wireless Past: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 1931–1968 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Boxall, Peter, The Prosthetic Imagination: A History of the Novel as Artificial Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). Bradshaw, Harry, and Nicholas Carolan, The Irish Phonograph (Dublin: RTÉ, 1984). Cammack, Susanne S., ‘The Death of a Gramophone in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September’, Journal of Modern Literature 40:2 (Winter 2017), 132–46. ‘Gramophonic Strain in Lennox Robinson’s Portrait’, in Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism, ed. Kathryn Conrad, Cóilín Parsons, and Julie McCormick Weng (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2019), pp. 131–43. Castle, Gregory, and Patrick Bixby, ‘Standish O’Grady and the Historical Imagination of Irish Modernism’, in A History of Irish Modernism, ed. Castle and Bixby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 44–63. Derrida, Jacques, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992). Edison, Thomas A., ‘The Phonograph and Its Future’, North American Review 126:262 (May–June 1878), 527–36. Foster, R. F., W. B. Yeats: A Life, Vol. ii: The Arch-Poet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Goody, Alex, Technology, Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Polity, 2011). Gregory, Augusta, Poets and Dreamers: Studies and Translations from the Irish (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis & Co., 1903). Heidegger, Martin, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). Hyde, Douglas, Songs Ascribed to Raftery (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1903). Keane, Damien, Ireland and the Problem of Information: Irish Writing, Radio, Late Modernist Communication (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014).

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Kelly, John, and Ronald Schuchard, eds., The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, Vol. iii: 1901–1904 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). Kittler, Friedrich, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). Lakoff, Jeremy, ‘Broadcatastrophe! Denis Johnston’s Radio Drama and the Aesthetics of Working it Out’, in Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism, ed. Kathryn Conrad, Cóilín Parsons, and Julie McCormick Weng (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2019), pp. 160–80. Litton, A. J., ‘The Growth and Development of the Irish Telephone System’, Journal of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland 20:5 (1961/2), 79–115. Lloyd, David, Irish Times: Temporalities of Modernity (Dublin: Field Day, 2008). McPherson, Conor, The Weir (London: Nick Hern, 1997). Morin, Emilie, ‘“I Beg Your Pardon?”: W. B. Yeats, Audibility, and Sound Transmission’, in Yeats’s Mask: Yeats Annual 19, ed. Margaret Mills Harper and Warwick Gould (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2013), pp. 191–219. Müller, Simone M., and Heidi J. S. Tworek, ‘Imagined Use as a Category of Analysis: New Approaches to the History of Technology’, History and Technology 32:2 (2016), 105–19. Ní Ghríofa, Doireann, A Ghost in the Throat (Dublin: Tramp Press, 2020). O’Grady, Standish, History of Ireland: The Heroic Period (London: Sampson Low, Searle, Marston, & Rivington, 1878). Ong, Walter J., Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 1988). Read, Oliver, and Walter L. Welch, From Tin Foil to Stereo: Evolution of the Phonograph (Indianapolis: Howard W. Sams, 1976). Schuchard, Ronald, The Last Minstrels: Yeats and the Revival of the Bardic Arts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Spottswood, Richard K., Ethnic Music on Records: A Discography of Ethnic Music Recordings Produced in the United States, 1893–1942, Vol. v (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), Ed7229–Ed7231. Synge, J. M., ‘Preface to The Playboy of the Western World’, Collected Works, Vol. iv: Plays: Book II, ed. Ann Saddlemyer (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 53–4. Wicke, Jennifer, ‘Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and Its Media’, ELH 59:2 (Summer 1992), 467–93. Yeats, George, Letter to W. B. Yeats, W. B. Yeats and George Yeats: The Letters, ed. Ann Saddlemyer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 283. Yeats, W. B., ‘William Carleton’, Uncollected Prose, Vol. i: First Reviews and Articles, 1886–1896, ed. John P. Frayne (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), pp. 394–7. ‘An Introduction for My Plays’, The Collected Works, Vol. ii: The Plays, ed. David R. Clark and Rosalind E. Clark (New York: Scribner, 2001), pp. 23–6.

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Letter to Anthony McDonnell, The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, gen. ed. John Kelly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), InteLex Electronic Edition. Letter to Lady Gregory, The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, gen. ed. John Kelly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), InteLex Electronic Edition. ‘Literature and the Living Voice’, The Collected Works, Vol. viii: The Irish Dramatic Movement, ed. Mary FitzGerald and Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 2003), pp. 94–107. ‘The Theatre’, The Collected Works, Vol. viii: The Irish Dramatic Movement, ed. Mary FitzGerald and Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 2003), pp. 147–52.

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part ii

Infrastructures

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chapter 5

Electric Signs and Echo Chambers: The Stupidity of Affect in Modern Irish Literature Barry Sheils

Few would argue that Tennyson in his 1848 poem ‘The Splendour Falls on Castle Walls’, written while he was on holiday near Killarney, was profoundly concerned with the Irish famine: [. . .] O love, they die in yon rich sky, They faint on hill or field or river: Our echoes roll from soul to soul, And grow forever and forever. Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying, And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.1

Also known as ‘The Bugle Song’, later part of The Princess, this is clearly a poem interested in its own sound. For Matthew Campbell it is ‘about immortality: it views the eternity of both the soul and memory’. It recalls works by Thomas Moore and Mary Tighe, entering the tradition of the romantic sublime wedded to place, and at the same time constitutes part of Tennyson’s ‘sublimated response to the horrors around him’.2 We might also note, however, that the poem’s attempt to convey music in writing, the bugle’s echoes returning key phrases to the listener over and over again, characterises its scene as one of narcissistic enchantment. This suggests that the contiguity of ‘dying’ sounds with dying bodies will not become a matter of realistic identification. Those dying ‘echoes’ will never re-present the dying people Tennyson must have disregarded on the side of the road. The pioneering theorist of electromagnetic fields, James Clerk Maxwell, wrote a half-serious imitation of Tennyson’s poem. Referring to the galvanometer, a machine for measuring electric current in submarine telegraph

1 2

Alfred Tennyson, The Complete Works (New York: R. Worthington, 1882), p. 152. Matthew Campbell, Irish Poetry Under the Union, 1801–1924 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 141, 139.

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cables, Maxwell replaces the bugle’s echo with electricity: ‘Flow, current, flow, set the quick light-spot flying, / Flow, current, answer light-spot, flashing, quivering, dying.’3 As Jason Rudy comments, ‘a transcription of sonic waves into written form [in Tennyson’s verse] becomes in Maxwell’s poem “the translation of an oscillating light into a telegraphic message”’.4 Reading Tennyson back through Maxwell’s pastiche alerts us to the sensationalism of the original. The poem resonates and is about resonance – and this perhaps accounts for Maxwell’s tribute: the translation of electrical current into communications technology depends on resonance, the decipherment of vibrations back into audible sound.5 Read in this way, ‘The Bugle Song’ is less the ‘localised romance’ suggested by Campbell, with its implications of landscape and the egoic sublime, than a recursive and resonating sound system that does not refer except to itself – an echolalic abstraction. The bugle’s echo moves towards and away from the poet, emerging and at the same time fading, travelling into the distance; the poem’s meaning is this register of nearness and farness as a modulation of somatic charge. Electricity is charged matter. We might say, in this respect, that Tennyson’s poem is electric. But electricity is also, socially and culturally speaking, infrastructural. It is this problem which Tennyson’s poem disavows. Michael Rubenstein has shown how the development of Irish public utilities (including electricity) influenced the formal qualities of Irish modernist literature. This was a consequence of the historical experience of underdevelopment, and, most specifically, of the cultural memory of absent famine relief and the infamous ‘Irish Board of Works’. If the Celts remained where Matthew Arnold had wanted to locate them, geographically as well as spiritually opposed to the governing apparatus of the modern state, then the Irish modernists of the 1930s and 1940s had left Celticism well and truly behind. Ireland’s literary culture, in tune with the example of the newly established Free State, itself responsible for the world’s first state-controlled electric grid in the 1930s, became unusually receptive to the networked quotidian, with writers including James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, and Flann O’Brien able to accommodate state infrastructure without denigrating it as mere utilitarianism.6 Registering the 3

4 5

6

Quoted in Jason R. Rudy, Electric Meters: Victorian Physiological Poetics (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009), p. 3. Ibid., p. 5. John Trowbridge, The Advance in Electricity Since the Time of Franklin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1922), p. 46. Michael Rubenstein, Public Works: Infrastructure, Irish Modernism, and the Postcolonial (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), pp. 21, 29, 24.

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unusual rapidity of Ireland’s social development, the changing relation between private and public worlds, as well as between the city and the country, they were also willing to regard the technologies of state as facilitating citizenship. Even so, although there might have been, as Rubenstein suggests, less posturing against infrastructural modernity in Ireland than elsewhere in Europe, electrical modernity was recorded ambivalently. Unlike fresh water, electricity was not a basic amenity; what’s more, its production was relatively occluded, even occult by reputation, while its manifestation as light – a light to produce telegraphic messages in Maxwell’s poem – placed the emphasis on distribution and reception. While electric light continued to stand, both technologically and symbolically, for modernity and enlightenment, its proliferation was scandalously deceptive, its assault upon the dark a disruption of the perceptual field. Almost inevitably, this invited counter-critique. We can see this, for example, in W. B. Yeats’s descant on the lights of central Dublin in the 1930s, which is ironically reminiscent of Tennyson’s exhilaration on the MacGillycuddy’s Reeks nearly a century before: When I stand upon O’Connell Bridge in the half-light and notice that discordant architecture, all those electric signs, where modern heterogeneity has taken physical form, a vague hatred comes up out of my own dark and I am certain that wherever in Europe there are minds strong enough to lead others the same vague hatred rises; in four or five or in less generations this hatred will have issued in violence and imposed some kind of rule of kindred. I cannot know the nature of that rule, for its opposite fills the light; all I can do to bring it nearer is to intensify my hatred.7

It is worth noting that the ‘modern heterogeneity’ Yeats so laments is an ironic consequence of a new infrastructural cohesion: the Shannon Hydroelectric scheme was already in operation in the 1930s. The predictability of Yeats’s response is that of a romantic poet deprived of the sublime: the lightning strike of nature, a sudden and potentially endangering meteorological event, has been earthed and redistributed in the banal form of an electric sign. The relative security of modern light compromises the self-image of a deep subject capable of apprehending phenomena which exist beyond the scope of human ingenuity. Though never straightforwardly Arnoldian, neither was Yeats averse to borrowing the anthropological perspective on Irish underdevelopment: the small, well-lit 7

W. B. Yeats, ‘A General Introduction for My Work’, Essays and Introductions (London: Macmillan, 1961), pp. 509–26 (p. 526).

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adventures of his London life had often been metaphysically transformed against the elemental backdrop of Ben Bulben and Knocknarea, his circumstantial emergencies given their proper twilight perspective by the deep field of the primitive. It is suggestive, then, that when Yeats loses this depth perspective – this is electric light in Ireland, not London! – his affective life is fundamentally reordered. Instead of sublime awe, he feels a ‘vague hatred’ come up and out of ‘his own dark’, which is like a compensatory memory for the ‘proper dark’ paradoxically obscured by electricity.8 We might recall that Joyce, writing as Stephen Dedalus, was fearful to the point of revulsion of the Irish dark: ‘I fear his [the old man’s] redrimmed horny eyes.’ For Joyce, the dark was contagious and creaturely, an illiterate element capable of submerging his whole being: ‘the peasant woman’s bat-like soul wakes to consciousness of itself in darkness’.9 But for Yeats, it remained a manageable poetic resource – part of his unending crepuscule. And yet, despite how obviously privileged his resistance to 1930s electrification, Yeats registers rather well its destabilising effects. It is especially significant in this example that his hatred for modernity is unsupported by the reality he seeks to pose against it: his future ‘rule of kindred’ can only be apprehended vaguely as an affective intensity. This disorienting loss of object connects his hatred of electric signs to Tennyson’s echolalia. In ‘The Bugle Song’, the poet is exhilarated by the movements of citation – from copy to copy to copy. Likewise, the ‘electric signs’ when viewed from O’Connell Bridge signify according to their repetitions. So, although Yeats’s critique is patrician in character, it nonetheless helps elucidate the topographical and geopolitical predicament of the electric world, already legible in Tennyson’s poem: namely that a body thrilled by its connectivity, entered into sensational relations with sound or light, a world of virtual stimulation, can become blind to the local imaginary of romanticism, as well as to any unbrilliant or unsounded material that happens to exist in proximity to it. The networked body does not feel itself to be local. Similarly, the technological imaginary of the state infrastructure is not equivalent to the historical imaginary of the nation. And the latter, for all its many deep problems, recalls a structure of care potentially lost to the systematic vitality of the former. 8

9

‘[Our]proper dark’ is a phrase taken from Yeats’s poem ‘The Statues’. There it seems to suggest a nation or race-based stay against the ‘filthy modern tide’. W. B. Yeats, Collected Poems (London: Macmillan, 2010), p. 430. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. H. W. Gabler with W. Hettche (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1993), pp. 281, 248.

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I would like, then, to extend but also further complicate the infrastructural optimism described by Rubenstein. This means recalling familiar Frankfurt School critiques of bureaucratic one-dimensionality (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse) and, more specifically, identifying a formative affinity between the logic of neoliberalism and that of the electrification of culture. Both are logics of currency emerging out of the modernist age, though ultimately fatal to modernism’s more mythopoeic and hierarchical expressions. Neoliberalism, in Wendy Brown’s memorable formulation, is a process of democracy defunding itself.10 It is a contortion within the enfranchising promise of modern infrastructure. Its model of power, Brown writes, transfers from ‘the hierarchically organised command and control’ to ‘governing that is networked, integrated, corporate, partnered, disseminated and at least partially self-organised’.11 Crucially, its various networks come to resemble one another according to the rationalisations of the market: even the provision of public utilities becomes infiltrated by market logics. Governments begin to act as if they were private businesess, or else they exempt themselves from objects of public concern in the name of consumer choice: the market as a fantasy of democratic self-regulation is always right. That private interests can rule the day under the cover of this fantasy of unfettered currency will come as no surprise to anyone who witnessed in the last years of the twentieth century the remarkable transformation of part of Ireland from post-colony to paradigm of neoliberal extravagance. Electricity remains an appropriate image or synecdoche for this extravagance. It is a metaphor for capital flow which also, literally, facilitates capital – a fact that is especially apparent in the age of the Internet. And yet, I suggest, electricity has also functioned as a self-reflective literary device. Though Ireland was in a rush to embrace electrification through state infrastructure in the 1930s and 1940s, and then again in the post-Celtic Tiger digital age of Yahoo and Google, its literature has consistently found ways to restore unbrilliant, material contiguity to the semiotic field. This depends on what I will call its tradition of stupidity. ‘Stupidity’ here is not meant in a strictly pejorative sense, nor does it designate the neutrality of mere error; rather, following Avital Ronell, I use it to further questions of embodiment and materiality. While the material world itself is not stupid, its conversion into exchangeable forms of knowledge inevitably 10

11

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015), p. 200. Ibid., p. 123.

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produces a supplementary discourse on the gross, the vulgar, and the unreconstitutable. Needless to say, ‘Irishness’ has often stood-in for rustic, uneducable stupidity in the history of English letters through the egregious figure of the racial stereotype. To be stupid, in this fashion, is to desublimate a polite economy of affect: to stand as the butt of a joke and convenient resource to be used up for other people’s stimulation. It is also clear that this historical subjugation by means of cultural caricature has been significantly challenged by Irish writers and transformed into various powerful forms of satire, romantic elegy, and political speech. It is my suggestion, however, that the old stupidity receives new impetus in the electronic age for its ability to highlight those moments when metaphoric connections die in the body; when clumsily contiguous materials are revealed in the midst of flighty and idealistic associations; and when a sudden disarticulation within the structure of exchange reveals some material distress that has been overlooked. ‘The question of stupidity is not satisfied with the discovery of the negative limit of knowledge’, writes Ronell: ‘it consists, rather, in the absence of a relation to knowing.’12 This non-relation at the heart of connectivity is key to understanding the figurative importance of electricity in modern Irish literature; it is not simply that there is an outside (an excluded other) to the cohesion of infrastructural modernity, but also that within evermore complex networks of animation there is an incompatible element – a discrepancy which emerges intermittently into view. My keynote example is the ‘electric lift’ in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman. In O’Brien’s novel, the narrator enters a space called ‘Eternity’ which resembles a power station. It is located on a hidden road and accessed by an electric lift which can only be found and operated by the lighting of a match. Accessed by contradictions, in other words, ‘Eternity’ is a place of endless productivity where the narrator orders gold, money, ‘a bottle of whiskey, precious stones to the value of £200 000, some bananas, a fountain-pen and writing materials, and finally a serge suit of blue with silk linings’.13 But nothing he possesses can be taken outside: his sundry stimulations within the power station remain forever unrelated to the contiguous world, their value untranslatable in terms of the surrounding countryside. This is because the electric lift will only work if the narrator weighs exactly the same when he leaves as he did on entry; it is an

12 13

Avital Ronell, Stupidity (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002), pp. 3, 5. Flann O’ Brien, The Third Policeman (London: Harper Perennial, 2007), p. 141.

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incongruous device which also enforces an incongruity between different worlds for comic effect. Yet it is a rudimentary truth within the universe of the novel that the exhilarations which obtain in the electric precinct of ‘Eternity’ are, despite the comedy of strict separation, implicated with the most ordinary things (particularly bicycles!). If stupidity, in its first iteration, is a dumb refusal to be connected and vitalised, then O’Brien’s parody of technological connectivity, embodied by the too-clever-by-half obtuseness of the policemen who operate the devices of ‘Eternity’, points us towards the conclusion that overstimulation is its own kind of stupidity – and, even more paradoxically, a form of death. Indeed, that excessive life can be a form of death is the novel’s final revelation. Stupidity in O’Brien’s work is not simply a mistake; it is, rather, a persistent lack of brilliancy, an active unknowing, which lives on – just about – beside or within more spectacular vitalities. Moving through several literary examples taken from the mid-twentieth century to the present day, I would like to suggest three themes by which this stupidity can be re-registered as a complicating factor within an electric modernity set adrift on the neoliberal current: emigration, constitutional politics, and ecology. In some ways, the first two of these themes are anachronistic, summoning the predictable and possibly redundant forms of satire, romantic elegy, and political speech which have characterised so much of Irish literature in the past. But it is through their very persistence beyond the parameters of their initial historical context that they emerge productively into new interpretive paradigms, specifically that of ecological critique. And while this third theme is clearly more future-oriented, its disruptive insistence on the finitude of natural resources compels us to reconsider the place and historical value of redundancy. The purpose of the examples I offer, then, is to show how disconnection functions, thematically and formally, within a networked imaginary, and how it might be repositioned within new discourses oriented around climate change. If, according to Friedrich Kittler, ‘1800’ was the discourse of the mother tongue and ‘1900’ that of technological mediation, then ‘2000’ would seem to indicate a further shift towards the discrepant coexistence of an apparently inexhaustible virtual world with an exhausted materiality.14 Thinking historically through electricity is one way to make this present discrepancy feel culturally real.

14

Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990).

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Emigration Although electricity can indeed be saved, the act of saving it can seem, within a modernist frame, to be a gross stupidity. It is as if by drawing attention to the measure of its expenditure one misunderstands its essential immeasurability – its fundamentally excessive nature. This is certainly the formative accusation levelled against the elder James Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill’s 1955 play, Long Day’s Journey into Night, whose inherited ‘fear of the poor house’ means he keeps turning off the lights: tyrone. [reacts mechanically] I never claimed one bulb costs much! It’s having them on . . . that makes the Electric Light Company rich.15

Tyrone’s ‘mechanical’ reactions are tellingly anachronistic when discussing the magic of electricity. Indeed, his astute detection of a profit motive operating within the infrastructural miracle of the grid is tied to his pathological alcoholism and ‘homesickness for Ireland’. A true mid-twentiethcentury capitalist, a white migrant to America at least, is supposed to bathe in a world of affects – to further intensify the already intense stimulations of his life. Turning on and off the lights in O’Neill’s play becomes therefore a significant drama of origins; Tyrone’s miserliness, a pre-capitalist refusal to spend, is repeatedly linked to the pre-electric imaginary of his parents’ homeland. The Irish dark is the locus of his injury and self-harm but remains also a theatrical device for reflecting on, and even critiquing, the migrant’s dream of futurity. It is dialectical, in other words; and though there is a predictability to the generationally inflected contest between deterritorialised modernity and the obdurate stupidity of place and home, the use of electric light significantly recodes the question of character and personal fulfilment as a matter of social energy and natural resource. We can see something very similar happen in Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls trilogy, the first two volumes of which register the continued electrification of rural Ireland in the 1950s. Clearly the tenor of these volumes is not against modernisation; in fact, their gender politics conspires with technology in favour of vitalism and mobility. And yet, when mediated through attitudes to electricity, Kate Brady’s personal oppositional relation to her abusive father – a totem of place and stupidity – is rendered in its full social complexity: We got into the convent town at dusk . . . we drove through a narrow street that had electric lights every fifty yards or so along the pavement and there 15

Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), p. 117.

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were poplar trees in between the green metal lamp posts. The dark sheet of water and the sad poplar trees and the strange dogs outside the strange shops made me indescribably sad. ‘Nice place,’ my father said, and snuffled. Nice place! A lot he knew about it. How could he think it was a nice place by just looking out the window?16

This is Kate, her father, and the Brennan family arriving at a new boarding school, fulfilling the bildungsroman destiny of Kate’s academic prowess. The association of light and literacy is quite obvious. But the daughter– father relation supplements the narrative of personal escape, and potential improvement, with a distorted form of attachment. Kate’s father’s illiterate stupidity is conveyed through his admiration for light: the town is estimable because it is electrified; it is estimable precisely because he knows nothing about it – and his ignorance remains to chastise and ironise his commendation. Kate, on the other hand, is dependent on knowing and feeling the force of light and connectivity. Later on in her development she scandalously admits to loving the ‘neon fairyland of Dublin . . . more than [she] had ever loved a summer’s day in a hayfield’. And later still, when she moves back to the countryside, albeit in more genteel circumstances with her lover Eugene, she remains entirely unperturbed at the idea that the telegraph poles would spoil the view.17 Connectivity is essential to Kate’s development; it facilitates her escape from abuse but at the same time remains symptomatic of her enduring need to be in more than one place or locale at the same time. She is far from being a romantic. Kate’s repulsion at her father’s express admiration for the technology she so desperately depends upon establishes the question of electricity as generational and pathological, as well as infrastructural and modern. Accordingly, her brilliant vitality remains inseparable from her mania and self-destruction throughout the series. In the final volume, separated from Eugene and living alone in a small ‘single storey terrace’ in London, she has her son Cash over to stay. There is no electricity, and the boy, afraid that the candlelight ‘might turn into something else’, cries out for his father. Kate’s bluff optimism on this occasion – ‘You’ll come back . . . when the electricity is in, and things are cheerful’ – cannot cover over the trauma of the situation: she has been pulled back into her own father’s dark.18 But still The Country Girls does not propose a recursive myth; nor, despite the tragedy of its epilogue, is it an over-salutary story about excess. We are left, rather, with the impression that Kate has experienced genuine freedoms, 16 17

Edna O’Brien, The Country Girls Trilogy (London: Faber & Faber, 2017), p. 81. Ibid., pp. 167, 447. 18 Ibid., p. 617.

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availing of the grid insofar as she was allowed to. Electricity enables her reading, her physical mobility, and the possibilities of her sexual life. And yet, no matter the intensity of the stimulations involved, obdurate attachments and real costs find a way of making themselves apparent. Brilliancy and stupidity remain aligned – this is the lesson of Irish electrification, both as state-led initiative and as a migratory phenomenon: when bodies move towards a brighter modernity they are not entirely released from the local dark.

Constitutional Politics It was part of Ireland’s infrastructural imaginary, and the magical thinking around total automation which underlay it, that investment in electricity and water would lead to the reunification of the island.19 Clearly this didn’t happen, and while electric goods aplenty were smuggled across the border, the electric grid remained, with some notable exceptions, effectively partitioned.20 Once more, when connectivity breaks down in a particular place – on the border itself – stupidity emerges as a form of affective deadness. Indeed, it was once a generally acceptable sentiment in Dublin and London that the Northern Irish problem was a problem of stupidity, and those engaged in/caught up by the violence merely pathological. In this way, constitutional politics could be reset as a question of natural elements, the resources of a people, and their recalcitrance deemed fundamentally incompatible with the liberalising imaginary of modern infrastructure. The language of the ‘peace dividend’ in the aftermath of the Good Friday Agreement testifies to this same logic: namely, that the presumed co-option of politics by the currency of affect is held up as the only realistic solution. Stewart Parker’s 1987 play, Pentecost, is a forceful corrective to this view. It is a play about the failure of infrastructure, the de-electrification of Northern Ireland, and the stupidity of sectarian impasse – and how this is too easily conflated with the stupidity of politics itself. It takes place just before and during the 1974 Ulster Workers’ Council strike, which was effectively a Unionist protest designed to topple the Sunningdale powersharing initiative. The quick translation from electric power back to political power is telling in the context, but also reflects the broader 19 20

Rubenstein, Public Works, p. 147. See, for example, ‘Cross Border Smuggling’, RTÉ, 6 January 1984, www.rte.ie/archives/2018/1206/ 1015520-smuggling-electrical-goods/ (accessed 1 February 2021).

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consideration of the electric grid: when it is deemed isomorphic to modern life itself, how might electricity be disconnected without pushing everyone back into political stagnancy and cultural death? The characters in Parker’s play occupy a dead space, a dead woman’s house, which is one in a row of houses situated at a flashpoint between the rival communities. The infrastructure is disabled, the houses on the street ransacked, bits of gas lamps, we are told, repurposed for bombs. The stage direction with which the play opens emphasises the central problem of light: . . . There is a single electric light with conical shade hanging from the middle of the ceiling in kitchen and scullery both; but there are also working gas mantles on the walls.21

Here, light doubled presages light to be taken away. The duplication of lights and their prominent staging recalls James Tyrone’s class anxiety intersecting with electrical expenditure – but it also insists on periodisation: the history of the house vies with its present situation. Only the older gas lights remain lit in Scene ii, an ominous return to the past, following which the play descends into darkness and candles. What this descent means for the main characters, two disenfranchised couples – one Protestant, the other Catholic – besides being condemned to the stupidity of sectarian violence, is to make apparent the fact that public utilities, despite the apparent impartiality of their stimulations, are owned – in this case by a section of the Unionist population. One of the play’s key scenes involves Marian, who is living on the verge of madness, daring to speak back to the ghost of the dead ex-tenant of the house, a Protestant widow called Lily Matthews: You think you’re haunting me don’t you. But you see it’s me that’s actually haunting you. I’m not going to go away. There’s no curse or hymn that can exorcise me. So you might as well just give me your blessing and make your peace with me, Lily.22

First of all, this is allegorical: a Catholic is taking joint ownership of a Protestant house in Belfast in 1974. But it’s also a deliberate exchange of life for death. Marian’s libidinal connections are breaking down in the play, specifically her marriage with Lenny – ended in the wake of losing a child. Her prior worldliness is replaced by a decisive occupation: a refusal to budge from the precarious, stupid street she wants to call home. 21

22

Stewart Parker, Pentecost, in Plays 2: Northern Star, Heavenly Bodies, Pentecost (Merseyside: Methuen Drama, 2002), pp. 169–245 (p. 171). Ibid., p. 210.

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Choosing a kind of death, she also begins to figure a new kind of vitality which redirects the play’s infrastructural imaginary. Indeed, her small-scale obduracy contrasts to the ludicrously idealistic endeavour recalled by Peter, who had planned in his student days to energise the entire Belfast water supply with LSD: ‘we actually got as far as Dundrum . . . before negative signals began to filter through even to us . . . the silent valley reservoir had been blown up by the UVF’.23 The Troubles, we are reminded, was an infrastructural war: buildings and utilities bombed in order to return cosmopolitan flow to the contingent realities of place, and the politics playing out therein. These were melancholic repetitions in many terrible ways, though also intentionally counterproductive, their stupidity a strategic reminder that the infrastructural imaginary and its modernising promise – the promise of de-territorialised flow – remains vulnerable to the political agency it attempts to surpass. Accordingly, Marian at the end of Pentecost makes no glib appeal to modern life and electricity to save her and her friends from the benighted stagnancy of 1974 Belfast – there is no ‘transcendent gesture’ to emulate Peter’s student idealism. Nor is she, strictly speaking, ideological – she offers, rather, a political way to live in the dark.

Ecology Contemporary ecological thought often struggles to frame political agency: how might we live in the dark, as Marian in Pentecost plans to – deliberately, but not atavistically – when the very notion of subjective intention can seem to indicate a standing over and against the natural world, a ‘challenging’ of its resources, premised on engrained ideas of the human exception?24 Yet without the image of a political subject there remains the perennial danger of conflation between ecological registrations of the earth’s biospheric systems and the economic dream of global markets as endlessly self-correcting flows of information and capital: complex but not deep; interconnected but not humanely social. Ruth Leys instructively interrogates the ecological world view of philosopher Jane Bennett along these lines. Bennett’s vital materialist philosophy allows that the failure of the North American electric grid in 2003 was due as much to the agency 23 24

Ibid., pp. 235–6. The problem of ‘challenging’ the earth’s resources (Herausfordern) is a central idea in Martin Heidegger’s critique of modern extraction economies, allied to the regime of modern aesthetics, in ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, trans. W. Lovitt (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 213–39.

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and unpredictable ‘strivings’ of the electric current itself as it was to human agency.25 Not only, says Leys, does Bennett’s analysis let the neoliberal deregulators off the hook (and how, we might ask, would this philosophy speak to the Unionist government in Stormont in 1974?), it proposes a vital politics of autonomic systems. As Leys writes: ‘If communication is understood on the materialist model of a vibration of water, or of an electric current sent down a wire or neural network, then nonhuman things and objects can and do pass on their affects without recourse to representation or signification.’26 We are back with Yeats’s electric signs whose brilliancy obscured any object that might oppose it. The danger for Leys is that without subjective intervention – without, in Brown’s terms, the revival of homo-politicus – we come to mystify through our philosophy and practice a nervous vitality that admits of no regulation, and which finds new modes of intensity even as it disavows its dependency on finite resources. Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones (2016) is a novel concerned with this contemporary join between the politics of ecology and electronic infrastructure. Its protagonist, Marcus Conway, is an engineer, citationally modernist in his sensibilities, and tellingly lost amidst the vitalities of the Internet age. The significance of this disorientation is doubled by the novel’s primary narrative conceit, borrowed from The Third Policeman, of having Marcus narrate the novel when he is already dead. The electric world he finds so unmanageable marks the passing of his vitality: he is dead stupid. In one sense this invokes the formative paradox of patriarchy: Marcus, a deceased father to two children, a deceased husband to one wife, exerts linguistic and symbolic control from beyond the grave. In another, more interesting sense the novel attempts to shift the grammar of fatherhood, displacing Marcus’s vocational engineering certainties through the virtual world (which is how he communicates with his distant son) as well as through his daughter Agnes’s shockingly visceral artworks. It is also important that Marcus is forced into the historically feminised labour of nursing his wife Mairead when she becomes seriously ill from the cryptosporidiosis virus. It may be, then, that not only has the father died in this novel, but that the fatherly imaginary has died with it.27 25

26

27

Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 30. Ruth Leys, The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press), p. 349. Mike McCormack, Solar Bones (Dublin: Tramp Press, 2016), p. 55. The emerging critical literature on this novel has emphasised both its concern for the quotidian and its feel for catastrophe. Deirdre Flynn, for example, reads Solar Bones as a meditation on loss at the local level, while Malcolm Sen has written on the novel’s ‘engineering anguish’ as an essentially multi-scalar registration of the

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Such a possibility plays out through Marcus’s deliberations on infrastructure: ‘systems which make the house a living thing with all its walls and the floors pulsing with oil and water and electricity’.28 This is a vital environment of care corrupted, in Marcus’s view, by political avarice and short-sightedness such that bodies which are supposed to be sustained and charged by the government are instead poisoned – like Mairead’s has been by the local water supply. As a critique of Celtic Tiger recklessness, the point could hardly be more critical: this is a crisis brought on by the privatisation of care. But, once more, electricity – not a basic amenity – proves a complicating factor. Marcus’s engineering mindset cannot fix the political opportunism he laments because his twentieth-century materialism, in love with concrete and the internal combustion engine, has been revealed as its own kind of idealism, left floundering by new twenty-firstcentury realities. For all of the novel’s experimentalism, fragmentary sentences, and modernist citation (specifically to the ‘Ithaca’ chapter in Ulysses), its affinity with Marcus’s own world view means that it, too, is fundamentally stupid – providing a retrospective meditation on its own redundancy as much as on the redundancy of Marcus’s enthusiasm for the mechanical world. Redundancy and electricity come together in the novel’s formative image of the felled wind turbine, ‘hauled through the main street on its bier without fanfare or procession’. Marcus charts the line from his own modernist desire for mechanics and engines to this: ‘if I saw the dismantled tractor as the beginning of the world . . . then this wind turbine was its end, a destiny it had been forced to give up on a dream of itself shelved or aborted or miscarried, an old idea which echoed’.29 As we saw with Tennyson, an echo can be the sound effect of the current running through the body, entered into a world of effects without apparent origins, replicated today in the echo chambers of the Internet, whose connectivity often propagates a disregard for physical contiguity. An echo also marks the point at which the endlessly connected body is revealed as the fatally narcissistic body, when the stupidity of disconnection which vitality opposes emerges as central to vitality itself. As Ronell puts it, stupidity does not oppose thought so much as repulse it.30 If it is too obvious to

28

environmental crisis. See Deirdre Flynn, ‘Holding on to “Rites, Rhythms and Rituals”: Mike McCormack’s Homage to Small Town Irish Life and Death’, in Representations of Loss in Irish Literature, ed. D. Flynn and E. O’Brien (Cham: Palgrave, 2018), pp. 37–52; and Malcolm Sen, ‘Risk and Refuge: Contemplating Precarity in Irish Fiction’, Irish University Review 49:1 (2019), 13–31 p. (22). McCormack, Solar Bones, pp. 128–9. 29 Ibid., pp. 27–8. 30 Ronell, Stupidity, p. 23.

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associate stupidity with the unelectrified rustic, the idiot outside, it remains instructive to find stupidity at the heart of the electric dream: the break in the circuit, the sudden disconnection, and the comic juxtaposition of what is faraway with what is nearby. This is the predicament embodied by the wind turbine in Solar Bones: the abstract thrill of its energetics entered into an incongruous looking proximity – a mere contiguity of matter. It might be a fallen God, or a new Gulliver suddenly exposed to Lilliputian vulgarity. But is it, as Marcus suggests, the end of hope? The turbine marks more than what the infrastructure has historically excluded – there has always been stupidity beyond the light; it also marks what infrastructure exhausts – the raw material of the earth. A fallen turbine marks a failure of renewal and also of the modernist, technocratic dream that one form of productivity can be replaced by another without having to acknowledge loss – as if climate change itself might be ludicrously resolved by a further intensification of light.

Select Bibliography Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). Brown, Wendy, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015). Campbell, Matthew, Irish Poetry Under the Union, 1801–1924 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Flynn, Deirdre, ‘Holding on to “Rites, Rhythms and Rituals”: Mike McCormack’s Homage to Small Town Irish Life and Death’, in Representations of Loss in Irish Literature, ed. D. Flynn and E. O’Brien (Cham: Palgrave, 2018), pp. 37–52. Heidegger, Martin, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, trans. W. Lovitt (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 213–39. Joyce, James, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. H. W. Gabler with W. Hettche (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1993). Kittler, Friedrich A., Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). Leys, Ruth, The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017). McCormack, Mike, Solar Bones (Dublin: Tramp Press, 2016). O’Brien, Edna, The Country Girls Trilogy (London: Faber & Faber, 2017). O’Brien, Flann, The Third Policeman (London: Harper Perennial, 2007). O’Neill, Eugene, Long Day’s Journey into Night (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014). Parker, Stewart, Plays 2: Northern Star, Heavenly Bodies, Pentecost (London: Methuen Drama, 2002).

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Ronell, Avital, Stupidity (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002). Rubenstein, Michael, Public Works: Infrastructure, Irish Modernism, and the Postcolonial (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010). Rudy, Jason R., Electric Meters: Victorian Physiological Poetics (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009). Sen, Malcolm, ‘Risk and Refuge: Contemplating Precarity in Irish Fiction’, Irish University Review 49:1 (2019), 13–31. Tennyson, Alfred, The Complete Works (New York: R. Worthington, 1882). Trowbridge, John, The Advance in Electricity Since the Time of Franklin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1922). Yeats, W. B., ‘A General Introduction for My Work’, Essays and Introductions (London: Macmillan, 1961), pp. 509–26. Collected Poems (London: Macmillan, 2010).

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chapter 6

Literature and the Technologies of Radio and Television Robert J. Savage

Throughout Europe, North America, and eventually across the globe, radio developed rapidly as a popular and transformative technology in the aftermath of the Great War. In the 1920s it quickly became a means of mass communication reaching millions, enabling listeners access to news, information, and entertainment. In Ireland, the advent of ‘wireless’ broadcasting coincided with independence and the partition of the island, with the establishment of the twenty-six-county Irish Free State and the consolidation of a Northern Irish state that remained part of the United Kingdom. Radio stations were launched in each jurisdiction in the wake of a brutal struggle for independence followed by a harrowing civil war. In the conflict’s aftermath, officials governing the two fledgling states grew determined to use the new medium to provide a sense of legitimacy and to encourage political stability. Both governments also hoped to use radio to define their respective states; one as independent and Gaelic, the other as a staunchly British part of the United Kingdom.

The Origins of Irish Radio The Irish Free State’s first radio station began amidst legislative controversy. Designated ‘2RN’, it went on air on 1 January 1926 after a lengthy debate in the Dáil considering how a national service should be organised. Initially, James Joseph Walsh, the Irish Free State’s first PostmasterGeneral, attempted to push legislation that would establish what he defined as the Irish Broadcasting Company. He envisioned the establishment of a private consortium, consisting of a number of companies that would apply for and be granted a state licence to begin broadcasting. Walsh’s initiative was greeted with suspicion and in some cases outright derision by deputies upset that they had not been consulted about plans for broadcasting that were already well underway. 99

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Walsh was blocked by colleagues unconvinced about the viability of his scheme and sceptical of surrendering radio to a private firm, even one licensed and supervised by the state. The Dáil therefore established a committee to investigate Walsh’s proposal and consider more thoroughly how radio should be introduced to the nation. In 1924 the Special Committee on Wireless Broadcasting called dozens of witnesses before issuing an exhaustive final report that exceeded 600 pages. It rejected Walsh’s plan, concluding that radio was too important to be entrusted to a profit-seeking private company. Instead, the report argued that the Irish Post Office, which would soon be renamed the Department of Posts and Telegraphs, was the most appropriate home for a radio service. The Cosgrave government quickly endorsed the committee’s recommendation and instructed the highly irascible Walsh to introduce radio to the nation. Upset with the decision, the Postmaster-General lashed out at his colleagues, arguing that operating radio would cause incalculable headaches: ‘If this house determines that the Post Office must differentiate between rival organ grinders, rival tenors and people of that kind and even rival politicians who want to get control and preferential treatment, we will be able to do it at a price and it will be a very dear price.’1 Despite such determined resistance from Walsh, the station, later renamed Radio Éireann, began broadcasting from a primitive lowpowered transmitter in Dublin’s Phoenix Park on New Year’s Day 1926. From the outset, radio was expected to support the cultural imperatives of the Irish Free State by developing and featuring programming to promote all things Irish: the language, literature, history, sport, and music of the nation. Maurice Gorham, a later director of Radio Éireann, explained that Irish radio was expected to revive the speaking of Irish; to foster a taste for classical music; to revive traditional music; to keep people on the farms; to sell goods and services of all kinds from sausages to sweep tickets; to reunite the Irish people at home with those overseas; to end partition. All this in addition to broadcasting’s normal duty to inform, educate, and entertain.2

Radio Éireann struggled to meet these multiple demands.

1

2

Robert J. Savage, Irish Television: The Political and Social Origins (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996), p. 5. Maurice Gorham, Forty Years of Irish Broadcasting (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1967), p. 221.

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Radio Éireann and Traditional Culture The medium was considered an especially important vehicle for the government’s incoherent commitment to the revival of the Irish language. Douglas Hyde, co-founder of the Gaelic League and future President of Ireland, was therefore tasked with opening the station. Hyde, who in 1892 had encouraged the de-anglicisation of Ireland in the foundational polemic of the Gaelic Revival, now celebrated radio as a modern technology that would enable the nation’s language to finally assume its place on the international stage. Irish radio was, he declared, ‘a sign to the whole world that a great change has come about when we can take our place among the nations of the world and make this wireless instrument work in our own language like every other country’. However, Hyde also feared that radio could undermine the cultural integrity of the nation. In this respect he articulated an ambivalence about the relationship between tradition and modernity that would resonate for decades to come. He warned listeners of the need to be ever vigilant against the insidious encroachment of English: There were two tides in Ireland – one of them coming in on this side of Ireland and the other going out on the west coast. The tide of Gaelic was ebbing there and leaving behind a bare, cold, ugly beach in its wake. The fine, Gaelic water had ebbed away and was replaced by the mud, slime and filth of English.3

Hyde’s concerns about the future of traditional culture influenced the choice of the station’s first director. A national search, overseen by John Reith, regarded as the architect of Britain’s renowned public broadcasting service, led to the choice of Séamus Clandillon as 2RN’s first director. Clandillon and his wife, Máighréad Ní Annagáin, already enjoyed reputations as talented singers experienced in promoting traditional music. Constantly under financial pressure, Clandillon found his new post challenging as he struggled to develop dynamic programming that would appeal to wide and diverse audiences. Because the Cosgrave government had other priorities and ignored the financial needs of the radio service, the Dublin station initially offered a limited programme, broadcasting inexpensive musical performances live from the studio for only four and a half hours each day. But Clandillon understood that as a public service the station was expected to do more than simply entertain listeners and 3

Douglas Hyde, Opening address of 2RN, 1 January 1926. Thanks to Nollaig Mac Congáil for the translation.

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explored ways to develop cultural programming. He oversaw the production of a variety of short plays, and identified local talent, including writers, to produce material for programmes both in Irish and English. Language supporters were determined to see radio bolster their goal of promoting Irish to wide audiences. As early as 1925, the writer Pádhraic Ó Domhnalláin identified radio as a revolutionary technology that could be harnessed to promote the language. Writing in the Irish-language newspaper Fáinne an Lae, he argued that Irish could be widely disseminated through the new medium if its supporters were astute enough to realise the opportunity wireless broadcasting offered: ‘It is the clever, fluent broadcaster who will teach the masses in the future, like the storytellers of Ireland in olden times.’4 Programming developed in the early days of radio included a series of weekly Irish lectures based on Eoghan Ó Neachtain’s Stair-Cheachta, as well as a diverse range of history lectures in both Irish and English that were broadcast throughout the following decades. One of Clandillon’s most innovative decisions was to appoint Máiréad Ní Ghráda, who joined 2RN in 1927 and became a creative force in broadcasting. Described by Philip O’Leary as ‘one of the very few playwrights in Irish to ever write work likely to last’, she proved an effective advocate and supporter of radio plays, especially Irish-language drama.5 Ní Ghráda held a diverse portfolio: she worked as a producer and announcer but was also tasked with developing programmes for women and children. Already a leading figure in the inventive Irish-language drama group, An Comhar Drámaíochta, she encouraged actors from the Abbey Theatre to perform regularly in a variety of radio plays. She also produced Irishlanguage drama herself, including a version of Sophocles’ Antigone.6 This emphasis on the Irish language alienated some listeners who could – and often did – simply turn the dial to receive programmes from the BBC or continental stations. Criticism of the station’s output could be relentless; letters in the press complained incessantly about monotonous musical performances and uninspired broadcasts in Irish. Critics included the head of government William Cosgrave, who complained bitterly that 4

5 6

Philip O’Leary, Gaelic Prose in the Irish Free State, 1922–1939 (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2004), p. 248. Ibid., p. 503. Recent years have seen a revival of interest in the work of Ní Ghráda as a prolific writer of Irishlanguage drama and as the ‘Woman Organiser’ in the early days of Irish radio. See the RTÉ Archives featuring a 1966 RTÉ interview with her, www.rte.ie/archives/exhibitions/681-history-of-rte/682-rte -1920s/290017-mairead-ni-ghrada-woman-organiser-appointed-1927/ (accessed 8 July 2022).

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the station was a ‘vehicle for Irish-Ireland propaganda . . . and there is only abuse awaiting any criticism’. He detected what he defined as an ‘antiBritish colour . . . It is not clear whether this is super-patriotism or the slave mind.’7 Clandillon and his successors searched for home-produced material to satisfy the relentless programming demands of radio; plays, lectures, and talks – both in English and Irish – found a welcome home on Ireland’s radio service. Those within Radio Éireann understood that adapting most dramatic sources on offer – plays written for the stage – for radio was difficult and time consuming. Beginning in the 1930s, a concerted effort was made to commission radio plays in both languages, but especially Irish. Radio Éireann organised national competitions to encourage the writing of drama designed specifically for broadcast. Understanding that radio offered a unique opportunity to promote Irish, the Gaelic League also encouraged emerging playwrights to contribute to radio. O’Leary’s exhaustive review of broadcast schedules published in the national press illustrates how efforts to find Irish-language drama for broadcast proved successful, as many were featured on Radio Éireann.8 Additionally, broadcasters shrewdly mined a rich tradition of folklore by featuring short, accessible lectures and talks in Irish and English by seanchaí, or storytellers. Lectures and interviews with folklorists featured regularly on Irish radio throughout the 1930s and 1940s as collectors sought to record and preserve oral narratives and song in both languages.

Radio Éireann and Fianna Fáil Fianna Fáil’s rise to power in 1932 introduced a modest effort to improve Radio Éireann. T. J. Kiernan became director, and implemented a number of new initiatives: outside broadcasts increased and the coverage of Gaelic games expanded and improved. The de Valera government slowly provided additional resources, and by 1947 the radio service had hired a professional news staff, a symphony orchestra, and a number of scriptwriters. With increased financial support, Irish playwrights, actors, and producers increasingly found a platform for their work. Innovative drama made its way into programming, providing artists with an important venue for their writing. In the 1950s, Siobhán McKenna successfully produced George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan in both Irish and English, and Cyril 7 8

Ronan Fanning, Independent Ireland (Dublin: Helicon Ltd, 1983), p. 79. O’Leary, Gaelic Prose, p. 493.

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Cusack offered plays by Sean O’Casey, Denis Johnston, and Frank O’Connor. Hilton Edwards, who was later appointed Telefís Éireann’s first director of drama, worked with his partner Micheál MacLiammóir to bring a number of Shakespeare plays, including Othello and Hamlet, to listeners. Brian Fallon, who has written perceptively about Irish culture between 1930 and 1960, even argues that prior to the advent of television Irish radio experienced a ‘golden age’ featuring plays and informative talks programmes that addressed an array of cultural subjects.9 During this period, Radio Éireann featured interviews with a variety of writers, including Brendan Behan, Austin Clarke, James Plunkett, and Padraic Fallon. Big Jim, Plunkett’s play about the labour leader Jim Larkin, was broadcast and later successfully staged at the Abbey as The Risen People. Padraic Fallon produced a number of remarkable radio plays in the 1950s that found a large and receptive audience, including Diarmuid and Gráinne, Steeple Jerkin, The Hags of Clough, and At the Bridge Inn. During these years, novelists, poets, playwrights, and critics alike found that radio was an important outlet for their work. However, success was often limited by financial constraints and a lack of artistic freedom that constrained innovation. Until 1960, Radio Éireann occupied an awkward position inside the civil service. Ireland’s national broadcasting service had no statutory independence, a situation reflected in its conservatism. In fact, since its foundation the radio service was subject to a strong degree of self-censorship. The civil servants managing the station were always wary of offending government officials or the powerful Catholic Church. Moreover, after his appointment in 1940, the notoriously conservative Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, kept close tabs on broadcasting and was seldom reluctant to intervene over material that offended his definition of national morals. When Emmet Lavery’s play The First Legion was broadcast in February 1956, the Archbishop used unofficial back channels to signal his displeasure, warning Ireland’s national broadcaster to avoid undermining Catholic social teaching. The play upset McQuaid because it featured three young novice priests expressing doubts about their vocation; his intervention underscored the influence of the Catholic Church in the period. Senior civil servants overseeing Radio Éireann remained sensitive to McQuaid’s criticism, knowing he would not tolerate programming that he defined as irreligious or offensive.

9

Brian Fallon, An Age of Innocence: Irish Culture, 1930–1960 (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1998), p. 262.

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One of Radio Éireann’s best-known programmes from the 1950s was a poetry initiative hosted by Austin Clarke, who interviewed Irish poets and critics. Clarke’s considerable influence in broadcasting at mid-century is addressed in Ian Whittington’s chapter in this volume. A young Seamus Heaney recalled ‘sitting with my ear to the baize-and-fretwork speaker of a big Cossor wireless picking up that unperturbed voice making its way among the strange squeaks and bubbles of the wave bands (they said it was the old valves that did it) between Dublin and Derry’.10 Despite its limited budget, Radio Éireann experienced notable success, especially in producing popular drama. It won the prestigious Prix Italia award in 1961 for The Weaver’s Grave, produced by Míchéal Ó hAodha, and again for Piano in the River, produced in 1965 by Dan Treston.

Radio in Northern Ireland: Tyrone Guthrie Sets the Standard Northern Ireland initiated broadcasting in September 1924 when 2BE began transmitting from Belfast. Like its southern counterpart, the radio service in Northern Ireland was initially broadcast via a low-power transmitter, reaching a small audience in and around metropolitan Belfast. Gillian McIntosh, who has written incisively about the early years of radio in Northern Ireland, argues that in its formative years 2BE’s director had little interest in the day-to-day tasks of managing a regional broadcasting service. Although the new Belfast station transmitted much of the national programme from London, it was also required to develop material for its regional audience. The result of apathetic management meant that until October 1926, when Gerald Beadle was named director, responsibility for operating the station fell to a youthful staff, open to experimentation, but with little experience in broadcasting. In these circumstances, the young, energetic producer Tyrone Guthrie filled the void, taking advantage of the opportunity he found by producing a range of innovative programmes. His productions, broadcast in the hours when there were breaks in the national programme, included eclectic, revue-type skits designed to entertain listeners, as well as musical performances, recitations, and short dramatic sketches.11 Guthrie’s material resonated with an audience that came to appreciate radio drama performed by the talented group of actors who formed the 10

11

RTÉ archives, www.rte.ie/archives/exhibitions/1982-seamus-heaney/1988-rte-and-poems-plain/ (accessed 30 January 2021). Gillian McIntosh, ‘Tyrone Guthrie and the BBC in Belfast’, Éire-Ireland 50:1–2 (Spring/Summer, 2015), 13–44 (p. 34).

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Belfast Radio Players. An important innovation was his production of more traditional work by local writers, thereby providing a welcome platform for dramatists who took advantage of the Belfast station’s needs. A versatile group that adapted to the demands of the regional station, the Belfast Radio Players proved comfortable with Guthrie’s penchant for experimentation and innovation. BBC Northern Ireland became increasingly popular – much to the delight of the local press, whose reviewers applauded the work of regional writers whose plays featured on the Belfast station. Guthrie’s repertoire also featured more established Irish material including W. B. Yeats’s The Land of Heart’s Desire and Lady Gregory’s comedy The Workhouse Ward. His critically acclaimed production of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris featured the renowned actress Flora Robson, who also appeared in Guthrie’s radio drama The Flowers Are Not for You to Pick, a play that was successfully broadcast to the BBC national network in 1930. In September 1926 Guthrie left Belfast to become a producer with the Scottish National Theatre, but his two years at BBC NI had a lasting impact. He proved a trailblazer for a number of impressive writers and producers, including Denis Johnston, who arrived in 1936 and two years later produced his critically acclaimed Lillibulero dramatising the siege of Derry. As McIntosh argues, Guthrie’s foundational work helped break ground for the ‘creative innovators who followed him in Belfast – his heirs in broadcasting included not only . . . Johnston but [also] Louis MacNeice, Sam Hanna Bell, W. R. Rodgers and ultimately Stewart Parker’.12 Guthrie later emerged as one of the best-known theatre producers of his generation in the United Kingdom and eventually the United States. Although regional programming throughout the United Kingdom was suspended during the Second World War, in the postwar period the station began to once again develop broadcasts for Northern Ireland, and recruited a number of talented writers including Sam Hanna Bell and John Hewitt. Like Radio Éireann, BBC NI made a concerted effort to increase the number and range of outside broadcasts, including recordings of folklore and music. McIntosh’s study of unionist identities, The Force of Culture, suggests that ‘the influx of locals did bring the station closer to the indigenous population’.13 Nevertheless, most nationalists viewed BBC NI 12 13

Ibid., p. 44. Gillian McIntosh, The Force of Culture: Unionist Identities in Twentieth-Century Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999), p. 94.

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as overly sympathetic to the unionist community and as representing a culture that was not their own. Well into the 1960s, the station employed few Catholics and featured little cultural programming that could be defined as Gaelic or Irish. Because unionists sought to marginalise the nationalist community and its culture and were determined that the image of Ulster presented should be a British one, radio programming suggesting Northern Ireland was Irish often provoked howls of angry protest from politicians.14 As was the case with Radio Éireann, self-censorship was taken for granted within the BBC and sensitive political, religious, or social issues concerning Northern Ireland were simply avoided. Telefís Éireann Throughout the 1950s there were public debates, in the press and in the Dáil, about how television should be structured and introduced in the Republic of Ireland. A consensus emerged within the government that broadcasting should not be operated by civil servants, an implicit admission that Radio Éireann had not thrived as part of the Department of Posts and Telegraphs. The 1960 Broadcasting Act therefore created an independent public authority to oversee both radio and television. The legislation establishing Telefís Éireann (later Raidió Teilifís Éireann) provided broadcasters with a considerable degree of autonomy, resulting in aggressive current affairs and creative programming that upset powerful political, clerical, and cultural elites. The Broadcasting Act also freed radio from the grip of the civil service, allowing its cultural programming to become innovative and more compelling. However, in broadcasting terms television dominated the 1960s. An American, Edward Roth, was appointed Telefís Éireann’s first directorgeneral in 1960 and succeeded in the challenging task of getting the service ‘on the air’. His tenure was never easy, as he and his staff were lambasted by impatient critics demanding the production of quality indigenous programming. In its early years, the Donnybrook station featured a steady diet of inexpensive American material, including crime shows, comedies, and westerns. Such broadcasting of cheap ‘canned’ programmes including Dragnet, I Love Lucy, and Bonanza upset many critics who bemoaned the lack of Irish material. However, the new television station found producing original programmes prohibitively expensive and, desperate to build 14

Robert J. Savage, The BBC’s ‘Irish Troubles’: Television, Conflict and Northern Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), pp. 9–13.

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an audience and sell advertisements, regularly featured older American imports. When he arrived in Dublin, Roth understood the importance of finding and developing indigenous programming and hoped to broadcast the work of Irish playwrights. As with Radio Éireann, expectations were high: Telefís Éireann would easily tap into a rich tradition of drama and broadcast plays granting the new service a distinctly Irish character. Hilton Edwards, the first director of drama, found mastering the transition of material from the stage to television’s small screen difficult. In spite of such challenges, Telefís Éireann’s first year saw the broadcast of J. M. Synge’s The Well of the Saints – a production signalling the direction the new service hoped to develop. Roth was keen to build on the Synge broadcast and feature the work of other playwrights, including Sean O’Casey. He convinced O’Casey to contribute a modest one-act play, The Moon Shines on Kylenamoe, for broadcast in September 1962, hoping that a successful production would convince the playwright to release more important work. Maintaining a correspondence with O’Casey after visiting him at his Devon home, Roth conveyed the challenges he confronted in developing indigenous material and enduring harsh Dublin criticism directed at him as an American. After he announced he was leaving Telefís Éireann at the end of his contract, O’Casey wrote to wish him well; Roth responded that he had never expected the withering criticism he and his staff endured – and that even after almost three years in Ireland he would never understand the Irish. This prompted a sympathetic reply from O’Casey: My dear Ed, you would be at least a demi-god if you understood the Irish, for they aren’t able to understand themselves, and worse still, they never try. Your advent was something of an invasion, reminding them of the Normans . . . We knew nothing about Television, and had to be taught. The Irish middle class don’t like this, especially by a Yank; they don’t think they need to be taught anything . . . We are a muddled and a puzzled people, envious of one another, so how can a stranger be at peace among us?15

The Evolution of Telefís Éireann As the 1960s progressed and as Telefís Éireann gained greater confidence, innovative and popular indigenous programming increased. The station’s successful hiring and training of a younger generation of writers, 15

O’Casey to Roth, 2 July 1963, Roth papers, Boston MA. Quoted in Robert J. Savage, A Loss of Innocence? Television and Irish Society, 1960–1972 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), p. 44.

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producers, and editors to develop programmes led to the slow emergence of quality dramatic television productions. Through much of the decade the station continued to look to the stage for inspiration, hiring talented writers and producers from the Irish theatrical world to develop material for television. Christopher Morash notes that television also provided ‘actors (and some playwrights) with a more or less steady income, making a career in theatre far more feasible than it had been in the past’.16 Hilton Edwards, Carolyn Swift, and Shelah Richards were hired in the hope that their theatrical skills would support programming at the station.17 Still, one of the most successful plays to be broadcast on television during the decade was an Irish-language work by Máiréad Ní Ghráda, who, as mentioned previously, joined 2RN in 1927. Her play An Triail (On Trial) opened to critical acclaim in the 1964 Dublin Theatre Festival, where it was presented by the organisation Gael-Linn and directed by Tomás Mac Anna. Adapted for radio and produced in English for television the following year, it was a scathing indictment of contemporary Ireland. An Triail depicts a callous state and uncaring society that oppresses women, denying them basic human rights including access to contraceptives and literature on family planning. James Smith notes that Ní Ghráda’s play ‘anticipates by almost thirty years the potential to reimagine Ireland’s architecture of containment in cultural representation’.18 At the time, the success of An Triail underscored television drama’s subversive capacity to critique the suffocating conservative consensus characterising Irish society in the 1960s. Although the play and RTÉ’s adaption of it met with critical acclaim, it all but disappeared until it was rediscovered by Bríd Ó Gallchóir and staged by Amharclann de hÍde in 1998. As Ireland confronted more forcefully a shameful past, the play once again resonated powerfully in Irish society. It was added to the Leaving Cert Irish syllabus and is regularly staged by Irish-language theatre companies.19 Well aware of how enthusiastically soap operas were received by British and American audiences, Irish writers responded by successfully adapting the genre – often with a persistent attention to contemporary issues. Maura 16

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Christopher Morash, A History of Irish Theatre, 1601–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 221–2. Hilton Edwards considered the situation at the start of RTÉ’s life in his article, ‘The Problems and Possibilities of TV Drama’, RTÉ Guide, 26 January 1962, 4. James M. Smith, Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), p. 83. See the Irish Theatre Institute’s website, www.irishtheatreinstitute.ie/event.aspx?t=an_triail_|_on_ trial___production_history&contentid=9289&subpagecontentid=9302 (accessed 30 January 2021), and Colin Murphy’s article, The Sunday Business Post, 15 March 2015.

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Laverty’s Tolka Row, airing from 1964 to 1968 and focusing on workingclass Dubliners, emerged as the country’s first popular ‘soap’. It was followed by yet another popular series, this one filmed on a working farm in County Meath. Written by Wesley Burrowes, The Riordans addresses a variety of contemporary rural issues and found a loyal audience. Film and television historian Lance Pettitt notes the didactic elements incorporated into this series that emphasise the need for good farm practices, but also suggests that the production’s ‘popular and credible characters’ and exploration of contemporary concerns ‘raised issues, including those challenging sexual morality, that captured a national audience’.20 Written from the distance of his then London home, Hugh Leonard’s week-long, nightly TV mini-series, Insurrection (1966), was directed by Louis Lentin and commanded the largest single budget that year. It combined 16 mm ‘vérité’ footage filmed on Dublin locations intercut with studio-shot scenes, in an innovative docudrama-style production with which RTÉ successfully marked the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rebellion. Leonard, who emerged as an influential playwright, later adapted James Plunkett’s novel Strumpet City for television. Set in Dublin’s inner city between 1907 and 1914, the series challenged romantic narratives of the Irish revolutionary period by addressing a range of issues including poverty, hunger, and the labour unrest provoked by the infamous 1913 lockout. Despite these successes, talented writers and producers within Telefís Éireann became dissatisfied with the pace of progress being made in producing quality Irish material. Three leading producers, Lelia Doolan, Bob Quinn, and Jack Dowling, outspoken critics of Irish television’s commercial priorities, denounced its managers for not enabling more creative home-made programmes. Their complaints set off protests and controversy within RTÉ, pitting management against many staff members. In 1969 the three wrote Sit Down and Be Counted, a scathing critique of the commercialisation of what was purportedly a public television service. Helena Sheehan, who has written extensively about Irish television drama, maintains that with a few notable exceptions, for many years RTÉ failed to produce compelling programming addressing critical contemporary issues.21

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Lance Pettitt, Screening Ireland: Film and Television Representation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 171. Helena Sheehan, The Continuing Story of Irish Television Drama: Tracking the Tiger (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004).

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But there were exceptions: The Spike, a series broadcast in 1978, critiqued Irish educational policies in Dublin’s inner city. Written by Patrick Gilligan and set in a co-educational post-primary school, the programme created a furore when a model appeared nude in one episode – leading to its abrupt cancellation.22 But as Deirdre Quinn argues convincingly, the furore was about far more than nudity; she contextualises the controversy within a growing scepticism towards a variety of corrupt and deeply entrenched institutions, especially those of the Catholic Church. Quinn maintains that the series examined ‘issues of class, disadvantage, and a seething alienation from authority among a growing underclass in Irish society’.23 Gerard Stembridge’s two-part series The Truth About Claire (1991), tackling the contentious issue of abortion, was yet another television drama provoking actual political drama. The series was broadcast less than a decade after the passage of the eighth amendment to the Irish constitution, which gave ‘equal right to life’ to a pregnant woman and the unborn. Stembridge’s series provoked intense debate in the media about abortion and the power of the Catholic Church in Irish society. Always under financial pressure, RTÉ looked for alternative strategies to increase quality indigenous programming. It successfully engaged in a number of co-productions, beginning in earnest in the 1980s and continuing into the new millennium. These initiatives shared the cost of production, enabling a number of critically acclaimed features to come to the small screen. For instance, Maeve Binchy’s novel Echoes was successfully adapted by RTÉ in 1980 as a co-production, as was The Real Charlotte by Somerville and Ross. To mark the centenary of his birth, a number of O’Casey’s plays were finally adapted for television in 1980, including Red Roses for Me, Juno and the Paycock, and The Silver Tassie, the result of collaboration between RTÉ and the BBC. Other notable co-productions included William Trevor’s The Ballroom of Romance (1982) and Beckett on Film (2001), co-produced with Britain’s Channel 4, the latter of which featured a star-studded broadcast of nineteen of Samuel Beckett’s plays. John McGahern’s tale of patriarchy and family dysfunction, Amongst Women, was another successful co-production that brought an important Irish writer to a large audience. Although television provided a platform for creative writers to present their work, it also enabled writers to be seen and heard addressing their 22

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For more on this controversy, see Deirdre Quinn, ‘Spiked: Bodies, Power, and Broadcasting’, ÉireIreland 50:1–2 (Spring/Summer 2015), 137–55. Ibid., p. 138.

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craft. James Plunkett produced Writers in Profile, a series that featured interviews with leading Irish authors including Máire Mhac an tSaoi, Máirtín Ó Direáin, John Banville, and William Trevor.24 Perhaps recognising the gender imbalance in earlier broadcasts, the station produced innovative biographical programmes that explore the work of a variety of Irish women writers. The documentary series A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl interviewed Molly Keane, Maeve Binchy, Pauline Bewick, Joan Lingard, Medbh McGuckian, Jennifer Johnston, Maria Simonds, Dervla Murphy, Julia O’Faolain, Mary Lavin, Eavan Boland, and Edna O’Brien.25

Telefís na Gaeilge: A Home for Irish-Language Drama Irish-language material struggled to find a place on television and only gained a degree of security in 1996, when the Irish-language television station, Telefís na Gaeilge (TnaG), began broadcasting from the Gaeltacht, those areas of Ireland where Irish was spoken as part of daily life and social interaction. The station offered a new outlet for writers, producing compelling Irish-language and Gaeltacht drama. One of its most successful ventures was Ros na Rún, a soap opera that marked the centenary of the founding of the Gaelic League. Set in the western Gaeltacht, it was originally written and produced in 1992 by Antoine Ó Flatharta and Con Bushe for RTÉ. The critically acclaimed series then migrated to TnaG, where it helped break new ground by addressing a variety of contentious social issues including domestic violence, teen pregnancy, drug abuse, and sexual assault. In 1996, Ros na Rún also featured the first gay kiss on Irish television, a scene upsetting to some viewers but acknowledging what director and producer Deirdre Ní Fhlatharta maintained was simply a part of everyday life.26 Another successful TnaG series, C. U. Burn by Niall Mac Eachmharcaigh, first broadcast in 1996, is set in rural Donegal. The comedy follows the exploits of two brothers, the community’s local undertakers, as they develop the world’s first peat-burning crematorium. Much like Ros na Rún, this series addressed troubling social issues including adultery, racism, and drug abuse. Eugene McCabe’s Tales from the Poorhouse (1998), yet another innovative dramatic initiative of TnaG, is set

24 25 26

RTÉ archives, www.rte.ie/archives/2018/0523/965476-writer-william-trevor/ (accessed 30 January 2021). RTÉ archives, www.rte.ie/archives/2015/1214/753426-writer-edna-obrien/ (accessed 30 January 2021). See The Journal.ie, 8 July 2020, www.thejournal.ie/first-gay-kiss-ros-na-run-5144512-Jul2020/ (accessed 30 January 2021). The episode was broadcast in April 2019.

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in an Ulster workhouse in the midst of the Great Famine. The four-part series, starring Brendan Gleeson, Mick Lally, and Ruth McCabe, presents startling first-person testimonies addressing the terrible consequences of An Gorta Mór.27

Finding a Regional Voice Amidst Political Controversy When BBC television began broadcasting from Northern Ireland in 1953, its transmitted material generally came from the national network in London. But gradually a local news programme emerged for regional audiences. Unlike Northern Ireland’s radio service that had produced plays regularly since the 1930s, the regional station did not begin to develop its own drama until well into the 1970s. Martin McLoone, who has written extensively about BBC programming and Northern Ireland, notes that only a limited number of pre-Troubles dramas were broadcast by British television.28 Only a few dramatic productions that addressed life in Northern Ireland originated in the region, although they often caused deep discomfort in the unionist community there. In 1961, Granada Television featured Sam Thompson’s Over the Bridge, a play set in the shipyard of Harland and Wolff. This critically acclaimed play about sectarianism and violence in working-class Belfast was informed by the playwright’s own work experience as a painter in the shipyards. This dramatic production was followed in 1965 by another Thompson play, Cemented with Love, a satire directed at the politics of Northern Ireland. Its airing was delayed when the controller in Broadcasting House, Belfast, nervously objected, arguing that he had not been consulted about the play. Such an incident suggests how broadcasting anything about Northern Ireland could easily stir up passions in the region, especially given unionist sensitivity to material addressing the divisions that defined its society. Another play, Boatman Do Not Tarry by John D. Stewart, broadcast in 1968, is significant because it was made locally by Ulster TV (founded in Belfast in 1959), and its storyline anticipated how events would follow over the coming years. It featured the civil protest over the control of a ferry linking an isolated rural peninsula in Northern Ireland to the wider world. Shot on location in Bannfoot, Armagh, the play featured scenes of protest marches outside Northern Ireland’s Stormont Parliament, with local 27 28

The Irish Times, 3 October 1998. Martin McLoone, ‘The Construction of a Partitionist Mentality: Early Broadcasting in Ireland’, in Broadcasting in a Divided Community: Seventy Years of the BBC in Northern Ireland, ed. McLoone (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1996) pp. 20–34.

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people complaining that the control of their ferry and relationship with the mainland was being jeopardised by an uncaring local government.29 The outbreak of violence in 1968 transformed broadcasting in and about Northern Ireland. Television coverage of the conflict found an international audience, unnerving governments and increasing anxiety and selfcensorship within the BBC and independent networks. The Troubles provided fertile ground for a variety of writers interested in addressing the conflict and its human costs, but also heightened sensitivities about the region’s identity. Dominic Behan’s Carson Country, described by film historian John Hill as an inventive ‘quasi-Brechtian attempt to explore the historical roots of the troubles’, was transmitted on the BBC network’s long-running Play for Today in 1972.30 However, the play was held back for a number of weeks and only went on the air after BBC director-general Charles Curran checked with the Northern Ireland Secretary of State William Whitelaw. Stewart Parker, one of Northern Ireland’s most successful playwrights, saw his first television play, Catchpenny Twist, broadcast on BBC Northern Ireland in December 1977. BBC NI collaborated on the production without provoking the wrath of the unionist community. But another feature on the BBC’s Play for the Day, Caryl Churchill’s The Legion Hall Bombing, ignited controversy when broadcast in 1978. The play addressed the trial of Willie Gallagher, who was convicted of bombing the Strabane Legion Hall and sentenced to twelve years by a non-jury ‘Diplock’ court. The production became especially controversial when its prologue, written by Churchill and director Roland Joffé, was censored by the BBC Belfast controller, who rewrote the introduction and cut the epilogue. The controller defended his intervention by arguing that the contextual prologue and epilogue were ‘tantamount to editorializing on behalf of one interpretation of the verdict’.31 Such plays and the controversy they provoked represent some of the earliest Troubles-related drama featured on the BBC. A number of other productions addressing the conflict made their way onto television. McLoone describes Graham Reid as one of the ‘most prolific and successful television dramatists of the 1980s and 1990s’, who produced a series of ‘Billy’ plays including Too Late to Talk to Billy (1982), A Matter of Choice for Billy (1983), A Coming to 29

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Pettitt, Screening Ireland, pp. 231–32, and Lance Pettitt, ‘A Box of Troubles: Representations of Northern Ireland in British Television Drama, 1960–1990’, PhD thesis (Dublin: University College Dublin, 1990), pp. 74–9. John Hill, TV That Tackled the Troubles: Play for Today and Northern Ireland (London: British Film Institute, 2020). Ibid.

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Terms for Billy (1984), and Lorna (1987).32 The initial ‘Billy’, featuring a young Kenneth Branagh, as well as the subsequent plays, explore how political conflict impacts on a dysfunctional Protestant working-class family. Significantly, these plays address the lives of ordinary Protestants who are apolitical; paramilitaries appear as fringe characters and fail to attract Billy to their cause. Reid later wrote a series of searching plays under the title Ties of Blood that addressed the human cost of Northern Ireland’s violence on a range of characters including belligerents and ordinary people. The Troubles in Northern Ireland continued to inspire serious creative television work and to instigate political responses. Directed by Alan Clarke and produced by Danny Boyle, the low-budget film Elephant remains one of the most disturbing productions to address the Northern Ireland conflict. When broadcast on BBC television in January 1989, the short film provoked both controversy and critical acclaim. Elephant contains little dialogue, but features eighteen cold-blooded murders relentlessly presented as routine operations. Boyle reportedly consulted police records of Northern Ireland shootings as his primary source. The film offered a stark reminder of the violence bedevilling Northern Ireland. Described by the New York Times as ‘among the most alarming and experimental works shown on British television’, it was broadcast only once.33 Other writers whose work was adapted for the BBC during the conflict include Eugene McCabe, Jennifer Johnson, Ron Hutchinson, Maurice Leitch, David Hammond, Anne Devlin, William Trevor, John McGahern, Marie Jones, Paul Muldoon, Frank McGuinness, Samantha Lee, and Derek Mahon; all contributed remarkable and diverse material for both television and radio. In the new millennium, cable TV, satellite radio, and internet streaming vastly increased the ability of creative writers to reach audiences across the globe. This leap in technological progress would have been inconceivable to Séamus Clandillon or Tyrone Guthrie in the 1920s. Irish writers have made an impressive international impact in this ever-shifting environment, producing a number of critically acclaimed dramas that have attracted global audiences. Many of these address a wide array of controversial subjects that would have been unimaginable material for programmes through much of the twentieth century. It is difficult to imagine how 32

33

Martin McLoone, Film, Television and the Troubles: A ‘Troubles Archive’ Essay (Belfast: Arts Council of Northern Ireland, 2009). New York Times, 10 August 2017.

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John Charles McQuaid would have reacted to Lenny Abrahamson and Hettie Macdonald’s 2020 adaptation of Sally Rooney’s best-selling novel Normal People, an incredibly popular television series broadcast on the BBC and streamed by Hulu in association with Screen Ireland. The series, featuring a sensitive portrait of a young couple’s complex relationship, and including graphic sexual content, has been picked up by broadcasters throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Although featured on Britain’s Channel 4, Lisa McGee’s Derry Girls has also enjoyed tremendous international success, becoming the network’s most successful comedy since the earlier sitcom Father Ted. That popular comedy, starring Dermot Morgan and written by Irish writers Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews, featured on Channel 4 and was broadcast around the world in the 1990s, adopting a post-Catholic diasporic take on Irish society and culture.34 Initially, broadcasting in Ireland looked inward as it sought to help define and consolidate the deeply conservative states that emerged from the violence of the Irish Revolution. However, identities throughout the island of Ireland have evolved to challenge the narrow, defensive, insular states that struggled to assert themselves a century ago. Irish writers have successfully used broadcasting technology to find regional, national, and global audiences by addressing issues that, although presented in an Irish context, transcend national borders because they explore the human condition in a variety of dramatic and comedic forms. Forcing dramatists to visualise differently for the screen rather than a stage space; challenging prose writers to cut and weave their narratives to work in adaptive ways for online or palm-held mobile viewing; the relationship between technology and Irish literature remains fluid, inviting writers to innovate and explore the possibilities of their craft.

Select Bibliography Bloom, Emily, The Wireless Past: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 1931–1968 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Brennan, Edward, A Post-Nationalist History of Television in Ireland (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Cathcart, Rex, The Most Contrary Region: The BBC in Northern Ireland, 1924–1984 (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1984). 34

The Irish Times, 16 March 2019.

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Dowling, Jack, Lelia Doolan, and Bob Quinn, Sit Down and Be Counted: The Cultural Evolution of a Television Station (Dublin: Wellington Ltd, 1969). Fallon, Brian, An Age of Innocence: Irish Culture, 1930–1960 (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1998). Fanning, Ronan, Independent Ireland (Dublin: Helicon Ltd, 1983). Gorham, Maurice, Forty Years of Irish Broadcasting (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1967). Hill, John, TV That Tackled the Troubles: Play for Today and Northern Ireland (London: British Film Institute, 2020). McIntosh, Gillian, The Force of Culture: Unionist Identities in Twentieth-Century Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999). ‘Tyrone Guthrie and the BBC in Belfast’, Éire-Ireland 50:1–2 (Spring/Summer 2015), 13–44. McLoone, Martin, ‘The Construction of a Partitionist Mentality: Early Broadcasting in Ireland’, in Broadcasting in a Divided Community: Seventy Years of the BBC in Northern Ireland, ed. McLoone (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1996), pp. 20–34. Film, Television and the Troubles: A ‘Troubles Archive’ Essay (Belfast: Arts Council of Northern Ireland, 2009). Morash, Christopher, A History of the Media in Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). O’Leary, Philip, Gaelic Prose in the Irish Free State, 1922–1939 (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2004). Pettitt, Lance, Screening Ireland: Film and Television Representation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). Pine, Richard, 2RN and the Origins of Irish Radio (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002). Quinn, Deirdre, ‘Spiked: Bodies, Power, and Broadcasting’, Éire-Ireland 50:1–2 (Spring/Summer 2015), 137–55. Reynolds, Paige, ed., The New Irish Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). Savage, Robert J., Irish Television: The Political and Social Origins (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996). A Loss of Innocence? Television and Irish Society, 1960–1972 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). The BBC’s ‘Irish Troubles’: Television, Conflict and Northern Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015). Smith, James M., Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007).

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chapter 7

‘The Re-Tuning of the World Itself’: Irish Poetry on the Radio Ian Whittington

When Seamus Heaney accepted the Nobel Prize in Literature in Stockholm in 1995, his speech traced the power of the broadcast word. Reaching back to his upbringing in County Derry, Heaney invokes a time when ‘the air around and above us was alive and signalling’, filled not only with the sounds of passing trains and falling rain but also with the voices carried, as if on the wind itself, from places as close as Belfast and Dublin and as far away as London and continental Europe.1 In this meditation, broadcast voices resonate along a continuum of effectual vibrations that includes the ripples caused in the bucket of drinking water in the scullery by passing trains and the wind-jostled aerial wire that connects the kitchen radio to the tall chestnut tree outside. These voices function, for Heaney, as an induction into the ‘wideness of language’ – we might say, its broadcast nature – and therefore an induction into poetry as a medium of verbal expression.2 Metered language becomes here a finely tuned instrument, a transducer of experience ‘as sensitive to the inner laws of the poet’s being as the ripples that rippled in and rippled out across the water in that scullery bucket fifty years ago’.3 Pivoting from personal recollection to critical reflection, Heaney claims that writers of lyric poetry seek out ‘a ring of truth within the medium itself’, a note ‘tuned’ somewhere between the ascetic and opulent ends of the dial, represented in Heaney’s mind by Emily Dickinson and John Keats, respectively. Poetry’s duty – and its power – is nothing less than ‘the re-tuning of the world itself’, by which Heaney means a search after a truth adequate to the world; a search that ‘keeps the poet’s ear straining to hear the totally persuasive voice behind all the other informing voices’.4 If this turn to the radio was perhaps unexpected in a Nobel acceptance speech, it resonates with Heaney’s larger career, and the last century of Irish 1 2

Seamus Heaney, Crediting Poetry: The Nobel Lecture (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 1996), pp. 9–11. 4 Ibid., p. 11. 3 Ibid. Ibid., p. 28.

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poetry more generally. Heaney’s speech draws from the same mnemonic well as his poem ‘A Sofa in the Forties’ and echoes the fascination with the broadcast voice evinced in his essay ‘The Regional Forecast’, to say nothing of works created for broadcasting, including his contributions to the programme Explorations (1968) and the plays Munro (1970) and Everyman (1971).5 But the history of Irish poetry, like the history of Ireland itself, has long been bound up with the voices that radiate into, and out of, its shores and the walls of its homes. It is the goal of this essay to trace the ripples in the barrel, as it were: to register the poetic function of radio on the island of Ireland. Heaney’s Nobel speech – late in radio’s century – captures the tension that animates the argument to come. Radio, for all its celebrated ability to leap frontiers, must come to earth somewhere, whether in the wind-blown wiggle of an antenna wire or the scripts that accumulate in an archive. At once ethereal and material, radio’s retuning of Irish history and literature takes the form of an oscillation that traces continuities between positions that nonetheless remain at a distance: it is in the simultaneous permeation and reification of borders between north and south, Ireland and the world, lyric privacy and the public sphere, and modernist experiment and cultural nationalism that radio has made itself heard. The first half of this essay tracks those oscillations in the work of poets from the Republic and Northern Ireland in order to foreground what we might call the plural positionality of radio, its simultaneous hereness and thereness. In its second half, this essay turns to consider the radio output of Austin Clarke, and in particular his 1942 radio play, ‘As the Crow Flies’, as emblematic of that plural positionality: a poet of the private conscience and yet an inescapable public presence on the mid-century Irish literary scene, Clarke used radio to suture the poetic and national goals of the Irish Literary Revival to a global awareness of the mass-mediated moment in which he lived.

Ireland’s Radio History: Intimacy and Estrangement The history of Ireland and the history of radio seem to have been braided together from the medium’s inception. Ireland was the site of early experiments in wireless telegraphy by Italian-Irish inventor Guglielmo Marconi, who had pioneered ship-to-shore communication near Rathlin Island in July 1898 and had broadcast messages from a regatta at Kingstown (now 5

On the threads connecting Heaney’s broadcasts and his regionalist vision of Northern Ireland, see Richard Rankin Russell, ‘Imagining a New Province’, Irish Studies Review 15:2 (2007), 137–62.

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Dun Laoghaire) that same month. Media scholars including Marshall McLuhan and Christopher Morash have argued that the world’s first news broadcast took place in 1916, when rebels commandeered an antenna at the top of the Irish School of Wireless Telegraphy across the street from the General Post Office (GPO) during the Easter Rising and sent a oneway transmission proclaiming the Republic to ships off Dublin – a claim of primacy that is no less true for the fact that the transmission almost certainly went unheard.6 It was, in any case, the world’s first performative declaration of statehood via radio; that Ireland’s national broadcaster continued to transmit from studios located within the GPO into the 1970s only reinforces the integration of communications infrastructures and the lieux de mémoire of national self-formation.7 As Robert J. Savage articulates in his contribution to the present volume and elsewhere, radio’s importance to the nation-state was at the forefront of many politicians’ minds from the early days of the Free State: officially launched on 1 January 1926 with an Irish-language speech by Douglas Hyde, the national broadcasting service was, until 1960, directly operated by the Department of Posts and Telegraphs.8 Initially known by its call sign 2RN, this service became Radio Athlone in 1933 before changing its name to Radio Éireann (RÉ) in 1938. With the advent of television in 1961, RÉ became Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ). In the north of Ireland, radio station 2BE had been launched out of Belfast in 1924; it became BBC Northern Ireland under the BBC Royal Charter of 1927. Far from ensuring the seamless, mutually imbricated development of the nation and its literature through the medium of national articulation, the coincident emergence of radio and the Free State on the global stage instead further entangled Ireland with the world, as Morash points out: ‘at the very moment that an independent Ireland had come into being in the name of a national culture, a new media technology had come along that challenged more profoundly than any before it the very idea of a self-contained national 6

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Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964; Berkeley, CA: Gingko Press, 2003), p. 266; Christopher Morash, A History of the Media in Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 125–8. Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations 26 (Spring 1989), 7–24. On communications infrastructure and the nation, see Janice Ho, ‘Nation: GPO Documentaries and Infrastructures of the Nation-state’, in The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology, ed. Alex Goody and Ian Whittington (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022) . Robert J. Savage, ‘Film and Broadcast Media’, in The Oxford Handbook of Irish History, ed. Alvin Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 268–90 (p. 270); Richard Pine, 2RN and the Origins of Irish Radio (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002), pp. 138ff. See also Robert J. Savage, ‘Literature and the Technologies of Radio and Television’, Chapter 6 in this volume.

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culture’.9 Radio’s territorial ambivalence applies both to its reception – in the ability of broadcasts from Belfast, Luxembourg, London, or Hilversum to reach Irish audiences and compete with the national broadcaster for their attentions – and to its production. Bodies might have flowed less easily across borders than radio waves did in the 1930s and beyond, but they still flowed, whether to London or (in more extreme cases, like the Nazi broadcasts of Francis Stuart) to other points on the map.10 W. B. Yeats is a case in point; although he was deeply invested in promoting an idea of Irish national culture and willing to do so on the airwaves, the majority of his radio output was with the BBC, where he broadcast nine times between 1931 and 1937, compared to only twice on Radio Athlone.11 Louis MacNeice, perhaps the most famous Irish poetbroadcaster of the twentieth century, spent from 1940 to 1963 making hundreds of broadcasts for the BBC, while only rebroadcasting BBCcommissioned radio plays on RÉ.12 Furthermore, he rarely – with the exception of a pair of late plays – used his works for radio to explore identifiably Irish narratives, politics, or topics, choosing instead to create broadcasts about Greek, Indian, and Norse history and literature when not broadcasting about Britain.13 MacNeice’s Anglocentric career and global imagination are partly explained by the facts that he lived almost all of his adult life in England and had longstanding intellectual commitments to Greek and Norse literature. But his tenure at the BBC is also instructive in terms of the displacement of Irishness, or at least of the Irish writer, that 9 10

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Morash, History of the Media, p. 132. On Stuart, see Damien Keane, Ireland and the Problem of Information: Irish Writing, Radio, Late Modernist Communication (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014), pp. 108–40. On the influx of Irish writers, actors, producers, and musicians at the postwar BBC, see Emily Bloom, ‘Channel Paddlers: 1950s Irish Drama on the British Airwaves’, Éire-Ireland 50:1–2 (Spring 2015), 45–65 (pp. 47–9). Yeats’s contributions to Radio Athlone consisted of participating in an interview on ‘The Irish Literary Movement’ (12 October 1935) and organising a broadcast of poetry and song called the ‘Abbey Theatre Broadcast’ (1 February 1937). On Yeats’s radio output, see Emily Bloom, The Wireless Past: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 1931–1968 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 27–63; and Emilie Morin, ‘W. B. Yeats and Broadcasting, 1924–1965’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 35:1 (2015), 145–75. For recent work on MacNeice, see Bloom, Wireless Past, pp. 64–93; Melissa Dinsman, Modernism at the Microphone: Radio, Propaganda, and Literary Aesthetics during World War II (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 75–96; Keane, Ireland and the Problem of Information, pp. 71–107; Ian Whittington, Writing the Radio War: Literature, Politics and the BBC, 1939–1945 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), pp. 83–116; and Amanda Wrigley and S. J. Harrison, eds., Louis MacNeice: The Classical Radio Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). On those two exceptional plays, The Mad Islands and They Met on Good Friday, see Simon Workman, ‘“An Ancient Celtic World Had Filled the Air”: The Celtic Turn in Louis MacNeice’s Mid-Century Radio Writing’, Irish Studies Review 25:3 (2017), 357–71.

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often attended the broadcast event: writers from Elizabeth Bowen and Samuel Beckett to Brendan Behan were drawn to broadcast more often for the BBC than for RÉ for a variety of reasons, including the BBC’s superior technical resources, greater remuneration, and expansive global reach.

Domestic Violence If Ireland’s intimate history with the medium is fraught with departures and distances, it was just as often characterised by uncomfortable proximities and intrusions. Radio’s calling card has of course always been signed in familiar terms and delivered within the walls of the home, in the kitchen, or by the hearth. Consider MacNeice’s poem ‘Cushendun’, composed on the brink of the Second World War, in which the poetic eye roams the rural landscape around the titular Northern Irish village, progressively narrowing its focus down to a house and finally a single room: Only in the dark green room beside the fire With the curtains drawn against the winds and waves There is a little box with a well-bred voice: What a place to talk of War.14

In MacNeice’s early poetry, radio signals the incursion of the outside world into the closed environs of the self and its intimates: radio music burbles ‘like water from a rock’ at the lovestruck café denizens of ‘Meeting Point’ (1941); ‘Hitler yells on the wireless’ and the radio ‘howl[s]’ in the autobiographical Autumn Journal (1939).15 While radio the world over was talked about in terms of its penetration of the domestic sphere in the turbulent 1930s, the medium’s tendency to remind us of the very frangibility of our homes and ourselves lingers longer, and sharper, on the island of Ireland than elsewhere.16 Thus George Buchanan, in his 1961 poem, ‘Conversation with Strangers’, notes how ‘Radio, newspaper/pierce the shell of the house’; and Roy McFadden laments in ‘Stringer’s Field’ (1977) that ‘The News was always the same from wireless and journal.’17 14

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Louis MacNeice, ‘The Closing Album: II: Cushendun’, Collected Poems, ed. Peter MacDonald (London: Faber & Faber, 2007), p. 180. MacNeice, Collected Poems, pp. 189, 115, 116. On radio’s boundary-crossing tendencies, see Ian Whittington, ‘“Hypocrite Auditeur, Mon Semblable, Mon Frère”: Literature and the Borders of the Radio Public’, in A History of 1930s British Literature, ed. Benjamin Kohlmann and Matthew Taunton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 163–76 (pp. 163–5). George Buchanan, ‘Conversation with Strangers’, in Poets from the North of Ireland, ed. Frank Ormsby (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1979), p. 18; Roy McFadden, ‘Stringer’s Field’, Verifications (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1977), p. 11.

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The persistence of wireless intrusion as a trope may simply reflect the fact that radio exerted its signal influence on Irish life a little longer than in Britain or the USA due to the delayed arrival of television in Northern Ireland in 1953 and in the Republic in 1961. But what manifests as persistence in Buchanan’s 1961 poem may be uncanny return by the time of McFadden’s 1977 one, as the Troubles ensured that radio sustained some of the same catastrophic functions that it had served so ruthlessly during the Second World War. If anything, the final turbulent decades of the twentieth century in Ireland offered a reminder that radio could literally function as a tool of war. In ‘Enemy Encounter’, Padraic Fiacc, writing during the first decade of the Troubles, places a radio among a British soldier’s effects: Dumping (left over from the autumn) Dead leaves, near a culvert I come on a British Army Soldier With a rifle and a radio Perched hiding. He has red hair.18

Fiacc’s poem reminds us that radio’s political valence has never resided exclusively in its propagandistic function. It has always also been a technology of war, the cousin of radar, and a means of encrypted communication; as such, radio workers could be seen as active players in the conflict. Indeed, as the violence of the Troubles grew in the late 1960s and early 1970s, reporters, sound engineers, and camera operators came under increasing threat of harm or, worse, direct attack. In February 1971, for example, two BBC engineers and three construction workers were killed by a landmine planted on the access road to the transmitter at Brougher Mountain, near the border of Tyrone and Fermanagh.19 One didn’t have to be a soldier or engineer to trace the currents of violence that shook their way through the air during this period. In essays about her poetry of the 1970s – ‘Domestic Violence’ and ‘On Writing the Political Poem in Ireland’ – Eavan Boland writes powerfully about the broadcast intrusion of violence into the domestic sphere during the Troubles. As a writer working from her suburban Dublin home, Boland observed first-hand the tendency for news broadcasts about the Troubles to bleed into a wider trauma that affected households across the 18

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Padraic Fiacc, ‘Enemy Encounter’, Ruined Pages: Selected Poems (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1994), p. 120. Rex Cathcart, The Most Contrary Region: The BBC in Northern Ireland, 1924–1984 (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1984), p. 220.

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island. Describing a typical morning in the late 1970s in the essay ‘Domestic Violence’, Boland notes how the calm of the day is broken as she turns on the wireless: ‘Guns and armaments fill the kitchen. Hoods, handcuffs, armalites – the paraphernalia of urban struggle slides easily in and out of the newsreader’s voice.’ As she stares about her kitchen, Boland struggles to identify an ‘odd thought’ flitting about her consciousness, before realising that, in a globalised world of consumer products, the traumatic scenes relayed via the air are the most indigenous aspect of the scene: ‘My coffee is the instant variety, closed in a glass jar made in Huddersfield. My marmalade comes from London. My kettle is from Holland. My knife from Germany. My radio from Japan. Only the violence, it seems – only that – is truly Irish.’ Reflecting, in the third person, on the early years of a marriage that was not without quarrels (she recalls ‘[t]heir raised voices filling the spaces’ of the home), Boland traces the filaments that connect such domestic strife to the struggles of the island of Ireland: ‘Above all, I sensed their angry words were connected – by a series of inferences, like an underground tunnel – to the larger quarrel happening on the island they inhabited.’20 If a central concern of Boland’s poetic and critical project has been to redefine what it means to write from the centre of Irish political and social experience, so that the centre encompasses conventionally feminised and excluded spaces like a suburban Dublin kitchen, the radio emerges as a potent symbol of the senselessness of that longstanding exclusion. How can the space of the home be excluded from the national imaginary, when the nation seeps in through the walls and across the threshold every day?21 More recently, in her collection The Radio (2017), Leontia Flynn has revisited territory first explored by Boland and Heaney. The Radio is, among the great many other things, a meditation on how human relations are so often mediated through and by technological devices. (‘August 30th 2013’, for example, recalls the event of Heaney’s death as being announced in a flurry of wireless messages: ‘Two texts. I get an email on my phone. /Twitter erupts, it seems, in shards of verse.’22) The title poem in Flynn’s 20 21

22

Eavan Boland, ‘Domestic Violence’, American Poetry Review 36:2 (2007), 33–7 (p. 34). Radio’s domestic role challenged the established notions of the national cultural centre in other ways; see, for example, Darragh O’Donoghue’s exploration of how Kate O’Brien and others used the ‘women’s programme Between Ourselves to reshape the canon of Irish literature by including discussions of female authors including Maria Edgeworth, Alice Milligan, and Lady Wilde. See Darragh O’Donoghue, ‘Between Ourselves and 1950s Ireland: The Use of Radio Archives as an Historical Source’, Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media 9:1 (2011), 25–33. Leontia Flynn, ‘August 30th 2013’, The Radio (Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 2018), p. 22.

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collection looks back, like Boland’s essays of the 1990s, on the function of radio as a mediator of the Troubles: The radio hoots and mutters, hoots and mutters out of the dark, each morning of my childhood. A kind of plaintive, reedy, oboe note – Deadlock . . . it mutters, firearms . . . Warrenpoint; Just before two this morning . . . talks between . . . and through its aperture, the outside world comes streaming, like a magic lantern show, into our bewildered solitude. Unrest . . . it hoots now both sides . . . sources say . . . My mother stands, like a sentinel, by the sink. [. . .] So daily the radio drops its explosive news and daily my mother turns to field the blow. The words fall down, a little neutral now, onto the stone-cold, cold, stone kitchen floor.23

As if refracting Boland’s own work, Flynn shows us not a suburban Dublin home through the eyes of an adult poet caring for her children, but a rural Northern Ireland home through the eyes of the future poet as a child, watching her mother shield her family from the intrusive force of the wireless. To say that the speaker’s mother shields her family is perhaps overstating the case: she may ‘field the blow’, but the words that fall are only ‘a little neutral now’ (emphasis added). As in the work of MacNeice, Boland, and others, Flynn’s poem reveals the erosion of the illusion of domestic insularity by the steady drip of radio’s ‘explosive news’, which leaves only a ‘bewildered solitude’ in which its audience can take shelter.

Austin Clarke and the Field of Mid-Century Broadcasting If poetry about radio often reflected anxieties about the intrusion of national and international catastrophes into the personal domestic sphere, poetry on the radio raised fraught questions about which forms of literary culture were proper to the national domestic sphere. As listener-funded semi-state institutions that offered some of the largest and most stable sources of patronage for the arts in the new Irish state, 2RN and its descendants occupied particularly influential positions in a postindependence cultural field that was shifting, from the late 1930s into the 23

Flynn, ‘The Radio’, The Radio, pp. 15–16.

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1940s, from an initial emphasis on promoting Gaelic culture and sport under 2RN’s founding director, Séamus Clandillon, to a more international and deliberately modern outlook under T. J. Kiernan.24 The function of literature – especially that featured on the national broadcaster – during this period of transition was especially contested. As Damien Keane has demonstrated with reference to the years of the Second World War, modern Irish literature (and its wireless dissemination) has been consistently pressured by ideals of aesthetic autonomy and national identity in varying measure and in varying degrees of conflict and complementarity. To be a cultural producer in mid-century Ireland was to take up a position in a cultural field in which ‘relational contests were most intensely waged around the very classification of “literary” versus “political” communication’.25 The question of whose literary culture belonged on the national airwaves played out not only in large institutional shifts but also in mid-century debates over writerly access to the microphone. At the heart of these debates is the poet Austin Clarke, a central if contentious figure in Irish poetry in the decades leading up to his death in 1974, and an unjustly outof-fashion one today. For some mid-century readers he was the ‘dean of Irish letters’, a writer who had enjoyed a long and varied poetic career that stretched back to 1917 and thereby placed him in the intellectual orbit of Yeats and other founders of modern Irish poetry.26 At the same time, Clarke served as the object of reproach and recrimination by figures including Patrick Kavanagh, who excoriated him (and so many others) in the pages of Kavanagh’s Weekly, and Samuel Beckett, who lampooned him as ‘Austin Ticklepenny’ in Murphy (1938).27 W. J. McCormack puts the terms of Clarke’s devaluation concisely: ‘Second-generation modernism declared independence from the first generation and, unfortunately for Clarke, it required a victim who mediated between the two generations in order to thoroughly ridicule the Celtic themes and techniques which it associated with its predecessor.’28 24

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Brian O’Neill, ‘“Lifting the Veil”: The Arts, Broadcasting and Irish Society’, Media, Culture & Society 22:6 (2000), 763–85 (p. 775); Eileen Morgan-Zayachek, ‘Losing their Day Jobs: The Radio Éireann Players as a Permanent Repertory Company’, Theatre Survey 46:1 (May 2005), 31–48 (p. 43). Keane, Ireland and the Problem of Information, p. 9. Susan Halpern, Austin Clarke: His Life and Works (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1974), p. 41. Patrick Kavanagh, ‘The National Bucklep’, Kavanagh’s Weekly 1:3 (26 April 1952), 6; W. J. McCormack, ‘Austin Clarke: The Poet as Scapegoat of Modernism’, in Modernism and Ireland: The Poetry of the 1930s, ed. Patricia Coughlan and Alex Davis (Cork: Cork University Press, 1995), pp. 79–86. McCormack, ‘Austin Clarke’, p. 81.

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Noteworthy for our purposes here is the term ‘mediated’. While Clarke was already a target for such antipathies by the time of Murphy, his prominence only grew with the poetry broadcasts he made once a week for most of the 1939–55 period, and which ensured that he exerted a singular influence on the public reception of poetry in mid-century Ireland. Together with Talks Producer Roibeárd Ó Faracháin, a friend and fellow poet, Clarke launched the ‘New Verse Competition’, a weekly radio contest that received around 500 listener submissions a week during the years of the Second World War, and which was the first venue in which the poets W. R. Rodgers and John Hewitt circulated their verse.29 Clarke used his position within RÉ to promote a very specific vision – or rather, sound – of Irish poetry. His own verse was heavily assonantal and characterised by patterns of internal rhyme, techniques through which Clarke sought to translate medieval Gaelic poetic traditions into modern English verse, in keeping with his self-perception as an inheritor of the traditions of the Irish Literary Revival. Beyond his own writing, Clarke (together with Ó Faracháin) sought to deepen public appreciation of the sonic components of poetry as a performance art through two organisations founded around the same time as Clarke’s radio debut: the Verse Speaking Society and the Lyric Theatre Company.30 The two organisations were complementary; the Lyric Theatre Company sought, in Antoinette Quinn’s words, ‘to revive the Yeatsian ideal of verse-drama at the Abbey’, while the Verse Speaking Society would foster appreciation of, and talent for, the kind of poetic delivery that Clarke believed necessary to a potent and affecting theatrical experience.31 Central to ensuring the widespread appreciation of this poetic ideal was radio; members of the Verse Speaking Society regularly broadcast on Radio Éireann, reflecting the crucial role the national broadcaster played in a cultural field otherwise devoid of major institutions of patronage. As Clarke says in the essay ‘Verse Speaking’: ‘At a time when poetry is 29

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Maurice Gorham, Forty Years of Irish Broadcasting (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1967), p. 147; Seán Mac Reamoinn, ‘Clarke and Broadcasting’, Poetry Ireland Review 22–23 (1988), 159–64 (p. 162). Ó Faracháin served in the Talks Department at RÉ from 1939 to 1947 and twice served briefly as Deputy Director before he became Controller of Programmes in 1947. Together with his role as a Director of the board of the Abbey Theatre from 1940 to 1973, Ó Faracháin’s radio career afforded him a uniquely central position in the mid-century Irish cultural firmament. The date ascribed to the founding of the Dublin Verse Speaking Society varies according to source between 1938 and 1940. The Lyric Theatre Company operated between 1941 and 1951 from the Abbey Theatre. Antoinette Quinn, Patrick Kavanagh: A Critical Study (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1991), p. 271.

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neglected here and we have few publishers of our own, broadcasting enables us to spread an interest in poetry and particularly to draw attention to the work of the Irish Literary Revival.’32 Poetic form and technological infrastructure came together, for Clarke, in the service of a national cultural tradition.

‘As the Crow Flies’ For all of the seeming artifice of his method, Clarke’s best radio plays demonstrate precisely how valuable an attention to the sonic dimensions of poetry could be to radio drama. In the thirty-minute verse play ‘As the Crow Flies’ (RÉ, 1942), for example, Clarke uses the qualities of assonance, internal and end rhyme, and flexible iambic metre as a means of forging a densely layered poetic soundscape that mirrors the cacophony of the play’s stormy setting and of its moral upheavals. In the play, three seventhcentury monks, sheltering in a mountain cave from a storm whose shrill wail pervades the soundscape of the drama, begin to hear voices they cannot explain. These voices – which come to dominate the middle scenes of the play – belong to an Eagle, her Eaglets, a Crow that has taken refuge in the Eagle’s nest, and a host of other animals drawn from the Fenian Cycle and other medieval narratives. The Crow brings an ominous message: it is on nights of terrible storm such as the one they are weathering that the much-feared Hag of Dingle can transform herself, take on a new shape, and terrorise mortal beings anew: ‘Every two-hundredth year/In storm, she casts another skin’, the Crow tells the Eagle, but will say little more: ‘I’ll only say that this bad storm/Has come that she may change her form/Once more.’33 Desperate to know whether the time has indeed come for the Hag to change her shape, the Eagle leaves her nest in order to visit a succession of animals who, she hopes, will know more. At last, from the wise and ancient Salmon of Assaroe, the Eagle learns of the tragic error of her journey: the Crow is, herself, the transformed Hag of Dingle. Having left her Eaglets in the care of the malevolent spirit, the Eagle races back to find her children dead in the nest. In despair, she dashes herself against the cliff face of the mountain, a sight which the monks witness as they leave the cave for their monastery the next morning.

32

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Austin Clarke, ‘Verse Speaking’, Selected Plays of Austin Clarke, ed. Mary Shine Thompson (Gerrards Cross, Bucks: Colin Smythe, 2005), pp. 319–20. Austin Clarke, ‘As the Crow Flies’, Selected Plays of Austin Clarke, ed. Shine Thompson, pp. 110–11.

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‘As the Crow Flies’ is a drama of liminality and transformation, in which Clarke uses prosody to mark the line between the Christian and Pagan worlds. In the play, the monks – elderly Father Virgilius and Brothers Aengus and Manus – speak in verse relatively free of Clarke’s trademark sonic effects of assonance and internal rhyme. Take, for instance, Aengus’s speech when he returns to his companions after getting lost while gathering reeds: The forest Was dark as Doom. I groped from age to age, Among the knottings of each century; And then my eyes were opened So suddenly by Heaven, it seemed their dust Had risen and this everlasting body Was glorified.34

The Christian sentiment of this passage is dressed in verse that seems deliberately shorn of the very poetic effects Clarke most sought to champion as hallmarks of the Irish poetic tradition. Compare it to the words of the Crow when it first crawls into the Eagle’s nest: Destroyed I am this night, blown helterskelter. Give me an inch, a pinch of shelter. I am so weak, I can hardly speak, So very cold, I cannot build A nest: and this big wind that filled My wingbones blew me into the trees, For the first time in centuries.35

In addition to the frequent perfect end rhymes (helterskelter/shelter, build/ filled), Clarke employs internal rhyme (inch/pinch, weak/speak) and weaves a network of assonance (give/inch/pinch) and consonance (cold/build) that binds the verse together. Such dynamic sonic texture was not without its artistic risks; even sympathetic listeners like fellow poet and broadcast playwright Padraic Fallon (himself long overdue for a radio reappraisal) sometimes took issue with the methods of Clarke and the Verse Speaking Society. Of Clarke’s dramas, Fallon said: ‘He mistakes a play for a lyric. We can ponder a lyric but we listen to a play. And the mysteries of assonance and dissonance by-pass us. Rhythmic writing is enough.’36 And yet, reviewing the published 34 36

Ibid., p. 105. 35 Ibid., p. 109. Quoted in Dennis O’Driscoll, ‘Athens to Athenry: Padraic Fallon Rediscovered’, Poetry Ireland Review 29 (1990), 34–46 (pp. 44–5).

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version of As the Crow Flies (1943) in The Dublin Magazine, Fallon recalled the broadcast version of the play as a ‘triumph’, praising its ‘brilliant clarity of technique where every lyrical impulse finds room’.37 For at least one listener, then, Clarke’s play successfully enacts his vision for a national poetic culture that retains and extends the thematic and prosodic goals of the Revival; in doing so, the play builds on the institutional prestige he already enjoyed as one of the country’s most vocal arbiters of the national poetic tradition, a kind of radiogenic critic-laureate of poetry. And yet for all the indebtedness of ‘As the Crow Flies’ to the tales and forms of Ireland’s past, this is no insular national vision, divorced from the global tragedy unfolding beyond Ireland’s borders in 1942. We can hear in this seemingly self-contained fable the stirrings of the globalising wind that would tug at the Heaney family’s aerial only a few years later.38 The storm that drives the monks into the hermit’s cave for shelter is of apocalyptic proportions: the refrain ‘Never have I known so bad a night’ echoes, in various forms, throughout the play, transforming the natural calamity into an unprecedented darkening of all horizons and all hope. The image of a dark and terrible night falling across the land grows increasingly ominous as the threat of the Hag looms ever larger. When asked by the Eagle whether it had ever seen such a storm, the Salmon replies: ‘I dreamed of horrors that had shrieked/Before creation.’ He continues: How can you guess, Poor bird, dressing your carrion meat With highflown feet, that every creature We know is eaten by disease Or violent blow! We are unseasoned, Unsensed, unearthed, riddle-diddled By what is hidden from the reason. How can the forethought of defilement Be reconciled with any faith That teaches mortals to be mild? [. . .] How must reality be named If carnal being is so shamed?39

37 38

39

Padraic Fallon, ‘Book Reviews’, Dublin Magazine 19:1 (March 1944), pp. 47, 46. We know that Clarke’s voice sounded in the Heaney household not long after ‘As the Crow Flies’ aired. As Robert J. Savage points out in this volume (Chapter 6), Heaney cited Clarke’s weekly poetry programmes as a formative influence: ‘I remember sitting with my ear to the baize-and-fretwork speaker of a big Cossor wireless picking up that unperturbed voice making its way among the strange squeaks and bubbles of the wave bands [. . .] between Dublin and Derry.’ RTÉ archives, www.rte.ie /archives/exhibitions/1982-seamus-heaney/1988-rte-and-poems-plain/ (accessed 6 May 2021). Clarke, ‘As the Crow Flies’, pp. 118–19.

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The imagery – of shrieking horrors, of a universal but irrational violence that ‘unsenses’ the perceiver, of ‘chronicles of war, greed, slaughter’ that trace the ‘[u]nchanging misery of mankind’40 – would, for an audience in 1942, have evoked the senselessness of the war unfolding on the Continent from whose effects Ireland was but barely sheltered.41 David Kilpatrick, in one of the few recent commentaries on ‘As the Crow Flies’, is correct in identifying the religious crisis at the heart of this play, and so much of Clarke’s work.42 Not only are the Eagle and Salmon horrified by ‘the forethought of defilement’ that awaits all life; as the monks watch the grieving Eagle dash herself upon the cliff face, Brother Aengus declares a newfound awareness of the brutality and cruelty of the world that shakes his faith in God: ‘I know/The ancient thought that men endure at night. /What wall or cave can hide us from that knowledge?’43 But this crisis of faith cannot be understood separately from the historical moment of the play’s writing and broadcast amidst a global conflagration. In the context of official Irish neutrality, in which censorship prohibited anything other than neutral commentary on the ‘Emergency’, this conflagration could only make itself known obliquely; in this case, in the form of allegory.44 Clarke was far from a warmonger; reviewing MacNeice’s anti-appeasement Autumn Journal for The Dublin Magazine in the summer of 1939, he remarked that ‘Mr MacNeice is prepared, apparently, to plunge Europe into a catastrophic war to save the Czechs and other small nations.’45 Edna Longley sees this jab as part of a ‘plangently isolationist tendency’ in Clarke’s interwar writings; and yet in ‘As the Crow Flies’ we might say that the plangency begins to outweigh the isolationism.46 Ultimately, Clarke’s play doesn’t take a side on the immediate war so much as it announces and mourns the cyclicality of such violent interruptions of peacetime life. Brother Aengus’s call becomes the 40 41

42

43 44

45

46

Ibid., p. 120. While there were enthusiastic notices in advance of the play in both the Irish Times (‘Austin Clarke’s New Verse Drama’, 31 January 1942, 4) and the Irish Press (Roddy the Rover, ‘Seen, Heard, and Noted: “As the Crow Flies”’, 5 February 1942, 2), and reviews of the published version by Padraic Fallon (cited above) and Tom Harrisson (‘Radio’, The Observer, 14 November 1943, 2). I have not been able to trace reviews of the broadcast itself. David Kilpatrick, ‘The Religious Crisis in Two Plays by Austin Clarke’, Notes on Modern Irish Literature 12 (2000), 43–9. Clarke, ‘As the Crow Flies’, p. 123. Clair Wills, That Neutral Island: A Cultural History of Ireland During the Second World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 8. Austin Clarke, Reviews and Essays of Austin Clarke, ed. Gregory A. Schirmer (Gerrards Cross, Bucks: Colin Smythe, 1995), p. 205. Edna Longley, ‘Postcolonial versus European (and Post-Ukanian) Frameworks for Irish Literature’, The Irish Review 25 (Winter 1999–Spring 2000), 75–94 (p. 85).

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listener’s: ‘What wall or cave’ – or, indeed, nest – ‘can hide us from that knowledge?’ If radio reminds us that homes are leaky things, vulnerable to signals seeping in from Luxembourg or London, Belfast or Berlin, the medium’s role in Irish literature also points out the permeability of distinctions between home and away, the private and the public, the nation and the world. Clarke’s admittedly narrow vision of a national poetic tradition earned him the disparagement of Kavanagh, Beckett, and others who saw it as hermetic and contrived, too nationally navel-gazing to allow Ireland to meet its literary and historical moment directly; and yet, when applied in a medium of international interpellation, a national tradition might just allow the poet to articulate one particular position with regard to a wider world that will draw the poet out, one way or another. The career broadcaster and channel-hopper Louis MacNeice thought as much, when, looking back on his first decade and a half at the BBC in Autumn Sequel (1954), he recalls it as an experience of entanglement: before I know it I find Myself at a microphone with miles of flex Twining around me and myself entwined By headphones with the world and at the becks And calls of each blind sound wave.47

‘[E]ntwined/By headphones with the world’, Irish writers across the twentieth century found in radio a means of looking at once inward and outward and of celebrating both the hereness and thereness of a medium that spoke of home even as it thinned the very walls.

Select Bibliography Bloom, Emily, ‘Channel Paddlers: 1950s Irish Drama on the British Airwaves’, Éire-Ireland 50:1–2 (Spring 2015), 45–65. The Wireless Past: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 1931–1968 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Cathcart, Rex, The Most Contrary Region: The BBC in Northern Ireland, 1924–1984 (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1984). Clarke, Austin, Reviews and Essays of Austin Clarke, ed. Gregory A. Schirmer (Gerrards Cross, Bucks: Colin Smythe, 1995). Selected Plays of Austin Clarke, ed. Mary Shine Thompson (Gerrards Cross, Bucks: Colin Smythe, 2005). 47

MacNeice, ‘Autumn Sequel’, Collected Poems, p. 484.

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Dinsman, Melissa, Modernism at the Microphone: Radio, Propaganda, and Literary Aesthetics during World War II (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). Gorham, Maurice, Forty Years of Irish Broadcasting (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1967). Keane, Damien, Ireland and the Problem of Information: Irish Writing, Radio, Late Modernist Communication (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014). MacNeice, Louis, Collected Poems, ed. Peter MacDonald (London: Faber & Faber, 2007). Morash, Christopher, A History of the Media in Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Morin, Emilie, ‘W. B. Yeats and Broadcasting, 1924–1965’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 35:1 (2015), 145–75. O’Donoghue, Darragh, ‘Between Ourselves and 1950s Ireland: The Use of Radio Archives as an Historical Source’, Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media 9:1 (2011), 25–33. Pine, Richard, 2RN and the Origins of Irish Radio (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002). Savage, Robert J., ‘Film and Broadcast Media’, in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish History, ed. Alvin Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 268–90. Whittington, Ian, Writing the Radio War: Literature, Politics and the BBC, 1939– 1945 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018). ‘“Hypocrite Auditeur, Mon Semblable, Mon Frère”: Literature and the Borders of the Radio Public’, in A History of 1930s British Literature, ed. Benjamin Kohlmann and Matthew Taunton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 163–76. Wills, Clair, That Neutral Island: A Cultural History of Ireland During the Second World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). Workman, Simon, ‘“An Ancient Celtic World Had Filled the Air”: The Celtic Turn in Louis MacNeice’s Mid-Century Radio Writing’, Irish Studies Review 25:3 (2017), 357–71. Wrigley, Amanda, and S. J. Harrison, eds., Louis MacNeice: The Classical Radio Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

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part iii

Invention

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chapter 8

Technology, Writing, and Place in Medieval Irish Literature Máire Ní Mhaonaigh

Is scíth mo chrob ón scríbainn; ní dígainn mo glés géroll; sceithid mo phenn gulban cáelda dig ndáelda do dub glégorm.

My hand is cramped from penwork. My quill has a tapered point. Its bird-mouth issues a blue-dark Beetle-sparkle of ink.

Bruinnid srúaim n-ecna ndedairn as mo láim degduinn desmais; doirtid a dig for duilinn do dub in chuilinn chnesglais.

Wisdom keeps welling in streams From my fine-drawn sallow hand: Riverrun on the vellum Of ink from green-skinned holly.

Sínim mo phenn mbec mbráenach tar áenach lebar lígoll gan scor, fri selba ségann, dían scíth mo chrob ón scríbonn.

My small runny pen keeps going Through books, through thick and thin, To enrich the scholars’ holdings – Penwork that cramps my hand.

Irish, anonymous (attributed to Colum Cille)1

Seamus Heaney, ‘Colum Cille Cecinit’

This short, skilful Middle Irish poem written in the eleventh or twelfth century perfectly encapsulates the technology of writing as process and as theme. The anonymous author is placed within the paraphernalia of writing and is actively engaged with it. The physical exertion of the act can be measured across the three verses, the poet’s hand (crob) moving from being merely tired (scíth) in the first line to being desperately tired (dían scíth) in the deliberately echoing closing phrase with which the poem 1

Gerard Murphy, ed. and trans., Early Irish Lyrics, Eighth to Twelfth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), pp. 70–1; Seamus Heaney, Human Chain (London: Faber & Faber, 2010), p. 72. I am grateful to my colleague Dr Marie-Luise Theuerkauf for comments on the material presented here.

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ends. The implements required to execute the action are presented: glés, a general word referring to any kind of material instrument, made specific by the accompanying adjective géroll, ‘very sharp’; the pen (penn), pointed (literally ‘beaked’) and narrow (penn gulban cáelda), and also small and moist (bec, bráenach). The liquid (literally ‘beetle-juice’) it pours forth (doirtid) is shiny dark ink (dub glégorm). Extracted from the green-skinned holly tree (dub in chuilinn chnesglais), it is spewed, vomited (sceithid) onto the page (duilenn). The author’s own investment becomes apparent, as he extends his pen (sínim mo phenn) across page after page of a whole gathering (áenach) of exquisitely beautiful books (lebar lígoll). From his fair, sallow, shapely hand (as mo láim degduinn desmais) a stream of wisdom (srúaim n-ecna) springs (bruinnid). His ceaseless (gan scor) engagement with the practice of writing results in actual writing from which scholars will be enriched (fri selba ségann). Attributed to St Colum Cille (Columba) in its single manuscript copy,2 the poem is much later in date than the floruit of the founder of the monastery on Iona, the 1,500th anniversary of whose birth in 521 was celebrated in 2021. Colum Cille’s fame and his association with literacy ensured that the authorship of many compositions he could not have written was assigned to him, lending authority and distinction to those particular works.3 In the case of our poem, the link with one of Ireland’s earliest saints situated it in the period of conversion to Christianity in the sixth century. Among the most important aspects of the new religion was the technology of writing on which its teaching was based. The Latin alphabet which was embraced by the medieval Irish learned elite was adapted to function as a medium for writing in Irish also.4 That Irish words connected with writing are frequently borrowed from Latin bears eloquent testimony to this fact; these include lebor ‘book’, penn ‘pen’, 2

3

4

Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud 615; see Kuno Meyer, ‘Anecdota from Irish MSS, XVII: MS Laud 615, p. 55: Colum Cille cecinit’, Gaelic Journal 8 (1897), 49; and his ‘Mitteilungen aus irischen Handschriften’, Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie 13 (1921), 1–30 (at p. 8). These include a corpus of exile poetry, for which see Máire Herbert, ‘Becoming an Exile: Colum Cille in Middle-Irish Poetry’, in Heroic Poets and Poetic Heroes in Celtic Tradition: A Festschrift for Patrick K. Ford, Celtic Studies Association of North America Yearbook 3–4, ed. Joseph Falaky Nagy and Leslie Ellen Jones (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005), pp. 131–40. A number of the miracles related in Colum Cille’s seventh-century Life associate the saint with literacy; see, for example, Adomnán’s Life of Columba, ed. and trans. Alan Orr Anderson and Marjorie Ogilvie Anderson, revised edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 104–7 (ii.8–9, relating how pages written by the saint were not damaged by water). The beginnings of literacy in Ireland are discussed in Elva Johnston, Literacy and Identity in Early Medieval Ireland, Studies in Celtic History 33 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2013), especially pp. 9–26 and 27–58.

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and scríbaid ‘to write’, employed by our accomplished poet.5 This transfer of technologies from one language-system to another was of profound cultural significance and is reflected in the rich and varied corpus of texts surviving from the medieval period. The process and product of writing, so vividly delineated in the penmanship of ‘Colum Cille’, the scribe, was manifest in Latin, Irish, and bilingually from an early stage.

Technologies of Writing Beyond the scriptorium of Colum Cille and other scholars, the technology of writing was visible in the medieval Irish landscape as well, in the form of ogham inscriptions on stone. Ogham (earlier ogam) letters consist of specific combinations of lines and dots carved on, or to either side of, a stem-line – the corner of a stone slab, the sharp edge of wood, or other hard material. As the Roman alphabet, a medium associated with Latin, was transformed into an instrument of expression for the Irish language also, so too in ogham are Irish and Latin interlinked. The language ogham represents is Irish, but contact with Latin speakers, and a knowledge of Latin grammar, underlines the way its letters are grouped.6 Thus, notwithstanding its distinctive appearance, ogham was informed by an acquaintance with Latin literacy in the period before the coming of Christianity to Ireland in the fifth century.7 Both ogham and the Latin alphabet were written in the early Christian period, the latest ogham inscriptions dating to the seventh-century ce.8 Limited in scope and function, these inscriptions commemorate specific individuals, while a much greater diversity of subject matter was addressed in the Latin alphabet, in both Latin and Irish, as noted above. Manuscripts, the exquisitely beautiful books referred to by our poet, contain texts penned in a variety of Latin scripts, including the relatively formal majuscule of a sixth-century Psalter, the Cathach (Battler), which also came to be associated with Colum Cille of Iona.9 A range of 5

6

7 8 9

From Latin liber, penna, and scribere, respectively. The poet uses the word scríbainn (and its scribal variant scríbonn), a later spelling of scríbend, ‘writing’, a verbal noun of scríbaid. The electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language (eDIL), s.v. scríbend (dil.ie/36641). Damian McManus, A Guide to Ogam, Maynooth Monographs 4 (Maynooth: An Sagart, 1991), pp. 27–31. For a general introduction to ogham, see David Stifter, Ogam: Language, Writing, Epigraphy, AELAW Booklets 10 (Zaragoza: Prensas de la Universidad de Zaragoza, 2022). On the origins of ogham, see Johnston, Literacy and Identity, pp. 11–13. McManus, Guide, pp. 78–100, 128. Dublin, Royal Irish Academy, MS 12 R 33, www.isos.dias.ie/english/index.html (accessed 11 July 2022); see Dáibhí Ó Cróinín, ‘The Cathach and Domnach Airgid’, in Treasures of the Royal Irish Academy Library, ed. Bernadette Cunningham and Siobhán Fitzpatrick (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2009), pp. 1–8 (pp. 1–6).

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minuscule letter forms are also attested, as in twelfth-century vernacular manuscripts written about the time our poem was being composed.10 Occasionally, words in ogham script occur alongside them, eight examples being found in the margins of a ninth-century Latin manuscript known as the St Gall Priscian.11 Among the most striking is latheirt, ‘drunkenness’, which has been interpreted as ‘hungover’, and taken as a complaint on the part of the scribe. He makes similar exclamations in Latin script elsewhere in the manuscript, not least a lament about his poor hand (a uit mo chrob ‘ouch my hand’!).12 These and more extensive examples of the occurrence of ogham letters in manuscripts indicate that medieval Irish scholars remained interested in this type of writing and its technology long after it had ceased to be a productive scribal form.13 Its execution and reception was addressed in what may be an eighth-century treatise, Auraicept na nÉces (The Scholars’ Primer) describing how ogham was read ‘as a tree is climbed, i.e. treading on the root of the tree first with one’s right hand before one and one’s left hand last. After that it is across it and against it and through it and around it’.14 The association with trees is also indicated in the label applied to ogham, In Beithe-luis-nin ‘The Birch-Rowan-Ash’, reflecting the tree names ogham letters were accorded. Ogham is indeed read vertically starting at the bottom, but the author’s real concern is with imagining the script’s history rather than with any practical application it had. The mechanics of ogham writing forms part of the story of the origins of the Irish language created in learned circles, a version of which is attested in ‘The Scholars’ Primer’. In a biblically inspired passage therein, designed to elevate Irish to the status of the three sacred languages, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, it is claimed that at the Tower of Babel, ‘what was best of every language and what was widest and finest was cut into Irish’.15 And as the creation of language was envisaged as a physical act being excised or fashioned out of a whole, it had an 10

11

12

13 14

15

See Timothy O’Neill, The Irish Hand: Scribes and their Manuscripts from the Earliest Times to the Seventeenth Century, with an Exemplar of Irish Scripts (Portlaoise: Dolmen Press, 1984), pp. 26–31, 70–1, 73. St Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod[ex] Sang[allensis]. 904, www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/list/one/csg/09 04 (accessed 11 July 2022); O’Neill, The Irish Hand, pp. 18–19, 67. Pádraic Moran, ‘Language Interaction in the St Gall Priscian Glosses’, Peritia 26 (2015), 113–42 (pp. 140–1). See McManus, Guide, pp. 132–41. . . . amal im-drengar crann .i. saltrad fora frém in chroinn ar tús ocus do lám dess remut ocus do lám clé fo déoid. Is íar-sin is leis ocus is fris ocus is trít ocus is immi: ibid., p. 3. . . . a mba ferr íarum do cach bérlu ocus a mba lethu ocus a mba caímiu, is ed do-reped isin nGoídilc: Anders Ahlqvist, ed. and trans., The Early Irish Linguist: An Edition of the Canonical Part of the

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alphabetic representation, ogham. Furthermore, it was the most comprehensive of alphabets: ‘and every sound for which a sign had not been found in other alphabets, signs were found for them in the Beithe-luis-nin’.16 According to an alternative explanation which forms part of an elaborate tract, In Lebor Ogaim (The Book of Ogam), detailing many fanciful varieties of ogham, it was invented by Ogma mac Elathan, ‘Ogma son of Artistry’, and the term ogam is derived from óg-úaim, ‘perfect alliteration’.17 The eloquent Ogma may recall the Gaulish god Ogmios, whose depiction with a golden-chained tongue in classical writing highlighted his superior verbal skill.18 The division of ogam into its perceived elements exemplifies the medieval discipline of etymology (etymologia), which was dependent on a loose correspondence between words in appearance and sound.19 Among the influential sources in this scholarly sphere were the works of Isidore, a seventh-century bishop of Seville. His Etymologiae (Etymologies or Origins) was so revered in Ireland that it was termed In Cuilmen, the Apex [of knowledge], and in exchange for it, the one remaining copy of the heroic narrative Táin Bó Cuailnge (The Cattle-raid of Cooley) was allegedly given away.20 Isidore’s underlying philosophy was that to understand something’s ‘force’ or nature, one had to understand the origin and meaning of its name; ‘for when you see where a name has originated, you understand its force more quickly’.21 Thus could ogam be divided up into its two syllables, each of which was then connected with independent separate words, óg (full, complete) and úaim (alliteration, literally sewing) in turn. These diverse accounts of the origins of ogham and the Irish language exemplify important aspects of medieval Irish learning, not least engagement with biblical and classical sources and medieval learning more generally. In creating a story of Ireland’s past, medieval Irish scholars

16 17

18

19 20

21

Auraicept na nÉces, Commentationes Humanarum Litterarum 73 (Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 1982), p. 48 (§1.13). Ibid., p. 48; see McManus, Guide, pp. 147–50. George Calder, ed. and trans., Auraicept na n-Éces: The Scholars’ Primer, being the Texts of the Ogham Tract from the Book of Ballymote and the Yellow Book of Lecan, and the Text of the Trefhocal from the Book of Leinster (Edinburgh: John Grant, 2017), pp. 272–3; see McManus, Guide, p. 150. See McManus, Guide, pp. 151–2; Mark Williams, Ireland’s Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), pp. 280–1. See Rolf Baumgarten, ‘Etymological Aetiology in Irish Tradition’, Ériu 41 (1990), 115–22. Kevin Murray, ‘The Finding of the Táin’, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 41 (2001), 17–23 (at pp. 21–2). Nam dum videris unde ortum est nomen, citius vim eius intellegis: W. M. Lindsay, ed., Isidori Hispalensis episcopi: Etymologiarum sive originum, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1911), vol. i, Book i. 29.3–4; The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, trans. Stephen A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach, and Oliver Berghof (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 54–5.

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situated the beginnings of language and writing, as well as the settlement of the country and the origins of peoples and places, within a universal frame. This involved synchronisation, the alignment of significant Irish happenings with world events.22 The invention of the Irish language, and with it ogham, is linked to the biblical dispersal of languages at the Tower of Babel, as we have seen. A foundational battle, the (second) battle of Moytirra, fought between the gods of the Irish, the Túatha Dé Danann, and the opposing Fomoiri (Fomorians), is placed at the same point on a universal timeline as the destruction of Troy, according to Cath Maige Tuired (The Battle of Moytirra), a narrative with a ninth-century core.23 As a defining comparator, Troy fixed what was deemed to be a significant moment in Ireland’s history in universal space and time. Ireland’s heroes, too, were the equivalent of Trojan warriors; Cú Chulainn is identified with the youthful Troilus, youngest son of King Priam who sought in vain to avenge his brother Hector, according to a twelfth-century poem.24 Around the same time, Lebor Gabála Érend (The Book of Invasions), a continuous history of Ireland preserved in a late twelfth-century manuscript, the Book of Leinster, drew a parallel between the Irish and the Israelites, both God’s chosen people in their own way.25 Writing Ireland’s past was a story of connections and one in which the technology of writing itself functioned as process (the means by which such origin-stories were created) and as theme (as exemplified in the focus on the nature of ogham itself). The ‘stream of wisdom’ (srúaim n-ecna) embraced ‘writing’ (scríbend) and language as subject matter, what was captured in the physical act of extending the pen (sínim mo phenn, in the words of our anonymous eleventh- or twelfth-century weary poet). Many other aspects of Ireland’s perceived beginnings are explored in the rich seam of medieval Irish writing concerned with explaining the past: how and when the land was settled; who came to dominate and how. These stories depict humans in a new and changing environment, fighting invaders, taming the landscape, and shaping their own space. And as the 22

23

24

25

See Elizabeth Boyle, History and Salvation in Medieval Ireland, Studies in Early Medieval Britain and Ireland (London and New York: Routledge, 2021), pp. 16–19. Elizabeth A. Gray, ed. and trans., Cath Maige Tuired: The Second Battle of Mag Tuired, Irish Texts Society 52 (Dublin: Irish Texts Society, 1982), pp. 40–1 (§69). Francis J. Byrne, ed. and trans., ‘Clann Olloman uaisle Emna’, Studia Hibernica 4 (1964), 54–94 (at pp. 61, 76: stanza 5). R. A. S. Macalister, ed. and trans., Lebor Gabála Érenn: The Book of the Taking of Ireland, 5 vols., Irish Texts Society 34, 35, 39, 41, 44 (Dublin: Irish Texts Society, 1932–42); and see John Carey, ‘Lebor Gabála and the Legendary History of Ireland’, in Medieval Celtic Literature and Society, ed. Helen Fulton (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005), pp. 32–48.

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representation of sound, in the form of writing (specifically ogham), formed a strand of the story about the origins of language, the means by which territory was moulded and society was organised through the actions of people was an important part of the narrative about the past. In naming and explaining the landscape – physical, social, and cultural – the technology of writing presented a story of technologies of other kinds.

Technologies of Place In the narrative of Ireland’s history, the battle of Moytirra was depicted as a pivotal moment and as a foundational encounter, as noted above. Synchronised with the destruction of Troy, it constituted Ireland’s war of the gods, establishing what is presented as an ideal society which overturned the previous incompetent, unjust order under the rule of Bres, whose mother was of the Túatha Dé Danann, the gods of the Irish, but whose father was of the foreign Fomorians. Bres is depicted as the epitome of bad kingship. He is ultimately defeated by Lug, who is similarly of mixed Túatha Dé Danann-Fomorian parentage, with the crucial distinction that it is Lug’s paternal kin who are of the Túatha Dé. Over the course of the narrative, Lug is presented as the creator of a just, ordered society to which each member contributes a vital skill. Even Bres is granted a place therein, since in return for being spared, he teaches the men of Ireland how they should plough, sow, and reap.26 Among the many limitations of Bres as leader had been that he did not show skilled professionals sufficient respect. These included Ogma, whom we have encountered as the inventor of ogham. In Cath Maige Tuired, his military rather than artistic skills are lauded. Yet he is accorded the demeaning task of gathering firewood for the fortress by Bres, who is depicted as his halfbrother. What’s more, ‘the sea would carry off two-thirds of his [Ogma’s] bundle because he was weak for lack of food’.27 On the other hand, under the leadership of Lug – another half-brother – Ogma’s contribution to society is applauded and he triumphs in the final battle.28 Under Lug’s command, the particular role of individual members of the nobility of the Túatha Dé Danann is underlined, each applying his especial skills to bring 26

27 28

Gray, Cath Maige Tuired, pp. 68–9 (§§155–61); see William Sayers, ‘Bargaining for the Life of Bres in Cath Maige Tuired’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies 34 (1987), 26–40; and Williams, Ireland’s Immortals, pp. 108–10. Noberiud an muir dá tríen a cóile airi fó uhíth be hénirt cen bieadh: Gray, Cath Maige Tuired, pp. 32–3 (§37). Ibid., pp. 52–3 (§105); pp. 68–9 (§162). There is some confusion in the text, as Ogma’s death in single combat is also noted at an earlier point in the tale, pp. 64–5 (§138).

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about collective invincibility. Alongside the battle-champion Ogma, the physician Dian Cécht, and the satirist Coirpre, the essential craftsmen are Goibniu the smith, forger of spears and spearpoints, and Crédne the brazier, supplier of rivets for spears, hilts for swords, as well as bosses and rims for shields.29 Alongside these technical experts, other groups control the elements: sorcerers who wield power over the mountains; cupbearers whose control of the rivers and lakes ensures that the men of Ireland (the Túatha Dé Danann) never thirst, while their opponents, the Fomorians, experience drought. And while gasping, the latter face showers of fire, conjured up by the pyrotechnics of the druids.30 In the midst of the chaos that prompts the epic encounter between the gods and the carnage it engenders, a blueprint for a perfectly ordered society is laid down. A narrative of firsts – the first satire that was made in Ireland (bringing an end to the kingship of Bres); ‘the first time weeping and shrieking were heard in Ireland’ (on behalf of a warrior of the Fomorians killed by a wounded Goibniu, the smith)31 – Cath Maige Tuired is a paradigmatic illustration of how the world should, and should not, be organised and run. It served as an origin myth for society at the hands of the ninth-, tenth-, and eleventh-century authors who wrote and rewrote it – a lesson for their own time.32 Central to the depiction were the technologies by which land and water, fire and weaponry could be controlled. The killing by an injured Goibniu of a fighter of the Fomorians, occasioning the first keen, is followed in the narrative by an account of how the smith was made whole by immersing himself into a healing well, Loch Luibe (literally ‘a lake of herbs’). That place is so-called ‘because Dian Cécht [the physician of the Túatha Dé Danann] put into it every herb that grew in Ireland’.33 A well is accorded a similar name, Lusmag (literally ‘plain of herbs’), in a series of related accounts that explain the origins of the latter place name. The onomastic text similarly associates this place with medicinal plants ground by Dian Cécht ‘at the time of the great battle between the Túatha Dé [Danann] and the Fomorians’.34 That the story in Cath Maige Tuired was drawn on to explain an equally suitable place name 29 31

32 33 34

Ibid., pp. 52–3 (§§97, 101). 30 Ibid., pp. 42–5 (§§78–80); pp. 52–3 (§111). Conad sí sin cétnae hóer dorónadh a n-Érinn; Conud and sin roclos gol ocus égem ar tós a n-Erinn: ibid., pp. 34–5 (§39); pp. 56–7 (§125). Williams, Ireland’s Immortals, pp. 93–127, discusses the date and function of the tale. Gray, Cath Maige Tuired, pp. 56–7 (§126). The relationship between these texts and Cath Maige Tuired is discussed, and the relevant passages cited, in Kevin Murray, ‘Sources of Irish Mythology: The Significance of the Dinnshenchas’, North American Journal of Celtic Studies 3:2 (2019), 155–70 (pp. 162–5).

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is suggested by the specific references to that battle in prose and poetic versions of how Lusmag got its name.35 The naming of Lusmag exemplifies a highly developed branch of medieval Irish learning, dindshenchas: knowledge (senchas) of notable places (dinda, sing. dind). Such narratives of place are interwoven into the fabric of manifold stories; in addition, they form an integrated collection of texts, the focus of which is the landscape of Ireland itself. In this extensive corpus, known as Ireland’s dindshenchas (Dindshenchas Érend), the history of Ireland is construed as an overarching narrative of place. If the origins of an ideal society are explored in Cath Maige Tuired, the much more voluminous Dindshenchas Érend recounts the transformation and organisation of a landscape into socially significant space. Drawing in part on existing narrative material such as Cath Maige Tuired, the creators of this spatial history reshaped sources, while also contributing their own imaginative strands.36 Delineating interaction between people and their environment, the force of explanation – in Isidorean tradition – rested in the understanding of a name. The first weeping and wailing heard in Ireland was a mother grieving her fallen son of the Fomorians, as we have seen. Dindshenchas Érend presents us with the first woman dying of grief – for her husband. She was Étar, who gave her name to Benn Étair (Howth), Étar’s peak, where she was buried.37 Benn Étair is directly linked with a series of other notable places in the vicinity, including Dún mBreá, the fort of Breá, the first man to ‘build a house, make a cauldron and engage in single combat in Ireland’.38 Further detail pertaining to the duel is provided in a poetic version of the narrative, as a result of which Breá acquired a fort (dún), an inlet (inber), and nearby ocean (ler), and was the first man to inhabit them (ba cét-fer a n-aittrebtha) until he and his family died.39 These narratives present the peopling of the land, describing who first lived, loved, and died there, how the human history of the environment took form. The first settlers frequently belong to the same cast of characters who are depicted 35 36

37

38 39

Ibid., p. 163. Some of those strands informed narrative literature also; Mark Williams discusses an instance of borrowing from dindshenchas material in Cath Maige Tuired itself, in the case of another story concerning Dian Cécht. See Williams, Ireland’s Immortals, pp. 115–17. Whitley Stokes, ed. and trans., ‘The Prose Tales in the Rennes Dindshenchas’, Revue celtique 15 (1894), 272–336, 418–84 [henceforth RD] (at pp. 330–1, no. 29); Edward Gwynn, ed. and trans., The Metrical Dindshenchas, 5 vols., Todd Lecture Series 8–12 (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1903–35) [henceforth MD], vol. iii, pp. 110–19 (Bend Etair II) (at pp. 114–15, lines 45–9). An cétna fer lasa ndernadh tech ocus coire ocus comrac óeinfir artus a nEirinn: RD, pp. 330–1 (no. 29). MD, vol. iii, pp. 112–13, lines 33–40.

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as taking Ireland in a series of invasions, according to Lebor Gabála Érend, including the Túatha Dé Danann and their predecessors, the Fir Bolg, as well as the earlier peoples of Cessair, Parthalón, and Nemed. The husband on account of whom Étar died of grief, for example, was a king of the Fir Bolg; Breá is said to have come to Ireland with Parthalón.40 These two roughly contemporary compilations, Lebor Gabála and Dindshenchas Érend, constitute a comprehensive, continuous account of Ireland’s origins, made up of multiple layers. According to the dindshenchas of Benn Étair, Breá simply ‘took’ Dún mBreá;41 how it came into being in the landscape is not addressed. In the same way, other places are presented fully formed, such as the plain of Mucrime (Mag Mucrime): Ferann réid amréid ria ar, fota rolethan roglan; clár itát claidib cressa lán do dairib dair-messa.

A land for tillage, smooth and rough alike, long, wide and shining; a flat country where girded swords are seen, full of oak woods and laden with fruit.42

But the plain is said to hold a secret, from which it got its name; a herd of magical, destructive swine traversed it and were hunted and counted by King Ailill and Queen Medb, in whose Connacht territory the plain was located. This eventful experience was enshrined in the place name, ‘the plain of pig-counting’. Mucrime, the descriptor of the plain (mag), was analysed (in medieval etymological terms) as being derived from muc (pig) and the act of enumerating, rím (rime is the genitive form).43 In Dindshenchas Érend, Ireland is mapped with many a mag, a significant feature referring to land-clearing for agriculture and habitation.44 It is through this human act that space becomes significant; in taming the area in question, people acquire mastery over a place. In explaining the origins of these pivotal places, the act of clearance is sometimes described. An alliterating trio of builders, Femen, Fera, and Fea, bearing an axe (túag), billhook, or mattock (bac), and spade or shovel (ráma), worked in tandem to cultivate the three plains onomastically associated with them, Mag 40 41 43

44

RD, pp. 330–1 (no. 29); see also MD, vol. iii, pp. 112–13, lines 25–9. RD, pp. 330–1 (no. 29). 42 MD, vol. iii, pp. 382–5 (Mag Mucrime) (at pp. 382–3, lines 5–8). See also RD, p. 470 (no. 70). The onomastic account is also embedded in a longer narrative concerning a battle on the plain in question. See Máirín O Daly, ed. and trans., Cath Maige Mucrama: The Battle of Mag Mucrama, Irish Texts Society 50 (Dublin: Irish Texts Society, 1975), pp. 48–9 (§§33–7). See Gregory Toner, ‘Landscape and Cosmology in the Dindshenchas’, in Celtic Cosmology: Perspectives from Ireland and Scotland, ed. Jacqueline Borsje, Ann Dooley, Séamus Mac Mathúna, and Gregory Toner, Papers in Mediaeval Studies 26 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2014), pp. 268–83 (p. 274).

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Femen, Mag Fera, and Mag Fea: ‘when Femen was shovelling, Fera was hacking and Fea lopping. But when Fea was hacking, Fera was shovelling and Femen lopping’, and to facilitate a smooth change-over of tasks ‘each of them kept throwing a change of tools to the other’.45 In one version of the narrative, the three implements were flung into a designated field, appropriately named Rae Urchair, ‘field of a cast’.46 Such utensils are attested elsewhere in the written record and survive in small numbers from medieval Ireland, but it is unlikely that they were ever deployed in quite this way.47 To Aí, who gave his name to Mag nAí, no tool is supplied, but we are informed that ‘swift his hand at hewing trees’ and that ‘he burnt the place from top to bottom’.48 According to the metrical version of the tale, he had the assistance of ‘a band of labourers, big and brawny’, twenty-four of them in total who worked for twenty-four hours.49 Notwithstanding their contribution to the enterprise, Aí begged them that his name should be bestowed on the plain ‘for his good fame’s sake, so that his power and pride might be increased’.50 The related prose account identifies Aí himself as one of the labourers, in fact ‘the twenty-fourth slave that the sons of Míl brought with them’.51 The sons of Míl of Spain are said to have arrived in Ireland after the Túatha Dé Danann, and it was to them that ancestry of the Irish (the Gaídil) was ascribed. For a contemporary medieval audience, therefore, these activities concerned the cultural appropriation of the landscape by the first of their own line. 45

46

47

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In tan nobid Femen ic fuilgeth [nobíd] Fera ic bacad ocus Fea ic tamnugud. In tan dono nobíd Fea ic bacad [nobíd] Fera ic fuilged [ocus] Femen ic tamnugud. Foceirdedh cach uaidib dia celi claechludh ernnaid dar in mag beous: RD, pp. 435–7 (no. 44); see also MD, vol. iii, pp. 198–9 (Mag Femin, Mag Fera, Mag Fea); the plain of Femen is also the focus of a separate poem, MD, vol. iii, pp. 200–5 (Mag Femin II). Whitley Stokes, ed. and trans., ‘The Bodleian Dinnshenchas’, Folk-lore 3 (1892), 467–516 (pp. 483–4, no. 16). For a discussion of the tools and technology of medieval Ireland based on written sources, see Fergus Kelly, Early Irish Farming: A Study Based Mainly on the Law-Texts of the 7th and 8th Centuries AD, Early Irish Law Series 4 (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1997), pp. 463–502 (pp. 465–6 [spade, shovel]; pp. 467–8 [mattock/hoe]; pp. 489–90 [billhook]; pp. 491–2 [axe and other tools for cutting]). The archaeological evidence is analysed in Aidan O’Sullivan, Finbar McCormick, Thomas R. Kerr, and Lorcan Harney, Early Medieval Ireland, AD 400–1100: The Evidence from Archaeological Excavations (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2013), pp. 179–214 (Farming in Early Medieval Ireland), where it is noted that ‘the number of agricultural hand tools recovered from excavations in Ireland is relatively small’ (p. 195). lúath a lám oc letrad chrann; raloisc etir bun is barr: MD, vol. iii, pp. 380–1, lines 6 and 8; see also RD, p. 469 (no. 69). methil mogda móir . . . cethri seisir curad crúaid . . . Cethri húaire ar fichit dóib/mar is dóig, co tairnic leo: MD, vol. iii, pp. 380–1, lines 9, 11, 13–14. . . . tria blaid mbil/combad móide a brig’s a búaid: ibid., vol. iii, pp. 380–1, lines 18–19. In cethramad mog fichet tucsat meic Míled leo: RD, p. 468 (no. 69).

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A doublet of the story underlies the claiming of another plain, Mag nAidne, both Aí and Aidne being sons of Allguba, according to the interrelated accounts. As one of ‘four and twenty fit rath-building serfs’, Aidne is described as ‘a strong warrior who practised digging and who used to clear great plains’.52 The nature of the manual labour is set out specifically in one verse: Claide fidbad co fonnaib, irgnam ráth i ríg-drommaib; fogníd in cech throm-thuirt te tene longphuirt is longse.

Digging up of woods with their stumps. construction of raths on royal hills; there was regularly made in glowing pyres fire for encampment and expedition.53

Moreover, the making of fires every night is attributed specifically to Aidne, whose ‘noble fingers used to drip fire’.54 His technique is explained in more detail in the corresponding prose account: ‘he needed only to wring his two hands, whereupon flashes of fire poured out of his knuckles, as large as fresh wild apples when their harvesting begins’.55 Not surprisingly, he is given the accolade of being ‘the first man that kindled a campfire for the sons of Míl’.56 The importance of creating and controlling the crucial element of fire is underlined in this fanciful account, as it is in another narrative of place. This concerns Mide (Meath), a site of cultural significance down through the medieval period, primarily because of the location of Tara, a symbolic site of kingship, therein. Mide, who gave his name to the place, is depicted as the igniter of the very first fire in Ireland, which burnt for six (or seven) years and from which every other principal fire was allegedly kindled.57 The druids of Ireland recognised Mide’s fire as ominous, noting that it constituted ‘unlucky smoke’ (mí-dé) for them.58 Significantly, Mide’s command of fire is said to provide his descendants with special privileges: ‘a sack (of corn), with a pig from every household in

52

53 54 55

56 57 58

Fiche is cethrur ráth-mug recht; trén-chaur nochlecthad claide / is noshlechtad mór-maige: MD, vol. iii, pp. 330–3 (Mag nAidni) (at pp. 330–1, lines 9, 19–20). Ibid., vol. iii, pp. 332–3, lines 21–4. Snigtis tenid a meóir maith: ibid., vol. iii, pp. 332–3, line 25. Ni ba hecen do acht tofascad a dá glac co snigtis richsi teined a suilib a mer meitis fiadubla adnúi i tus a mbuana: RD, p. 460 (no. 62). In cetna fer no atád tenid longpuirt artus re macaib Miledh: ibid., p. 460 (no. 62). robói sé bliadna for lasad, conid on tene sin rohadnad cach primtene i nHérinn: ibid., p. 297 (no. 7). This etymological explanation of the naming of Mide is coupled with that of another culturally resonant space, Uisnech, a hill in neighbouring Westmeath: ibid., pp. 297–8 (no. 7); MD, vol. ii, pp. 42–5 (Mide) (at pp. 44–5, lines 35–40).

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Ireland’, as is stated in one version,59 and additionally, a perpetual right ‘over every chief hearth in Ireland’, according to another.60 This speaks directly to a contemporary audience, legitimising the superior position of Mide’s current political rulers, with reference to Mide’s illustrious eponymous ancestor, creator of fire. The poetic account is attributed to Áed Úa Carthaig, most likely a twelfth-century author to whom another dindshenchas poem on the western territory of Connachta is also credited.61 As has previously been noted, the poet draws on the seventh-century Life of St Patrick by Muirchú in both poems.62 Specifically, the saint’s fire at Easter time infuriating the pagan king Láegaire mac Néill and his druids is deliberately recalled in Mide’s conflagration which caused comparable druidic outrage.63 Thus the authority of the leaders of the territory of Mide (Meath) is bolstered with reference to their own pre-Christian ancestor whose control of fire was presented as supreme. But the deliberate recollection of Patrick too lends authority, as the premier saint of Ireland, whose paschal fire at Slane, in the territory of Meath, set the flame of Christianity alight. Patrick is directly alluded to in the place-narrative of Tailtiu (Teltown, Co. Meath) located in the same geographical area. This account provides another perspective on land clearance since the razing of a wood is demanded of her husband by Tailtiu ‘so that there might be an assembly round her grave’, according to one account.64 In another, wielding an axe, Tailtiu undertook the strenuous labour herself and her heart broke as a result of the exertion.65 With her dying breath, she requested that those associated with her hold funeral games to commemorate her. Thus was Ireland’s principal gathering (prím-óenach hÉrend) said to have been called into being. It was associated with Lugnasad (the first of August), the festival (násad) of Lug, since the latter, the successful leader at the time of the battle 59

60 61

62

63

64

65

Conid de dliges a comarba miach la muic cach oen cleithe i nEirinn: RD, p. 297 (no. 7); see also MD, vol. ii, pp. 42–3, lines 21–4, and Stokes, ‘The Bodleian Dinnshenchas’, p. 476. condlig a sír-chennach ind/cach prim-thellach in Érind: MD, vol. ii, pp. 42–3, lines 19–20. This has been edited by John Carey, who discusses both poems in relation to one another in ‘Connachta, cid dia tá int ainm’, Celtica 32 (2020), 127–44; I am grateful to Professor Carey for allowing me access to a pre-publication copy of his article. Donnchadh Ó Corráin, Clavis Litterarum Hibernensium: Medieval Irish Books and Texts (c.40– c.1600), 3 vols. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), vol. iii, p. 1565. Ludwig Bieler, ed. and trans., The Patrician Texts in the Book of Armagh, Scriptores Latini Hiberniae 10 (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1979), pp. 84–7; for discussion of the parallel, see Carey, ‘Connachta’. Is í conataig coa fer caillid Cuan do slaide di comad óenach imo lecht: Whitley Stokes, ed. and trans., ‘The Prose Tales in the Rennes Dindshenchas’, Revue celtique 16 (1895), pp. 31–83 [henceforth RD II] (at pp. 50–1, no. 99). MD, vol. iv, pp. 146–63 (Tailtiu) (at pp. 148–9, lines 25–36).

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of Moytirra, was Tailtiu’s foster-son.66 The narrative in its various forms serves as an origin legend for the gathering of Tailtiu (óenach Tailten), which in the medieval period was symbolic of supreme kingship. Patrick is said to have given it his imprimatur, becoming a guardian of the place and the event.67 And this story, providing authority to a place and its people, commences with the clearing of the land. The present dictates the construction of the past, and in this case the literary creation can be associated with a particular moment in time. The poem on Tailtiu declares that óenach Tailten had been forgotten until it was revived by a historical king, Máel Sechlainn mac Domnaill. That Máel Sechlainn did convene ‘the assembly of Tailtiu’ in 1007 is recorded in chronicles.68 It has therefore been suggested that this poem was written to commemorate that particular event.69 The verse composition is ascribed to Máel Sechlainn’s own court poet, Cúán ua Lothcháin. His authorship of it is highly likely, given that Máel Sechlainn’s authority is exalted through the king’s association with a ritual of power endorsed by Patrick and linked to the origins of the landscape of Tailtiu itself.70 Thus is Máel Sechlainn depicted as heir to and saviour of a space, the significance of which is depicted as enduring from pre-Christian into Christian times. Tailtiu’s story informs the naming of another political centre, Nás, and the texts concerning the two important centres of power in Dindshenchas Érend are textually interlinked. The narrative hook is provided by Lugnasad, festival (násad) of Lug, with whom Tailtiu was related through fosterage, as we have seen. A constructed etymological association between the word násad and the eponym Nás underlies a series of alternative explanations of the place name Nás (Naas, Co. Kildare) which are prefaced with Tailtiu’s tale. Taming the land is central to this account also, which commences with a wood being cut down in Tailtiu’s honour at the command of her husband, leading to the creation of a plain which came

66 67 68

69

70

Ibid., vol. iv, pp. 150–1, lines 41–8; RD II, pp. 50–1 (no. 99). MD, vol. iv, pp. 152–3, lines 85–8; see also pp. 158–9, lines 157–60, 169–72. Seán Mac Airt and Gearóid Mac Niocaill, eds. and trans., The Annals of Ulster (to A.D. 1131): Part 1, Text and Translation (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1983), pp. 438–9; William M. Hennessy, ed. and trans., Chronicum Scotorum: A Chronicle of Irish Affairs, from the Earliest Times to A.D. 1135 (London: Longmans, 1866), pp. 244–5. MD, vol. iv, p. 413. See Clodagh Downey, ‘Cúán ua Lothcháin and the Transmission of the Dindshenchas’, in Celebrating Sixty Years of Celtic Studies at Uppsala University: Proceedings of the Eleventh Symposium of Societas Celtologica Nordica, ed. Ailbhe Ó Corráin and Gordon Ó Riain, Studia Celtica Upsaliensia 9 (Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet, 2013), pp. 45–61 (pp. 56–7). For discussion, see Clodagh Downey, ‘The Life and Work of Cúán ua Lothcháin’, Ríocht na Midhe 19 (2008), 55–78 (pp. 61–5).

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to be known as óenach Tailten. Lances, billhooks, and axes are the tools of construction employed, but suspicions were aroused that three of the builders involved were shirkers. Tailtiu’s response was to demand that they build three residences for her. So to prove their diligence, they build a trio of raths which demarcate principal territories in Ireland and are named after their constructors, one of whom was Nás, after whom the place Nás (Naas) is named.71 The broad political tenor of this literary topography is clear; Nás in Leinster is associated with Tailtiu (Teltown), a site of symbolic significance linked with the kingship of Tara and most frequently the northern dynasty of Uí Néill. There were many occasions in the medieval period in which this statement would have had specific political intent.72 The location of Tailtiu and Nás with reference to one another as delineated in the tale of their construction could legitimise power relations in contemporary times. It was the deliberate association with more emblematic sites that accorded Nás augmented meaning in this case. Within the flexible, multivalent construct that is Dindshenchas Érend, authentication could be provided in various ways. Dindshenchas Érend facilitated the creation, recollection, and analysis of landscape history, a central strand in the story of Ireland’s past. A literary monument of cultural significance, it relates how humans acquired control of their physical surroundings and in so doing named and hence claimed the land. These stories may have had political import, as some of the examples reveal; but in essence the overarching narrative constitutes an extended spatial history, focused on the interaction between people and place. The technologies of organising a geographical universe, landclearing, rath-building, metalworking, and burning (to name only those discussed above) are among this complex composition’s prevalent themes. Incidental information is undoubtedly provided about tools and techniques in the midst of these stories of origin, and human emotion is occasionally revealed. The first mill of the legendary king of Tara, Cormac mac Airt, was said to have been secured to relieve his servant, Ciarnait, when she was pregnant with his child. No longer able to undertake the heavy grinding by means of which ‘she used to feed many hundreds from

71 72

RD, pp. 316–17 (no. 20). It is significant that this explanation of Nás, linking it to Tailtiu, is immediately followed by an alternative account in which Nás is interpreted with reference to a neighbouring site of equal significance, Cnogba, Knowth, located within the complex of the Boyne monuments and so not far from Tailtiu in the territory of the Southern Uí Néill: RD, pp. 317–18 (no. 20); see also MD, vol. iii, pp. 48–58 (Nás).

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her quern’, Cormac ‘took pity on her’ and so secured a millwright from overseas.73 This deed of alleged compassion, however, must be read in the context of the act of rape which preceded it, Cormac having got Ciarnait pregnant illicitly, ‘secretly’ (fo chleith), as the text makes clear.74 She remains powerless and voiceless, and the closing comment that Cormac mac Airt’s first mill ‘was a help to Ciarnait’ presents the perspective of the king.75 This is his story, the litany of Tara’s landmarks in which the vignette concerning Ciarnait is embedded, commencing with the depiction of Tara as ‘the noble settlement of Cormac mac Airt’.76 And in the literary tour of Tara’s sites that follows, it is a reference to a stream there, ‘on which Cormac set the first mill’, that prompts Ciarnait’s fate to be made known.77 Ciarnait and her quern, Cormac and his mill, embody the power relations that permeate Ireland’s history, and in the memorial to human endeavour that is Dindshenchas Érend, both subjugated and subduer, alongside their respective technologies, find a place. A history of people’s interaction with their surroundings and the places that ensue from those encounters, Dindshenchas Érend presents the naming and so claiming of space. The technologies of taming a landscape punctuate its narratives, a number of which have been highlighted here. In focusing on Dindshenchas Érend, thematic links with other medieval Irish narrative literature, including Cath Maige Tuired, have been noted, as well as the conceptual approach shared with such texts as Lebor Gabála Érend. These related works are shaped by a European intellectual milieu; they illustrate different aspects of Ireland’s continuous history and all facilitate a causal, detailed, intricate understanding of the past. How the land was settled; how society was ordered; how an enduring landscape feature came into being. Human action and interaction underpinning these spheres shaped the authors’ present, and the technologies of place and of authority continued to resound, the resonance of names and the universality of landscape features binding humans through time. The technology of writing both engendered and fixed these imaginative, authoritative, inspiring strands. Splendid are the streams of wisdom that spewed from a medieval Irish pointed pen.

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mór cét nobiathad a bróin . . . Iarsin rosairchis úa Cuind [Cormac]/tuc sáer muilinn tar mór-thuind/ cét-muilenn Cormaic meic Airt . . .: MD, vol. i, pp. 14–27 (at pp. 22–3, lines 108–20). Ibid., pp. 22–3, lines 113–16. 75 Ibid., pp. 22–3, line 120: robo chobair do Chiarnait. Ibid., pp. 14–15, line 3: ard-chathir Cormaic meic Airt. Ibid., pp. 20–1, lines 107–8: Nemnach úad sair, sruth fo glenn/fors’ tart Cormac cét-muilenn.

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Select Bibliography Bowen, Charles, ‘A Historical Inventory of the Dindshenchas’, Studia Celtica 10–11 (1975–6), 113–37. Boyle, Elizabeth, History and Salvation in Medieval Ireland, Studies in Early Medieval Britain and Ireland (London and New York: Routledge, 2021). Carey, John, The Mythological Cycle of Medieval Irish Literature, Cork Studies in Celtic Literature 3 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2018). Carey, John, ed., Lebor Gabála Érenn: Textual History and Pseudohistory, Irish Texts Society Subsidiary Series 20 (Dublin: Irish Texts Society, 2009). Mulligan, Amy C., A Landscape of Words: Ireland, Britain and the Poetics of Space, 700–1250 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019). Murray, Kevin, ‘Genre Construction: The Creation of the Dinnshenchas’, Locating Place and Landscape in Early Insular Literature [Special Issue], ed. Joseph McMullen and Kirsten Carella, Journal of Literary Onomastics 6:1 (2017), 11–21. ‘Sources of Irish Mythology: The Significance of the Dinnshenchas’, North American Journal of Celtic Studies 3:2 (2019), 155–70. Ní Mhaonaigh, Máire, ‘The Literature of Medieval Ireland, 800–1200: From the Vikings to the Normans’, in The Cambridge History of Irish Literature, Vol. i: To 1890, ed. Margaret Kelleher and Philip O’Leary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 32–73. ‘The Peripheral Centre: Writing History on the Western “Fringe”’, Interfaces: A Journal of Medieval European Literatures 4 (2017), 59–84, https://doi.org/10 .13130/interfaces-04-05 Ó Cathasaigh, Tomás, ‘The Literature of Medieval Ireland to c. 800: St Patrick to the Vikings’, in The Cambridge History of Irish Literature, Vol. i: To 1890, ed. Margaret Kelleher and Philip O’Leary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 9–31. Schlüter, Dagmar, ‘“Lass mein Lied nicht dem Vergessen anheim fallen”: Die irischen “dindshenchas”’, in Vergessene Texte des Mittelalters, ed. Nathanael Busch and Björn Reich (Stuttgart: Hirzel, 2014), pp. 107–17, 288–9. ‘Boring and Elusive? The Dindshenchas as a Medieval Irish Genre’, Locating Place and Landscape in Early Insular Literature [Special Issue], ed. Joseph McMullen and Kirsten Carella, Journal of Literary Onomastics 6:1 (2017), 22–31. Theuerkauf, Marie-Luise, ed., Dublaídi Dindshenchais: Essays on Dindshenchas Érenn (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, forthcoming). Toner, Gregory, ‘Landscape and Cosmology in the Dindshenchas’, in Celtic Cosmology: Perspectives from Ireland and Scotland, ed. Jacqueline Borsje, Ann Dooley, Séamus Mac Mathúna, and Gregory Toner, Papers in Mediaeval Studies 26 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2014), pp. 268–83.

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chapter 9

The Critique of Sola Scriptura in A Tale of a Tub and STEM in Gulliver’s Travels Sean Moore

Virtue 13: Humility: Imitate Jesus and Socrates Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography

Information revolutions, as we have seen with the rise of social media, are not always emancipatory, nor are they particularly friendly to the ‘human’. Jonathan Swift was among the first to comment upon what the printing press had done to community, and on the fallacy that printing technology could mediate truth of its own accord.1 As Christian Thorne and many others have written, the explosion in the number of printed texts with the lapsing of the Licensing Act in 1695 led Swift and other members of the Tory Scriblerus Club of satirical writers, like Alexander Pope and John Gay, to be sceptical of print culture and the Habermasian public sphere it created. In Thorne’s words, they viewed ‘the glut of print with something akin to hysteria; almost wholly anticipating recent handwringing over the Internet . . . the rise of print culture heralds an age in which signification will run amok, flooding the polity with an undifferentiated mass of contradictory opinions and arguments’.2 We may speculate therefore that, should time travel allow, digital humanities projects like the Jonathan Swift Archive and the Swift Poems Project would be greeted with some scepticism by Swift, in a manner echoing his satire of the printing press in the Academy of Lagado episode of Gulliver’s Travels. 1

2

Christian Thorne, ‘Thumbing our Nose at the Public Sphere: Satire, the Market, and the Invention of Literature’, PMLA 116:3 (May 2001), 531–44; J. A. Downie, ‘Public and Private: The Myth of the Bourgeois Public Sphere’, in A Concise Companion to the Restoration and Eighteenth Century, ed. Cynthia Wall (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 58–79; Brian Cowan, ‘Mr. Spectator and the Coffeehouse Public Sphere’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 37:3 (Spring 2004), 345–66; Michael Brown, ‘The Biter Bitten: Ireland and the Rude Enlightenment’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 45:3 (Spring 2012), 393–407; Sean D. Moore, Swift, the Book, and the Irish Financial Revolution: Satire and Sovereignty in Colonial Ireland (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), pp. 18–19, 90–133. Thorne, ‘Thumbing our Nose at the Public Sphere’, p. 534.

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Even Benjamin Franklin, an avid reader of Swift who made a fortune as an Early American printer and bookseller, would list the imitation of Jesus and Socrates as the final and most humbling of the thirteen virtues in his Autobiography. The reason for this listing – a contretemps to espousers of the fundamentalist Protestant ‘sola scriptura’ doctrine of Biblical exegesis before and since – is that Jesus and Socrates were not authors, but speakers. ‘Sola scriptura’ is a Protestant Reformation doctrine arguing that reading the Bible alone, not oral tradition in the form of teaching, homilies, prayer, and rituals as the Catholic Church said, was solely sufficient for interpretation and salvation. Franklin was making the point that the words of Jesus and Socrates were oral (verbal), and only later inscribed in writing by the Gospel writers Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and the philosopher Plato in the Phaedrus dialogue in particular, suggesting slippage in the truth value of the written word from its original oral teaching. Swift, as a highranking Anglican Church of Ireland clergyman in his capacity as Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, was steeped in both the classics and theological controversies over textualism and formalist criticism. Indeed, his works like A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver’s Travels suggest that the written word was not alone a container of truths or any meanings whatsoever; rather, the text was in a state of play, in these and his other works. The problem with the printing press and, by extension, with innovations such as the Internet, for a reader like Swift, was one of mediation – the possibilities and limitations of communications technology. His Anglican exegetical background, while placing a premium on the virtues of writing as a medium, was also keen to challenge ‘Puritan biblical fundamentalism’, which continues to position itself contrary to past and present Catholic doubt about sola scriptura.3 Indeed, his friendship with his Catholic friend Pope of the Scriblerus Club may have been what linked the men’s critique of the supposed veracity of print culture and the public sphere. Pope rejected sola scriptura by satirically placing a Bible on his heroine Belinda’s make-up table in The Rape of the Lock as if it were a fashion accessory, a gesture that Alex Eric Hernandez sees as a rejection of the English idolatry of the Bible as the symbol of the Protestantism of Englishness. ‘And we must suspect as a Catholic in a Protestant kingdom’, Hernandez writes, ‘any reverence Pope has for the holy book ultimately cannot mask what he sees as Protestant bibliolatry run amok’.4 In short, 3

4

Nicholas McDowell, ‘Tales of Tub Preachers: Swift and Heresiography’, Review of English Studies 61:248 (February 2010), 72–92 (p. 87). Alex Eric Hernandez, ‘Commodity and Religion in Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock”’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 48:3 (Summer 2008), 569–84 (p. 579).

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there had begun to be a shared Catholic and Anglican scepticism of sola scriptura in view of the common threat of the Puritans, Dissenters, and other evangelicals. For example, during the English Civil War, the Anglican tradition, seeking to challenge the Puritans, even began ‘to incorporate the very arguments about the inevitable corruption of the biblical texts in their historical transmission to which Catholic polemicists turned in their critique of Protestant Biblicalism’.5 In other words, the Catholic school of Bible interpretation had begun to filter into the Church of England under duress in the crisis of the mid-seventeenth century; as I shall explain, this was particularly true in its sister institution, the Anglican Church of Ireland. The critique of sola scriptura was even more urgent for the latter Church, as fundamentalists like Presbyterians were a greater threat to both their religious and governmental authority in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ireland than the Catholics. Jeremy Taylor, Bishop of Down and Connor from 1661 to 1667, argued ‘on historical and textual grounds that the Bible can provide no decisive answers concerning speculative theology’.6 No less an authority than William King, Archbishop of Dublin from 1703 to 1729 and Swift’s boss, had developed this scepticism as a student. Joseph Richardson attributes King’s conversion to Anglicanism at Trinity College, Dublin to his tutor, John Christian, who was sceptical of literalist attitudes towards the truth of the word and in favour of prayer: ‘in a protestant institution Christian might have been expected to exhort King to read Holy Scripture as the fount of God’s word and the means to salvation. Instead, Christian advocated the use of meditation, the faculty of intellection rather than concentration, on the revealed word of scripture’.7 King’s literalist Scottish Calvinism collapsed under this tutelage. David Berman has explained that writing is King’s central example of the instrumentality of the provisional knowledge rendered available via this faculty of representation; the letter is not a container of truths, but a modelling of them that makes them immanent.8 Swift’s own scepticism of Scottish Calvinism was born of his trial by fire in his first position as a priest as the Prebend of Kilroot, a parish in Antrim in the North of Ireland, where Presbyterians were numerous. His critique of sola 5 7

8

N. McDowell, ‘Tales of Tub Preachers’, 87. 6 Ibid. Joseph Richardson, ‘William King: European Man of Letters’, in Archbishop William King and the Anglican Irish Context, ed. Christopher J. Fauske (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), pp. 106–22 (p. 107). David Berman, ‘The Irish Pragmatist’, in Archbishop William King and the Anglican Irish Context, ed. Christopher J. Fauske (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), pp. 123–34 (p. 130).

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scriptura, in short, was well within the mainstream in the development of Church of Ireland theology. This essay will first briefly explore the problem of textuality and sola scriptura in A Tale of a Tub. Then, it will investigate Swift’s understanding of words, particularly the written word, in his approach to the printing press and empiricism in Gulliver’s Travels. In doing so, it will investigate his critique of not only sola scriptura but also how sola scriptura was linked to the scientific revolution; Swift positions himself as a critic of empiricism and what we now term STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) as literalist disciplines. Finally, it will deploy Swift’s view that the belief in sola scriptura was morphing into the literalism of the secular public sphere, to comment on the Jonathan Swift Archive and the Swift Poems Project. In doing so, it will explain how these digital humanities initiatives are both necessary for Swift studies and yet questionable from Swift’s perspective, which is always pointing away from inscription as the final arbiter governing interpretation. It will ask, can the digital humanities interpret, or only display? Is an oral component necessary for understanding internet sources like these online Swift projects properly? Would Swift have viewed the digital humanities in a manner akin to that of some STEM practitioners, forcing the attitudes and practices of their own disciplines upon humanists, asking them to view language and textuality as fixed and material, rather than open to interpretation? In doing so, it will explain that Swift was an advocate for the triumph of the human – of the learned person, of teaching, the oral tradition, and the intellectual practice of reading against the dehumanising influence of communications technology. Further, it will explain that our new Swift digital sites, rather than being examples of the literalist and scientistic use of communications technology that Swift disdained, are actually quite like his works in their fragmentary and incomplete nature and as such are the projects of Swift disciples. A Tale of a Tub, published in 1704, sets out to disrupt the doctrine of the transparent meaning of texts espoused by fundamentalist readers of the Bible and their Calvinist allies, like Daniel Defoe, who were projectors for making the emergent public sphere similarly literalist. Very much in the vein of the Church of Ireland criticism of sola scriptura of which Swift was a part, it works to challenge the veracity of textuality and, by doing so, calls into question the printed word’s reliability. As with later Scriblerus Club works, it is a Tory critique of the Whig effort to use printing technology to manufacture consent to its policies towards an unsuspecting and credulous British people. It calls attention to the printed word’s status as propaganda,

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creating interpretive anarchy that carries far beyond its parable of Biblical exegesis into print culture in general. As Paula McDowell has explained, Scriblerians were ridiculing the project of Daniel Defoe and other Whigs ‘to strengthen the credibility of print’.9 Swift’s career builds towards the critique of the putative transparency of print culture and the public sphere from an initial questioning of sola scriptura on religious grounds. While A Tale of the Tub seems to favour Anglicanism and Lutheranism (embodied in the character Martin), it really leans more towards the Catholic critique of sola scriptura (expressed in Peter) than in the Puritan/Dissenting embrace of it by Jack. ‘Swift is finally more concerned in the Tale with the dissenting than the Catholic threat precisely because of the fresh and bitter memory of the Civil Wars’, writes Nicholas McDowell, ‘hence . . . the comparatively mild and unmemorable treatment of Catholicism in the narrative of Peter, Martin, and Jack’.10 Ever a proponent of the authority of the trained clergy over the laity, he rejected the Puritan and Dissenting view that any individual could understand the Bible without guidance from a teacher – a view ubiquitous among the Presbyterians and other Dissenters surrounding him in Ireland. The Tale’s send-up of textual authority may have been viewed sceptically by some Protestants of the Established Church because it brought them closer to Catholicism than to the Dissenting Protestants they needed to maintain security in Ireland in the wake of the 1688 Revolution. ‘But this is a dangerous game’, McDowell writes; ‘by demonstrating the epistemological unreliability of the text, Swift also risked undermining the Anglican argument for the (delimited) authority of Scripture against either the Catholic total investment of sacred authority in ecclesiastical tradition or the deist’s outright rejection of Biblical authority’.11 Swift saw that the school of interpretation that was emerging with the public sphere was both evangelical and secular in its doctrine of formalism and textualism. As I have argued elsewhere, Swift’s more general target was the London culture industry (often called ‘Grub Street’ for its fake news), manifest in its book trade; in his later works he sought to validate the Irish book trade as a force oppositional to the Whig public sphere as his more British Tory critiques were.12 By being a book about books, A Tale of a Tub points out that the lack of scholarly consensus on the meaning of the Bible and other 9

10 12

Paula McDowell, ‘Defoe and the Contagion of the Oral: Modeling Media Shift in A Journal of the Plague Year’, PMLA 121:1 (January 2006), 87–106 (p. 95). N. McDowell, ‘Tales of Tub Preachers’, p. 88. 11 Ibid. Moore, Swift, the Book, and the Irish Financial Revolution, pp. 18–19, 90–133.

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works like the classics, the latter of which were specified in his simultaneously published The Battle of the Books, was obvious evidence of textualism’s shortcomings. A Tale questions the materialist and empirical approach to texts as a Grub Street ‘threatening false orthodoxy’.13 The fragmentary nature of A Tale of a Tub – its semblance to a cut-andpasted assemblage of texts put together poorly (imitated decades later in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy) – further presents the London culture industry as a kind of similarly assembled Frankenstein’s monster, a ‘grotesque body’ meant to satirise British government and society under the Whigs.14 Swift’s book parodies the special effects of the industry like prefaces, dedications, footnotes, digressions, and other hypertexts. It questions the ‘immediacy’ of the medium of print by targeting what Samuel Richardson would later call ‘writing to the moment’ in Pamela, his narrative of the ‘immediate’ experiences of a maid tormented by her master. Swift has his narrator articulate a ‘claim to historicity’ including ‘the insistence of immediacy – “this minute I am writing”, “the very garret I am now writing in”, and the accumulation of obscure information, such as the account of the macrocephali’.15 This mockery of the medium is accompanied by large sections of missing or blank pages, which is meant to demonstrate the inadequacy of the printing press as a communications technology. At the centre of the Tale is a parable of a will – the ‘orphaned text’ consisting of a father’s listed bequeathments to his three sons, Peter (Catholicism), Martin (Lutheranism and Anglicanism), and Jack (Puritans/Dissenters) – that is meant to be an allegory for the Bible. As Marcus Walsh and others have explained, an orphaned text naturally brings up questions of its veracity: ‘Set loose in a culture orphaned from seminal origins of legitimacy by the wilfulness of its recent history, the orphaned text generates myths of origins and authenticity in a frantic attempt to claim or forge a legitimacy to which it has no natural claim’.16 13

14

15 16

Howard Weinbrot, Menippean Satire Reconsidered: From Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), p. 115. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 103. N. McDowell, ‘Tales of Tub Preachers’, p. 89. Marcus Walsh, ‘Text, “Text”, and Swift’s A Tale of a Tub’, in Jonathan Swift: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Claude Rawson (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995), pp. 82–98 (p. 87); Robert Phiddian, Swift’s Parody (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 140; Clive Probyn, ‘“Haranguing Upon Texts”: Swift and the Idea of the Book’, in Proceedings of the First Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift, ed. Hermann Real and Heinz J. Veinken (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1985), pp. 187–97 (p. 189); Deborah Baker Wyrick, Jonathan Swift and the Vested Word (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), p. 33.

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As Plato and others explained over the course of the history of coming to terms with writing as a communications technology, an orphaned text is often regarded as an illegitimate child unable to help itself, which leads to it being interpreted in all kinds of ways.17 The legitimate heirs to interpretive authority in this Platonic school are those who treat writing as a reminder of the Father’s (or author’s) words, and not those who argue that the text itself makes intentions clear. Accordingly, far from the will having a clear meaning to all, the sons all have different interpretations, once again disputing sola scriptura from the point of view of the school of the orphaned text. The ‘material’ bequeathed to the sons comprises a set of identical coats, with the will containing instructions on how to wear them. These sons function as figures for the eighteenth-century reader: ‘eighteenth-century readers sometimes recreated texts for their own purposes by selectively reproducing and inferring available textual material’.18 Everyone does this, Swift says, contending that meanings inhere in the reader and his or her experiences, with luck properly trained by teachers and clergy, and not in the written word itself. If Swift is accepting the Catholic position that faith (orally taught received doctrine) is prior to reason (writing), he is doing so in A Tale by representing writing and printing – and the three brothers – as chaotic, unreliable mediators of truth. As a Tory and man of the Established Church, he feared revolution from both the Catholic and Dissenting fronts, and A Tale of a Tub sets out to disarm the political uses of religious and theological controversy to stabilise the supremacy of the Churches of Ireland and England and the state itself. This argument was especially urgent in the early years after the Revolution of 1688, which Swift viewed as an event securing this supremacy. Swift explains that Peter, Martin, and Jack are a ‘multiplicity of godfathers’ who attempt to ‘christen’ the orphaned text in each of their three religions or interpretive schools.19 The will ‘invests’ them with clerical authority and the coats symbolise their ceremonial ‘vestments’: As the word investiture attests, the ceremony’s visible focal point is the giving and the wearing of special clothing symbolizing the power of office: . . . investiture is both a putting in and putting on; the vestments, as outward 17

18

19

Plato, ‘Phaedrus’, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), pp. 475–525 (p. 521). Stephen Karian, ‘Reading the Material Text of Swift’s Verses on the Death’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 41:3 (Summer 2001), 515–44 (p. 531). Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub and Other Works, ed. Angus Ross and David Woolley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 33.

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signs of inward power, are badges of distinction, of privileged authority and proper placement within a preexisting order.20

Peter styles his vestments with shoulder knots, gold lace, satin linings, a silver fringe, and Indian embroidery, which he legitimates by forging addendums to the will. Here, Swift satirises the Donation of Constantine and other Catholic Church forgeries as well as Catholicism’s critique of sola scriptura as the key to the continuity of authoritative interpretation: ‘there is nothing here in this Will, totidem verbis [written], making mention of shoulder-knots, but I dare conjecture we may find them inclusive, or totidem syllabus [oral]’.21 Martin and Jack, in turn, deconstruct Peter’s doctrine, but they too ‘deal entirely with invention, and strike things out of themselves’.22 Jack unweaves his coat down to its underlying cloth, but in doing so misjudges its threads as empirical material. His interpretive method – sola scriptura – is described by the narrator as ‘zeal’, which ‘proceeded from a notion into a word, and thence, in a hot summer, ripened into a tangible substance’.23 Jack is an idolator of the book – a Protestant bibliolater – and stands in Swift heresiography as a fetishist tantamount to being a sexual pervert, which was a commonplace stereotype in the seventeenth century through to at least Fielding’s Shamela.24 This bawdy satire of fundamentalism is accompanied by scatological critique as if to say, ‘Jack’s argument proceeds from the fundament’. Jack is not only the figure for the fundamentalist who attempts to strip doctrine down to its basic biblical threads but also is a ‘Modern’ of the kind the Scriblerians targeted in their critique of the public sphere.25 In other words, he is the figure of sola scriptura’s migration to the Modern, secular print culture. Jack hates Peter for obvious reasons, but Martin reminds him that the will prescribed friendship between the brothers, and is unwilling to treat the Bible in the way that Jack does.26 In short, Martin’s form of Anglicanism is shown to critique the sola scriptura of Jack – the main threat to stability in Ireland. Martin is the figure for the Church of Ireland, which, as the Catholic poet Pope desires in An Essay on Man’s phrase, ‘Whatever is, is right’, decades later, conservatively wants people ‘to accept existing institutions, political as well as religious’.27 20 22 25 27

Wyrick, Jonathan Swift and the Vested Word, p. 32. 21 Swift, A Tale of a Tub, p. 39. Ibid., p. 65. 23 Ibid., p. 66. 24 N. McDowell, ‘Tales of Tub Preachers’, p. 82. Weinbrot, Menippean Satire Reconsidered, pp. 119–20. 26 Ibid., p. 67. Marcus Walsh, ‘Swift and Religion’, in The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift, ed. Christopher Fox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 161–76 (p. 169); Judith Mueller, ‘A Tale of a Tub and Early Prose’, in The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift, ed. Christopher Fox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 202–15 (p. 202).

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Theological and exegetical controversy was therefore the Tale’s surrogate discourse for very real political instability in the post-1688 Revolution settlement and the Church of Ireland’s desire to continue its institutional dominance via the Penal Laws against Catholics and Sacramental Tests for Dissenters. A Tale of a Tub, as a satire of the English book, thus deconstructs both sola scriptura and the London book trade. The Grub Street cultural industry is viewed as a continuation of textualist nonsense, and a threat to traditional genres of exegesis like the sermon (homily), instruction at schools, universities, and other establishment institutions. The public sphere of print culture is viewed by Swift, Pope, and others as a conspiracy hatched by aristocratic allies of Dissenters like the Earl of Shaftesbury, whose Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times was the architectural blueprint for the public sphere. Indeed, Shaftesbury’s grandfather had led the Whig charge against the Anglican King Charles II and his Catholic brother James II decades earlier, during the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis that John Dryden had sought to end in Absalom and Achitophel. The printing press – an innovation Swift views as part of both the aforementioned Dissenting bibliolater attempt to use printed books to influence religion and politics and the secular scientific revolution – is consequently the target of Swift’s critique of the modern British culture industry in Gulliver’s Travels. Gulliver’s Travels (1726) amplifies the scepticism of textuality characteristic of A Tale by extending it to a critique of the British Enlightenment and its focus on STEM. It does so via the adventures of a scientist – Dr Lemuel Gulliver – whose experiences with other societies and their epistemologies continually challenge his Eurocentric empiricism and frame of reference. Swift asks us to question symptoms of modernity like ‘the growth of scientific consciousness, the development of a secular outlook, the doctrine of progress, the primacy of instrumental rationality, the fact-value split, individualistic understandings of the self, contractualist understandings of society, and so on’. With what accompanies them, ‘the emergence and institutionalization of market-driven industrial economics, bureaucratically administered states, modes of popular government, rule of law, mass media, and increased mobility, literacy, and urbanization’, the Tory in him asks us to embrace a more traditional landed, agricultural, and Churched societal order.28 Crucially, Gulliver’s Travels positions itself as a parody of the travel narrative, which, in Daniel Defoe’s hands in Robinson 28

Dilip Gaonkar, Alternative Modernities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), p. 17.

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Crusoe (1719), had become the new genre serving as the vehicle of the new textualist formal realism of the public sphere.29 Swift was critical of realism as an articulation of what Michael McKeon calls ‘naïve empiricism’, both in the travel narrative and in the scientific revolution itself; it, too, is a symptom of a wayward modernity.30 In parodying the conventions of the realist novel, Swift is also undermining the empirical epistemology associated with the Enlightenment, since he saw realism as only the latest, albeit more literary tool of the scientific revolution.31 In short, Gulliver’s Travels is questioning the genre that was the main vehicle for the putative transparency of the public sphere, continuing his challenge to sola scriptura in its capacity as the building-block to the textualism of the print culture, the formalism of the novel that improved upon it, and the new modernism.32 Swift’s critique of the London culture industry comes into focus in the third book of the Travels, ‘A Voyage to Laputa’. Gulliver is touring Laputa’s prestigious Academy of Lagado when he meets a professor who had invented a printing press. This machine is ‘a Frame, which took up the greatest part of both the Length and Breadth of the Room’.33 This press has been taken not only as a figure for all printing presses of Swift’s time, but of the Royal Society’s printing press specifically. It was invented for people to ‘write Books in Philosophy, Poetry, Politicks, Law, Mathematicks and Theology without the least Assistance from Genius or Study’.34 Swift is making fun not only of the lack of learning and the vulgarity of Grub Street cultural production but also of how the Royal Society is attempting to turn the Humanities into an empirical science that, condescendingly, ‘anyone’ can do. The machine consists of handles attached to wooden cubes that have alphanumeric characters engraved on them. The professor has assistants who crank these handles to create what turn out to be a random assortment of characters imprinted on sheets of paper. They then mine this assortment for patterns: ‘where they found three or four Words together that might make part of a Sentence, they dictated to the four remaining Boys who were Scribes’.35 The text that they have 29

30

31

32 33 34

J. Paul Hunter, ‘Gulliver’s Travels and the Novel’, in The Genres of Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Frederik N. Smith (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990), pp. 56–74 (p. 69). Michael McKeon, Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 351. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (London: Chatto & Windus, 1957), p. 28; McKeon, Origins of the English Novel, p. 352. Hunter, ‘Gulliver’s Travels and the Novel’, p. 66. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Albert J. Rivero (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), p. 154. 35 Ibid. Ibid., p. 155.

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assembled in this way consists of ‘several Volumes in large Folio already collected, of broken Sentences, which [the professor] intended to piece together, and out of those rich Materials to give the World a compleat Body of all Arts and Sciences’.36 Here Swift is complaining that scientific method cannot produce works in the other disciplines, and when it tries to do so, it fails. Furthermore, he is pointing to the press as a machine for the new Whig order to manufacture consent to its policies and indicates that its Grub Street print culture is producing trash and cannot put two words together. Once again, in a critique of sola scriptura, he conveys that one cannot read or write a book without knowledge, and without a mediator of the word who has ‘Genius or Study’ – like a Church of Ireland clergyman. STEM seems suspiciously Calvinistic to him, and he takes great pains to expose it and the press as the blunt instrument of the evangelical Protestant creation of a militaristic state set out to destroy humanity. This episode of scientific wrongheadedness about writing is one of many jeremiads Swift launches against STEM in the Academy of Lagado tour. The Royal Society is attacked by having the first lab in the Academy dedicated to ‘a Project for extracting Sun Beams out of Cucumbers’.37 Its professor is also a fundraiser, seeking an endowment from Gulliver to assist him in acquiring more cucumbers for experiments. In the next room is a professor doing an absurd experiment ‘to reduce human Excrement to its original Food, by separating the several Parts, removing the Tincture which it receives from the Gall, making the Odour exhale, and scumming off the Saliva’.38 This scatological satire of science is continued with a physician’s attempt to cure gastrointestinal illness by discharging air from a bellows into a patient’s anus, which results in the death of a dog upon which he was experimenting.39 What Swift most disdained was the attempt of STEM professors of his time to turn language into a science; the printing press was only his most salient target for a larger critique of the naive empiricism of treating words as things. In another room he discovers a ‘Scheme for entirely abolishing all words whatsoever’.40 The professor there believes that ‘since Words are only Names for Things, it would be more convenient for all Men to carry about them, such Things as were necessary to express the particular Business they are to discourse on’.41 These men were trying to abolish language, arts, and the humanities by working around them with something more in keeping with their own disciplines. Consequently, ‘if a Mans Business be very great, of various kinds, he must be obliged in Proportion 36

Ibid.

37

Ibid., p. 151.

38

Ibid., p. 152.

39

Ibid., p. 153.

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40

Ibid., p. 157.

41

Ibid.

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to carry a greater Bundle of Things upon his Back, unless he can afford one or two strong Servants to attend him’. Memorably, Gulliver witnesses ‘Sages’ absurdly carrying around huge backpacks in the Academy in order to communicate.42 It is such materialism of language that Swift questions in satirising the press, a vehicle if there ever was one for turning language into material print. As a Church of Ireland man, he is, after all, asking us not to place a lot of faith in the written word alone. The danger now posed to the humanities by some STEM proponents is comparable with Swift’s portrait in the Academy of Lagado – forcing us to speak in the terms of their disciplines rather than our own, which are largely Platonic as oral and teaching-centred. They ask us to transubstantiate texts on screens without any ritual explanation for their significance or teaching whatsoever, and they compel us to use the electronic platforms they invented in order to continue doing our scholarship. We have ceded much ground and authority with it due to our reliance on the electronic word, to the extent that the essays and books that we traditionally write to communicate our new learning themselves routinely rely on electronic texts for citation. Many libraries now throw into the garbage the hard copies of books and journals that we cited just a few years ago and force us onto pay-per-view electronic platforms to access crucial scholarly sources. Swift, I contend, would be offended at this development and would find much material for another satire on behalf of the Humanities – and the truth of the Human. In short, his major works offer us a view of a what David Berman has described as a postcolonial Enlightenment of a very Church of Ireland kind.43 Swift is ‘a distant precursor to the excremental writers of postcolonial Africa and Ireland’ because what has been called his ‘Counter-Enlightenment’ attitude is actually the assertion of the ‘more ethnographically sensitive Enlightenment’ – a more humane one – emerging from Ireland.44 It could be said that the Jonathan Swift Archive and the Swift Poems Project are as fragmentary at this point as A Tale of a Tub; at the time of writing, neither are quite finished nor yet have all Swift texts up online.45 Searching the Archive’s database under the term ‘authoritative’ yields no results, indicating that it is not aiming, as most print editors of Swift’s 42 44

45

Ibid. 43 David Berman, Berkeley and Irish Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2005), pp. 80–1. Joshua D. Esty, ‘Excremental Postcolonialism’, Contemporary Literature 40:1 (Spring 1999), 22–59 (pp. 26–8); Luke Gibbons, Edmund Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics Politics, and the Colonial Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 235–6. See https://jonathanswiftarchive.org.uk/index.html; https://dss.lafayette.edu/projects/swift-poemsproject/ (accessed June 2022).

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works do, for an ‘authoritative edition’. It is apparent that its editors (Paddy Bullard, Daniel Cook, Adam Rounce, James McLaverty, and David Womersley) do not have the hubris to believe that their database will ever be fully comprehensive. Indeed, we Swiftians all wear our coats differently and quarrel like a large Irish family – these are the perils of a single-author scholarly career. Similarly, the website of the Swift Poems Project, edited by Stephen Karian and James Woolley, speaks to incompleteness, in that its digital files have not yet been uploaded to it. As Karian wrote himself in an early article, Swift may have not wanted there to be an authoritative edition of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (1739), in that he left blank spaces for readers to fill in its printing – much like the nonauthoritative will of A Tale of a Tub. Indeed, the Swift Poems Project is very Swiftian in that it, too, is a blank space, and will rely on Karian and Woolley putting up electronic versions of texts that themselves are monuments to blank spaces and incompleteness.46 The hands of these electronic editors have captured Swift better than any print edition of his works can. They reflect what many other Irish Menippean satires like James Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake do – an irrepressible orality pouring off the page in a cacophony of incompleteness. These electronic editors are practising Swiftian scepticism of sola scriptura and the authority of the printing press and are making the digital humanities a very Swiftian textual space. What this suggests for Irish culture and its encounters with technology is that text continues to be a secondary mediation to what was already said and thought; productively and always falling short.

Select Bibliography Berman, David, Berkeley and Irish Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2005). Brown, Michael, ‘The Biter Bitten: Ireland and the Rude Enlightenment’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 45:3 (Spring 2012), 393–407. Cowan, Brian, ‘Mr. Spectator and the Coffeehouse Public Sphere’, EighteenthCentury Studies 37:3 (Spring 2004), 345–66. Downie, J. A., ‘Public and Private: The Myth of the Bourgeois Public Sphere’, in A Concise Companion to the Restoration and Eighteenth Century, ed. Cynthia Wall (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 58–79. Eisenstein, Elizabeth L, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 46

Moore, Swift, the Book, and the Irish Financial Revolution, pp. 18–19, 90–133.

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Esty, Joshua D., ‘Excremental Postcolonialism’, Contemporary Literature 40:1 (Spring 1999), 22–59. Fauske, Christopher J., ed., Archbishop William King and the Anglican Irish Context, 1688–1729 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004). Gaonkar, Dilip, Alternative Modernities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). Hunter, J. Paul, ‘Gulliver’s Travels and the Novel’, in The Genres of Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Frederik N. Smith (Newark: University Delaware Press, 1990), pp. 56–74. Karian, Stephen, ‘Reading the Material Text of Swift’s Verses on the Death’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 41:3 (Summer 2001), 515–44. McDowell, Nicholas, ‘Tales of Tub Preachers: Swift and Heresiography’, Review of English Studies 61:248 (February 2010), 72–92. Moore, Sean D., Swift, the Book, and the Irish Financial Revolution: Satire and Sovereignty in Colonial Ireland (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). Mueller, Judith, ‘A Tale of a Tub and Early Prose’, in The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift, ed. Christopher Fox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 202–15. Phiddian, Robert, Swift’s Parody (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Probyn, Clive, ‘“Haranguing Upon Texts”: Swift and the Idea of the Book’, in Proceedings of the First Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift, ed. Hermann Real and Heinz J. Veinken (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1985), pp. 187–97. Swift, Jonathan, A Tale of a Tub and Other Works, ed. Angus Ross and David Woolley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Albert J. Rivero (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002). Thorne, Christian, ‘Thumbing our Nose at the Public Sphere: Satire, the Market, and the Invention of Literature’, PMLA 116:3 (May 2001), 531–44. Walsh, Marcus, ‘Text, “Text”, and Swift’s A Tale of a Tub’, in Jonathan Swift: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Claude Rawson (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995), pp. 82–98. ‘Swift and Religion’, in The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift, ed. Christopher Fox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 161–76. Wyrick, Deborah Baker, Jonathan Swift and the Vested Word (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).

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chapter 10

Technology and Irish Modernism Kathryn Conrad

In our contemporary moment, the word ‘technology’ has come to stand in as shorthand for a particular subset of applied science, generally either machinic or digital. Of course, ‘technology’ did not carry that precise meaning in the modernist period on which this chapter focuses. It did not even come to be a popular term in English until the middle of the twentieth century, where it had shifted from its general sense as the language used to describe human skills, craft, arts, and knowledge (from the Greek technê and German Technik) to its narrower sense as applied science. Indeed, this former, now archaic meaning is in play in the only evocation of the term in the British Parliament from 1800 to 1883 – interestingly enough, in a debate in the House of Lords entitled ‘The State of Ireland’: They had allowed things to go on under the notion – and a very laudable notion – of not interfering with the right of the people to meet in public and discuss their grievances. They were afraid to trespass upon the right of discussion, or what was now called, by a new technology, agitation, which he (Lord Brougham) understood in a mocker and milder sense to mean only discussion, but which in the stronger and major sense meant something like resistance.1

Lord Brougham uses the word ‘technology’ in this debate to mark a shift in the language used to understand political discourse.2 ‘Technology’, in other words, refers in this passage to the rhetoric, not the material tools, of rebellion. And Brougham, in his outraged belief that the ‘present disturbed

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House of Lords Debate, ‘The State of Ireland’ (3 August 1848), vol. 100, col. 1103 (emphasis mine), https://hansard.parliament.uk/Lords/1848-08-03/debates/abadc30e-c2b5-41a5-8798-9db876e20735/S tateOfIreland (accessed 18 June 2022). Hereafter cited as ‘HL 1848’. Lord Henry Peter Brougham was a man arguably interested in technology in its emerging machinic sense, as the inventor of the Brougham carriage. Thanks to Timothy McMahon for helping me to parse the sense of ‘technology’ being evoked in this passage.

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state of the sister country’3 was a result of misrecognising and misnaming Irish political agitation as ‘discussion’ instead of what he sees as an ‘illegal Parliament’,4 makes clear how important, and formative, the ‘technology’ of rhetoric and language is to political action, policy, and colonial rule. Etymologically, ‘technology’ is as tied to language as it is to science and machines. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the etymology of ‘technology’ from the Greek combination of ‘techno’ (τέχνο) and ‘logia’ (λογία), its first recorded use as ‘technologia’ in a Latin treatise on the liberal arts (1607) and then as a systemic treatment of grammar (1612).5 The connection to language, and the relationship between language and creativity, manifests in both parts of the word: the ‘techno-’ of technology can be traced not only to the Sanskrit prefix for ‘to fashion’ (taks-) and the Greek for ‘carpenter’ (τέκτων) but also the Latin verb ‘to weave’ (texere) – the same root for the English noun ‘text’.6 The ‘-logy’ of technology, of course, comes from λóγos, ‘word’, and generally indicates discourse about a field of knowledge.7 The connection between technology, art, and formal rules or systems is reinforced in the etymology of ‘technic’, where the Greek technikos (τεχνικός) means ‘artistic, skilful, done by rules of art, technical, systematic’.8 In the early 1800s, ‘technology’ was still primarily used to refer to the language or terminology of a field (as in, for instance, the 1823 Universal Technological Dictionary; or Familiar Explanation of the Terms used in All Arts and Sciences, or the 1846 Buchanan’s Technological Dictionary, Explaining the Terms of the Arts, Sciences, Literature, Professions, and Trades).9 We might, then, refer to this earlier sense of ‘technology’ as ‘(discourse about) systems of human creativity’. The shift in usage to its contemporary sense as ‘applied science’ marks more than an etymological curiosity: it serves as a parallel to the shift in understanding of ‘science’ during roughly the same period. What we see in the nineteenth century are two meanings of ‘science’ struggling for primacy: one, a broader sense of science as ‘scientia’, the notion of theoretical knowledge of any kind (versus the applied knowledge of ars, roughly parallel to the Greek episteme and technê); and the other, a more focused notion of science, the one that most informs our contemporary sense of the 3 5

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HL 1848, col. 1099. 4 HL 1848, col. 1104. ‘technology, n.’, OED Online (December 2020), Oxford University Press, www-oedcom.www2.lib.ku.edu/view/Entry/198469?redirectedFrom=technology (accessed 5 February 2021). OED, ‘techno-’. 7 OED, ‘-logy’ and ‘-ology’. 8 OED, ‘technic’. George Crabb, Universal Technological Dictionary; or Familiar Explanations of the Terms used in All Arts and Sciences, 2 vols. (London: Baldwin, Cradock, & Joy, 1823); W. B. Buchanan, A Technological Dictionary, Explaining the Terms of the Arts, Sciences, Literature, Professions, and Trades (London: W. Tegg & Co., 1846).

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word, as knowledge of the physical world and observable phenomena that one might approach rationally with a particular set of empiricist methodologies, and which one might be able to put to use in a practical and material way. Both ‘science’ and ‘technology’, then, were narrowing their meanings into what science and technology studies scholars call ‘technoscience’ during the period that overlapped with the start of the modernist era, in the context of profound paradigm shifts in empirically based science as well as in its practical applications.10 Modernists in general, as Mark Morrisson has argued, ‘all understood science and technology as a central feature of the modern world, and in many ways key to its newness’.11 But I would further suggest that Irish modernist writers were keen to capture the earlier sense of ‘technology’ as ‘(discourse about) systems of human creativity’ as they engaged directly with the particular artefacts of our more contemporary sense. More specifically, Irish modernists saw technologies – lenses and printing presses, bombs and cameras – as forms that shape how we understand and negotiate the world. The ‘formalism’ of modernism and the New Criticism have often been taken together as inextricably linked: the hermeneutic approach of the New Critics could be argued to be a natural extension of the modernist concern with the value of form. But here, I suggest that Irish modernists are formal theorists of a different sort: they see literary forms as technologies that, in the words of Peter-Paul Verbeek, ‘mediate human experiences and interpretations of reality’.12 They recognise, to use the language of design theory popularised by Caroline Levine, that all forms have different affordances, or things that they allow the user to do; and, I would argue, it is a defining characteristic of Irish modernist literature that they consider and engage those literary forms in relationship to other technologies.13 Such engagement is rarely simply enthusiastic or technophobic. As I have argued elsewhere: Irish modernism’s ambivalence toward technology . . . [emerges] not simply from a naïve opposition to Victorian British materialism or resistance to 10

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‘Technoscience’ broadly refers to the mutually informing processes of the empirical scientific method and the human development of tools. In science and technology studies, ‘technoscience’ refers to the material and technological networks that sustain scientific knowledge. See Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). Mark S. Morrisson, Modernism, Science, and Technology (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), p. 6. Peter-Paul Verbeek, Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the Morality of Things (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 8. Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).

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change, but from a subtler recognition of how technologies – including technologies of the word – both mediate human experience and are necessarily embedded in larger systems that cannot simply be ignored or evaded.14

Indeed, I would suggest, along with Coílín Parsons, that the origins of Irish modernism are not a response to Victorian Britain at all, but a continuation of engagement with earlier groundbreaking shifts in science, technology, and perception. The year 1824 marks the start of the cartographic project of the Ordnance Survey in Ireland and further marks, as Parsons so convincingly argues, an originary moment of Irish modernism. The Ordnance Survey maps ‘[offer] a template against and with and over which writers could define themselves’ and generated ‘attitudes of fascination and revulsion, skepticism and attraction’ for modernist writers from James Clarence Mangan and J. M. Synge to James Joyce, Flann O’Brien, and Samuel Beckett.15 Pushing the temporal boundaries of Irish modernism in yet another direction, Parsons’s essay in Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism (2019) claims contemporary novelist John Banville as a modernist, arguing that in his science tetralogy, Banville takes a long – and a high – view of Irish modernism that, as the editors of the collection put it, ‘seeks to reset the clock of modernity and modernism, recognizing their jagged and overlapping temporalities’.16 Parsons’s expansive approach to Irish modernism considers, then, the ways that Irish modernist writers engage conceptually and explicitly with both the spatial and the temporal. To this I would add that Irish modernism’s engagement with the concepts of space and time is itself framed by its explicit engagement with technologies. Via the Ordnance Survey in Ireland, Irish modernists considered the spatial through the newly refined technologies of surveying and the maps they enabled; and they considered both temporality and scale, as Parsons has more recently argued, through the lens of the telescope and the microscope.17 Katherine Ebury’s exploration, in her essay in this volume, of temporality and the body through the technology of the watch offers another example from the period more traditionally associated with modernism. Morrisson has noted that the modernist period witnessed a range of scientific and technological 14

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Kathryn Conrad, ‘Infernal Machines: Weapons, Media, and the Networked Modernism of Tom Greer and James Joyce’, in Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism, ed. Kathryn Conrad, Cóilín Parsons, and Julie McCormick Weng (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2019), pp. 77–94 (p. 78). Cited hereafter as STIM. Cóilín Parsons, The Ordnance Survey and Modern Irish Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 3, 2. Kathryn Conrad, Cóilín Parsons, and Julie McCormick Weng, ‘Introduction’, in STIM, pp. 1–16 (p. 14). Cóilín Parsons, ‘John Banville, Long Form, and the Time of Late Modernism’, in STIM, pp. 264–80 (p. 278).

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paradigm shifts in mathematics, physical sciences, and life sciences; indeed, much work in the ‘new modernist studies’ has been focused on the impact of those paradigm shifts on the work of modernist writers and artists.18 The Ordnance Survey, as Parsons suggests, offered an early but major paradigm shift that emerged out of technoscientific development. But the Ordnance Survey’s origins should draw our attention to more particular reasons why an Irish modernism would be so tightly connected to the technologies of modernity. This connection is borne of Ireland’s position – literal, political, and imaginative – in relation to its imperial neighbour and founded on an awareness of the embeddedness of technoscience in the imperial military power that supports British colonial rule. The Ordnance Survey began, after all, as the brainchild of Major-General William Roy in the wake of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion, and was intended as a general military map of Great Britain. And it is in the ordnance of the ‘Ordnance Survey’ that we can see a first glimpse of the reasons for Irish modernists’ ambivalence about technoscientific development. As I noted together with Cóilín Parsons and Julie McCormick Weng, the work of the Ordnance Survey as well as others like Robert Kane’s The Industrial Resources of Ireland (1845) facilitated industrial and economic development: [T]hroughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Irish science and technology were largely sponsored by or created in the service of the British empire, and they often provided legitimacy to the empire. We might therefore reasonably attribute any Irish resistance to the claims of science to the lack of evidence for any of their practical benefits being shared with the indigenous population.19

Indeed, ‘to write of science, technology, and Irish modernism is, almost by default, to make an implied argument about the relationship between the experience of empire and the aesthetics of modernism’.20 But as I have noted elsewhere in the same volume, Irish modernism’s ambivalence towards technoscience emerges from something even more than concern about potential exploitation of resources: it emerges also from an understanding of technoscience’s connection to what Caroline Holmqvist has called the ‘human-material assemblage of war’ and its impact on the human experience beyond the narrow confines of the battlefield.21 In short, scientific and technological development had a profound impact 18 21

19 Morrisson, Modernism, pp. 39ff. K. Conrad et al., ‘Introduction’, p. 3. 20 Ibid. K. Conrad, ‘Infernal Machines’, pp. 78, 83; Caroline Holmqvist, ‘Undoing War: War Ontologies and the Materiality of Drone Warfare’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 41:3 (2013), 535–52 (p. 539).

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on the Irish well before British, American, and European modernists found themselves reeling from the effects of world war. The Ordnance Survey, a cartographic enterprise, offers an instructive example of a perceptual technological form, a way of seeing, that is tied both to colonial development more broadly and the deployment of military ordnance more specifically, and which, as Parsons has argued, was profoundly influential on Irish modernist literary form. The first wave of Irish modernists, or what I will refer to here as protomodernists, engaged critically with technological forms by the end of the nineteenth century, setting them alongside literary forms and evaluating them as modes of perception, engagement, and mediation – writers like Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, and W. B. Yeats.22 By the height of the European modernist period, Irish modernists like Joyce, Beckett, and Elizabeth Bowen would fully acknowledge that technoscientific development was part of a larger network of forms that could not be so easily disentangled from literary form.23 And all recognised those forms, as I would argue, as ‘[organising] a situation of moral decision-making’.24

Irish Protomodernism: A Mass of Type-Writing As one exemplar of what I am calling Irish protomodernism, I turn to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, best known generically as a Gothic novel, although anticipating, in its unusual collage of forms, the formal experimentation 22

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Although this essay does not attempt to fully survey all such writers, it is worth noting the somewhat anomalous position of John Eglinton (né William Kirkpatrick Magee), who spoke directly to the promise of the new technologies and their relationship to the arts. As Julie McCormick Weng notes, Eglinton proposed ‘a literary method that would privilege the material over the immaterial and the present age over the past’. See McCormick Weng, ‘John Eglinton: An Irish Futurist’, in STIM, pp. 34–52 (p. 35). In his essay ‘Mr. Yeats and Popular Poetry’, Eglinton famously writes that ‘the kinematograph, the bicycle, electric tramcars, labour-saving contrivances, etc, are not susceptible of poetic treatment, but are, in fact, themselves the poetry . . . of a scientific age . . .. The epics of the present age are the steam-engine and the dynamo, its lyrics the kinematograph, phonograph, etc. and these bear with them the hearts of men as the Iliad and [Odyssey] of former days uplifted the youth of antiquity, or as the old English ballads expressed the mind of a nation in its childhood’. See John Eglinton, ‘Mr. Yeats and Popular Poetry’, in Literary Ideals in Ireland, ed. John Eglinton, W. B. Yeats, A.E., and W. Larminie (London: Fisher Unwin, 1899), pp. 41–6 (pp. 42– 3). In other words, for Eglinton, literary forms were not alternatives to technoscientific forms or, as with later Irish modernists, interwoven with and implicated by such forms; rather, technoscientific forms are imagined as replacements for literary forms. See K. Conrad, ‘Infernal Machines’, for a brief discussion of Joyce’s engagement with technoscience and networks. See Kathryn Conrad, ‘Rage’s Brother: The Bomb at the Centre of Wilde’s Trivial Comedy’, in The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism, ed. Maud Ellmann, Siân White, and Vicki Mahaffey (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021), pp. 200–16, for a discussion of Wilde’s formal and literary response to technologies of violence. Verbeek, Moralizing Technology, p. 8.

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more closely associated with modernism.25 As Jennifer Wicke, Luke Gibbons, Allan Johnson, Nicole Lobdell, and several others have emphasised, new technologies are central to this text, the contemporary elements that stand in opposition to the more typical medieval elements that characterise the Gothic.26 In Dracula, the proliferation of technologies makes the reader aware of the place, and the limit, of these new forms of technological mediation in the context of human relationship and struggle. In Stoker’s novel, for instance, the typewriter, telegraph, Kodak camera, wax cylinder phonograph, and new technologies of journalistic media take their place alongside other kinds of contemporary technological advancements, such as the American Winchester repeating rifle, the blood transfusion, and the train. These technologies are in turn set alongside the decidedly pre-modern technologies of the sacramental Host, the crucifix, garlic, the knife, and other tools that are central to the effective conquering of Dracula. Technologies of communication are marked throughout as just as potentially disruptive as technologies of war, impacting affective response, organising the social, and, in turn, shaping and misshaping ethical relationships. Reading Dracula as profoundly ambivalent about its technologies makes it easier to see its relationship to the dynamite novel, about which Barbara Melchiori, Deaglán Ó Donghaile, and Alex Houen have written at length and to which I have made reference in my reading of Tom Greer’s novel, A Modern Daedalus (1885).27 This genre was inspired by the Fenian dynamite campaign of 1881–5 and, later, the anarchist bombing campaign in Europe. Ó Donghaile sees the dynamite novel as an attempt to capture the often sensationalised media coverage of the dynamite campaigns; and

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Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897; London: Penguin Books, 2003). Dracula is not the only text in which Stoker experiments with form; he returns to a similar formal model in The Lady of the Shroud (1909). See Jennifer Wicke, ‘Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and its Media’, ELH 59:2 (Summer 1992), 467–93; Luke Gibbons, ‘“Empire of the Air”: Ireland, Aerial Warfare and Futurist Gothic’, in Bram Stoker and the Gothic: Formations to Transformations, ed. Catherine Wynne (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 138–58; Allan Johnson, ‘Modernity and Anxiety in Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, in Critical Insights: ‘Dracula’, ed. Jack Lynch (Englewood, NJ: Salem Press, 2009), pp. 72–84; and Nicole Lobdell, ‘Piercing Vibrations: Orality and Literacy in Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s L’Eve Future and Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, MA thesis (Athens, GA: University of Georgia, 2007), https://esploro .libs.uga.edu/discovery/fulldisplay/alma9949333208402959/01GALI_UGA:ResearchRepository (accessed 4 July 2022). K. Conrad, ‘Infernal Machines’. See also Barbara Melchiori, Terrorism in the Late Victorian Novel (London: Croom Helm, 1985); Deaglán Ó Donghaile, Blasted Literature: Victorian Political Fiction and the Shock of Modernism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011); and Alex Houen, Terrorism and Modern Literature, from Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

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he further reads not only the novels but also the dynamite campaigns themselves as a literal inspiration for the often shocking modernist aesthetic. As an Irishman who moved to London just before the start of the Fenian dynamite campaign, and who lived and worked there throughout, Stoker may have intended even closer connections to the dynamite novel genre than might be immediately visible. Dracula himself, the foreigner who has moved to London to spread his vampiric contagion throughout its population, who works hard to blend in with his environment, who can be overlooked in the press of urban faces, bears a striking resemblance to the dynamiters in fictions as diverse as those of Robert Louis and Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson and Joseph Conrad.28 Unlike the violence of the dynamiter, however, Dracula’s damage is wrought at close quarters, vampire to person. Dracula’s connection to A Modern Daedalus, I would suggest, lies in the celebration of what might be termed ‘appropriate proximity’: the proper distance between people. Greer’s novel focuses most notably on the distancing effects of technology, while also gesturing towards the damage done by hyperproximity; Dracula takes on the same issues, albeit with a different emphasis. Contemporary technology does not always mark distance in Dracula, nor is technoscience always successful when employed. Sometimes, as with the blood transfusions or the Winchester rifle, the technologies fail against Dracula’s particular powers. At others, the technology fails by expanding the time between the production and delivery of a message, as when Van Helsing’s telegram fails to arrive at a crucial moment. And in one scene, the contemporary technology is a sign of multiple failures: the wax cylinder phonograph that Dr Seward uses for his diary. The first failure of the wax cylinder phonograph occurs when Seward admits to Mina Harker that he does not know how to find a section on his wax-cylinder diary; that is, Seward fails as a user of the technology in that he is able to record his thoughts but not access them later. Mina must transform this oral form into a textual one to make it useful, creating a typescript that becomes part of the text that the vampire hunters use and, of course, the one that we read. The problems with the wax cylinder not only lie in Seward’s failure to use it well, however; the technology itself is inappropriate to the purpose for which it is needed. The phonograph preserves the sound of his speech, rendering it accessible only as an 28

Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson, More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1885); Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (London: Methuen & Co., 1907).

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unbroken oration. The phonograph’s disturbing quality is thus its preservation of orality, an orality that feels unmediated. The socially disruptive quality of the technology of the phonograph becomes clearer when we witness Mina’s response to listening to it. She notes that the phonograph is a wonderful machine, but it is cruelly true. It told me, in its very tones, the anguish of your heart. It was like a soul crying out to Almighty God. No one must hear them spoken ever again! See, I have tried to be useful. I have copied out the words on my typewriter, and none other need now hear your heart beat, as I did.29

Her overwhelming affective response results from her being too close to Seward’s private experience; the phonograph has the effect of seeming to erase both the passage of time and spatial distance. The phrasing used here, that the phonograph allows Mina to hear Seward’s ‘heart beat’, implies not only a figurative but also a literal nearness to the chest, a phrasing that aptly prefigures the way Mina will suck the blood from Dracula’s chest later in the text. In this sense, Stoker’s representation of the failure of sound technology is quite different from that of either Yeats, Lady Gregory, or, at the other extreme, Joyce; as Christopher Morash argues in this volume, these latter writers either resist or embrace the oddly prosthetic and mediating quality of recording technologies. Like those writers, Stoker acknowledges the technology as technology; but he presents the phonograph as a technology that offers a less, rather than more, mediated experience. For Stoker, in short, the phonograph is disruptive and disturbing in its removal of the mediating quality offered by textual, including literary, forms. Unlike textual forms, Dracula specifically, and vampirism more generally, offer an extreme of proximity. Stoker’s vampires show us that when bodies approach too closely, the human quality is lost. At close quarters, humans are dehumanised and animalised: they become food, and they eat others as food. Vampire and victim consume and are consumed in a hyperbolic parody of sentimental connection that is hypersexualised and feminised throughout the text. Mina becomes a kind of vampiric technology herself, as she enters the mental space of the distant Dracula and thus mediates between Dracula and the vampire hunters: as David Glover points out, ‘by putting herself in Van Helsing’s hands and asking him to hypnotize her, Mina becomes both patient and double-agent, 29

Stoker, Dracula, p. 236.

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serving as a kind of conductor between vampire and man’.30 And, indeed, as the band of vampire fighters enters old Europe to fight Dracula, as Joseph Valente has pointed out, they approach vampiric behaviour themselves – perhaps in large part because Van Helsing’s mesmeric science and their use of Mina as a conductor means they are dependent on a technology of nearness, a kind of biotechnology of intense affect, that risks moral confusion.31 As much as the text focuses on the dangers of hyperproximity, it also offers warnings about distance – including scientific distance. In Stoker’s early notebooks for Dracula, he imagined Seward as a ‘mad doctor’, one who, like Victor Frankenstein, has the capacity to bring people back to life.32 That the ‘doctor’ was originally imagined as sharing Dracula’s diabolical powers gives us some insight into the character of Seward. In the novel itself, Seward’s objectifying gaze on his patient Renfield renders the latter an object of study for the purposes of Seward’s own scientific advancement; he even wistfully imagines what could be gained by examining Renfield’s brain through vivisection.33 Seward’s geography of affect might be said to be vampiric: simultaneously too near to his patients to see patterns of behaviour (and thus solve the riddle of Renfield’s relationship to Dracula) and too far to see them as human. Stoker’s protomodernism lies, I would argue, in his offering of the novelistic form as a response to the failed contemporary technologies offered by the story, a way to mediate human relationships with appropriate proximity while ensuring that a human is always in the loop. He does so with the figure of the artist as a combination of secretary and priest: that is, the active conduit for and organiser of multimedia, texts, technologies, and ultimately nations. Mina occupies this role within the novel. As Jennifer Fleissner has argued, Mina is the consummate secretary: both passive receptacle and active organiser, present and invisible.34 The vampire hunters succeed despite their moral confusion, and they do so precisely, I would suggest, because Mina’s typewriting – of Seward’s phonograph records and of the 30

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33 34

David Glover, Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals: Bram Stoker and the Politics of Popular Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 96. Joseph Valente, Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002). Bram Stoker, Bram Stoker’s Notes for ‘Dracula’: A Facsimile Edition, ed. Robert Eighteen-Bisang and Elizabeth Miller (Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland & Co., 2008), pp. 22–3. Stoker, Dracula, p. 80. Jennifer Fleissner, ‘Dictation Anxiety: The Stenographer’s Stake in Dracula’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 22.3 (2000), 417–55.

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narrative more generally – controls the distance and lessens the intensity of the affective encounter that threatens, like the vampire, to consume. To extend Fleissner’s argument, if Mina is the perfect secretary, so too is Stoker, who occupied a position strikingly and deliberately similar to that of Jonathan Harker, clerk, and Mina, secretary, both in his work as an actual Dublin clerk and as manager for Henry Irving. Stoker imagines himself in the position of a secretary of the imagination. If one reads Stoker’s diary entries written at Whitby in conjunction with Dracula, for instance, the connection between his secretarial character Mina and himself becomes explicit. In his diary, he writes: Whitby cliff 9 p.m. 18/8/90 Lights scattered town & West Cliff & up river Esk – black line of roof on left – near Abbey House – sheep & lambs bleating – clatter of donkey’s hoofs up paved road. Band on pier harsh waltz. Salvation Army in street off Quay neither hearing each other we hearing both.35

In Dracula, Stoker renders his own experience as Mina’s: MINA MURRAY’S JOURNAL 24 July. Whitby. . . . The same day. – I came up here alone, for I am very sad. There was no letter for me. I hope there cannot be anything the matter with Jonathan. The clock has just struck nine. I see the lights scattered all over the town, sometimes in rows where the streets are, and sometimes singly; they run right up the Esk and die away in the curve of the valley. To my left the view is cut off by a black line of roof of the old house next the Abbey. The sheep and lambs are bleating in the fields away behind me, and there is a clatter of a donkey’s hoofs up the paved road below. The band on the pier is playing a harsh waltz in good time, and further along the quay there is a Salvation Army meeting in a back street. Neither of the bands hears the other, but up here I hear and see them both. I wonder where Jonathan is and if he is thinking of me! I wish he were here.36

These passages offer us Stoker’s image of the author as a super-secretary, able to organise new textual forms (the diary entry and Dracula respectively) from their privileged position between groups (in this case, the two bands’ music, each inaudible to the other). But the secretarial is not the only model that Stoker evokes in the text. While her secretarial position appears at first glance to be relatively humble, Mina is also an author (of diary entries) and creator (of a child). And if Mina is more important than her humble role first implies, so too is Stoker. Stoker’s Dracula resonates with Catholic and High Church 35

Stoker, Bram Stoker’s Notes, pp. 158–9.

36

Stoker, Dracula, p. 77. Emphasis mine.

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Anglican imagery, with multiple appearances of the sacred Host or wafer that protects the human from the vampiric – even while, as Lisa Hopkins points out, ‘there is no priest, in any shape, denomination, or form’ in the text.37 ‘Host’ is a rich word that evokes battle, hospitality, and sacrifice, and indeed, in the Catholic and High Church Mass, it is a tool or technology of mediation between human and divine. This sense of the ‘mass’ as a religious ceremony, a connection between human and divine, is set against the end of Dracula, where Harker dismisses the value of the ‘mass of type-writing’: We were struck with the fact, that in all the mass of material of which the record is composed, there is hardly one authentic document; nothing but a mass of type-writing, except the later notebooks of Mina and Seward and myself, and Van Helsing’s memorandum. We could hardly ask any one, even did we wish to, to accept these as proofs of so wild a story.38

Harker’s anxiety about the ‘mass of type-writing’ indicates the kind of ambivalence that Morash identifies in Yeats and Gregory about technological mediation: in this case, Harker sees these technologically generated forms as distancing people from immediate experience in time and space, and every typewritten transcript is one step removed from the original experience. In lieu of that ‘mass of type-writing’, Van Helsing counters Harker’s pessimism with celebration of the baby Quincey, present and immediate. Seen another way, however, Stoker himself is the celebrant of that ‘mass’, serving as the hierophant who transforms abstraction into the material reality of the book and from that generates human, and humane, affective responses. In so doing, in this particular and wildly successful synthesis of new and old media, he suggests that the writer is the best figure to serve as a priest of this technologically complex new world order.

Irish Modernism: Prospects Have Alternatives In summary, Stoker articulates the place of literary forms or ‘technologies’ alongside new technoscientific developments and claims a privileged space for the literary artist as the stage manager of the various technologies of the age, and in so doing situates himself as an Irish protomodernist. Resisting a neat divide between ‘technophilic and technophobic’, I argue 37

38

Lisa Hopkins, Bram Stoker: A Literary Life (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 77. Stoker, Dracula, p. 402.

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with Parsons and McCormick Weng that ‘technologies . . . are not merely additive artifacts, but . . . are profoundly constitutive – of the human, of the social, and of Irish modernism itself’.39 Throughout the modernist period, as others in this volume suggest, Irish writers grappled with the impacts of technoscientific development, recognising and making visible, as Morash argues of Yeats, Joyce, and others, following Heidegger and Derrida, the extent to which technology is a perceptual frame that changes our relation to the world.40 The extent to which the ‘real’ is transformed, through the instrumentalisation that technologies facilitate, and becomes ‘standing-reserve’,41 is perhaps more visible to artists whose experience of the real is profoundly shaped by the technologies of colonial rule and development, imperial violence, and the responses to it that emerge from, as Holmqvist puts it, the ‘human-material assemblage of war’. As we approach the nearer end of the temporal spectrum of Irish modernism, we find another Irish writer engaging with the role of technology: Elizabeth Bowen. Bowen, with her insistent aeroplanes, man-eating houses, and judgmental furniture, is often read as an anomalous sort of Irish writer; but her engagement with the material elements of modern life positions her firmly within the Irish modernist tradition I have been articulating throughout this chapter. Bowen’s approach to technology, I would argue, most closely resembles Morash’s description of Joyce’s approach to sound technology: immersion, with ‘authentic being . . . produced by . . . connections – even technologically mediated – with others’.42 As Maud Ellmann writes of Bowen, while it is tempting to think of her primarily as a novelist of the interior life, she ultimately relishes the narrative business of the realist, insofar as it releases her from the stifling rose-house of inner life into the world of cars and cocktail-shakers, typewriters and telephones – in short, into the modern world . . . Fascinated by the gadgetry of modernity, Bowen’s writing documents the changes to personal and social life wrought by innovations in technology throughout the century.43

In several of her novels, especially The Last September (1929), To the North (1932), and The Heat of the Day (1948), Bowen reveals the ways in 39 40

41 43

K. Conrad et al., ‘Introduction’, p. 7. See Christopher Morash, ‘Technologies of Sound: Telephone/Gramophone’, Chapter 4 in this volume. See also Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). Heidegger, The Question, p. 24. 42 Morash, ‘Technologies of Sound’, pp. 77–8. Maud Ellmann, Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow Across the Page (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), p. 5.

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which contemporary technologies serve as moral, ethical, and political forms of mediation. Bowen focuses especially on points of contact between forms, to use Levine’s language: the temporal rhythms of narrative or season, the hierarchies of class, the bounded whole of nation, the networks of revolutionary insurgence or international espionage. To the North, a text that features a rich complement of transportation technologies, offers one such example. Simon During argues that To the North is ‘not to be read as a critique of technology’, contra Ellmann, but rather as a text that ‘affirms technology by encountering it through a battery of categories, frames, and literary devices which have no truck with either critique or with humanism’.44 My reading of Bowen, in contrast, acknowledges that, like other Irish modernists, she sees human experiences as inevitably shaped by technologies, whether literary or technoscientific, but neither fully ‘affirms’ nor negates such technologies. Rather, Emmeline’s car in To the North, I would argue, serves as a moral environment, an object that ‘organizes a situation of moral decision-making’, as Verbeek puts it, one of several modern technologies of transportation in that novel that provide the opportunities for such decision-making and which, once engaged, shape the outcomes of those decisions.45 Military technologies – military lorries, for instance, and pistols – provide the most obvious moral environments in The Last September. But so too does the gramophone that appears throughout the novel, creating the opportunity for Lois Farquar’s first dance with Gerald Lesworth down the lane at Danielstown, and literally echoing throughout the story until it breaks at the last dance before Lois severs her relationship with Gerald and he is executed by Irish revolutionaries. The reader’s first instinct may be to see the gramophone as simply a symbol or metaphor of something, such as, for instance, idealistic young romance. But the gramophone serves further as a concrete reminder of the effects of technology in shaping their relationship, something that Bowen sets against linguistic forms of communication. Lois, in her frustrated outburst to Gerald near the end of the fateful party, cries that language ‘twists’ to form a ‘net’ that means that ‘one can’t move, one doesn’t know where one is’.46 In contrast, the sound of the gramophone – portable, romantic – provides another way of being together outside of verbal language, offering instead connection through touch and vibration. These technologies shape and order, active 44 45 46

Simon During, ‘Accelerate: Why Elizabeth Bowen Liked Cars’, in STIM, pp. 113–28 (p. 115). Verbeek, Moralizing Technology, p. 39. Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September (1929; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1942), p. 191.

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rather than inevitable parts of the ‘design of order and panic’,47 as Bowen puts it, that is The Last September. The material, technological, and personal networks that shape and order Second World War England and Ireland come into focus in The Heat of the Day. As with her other novels, Bowen puts a tight focus on the materials and technologies that share and shape her characters’ world – notes, clocks, dressing gowns, telephones, sofas – and the patterns that their interactions create. Ellmann suggests that the two Roberts of the novel, Robert Harrison and Robert Kelway, both parts of a system of espionage, are ‘implicated in a system that renders individualities of characters irrelevant’48 – a ‘worldwide web’, as she describes it in ‘futuristic terms’49 wherein the characters are, as Levine might call it, ‘replaceable nodes’ in a network that could exist without them. What brings the protagonists Stella Rodney and Robert Kelway together in this web is a bomb, falling from an enemy plane, that is delivered near the ‘bar or pub’ where they first meet: Overhead, an enemy plane had been dragging, drumming slowly round in the pool of night, drawing up bursts of gunfire – nosing, pausing, turning, fascinated by the point for its intent. The barrage banged, coughed, retched; in here the lights in the mirrors rocked. Now down a shaft of anticipating silence the bomb swung whistling. With the shock of detonation, still to be heard, four walls of in here yawped in then bellied out; bottles danced on glass; a distortion ran through the view. The detonation dulled off into the cataracting roar of a split building: direct hit, somewhere else. It was the demolition of an entire moment: he and she stood at attention till the glissade stopped. What they had both been saying, or been on the point of saying, neither of them ever now were to know. Most first words have the nature of being trifling; theirs from having been lost began to have the significance of a lost clue.50

This bomb’s detonation is a technology that forms the nature of their meeting, causing them to stand at attention and creating a fellow feeling in adversity, a sense of time and place suspended, to which their entire relationship can be largely attributed. The disruptive technologies of war create opportunities for disruption and re-routing of relationships for all the Londoners in the text, an opportunity which Stella in particular craves; she provides a contrast to her son Roderick, a soldier who has inherited his uncle’s Irish estate, who 47 50

Ibid., p. 206. 48 Ellmann, Elizabeth Bowen, p. 167. 49 Ibid., p. 168. Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day (1948; New York: Anchor Books, 2002), p. 104.

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‘like[s] about people’ the ‘order in which they could be arranged. Such idealisation of pattern, these days . . . alarmed his mother’.51 Stella effectively, if temporarily, suspends the patterns of her life with Robert thanks to the opportunity afforded by an enemy aeroplane – but neither the plane nor the opportunity is morally neutral. Robert, as she learns, is a Nazi agent; and the reader can, at this moment of revelation, begin to trace a series of networks that intersect at the moment created by the technology of the wartime aircraft, networks that even extend to and jar the seemingly unrelated hierarchies of the Irish landed gentry. Despite the fact that Bowen shows her characters operating in a larger environment of forms and technologies that dispel the illusion of full individual agency, there is no sense of the inevitable in Bowen. Although, for instance, the network of espionage and counter-espionage would exist whether or not these two particular Roberts were involved, this particular story would not: each choice and each story matters. As she steps into a new role at the end of the novel, Stella announces that ‘Prospects have alternatives’, a phrase that resonates with every action taken in the universe of the novel and, indeed, with those outside of it.52 From Stoker to Bowen, then, these Irish modernists engage with the technologies that inform human interaction, exposing their role as moral agents, but not in the sense that they are completely independent of the human. Rather, these technologies, tied inexorably to human agency, inform the patterns of our interaction. Stoker sees in contemporary technologies a range of forms that can shape and warp ethical relationships, but that can ultimately be harnessed within literary form; Bowen reminds us that, even as such technologies are deployed, we share agency with them. Never grimly deterministic, these writers suggest that the material and the ideal are mutually informing; and their own narratives, in recognising the arrangement of forms at a local and particular level, work to imagine the world otherwise.53

Select Bibliography Bowen, Elizabeth, The Last September (1929; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1942). To the North (1932; New York: Anchor Books, 2003). 51 53

52 Ibid., p. 65. Ibid., p. 363. I take this final phrase from Ailbhe Smyth, who writes that she has a ‘strong sense that tangible social and political change is never achieved without the ability to imagine the world otherwise, to find the language which can give shape and substance to our unnameable, thus unnamed, longings’. See Smyth, ‘Foreword’, in Alternative Loves: Irish Gay and Lesbian Stories, ed. David Marcus (Dublin: Martello Books, 1994).

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The Heat of the Day (1948; New York: Anchor Books, 2002). Conrad, Joseph, The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (London: Methuen & Co., 1907). Conrad, Kathryn, ‘Rage’s Brother: The Bomb at the Centre of Wilde’s Trivial Comedy’, in The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism, ed. Maud Ellmann, Siân White, and Vicki Mahaffey (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021), pp. 200–16. Conrad, Kathryn, Cóilín Parsons, and Julie McCormick Weng, eds., Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2019). Ellmann, Maud, Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow Across the Page (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003). Fleissner, Jennifer, ‘Dictation Anxiety: The Stenographer’s Stake in Dracula’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 22:3 (2000), 417–55. Gibbons, Luke, ‘“Empire of the Air”: Ireland, Aerial Warfare and Futurist Gothic’, in Bram Stoker and the Gothic: Formations to Transformations, ed. Catherine Wynne (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 138–58. Glover, David, Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals: Bram Stoker and the Politics of Popular Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). Heidegger, Martin, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). Holmqvist, Caroline, ‘Undoing War: War Ontologies and the Materiality of Drone Warfare’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 41:3 (2013), 535–52. Hopkins, Lisa, Bram Stoker: A Literary Life (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Houen, Alex, Terrorism and Modern Literature, from Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Melchiori, Barbara, Terrorism in the Late Victorian Novel (London: Croom Helm, 1985). Morrisson, Mark S., Modernism, Science, and Technology (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2017). Ó Donghaile, Deaglán, Blasted Literature: Victorian Political Fiction and the Shock of Modernism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011). Parsons, Cóilín, The Ordnance Survey and Modern Irish Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Saint-Amour, Paul K., Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Stevenson, Robert Louis, and Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson, More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1885). Stoker, Bram, Dracula (1897; London: Penguin Books, 2003). Bram Stoker’s Notes for ‘Dracula’: A Facsimile Edition, ed. Robert EighteenBisang and Elizabeth Miller (Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland & Co., 2008).

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Valente, Joseph, Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002). Verbeek, Peter-Paul, Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the Morality of Things (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011). Wicke, Jennifer, ‘Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and its Media’, ELH 59:1 (Summer), 467–93.

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chapter 11

W. B. Yeats, the Revival, and Scientific Invention Aoife Lynch

It is surely ironic that W. B. Yeats, who took exception to Newtonian science as overly deterministic in both his philosophy of life and resulting poetry, should look to science itself as an aspect of knowledge to help ground his own esoteric work in A Vision (1925, 1937) – but this is indeed what he did. A Vision itself emerged through the automatic writing of the poet’s wife, George, at the very outset of their married life together, and this esoteric knowledge was to provide the poet with the framework and images for his greatest poetry. However, just as Yeats spent ten years revising the first edition of A Vision (1925) to make it more comprehensible to any reader, he also understood that it remained a confusing and otherworldly text to many. He writes to Edith Shackleton Heald of the completed second edition in May 1937: ‘This book is the skeleton in my cupboard. I do not know whether I want my friends to see it or not see it. I think “Will so and so think me a crazed fanatic?” But one goes on in blind faith.’1 For Yeats, A Vision remained a serious undertaking and a necessary part of his work as a whole, as he writes in a letter to his publisher Harold Macmillan in May 1934: ‘I want it to be taken as part of my work as a whole, not an eccentricity. I have put many years of work into it.’2 What is interesting is how these two complex texts of 1925 and 1937 produce a ‘both/and’ understanding of historical process and evolution to coalesce with the postmodern world of the Digital Age; an age foreshadowed by the poetry of the Irish past, and the dynamic famously harnessed by Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory in their own recovery of ancient Gaelic myth to establish a postcolonial voice for an independent Ireland. W. B. Yeats’s personal library provides rich evidence of the poet’s engagement with the new scientific world view in the twentieth century, 1

2

W. B. Yeats, The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allen Wade (London: Rupert-Hart Davis, 1954), pp. 888–9. Ibid.

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and his letters likewise reveal his understanding of the links between the modern age and the mystery of the archetypal collective unconscious which infiltrates both the individual and the universal to produce new realities and, indeed, new forms of literature. As he writes in the 1925 edition of A Vision: Mr. E. Pound, Mr. Eliot, Mr. Joyce, Signor Pirandello . . . either eliminate from metaphor the poet’s phantasy . . . or breakup the logical processes of thought by flooding them with associated ideas or words that seem to drift into the mind by chance; or set side by side as in ‘Henry IV’, ‘The Waste Land’, ‘Ulysses’ the physical primary – a lunatic away with his keepers, a man fishing behind a gas works, the vulgarity of a single Dublin day prolonged through seven hundred pages – and the spiritual primary, delirium, the Fisher King, Ulysses wandering.3

Yeats, like James Joyce and the other writers of the Irish Revival, perceived the chaos of social upheaval in Ireland as a revolution of thought which necessarily returns us to our origin or home in the vein of Homer’s Odysseus. This origin or home, however, is viewed from a new original perspective on return: through the wiser eyes of embodied or lived experience. Yeats writes that all true knowledge is embodied and, so, it is the excavation of a buried Gaelic culture in the case of the Revival, and a self in terms of poetry, that finally allows for the actualisation of formal cultural creation or poesis. Such a process, however, also requires imagination; and ironically, in actualising and recovering the past, what finally emerges is a constructed reality which itself is a form of doubling. For Yeats, the mask-like nature of human consciousness is reflected in the antinomies of all natural life in his philosophy of universal reality, and these antinomies emerge through the unending strife of the formal ‘tinctures’ of universal existential difference in A Vision; mystery necessarily remains at the core of these dual realities. It is likewise through the laws of logical contradiction that man’s rationality is formed, the essential duality of ‘I’ and ‘not I’ as a construction of any sense of self in the world and any expression of that self in language. Thus, to perceive everything in a spherical unity of perfection becomes inhuman, a form of madness, and, finally, a form of death. Yeats writes of these limitations in a letter to L. A. G. Strong in December 1931, in which he discusses J. W. Dunne’s An Experiment with Time (1927) and the concepts emerging through the new physics of his day.

3

W. B. Yeats, A Vision (1925; London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1962), pp. 211–12.

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Specifically, Yeats writes of his inability to embody concepts he can’t yet conceive of, from his reading of Dunne’s book: It happens to touch on a very difficult problem, one I have been a good bit bothered by. If I could know all the past and all the future and see it as a single instant I would still be conditioned, limited, by the form of that past and the form of that future, I would not be infinite. Perhaps you will tell me I misunderstood Dunne, for I am nothing of a mathematician.4

Here, Yeats accepts the paradox of the time-bound nature of the human mind that constructs the illusion of time even while holding the conception of transcending it. A Vision engages with this ephemeral ‘reality’ outside of time that cannot be quantified but whose representations exist in the organisation of the perceived world about us. All is encompassed within a sphere, which is also born of imagination and ‘has but a symbolical relation to spaceless reality’.5 This ‘spaceless’ reality implicitly rejects the Newtonian concept of space as an objective reality in itself, in favour of the dynamic spacetime of Einstein’s general theory of relativity (1915). Marginalia in Yeats’s personal copy of Alfred North Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World (1926) further reveals the poet’s deepening interest in the philosophical implications of this new scientific knowledge. The following passage, highlighted by Yeats, underscores his own association with scientific ideas as a poet: It is in respect of this comparison that the testimony of great poets is of such importance. Their survival is evidence that they express deep intuitions of mankind penetrating into what is universal in concrete fact . . . There is the summary answer which refers nature to some greater reality standing behind it. A wider evolution beyond nature itself, and within which nature is a limited mode.6

For Yeats, as for Whitehead, reality is a form of co-creation between the unperceived force fields about us, fields which de-cohere into formal resolution through the power of consciousness; the archetypal energies produced. As unusual as these concepts were and, indeed, are still to our understanding of the material world, they coalesce with the wave-particle view of quantum physics as discovered in 1900 by Max Planck. Schrödinger’s cat is the thought experiment developed by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger to illustrate the probability wave theory he had 4 6

Yeats, The Letters, pp. 787–8. 5 Ibid., p. 69. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926), pp. 122–9. The source of the annotation is Yeats’s personal copy of Science and the Modern World, now held in the W. B. Yeats Library, Collections, National Library of Ireland.

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captured in a mathematical equation, a theory that speaks to the ‘greater reality’ Whitehead writes of and the underlying wave-particle dynamics Planck had uncovered in 1900. Ironically, this knowledge itself derives from the imaginative mind of Schrödinger, as the Nobel physicist Richard Feynman reminds us: ‘Where did we get that [equation] from? Nowhere. It is not possible to derive it from anything you know. It came out of the mind of Schrödinger.’7 The probability wave allows for a connection between quantum theory and all types of matter. In turn, the Schrödinger equation applies to all waves such as the sea and sound waves that we may perceive with our senses in the classical Newtonian world. This link between the subatomic world and our own is unobservable, and thus the quantum universe remains a probability function that is a mask of willed connection (in Yeatsian terms) to our atomic realm. We cannot see superpositional states or indeterminate realities except in our mind’s eye. Schrödinger illustrates this phenomenon in his famous thought experiment of a cat in a box: this cat, trapped in a box, is neither alive nor dead and exists instead in a superpositional state. The cat must wait for the quantum particles to de-cohere into one form or state that will determine whether the cat will be poisoned or not; whether he will live or die. This thought experiment serves to elucidate the paradoxes contained in quantum theory and the mysterious process of the formal resolution of positional matter from quantum superpositional states. For Schrödinger, the answer lies within the universe itself, and he posited that the bifurcation of the universe at each atomic event allows for observation and thus de-coherence of any and all superpositional states ad infinitum.8 Thus the eponymous cat is either alive or dead and escapes the indeterminacy of superpositionality that yet exists in the world. This natural mystery has not, aptly, been resolved by physicists and duality is accepted as part of what we are (and are not). A Vision itself exists in two separate forms which intermingle to produce an overall Yeatsian philosophy, and the texts themselves emerge from what Margaret Mills Harper calls a ‘Wisdom of Two’, that is the duality of thought between the subconscious mind of George Yeats in automatic writing and the conscious rendering of those thoughts into philosophical form by her husband W. B. Yeats.9 In this way, they function as a process of doubling, or absence as presence, as George 7

8 9

Quoted in Tony Hey and Patrick Walters, The New Quantum Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 35. Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy (London: Penguin Books, 1990), pp. 3–13. Margaret Mills Harper, Wisdom of Two: The Spiritual and Literary Collaboration of George and W. B. Yeats (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

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Yeats vacates her conscious mind to the occult instructors who present themselves to the mind of Yeats himself. In the Vision papers, George Yeats quotes W. B. Yeats directly on this process of mediumship: ‘She finds the words, we send the wave and she as it were catches it in a box.’10 Critics including Harper have thus sought to recover George’s creative voice in the making of Yeats’s own philosophy. As Harper writes: It is vital to recognize that the veils that hang around the Yeatses’ years of automatic writing, complementary dreaming, compilation of material, and composition of the first two versions of the book A Vision are as much a part of the matter as what lies behind them. The act of hiding in other words is as significant as what is hidden or misconstrued.11

This dichotomy of abstract and hidden knowledge and material reality is the subject of poetic investigation in Yeats’s lyric ‘The Cat and the Moon’. The cat in the poem, named Minnaloushe, performs the universal dance of interactive energetic matter, absorbing the changing crescents of the moon and, in turn, changing the light of the moon itself. Minnaloushe’s dance echoes the formation of quantum theory born out of the struggle between light waves and particle matter, and, likewise, the cat embodies the change he instigates in his feline dance. However, the question of embodied truth versus a conscious understanding of that truth remains a mystery to the poet, just as it does for the physicist Schrödinger in his own cat analogy: Does Minnaloushe know that his pupils Will pass from change to change, And that from round to crescent, From crescent to round they range?12

Yet the final lines of the poem equate embodied knowledge to wisdom for the poet. Minnaloushe’s eyes reflect the changing moon back to itself and the cat now embodies lunar wisdom, even if he is not fully aware of its significance. He is transformed, as is Leda in a later poem, by the process that gives him knowledge: the cycles of embodied life as reflected in the light of the ever-changing moon: Minnaloushe creeps through the grass Alone, important and wise, And lifts to the changing moon His changing eyes.13

10 12

Ibid., p. 26. 11 Ibid., p. 32. W. B. Yeats, The Poems, ed. Daniel Albright (London: Everyman, 1990), p. 217.

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13

Ibid.

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For the poet Yeats, as for theoretical physics, the acceptance of the limits of our knowledge of the universe is wisdom enough; it is the limit that paradoxically points the way forward. Yeats describes in A Vision how his wife George would often dream she was a cat, and her subconscious dreams would interfere with the automatic transmissions of her instructors: She dreamed she was a cat lapping milk or a cat curled up asleep and therefore dumb. The cat returned night after night, and once when I tried to drive it away by making a sound one makes when playing at being a dog to amuse a child, she awoke trembling.14

Schrödinger’s cat experiment illustrates the same problem as George Yeats’s image of herself in feline form: the conscious mind cannot know its own limits because it cannot, by definition, fully access its own subconscious. The accession to complete knowledge must remain elusive to the human condition, despite, or even because of, our lived experience in the natural world. Our conscious and subconscious minds replicate, therefore, the antinomies of nature in allowing for superpositional states whereby knowledge is held indeterminately within the subconscious; yet such thoughts may only come to full realisation in the ‘de-coherence’ of our habitual lived experience.

The DNA of Irish Revival This question of individual realisation born out of ‘complementarity’ is captured by the famous lines Yeats wrote in the late poem ‘Among School Children’: ‘O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,/How can we know the dancer from the dance?’15 The paradox of ‘unity of being’ emerging through an ever-present essential duality may be applied in general terms to the Revival in Ireland and the project of transformation of the colonial mindset through the recovery of a Gaelic past to initiate a renaissance in both Gaelic and English. However, within this antinomy too were contained other schisms, as Eve Patten notes in ‘Ireland’s “Two Cultures” Debate’, among them ‘that between nationalism and cosmopolitanism and that between literature and science’.16 Patten demonstrates how Yeats and his contemporaries in the Revival movement chose to eschew the considerable Irish scientific accomplishment of the Victorian era and points to the exchange between Yeats and John Eglinton in the 14 16

Yeats, A Vision, p. 10. 15 Yeats, The Poems, p. 261. Eve Patten, ‘Ireland’s “Two Cultures” Debate: Victorian Science and the Literary Revival’, Irish University Review 33:1 (2003), 1–13 (p. 3).

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Saturday pages of the Daily Express in 1898 as a crystallisation of the discourse within the Revival itself between literature and science. The Yeatsian position was that art must resist a reduction to the material at all costs, and this included the scientific world view of classical physics. In contrast, John Eglinton’s belief was that literature should fully engage with the contemporary world, a world of scientific advance that necessarily affected the lives of artists within this modern society. In summary, Eglinton rejected poetic escapism for an aesthetic of the quotidian that looked to modern technology as a form of artistic national expression itself: ‘The kinematograph, the bicycle, electric tramcars, labour-saving contrivances, etc, are not susceptible of poetic treatment, but are, in fact, themselves the poetry, not without a kind of suggestiveness, of a scientific age.’17 The riposte Yeats delivered to Eglinton in his essay ‘The Autumn of the Flesh’, contended that the arts should remain spiritually informed to inspire the inner nature of humanity amid the encroaching reality of the material, ‘filling our thoughts with the essence of things, and not with things.’18 Patten points to the centrality of this debate to the Irish cultural dynamic at the beginning of the twentieth century and to the influence of Edward Dowden, Professor of English literature at Trinity College Dublin, and a mentor of the young Yeats, who believed in the integration of science and the arts. However, she also shows how science lost ground in this Irish cultural milieu, and ‘after the fall of Parnell, the demand was for symbols of the Celt, not the scientist’.19 More generally, an eschewal of science and technology would in turn come to be seen as a nationalist trope in Ireland that emanated from the rejection of the intellectual pursuits and interests of the Protestant elite by the Revivalists and foreshadowed the subsequent resistance to technological and scientific development in the new Irish state under Éamon de Valera which sought to return to an idealised Irish pastoral. In Ireland and the Contemporary (2017), Margaret Kelleher and Nicholas Wolf consider how difficult it is for scholars to understand the contemporary moment they live through. It is in the gap of history that we can ‘recover the subject’s own historical point of view’, they argue.20 17

18

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John Eglinton, ‘Mr. Yeats and Popular Poetry’, in Literary Ideals in Ireland, ed. John Eglinton, W. B. Yeats, A.E., and W. Larminie (London: Fisher Unwin, 1899), pp. 41–6 (p. 42). W. B. Yeats, ‘The Autumn of the Flesh’, in Literary Ideals in Ireland, ed. John Eglinton, W. B. Yeats, A.E., and W. Larminie (London: Fisher Unwin, 1899), pp. 69–75 (p. 74). Patten, ‘Ireland’s “Two Cultures” Debate’, p. 8. Margaret Kelleher and Nicholas Wolf, ‘Introduction: Ireland and the Contemporary’, Ireland and the Contemporary [Special Issue], Éire-Ireland 52.1–2 (2017), 9–16 (p. 9).

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A comparable act of recovery animates Declan Kiberd and P. J. Mathews’s work as editors of The Handbook of the Irish Revival (2015), whereby they challenge earlier simplified tropes by recovering the diversity of thought and writing at this embryonic time in Ireland. In bringing together a vast array of Revivalist writings, The Handbook provides a compendium of scholarly resources to allow for a more nuanced understanding of the debates around science at the turn of the twentieth century. Here, the editors argue that the invigoration of Irish culture through Gaelic language and culture would allow Ireland to move out from the shadow of her neighbouring island, Britain, to become a modern independent state. The Revival may thus be viewed not as a simplistic rejection of the modern world of technological change in favour of a pastoral idyll, but rather as a recognition of a culturally rich Gaelic past to allow for a decolonised, modern Irish future: J. M. Synge, for instance, found on the Aran Islands many elements of the culture of Left Bank Paris, and Patrick Pearse argued that you could Europeanise writing in Irish without de-Gaelicising it. All agreed on the need for new forms of art and thought in which an unfettered Irish mind could become metropolitan to itself.21

This independent Irish mindset allowed for the translation of the Gaelic past into the Anglo-Irish present. Synge, for instance, writing of the appropriation of the English language by the Irish mind cites W. B. Yeats as an exemplar of this change: ‘It is especially in the work of W. B. Yeats, the writer of genius who leads the new school of Irish poetry, that the true extent of this advance can be seen.’22 Thus the translation of the past was seen as central to its healing to allow a new body of Irish cultural life to emerge and to produce new forms of art. Yeats’s poetry during the Revival period presented the land of Ireland itself as a healing force, and he invokes the supernatural elements of Gaelic myth to bring consolation to modern daily life and, indeed, to escape from it: I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart’s core.23

21

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Declan Kiberd and P. J. Mathews, eds., The Handbook of the Irish Revival: An Anthology of Cultural and Political Writings, 1891–1922 (Dublin: Abbey Theatre Press, 2015), p. 58. Ibid., p. 70. 23 W. B. Yeats, ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, The Poems, p. 60 (lines 9–12).

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The freedom Yeats sought in this ‘lake isle’ was ultimately inside himself, in his ‘heart’s core’, and this wisdom of using self to heal self extended to the poet’s conception of recovering the ‘heart’s core’ of Gaelic Ireland for an ideal Irish future. For Yeats, the new science of Einstein and his contemporaries was to provide its own form of escape from the dichotomy between external and internal realities, between the ‘pavements grey’ of a well-trodden material realm and the freeing indeterminacy of waveparticle duality and relativity theories. Different times produce different viewpoints, and The Handbook of the Irish Revival speaks to this historiographical uncertainty as a form of relativity itself: ‘Different versions of the Revival have been produced at different historical moments.’24 Notably Yeats, in his approach to the Revival, considers historical relativity as constitutive, and in a letter to T. Sturge Moore he includes selfknowledge in this process: ‘the consciousness by which we know ourselves and exist is itself irrational’.25 Such ‘irrational’ knowing extended, in the Yeatsian view, to classical scientific epistemology, and he reserved special ire for the philosophy of John Locke in his short poem ‘Fragments’. In this lyric, Yeats links the modernisation of society, as represented by the image of the spinning jenny, to a form of original sin that stems from the irrationality of considering partial knowledge as the whole and brings destruction alongside creation in its wake. The religious overtones within the lyric add a tone of irony as Yeats writes of the necessity for a Godly intervention to exorcise the sinful error of mankind’s rejection of the natural and spiritual worlds for industrial control and material gain. The second stanza sees that spiritual intervention informs Yeats himself, in a mode that is both of the natural world and yet also of the mystical: ‘Where got I that truth?/Out of a medium’s mouth/Out of nothing it came’.26 Here, Yeats views knowledge as given and received in a mysterious process that is itself irrational and unscientific. The epistomological paradox the poet presents us with is the reversal of perceived understandings of ordering and chaos. It is the shift to self-conscious understanding in Adam and Eve that results in their fall and subsequent expulsion from the divinely ordered Garden of Eden into chaos. Yeats links this original sin to scientific materialism: ‘Descartes, Locke and Newton took away the world and gave us its excrement instead.’27 24 25

26 27

Kiberd and Mathews, The Handbook of the Irish Revival, p. 27. W. B. Yeats & T. Sturge Moore: Their Correspondence 1901–37, ed. Ursula Bridge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953), p. 131. Yeats, The Poems, p. 260. W. B. Yeats, Explorations, selected by Mrs W. B. [George] Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1961), p. 325.

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When we examine Yeats’s view of science and his repudiation of Locke and Newton, among others, in his poetry, it is easy to come to the view that the poet was wholly anti-materialist and anti-scientific and brought this to bear in his espousal of the Irish Revival. However, what Yeats does in his thinking, rather, is reverse the understanding of science as ordered. For Yeats, the self-conscious application of materialism is a fallacy, and he rejects this determinism in favour of what we would now see as a postmodern, multidimensional world view that necessarily includes mystery and co-creation. Accordingly, the poet enthusiastically welcomed the new science of multidimensionality and the unknown. He espoused this new physics as complementary to his own vision of mysterious energetic will as a form of creation: ‘Matter is the source of all energy, all creative power, all that separates one thing from another, not matter as understood by Hobbes and his mechanists, . . . but interpreted with profound logic almost what Schopenhauer called will.’28 The new paradigm of physics, as Kiberd notes, contained ‘a principle of high irony: the notion that with every structuralization of chaos, chaos itself increases, because each new structure gives rise to new reactions’.29 What Kiberd is referring to is the exponential increase in disorder within any contained system, or the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Order itself, Kiberd argues, was viewed by Yeats as an illusion, a stylistic arrangement of forms that hold within them the potential for collapse into disorder; and this included his own philosophy in A Vision. In this vein, civilisation itself becomes susceptible to potential collapse, and Kiberd persuasively cites Yeats’s late poem ‘Meru’ as explicative of the poet’s viewpoint. The original conception for the poem, which Yeats wrote out in longhand, confirms this idea of ‘Meru’: Theme for a poem: Civilisation is a dream, a series of illusions which we Dissolve as we die of the truth The ascetic frozen into the ice bird [sic] sits naked in Contemplation he alone of living things possesses the truth.30

Disorder increases through historical cycles that pile atop each other to create a vertiginous mountain of the ephemeral past we live through and 28 29

30

W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (London and New York: Macmillan, 1961), p. 461. Declan Kiberd, After Ireland: Writing the Nation from Beckett to the Present (London: Head of Zeus Ltd, 2017), p. 173. W. B. Yeats, Michael Robartes and the Dancer: Manuscript Materials by W. B. Yeats, ed. Thomas Parkinson with Anne Brannen (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 243.

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use to build the future. It is the contemplative holy men within the poem who expose their bodies to the naked truth of this past as a mere illusion and who provide an exemplar of freedom through the painful process of witness and recognition. In his recent book, After Ireland (2017), Kiberd applies the concept of recognition itself to the ‘arrangements of physicists’ who co-create formal theories which fall and rise through different epochs to allow for new creative understandings of the universe in the art of science.31 He links this ongoing conceptual change within the body of knowledge to the principle of general relativity and, indeed, to literature: ‘If all scientific cosmologies and all physicists’ codes are precarious and provisional arrangements this makes them like Banville’s notion of literary tradition: strictly temporary arrangements, subject to endless modification on a principle of general relativity.’32 Thus Kiberd views the creativity of the human mind as linked to the Copernican revolution, whereby God and the earth are sidelined in cosmology and replaced with a void. This postmodern void allows for the freedom of the replication of worlds within body and mind that are conversely devoid of actual reality and ‘selfenclosed’.33 In Ireland and the Contemporary, cited earlier, Kelleher and Wolf describe the ‘enclosed’ body of library acquisitions and digital technologies which form the mode by which scholars examine the contemporary and that will allow for future scholars to revise these analyses in new forms.34 Notably, they write of the importance of witnessing in any ethical reconsideration of the past and cite the new understandings that emerge through a process of reconciliation between the differential of past and present to allow for a reordering of the societal future. This gestalt of consciousness that stands outside of itself to view the whole through reflective ordering is congruent with the new paradigm of physics. Erwin Schrödinger, in his lecture series entitled What is Life? (1944), considers the pervasive nature of order in human consciousness and bodily existence despite the chaos of constant change and ensuing entropy. What Schrödinger posits is that the material carrier of life is a complex tapestry that allows for innovation, repetition, and difference. However, Schrödinger points out that the properties of individuality come to be out of difference, and for him, like Jacques Derrida in a later time, it is the difference or otherness which establishes any property. For Schrödinger, this question of order versus chaos through differential time is vital to the persistence principle of life. 31 34

33 Kiberd, After Ireland, p. 166. 32 Ibid. Ibid., p. 176. Kelleher and Wolf, ‘Introduction: Ireland and the Contemporary’, p. 9.

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However, Schrödinger’s paradox remains: ordered formal persistence persists both from and through chaos, and the past is retained within the structures of the present and future in its own gyre of timely relativity.

Man and the Echo: An End as Beginning Yeats published his first works, The Island of Statues (1885) and Mosada (1886), in the Dublin University Review, and George Bornstein’s edition of the Manuscript Materials suggests that Yeats worked interchangeably on the two poems at one time.35 These early works are set in Arcadia and medieval Spain, respectively, and display the influence of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Edmund Spenser in their aesthetic. However, these formative works by the young Yeats also foreshadow the thematic antinomies that were to remain throughout his writing life: the tension of opposites he perceived within human consciousness and its perception of the world. As Bornstein notes, ‘the point is not just that these terms form antinomies, but that they constitute many of the same antinomies to which Yeats devoted his later art’.36 Yeats writes to Katharine Tynan in 1889 that in revising the verse of Mosada, he noticed that his poetry is all ‘the flight into fairyland from the real world, and a summons to that flight . . . the cry of the heart against necessity’.37 Almost five decades later, in August 1938, Yeats recorded a BBC series called ‘The Listener’, in which the elderly poet devoted a third of his reminiscence to Mosada and The Island of Statues and spoke of the pivotal nature of this early work for him even into old age. In terms of nationalism it is interesting to note Yeats’s choice of the name Mosada, a name famously synonymous with the tragedy of suicidal past battles in the Middle East. If we look to Yeats’s own early aspirational nationalism it is steeped in the fairy tales and myths of his youth in Sligo, and in the heroic Gaelic figures who valiantly suffered destruction and death in epic battle. In his two lectures, ‘Nature and the Greeks’ and ‘Science and Humanism’, Schrödinger explores how archives of ancient knowledge inform us to the present day. All enquiry, he suggests, is a search for ontological meaning, and he allies the changes that have occurred in scientific understanding with different world views rather than with ultimate truths: ‘It seems plain and self-evident, yet it needs to be said: the isolated knowledge 35

36

W. B. Yeats, The Early Poetry, Vol. i:Mosada and The Island of Statues: Manuscript Materials by W. B. Yeats, ed. George Bornstein (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 3. Ibid., p. 4. 37 Yeats, The Letters, p. 63.

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obtained by a group of specialists in a narrow field has in itself no value whatsoever, but only in its synthesis with all the rest of knowledge.’38 For Schrödinger, then, the archive that is this ancient, ephemeral knowledge necessarily partakes in the formation of true advancement in the field of science. Schrödinger’s probability wave in physics is likewise concerned with the interpenetrative duality of the material universe with the unseen, and the quantum universe remains a probability function: an external and independent domain that yet yields to the forces of willed connection in the atomic realm we inhabit. Knowledge is central to this dynamic, and he traces alignments between ancient and modern scientific concepts in what he terms ‘a return to antiquity’ through the ever-present archetypal collective unconscious.39 Yeats writes in A Vision that it is the memory of perfect forms that exist on the Great Wheel of Life which engenders successive individual lives and their expression in the ‘Creative Mind’ of humanity. In this way, individual consciousness itself becomes allied to a universal form of historical consciousness as an evolving and overarching episteme. The Greeks understood this as poesis, and, as David Ayers writes, ‘The Greeks regarded actual historical events as ephemeral, but the writing of history had in common with poetry the aim of providing images or examples of that which was eternal, of permanent importance in a transient world.’40 For Yeats and the cultural and political revival, Irish folklore and saga became filled with similar potency, and this symbolic efficacy allowed for an expression of nationality that propelled the cultural and political history of Ireland forward at the turn of the twentieth century. Yeats viewed this national progress as spiritually informed, and he understood the modern era as congruent to the Revivalist approach: Perhaps now that the abstract intellect has split the mind into categories, the body into cubes, we may be about to turn back towards the unconscious, the whole, the miraculous; according to a Chinese sage darkness begins at midday. Perhaps in my search, as in that first search with Lady Gregory among the cottages, I but showed a first effect of that slight darkening.41

In Yeats’s last poem, ‘Politics’, the poet explicitly rejects the dark convictions of strongly held political beliefs for the universal of love: ‘But O that 38

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Erwin Schrödinger, Nature and the Greeks and Science and Humanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 109. Ibid., p. 3. David Ayers, ‘Modernist Poetry in History’, in The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry, ed. Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 11–27 (p. 15). Yeats, Explorations, p. 404.

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I were young again/And held her in my arms.’42 At the start of the lyric, Yeats quotes Thomas Mann: ‘In our time the destiny of man presents its meanings in political terms.’ At a time of growing political and societal crisis, when we too live within echo chambers of consciousness and the intensification of alienating digital manipulation, we would do well to listen. Yeats, Schrödinger, and the greatest minds of the past believed that knowledge comes through accessing the universal probability wave, and that the universal is made manifest depending on our level of consciousness. We have the opportunity in a globalised world to harness this capability for a destiny of compassion or to be harnessed by it. What consciousness will we choose?

Select Bibliography Albright, Daniel, Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and the Science of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Bolton, Lyndon, An Introduction to the Theory of Relativity (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1921). Bornstein, George, Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Harper, Margaret Mills, Wisdom of Two: The Spiritual and Literary Collaboration of George and W. B. Yeats (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). Heisenberg, Werner, Physics and Philosophy (London: Penguin Books, 1990). Kelleher, Margaret, and Nicholas Wolf, ‘Introduction: Ireland and the Contemporary’, Ireland and the Contemporary [Special Issue], Éire-Ireland 52.1–2 (2017), 9–16. Kiberd, Declan, After Ireland: Writing the Nation from Beckett to the Present (London: Head of Zeus Ltd, 2017). Kiberd, Declan, and P. J. Mathews, eds., The Handbook of the Irish Revival: An Anthology of Cultural and Political Writings, 1891–1922 (Dublin: Abbey Theatre Press, 2015). Middleton, Peter, Physics Envy: American Poetry and Science in the Cold War and After (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015). Miller, Nicholas, Modernism, Ireland and the Erotics of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Patten, Eve, ‘Ireland’s “Two Cultures” Debate: Victorian Science and the Literary Revival’, Irish University Review 33:1 (2003), 1–13. Schrödinger, Erwin, What is Life? (1944; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Nature and the Greeks and Science and Humanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 42

Yeats, The Poems, p. 395.

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Yeats, W. B., W. B. Yeats & T. Sturge Moore: Their Correspondence, 1901–37, ed. Ursula Bridge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953). The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allen Wade (London: Rupert-Hart Davis, 1954). The Variorum Edition of the Poems by W. B. Yeats, ed. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (New York: Macmillan, 1957). Explorations, selected by Mrs. W. B. [George] Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1961). A Vision (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1962). Essays and Introductions (London and New York: Macmillan, 1961). The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats, ed. Russell K. Alspach (London and New York: Macmillan, 1966). Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran and Colton Johnson, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1970; 1975). The Early Poetry, Vol. i: Mosada and The Island of Statues: Manuscript Materials by W. B. Yeats, ed. George Bornstein (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987). The Poems, ed. Daniel Albright (London: Everyman, 1990). Michael Robartes and the Dancer: Manuscript Materials by W. B. Yeats, ed. Thomas Parkinson with Anne Brannen (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Vol. iii: Autobiographies, ed. William H. O’Donnell and D. N. Archibald (New York: Scribner, 1999). Yeats, W. B., ed., The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892–1935 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936).

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chapter 12

James Joyce, Irish Modernism, and Watch Technology Katherine Ebury

In a famous photo-shoot of some of the ‘men of 1914’, featuring James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, and John Quinn, taken at Pound’s home in Paris in 1923, these men register the change and continuity associated with modernism through their clothes. Joyce and Pound are raffish but self-contained, hands often in pockets; Ford looks jolly and unfashionable, though he imitates the casual poses of the younger men; Quinn’s clothes and manner in the year before his death are determinedly nineteenth century, down to his watch and chain. Though we cannot see Joyce’s or Pound’s timepieces in these images, we see from the set of indoor photographs that Ford has adopted the comparatively recent fad of the wristwatch. These 1923 photographs may indeed have been taken at one of many moments in Joyce’s life where he had no watch at all; most of the occurrences of watches in Richard Ellmann’s biography record moments where Joyce pawned and sold his timepieces, turning them from wearable technology to ready money. In this sense, Joyce as an impecunious modernist artist kept up a continuity with male characters in Victorian novels, who, as Sue Zemka notes, ‘might own watches intermittently, as watches also functioned as portable property’.1 As ‘watch ownership was a marker of the line between solvency and poverty’,2 so at crucial moments of his life – staying to wrangle with Grant Richards over Dubliners in 1912, returning to Trieste from exile in Zurich in 1919 – Joyce pawned his watch and even asked others to pawn theirs.3 In Joyce’s fiction, characters including Farrington in the Dubliners story ‘Counterparts’ also transform watches into cash. Joyce’s wayward approach to the technology persists into the archives, accounting for the fact that the James Joyce Collection at the 1

2 3

Sue Zemka, Time and the Moment in Victorian Literature and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 3–4. Ibid. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, new and revised edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 331, 467.

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University at Buffalo contains only a wristwatch strap with no face: ‘A leather wristwatch strap that once belonged to Joyce, with envelope, and notation in Beach’s hand; n.d. [?late 1920s]’.4 Soon after their marriage in 1931, as Ellmann notes, Joyce and Nora had a visit from her young sister Kathleen: ‘Joyce observed that the handsome young woman [. . .] was not carrying the watch he had given her in Bognor, and said in surprise, “Have you no watch, Kathleen?” “I pawned it”, she said, abashed. Joyce howled with laughter and said, “That’s just what I’d do.”’5 The anecdote is revealing; none of Joyce’s watches seem to have survived symbolically as such, though these physical objects that he touched will have undoubtedly made their way, via pawn shops, into other hands today. For Joyce’s contemporary Georg Simmel, ‘the universal diffusion of pocket watches’ allowed metropolitan men and women to ‘integrate their relations and activities into a highly complex organism’, but also created a great dependence on the technology so that ‘If all clocks and watches in Berlin would suddenly go wrong in different ways, even if only by one hour, all economic life and communication of the city would be disrupted for a long time.’6 Similarly, Iain Chambers has argued that modernism is ‘a seamless web of total design that stretches from a wristwatch to a city’.7 Since then, recent scholarship has addressed the importance of interdisciplinary perspectives on time in modernism, but has not always centred the technology that informed thinkers such as Henri Bergson and Albert Einstein about the subjectivity of time, especially the pocket watch and the wristwatch as personal timepieces.8 For Einstein and other scientists and philosophers adjacent to modernism, the ideas depend on ‘such images as watches, light signals, locomotives, lightning bolts’; indeed, Einstein’s initial inspirations came from technology, as ‘reading 4

5 6

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‘XIX. Miscellaneous James Joyce Material’, Folder 29, James Joyce Collection, University at Buffalo, https://library.buffalo.edu/jamesjoyce/catalog/xix/ (accessed 19 June 2020). Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 639. Georg Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, in Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities, ed. Richard Sennett (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1969), pp. 46–60 (p. 50). Iain Chambers, Popular Culture: The Metropolitan Experience (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 44. For a selection of works on the topic of time since the New Modernist Studies, see Ronald Schleifer, Modernism and Time: The Logic of Abundance in Literature, Science, and Culture, 1880–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Bryony Randall, Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Michael D’Arcy and Mathias Nilges, eds., The Contemporaneity of Modernism: Literature, Media, Culture (New York: Routledge, 2016); Charles M. Tung, Modernism and Time Machines (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019); and, most recently, Trish Ferguson, ed., Literature and Modern Time: Technological Modernity; Glimpses of Eternity; Experiments with Time (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

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patents at the patents office, Einstein undoubtedly visualized the devices involved in the patents’.9 Modernist studies’ engagement with this temporal technology is still developing, with Cedric Van Dijck’s essay on the wristwatch and wartime in Siegfried Sassoon and Virginia Woolf an important milestone.10 Beyond this wider context of modernism and time philosophy, though his actual possession of timepieces was intermittent, it is important to note that Joyce’s life coincided with a golden age of watch technology, including the development of much cheaper ‘dollar watches’; the diversification of watch manufacturing away from Switzerland; the widespread adoption of the watch by women, especially the middle-class ‘New Woman’; the refinement and miniaturisation of the ‘complication watch’, which incorporated calendars, chronographs, and a repeating function; and the development of the wristwatch and the automatic or self-winding watch.11 But this technological progress was not linear, with newer forms and fashions of the watch overlapping with much older timepieces due to the masculine tradition of handing down watches through the generations.12 The role of watches in Irish modernism was also affected by the Irish semi-colonial situation, where innovations were more slowly exported and adopted. Watch technologies sold in Ireland in Joyce’s day were also not made in the country itself, meaning that Irish consumers benefitted even more substantially from American ‘dollar watches’. In Joyce’s story ‘Counterparts’, Farrington, unusually compared to the patterns discussed in Victorian fiction, pawns his watch chain, rather than the watch itself, to go on a drinking spree, suggesting that he may have a ‘dollar watch’, where the accessories are worth more than the device itself. Watch technology was part of a wider picture of Irish science and technology. As Kathryn Conrad, Cóilín Parsons, and Julie McCormick Weng reflect: ‘Throughout the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, Irish science and technology were largely sponsored by or created in the service of the British Empire, and they often provided legitimacy to the empire’, often in 9

10

11 12

Thomas P. Hughes, ‘Einstein, Inventors, and Invention’, in Einstein in Context, ed. Mara Beller, Robert S. Cohen, and Jurgen Renn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 25–42 (p. 27). Cedric Van Dijck, ‘Time on the Pulse: Affective Encounters with the Wristwatch in the Literature of Modernism and the First World War’, Modernist Cultures 11:2 (2016), 161–78. See Alexander Barter, The Watch: A Twentieth-Century Style History (New York: Prestel, 2019). Still, in modernism we also have the first indications that the inherited watch was no longer desirable; for example, in Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ (1920), the daughters Josephine and Constantia cannot decide whether to give the patriarch’s gold watch to his son or grandson, while details of the story suggest that neither would wish to receive it.

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turn producing a stance of resistance to technology in Irish literary works.13 However, Joyce’s attitude to technology was more open-minded compared to the works of other Irish modernist writers, as Christopher Morash argues in his essay for this volume; Morash demonstrates how in contrast to Yeats, who kept technology such as the gramophone and telephone at a distance, Joyce ‘immers[ed] himself’ in technology in order to create networked connections with the world and other people.14 Indeed, from his earliest writings, Joyce would identify art with technology and the artist with the maker, via his identification with Daedalus, the ‘fabulous artificer’.15 But Joyce would also identify as Icarus, the victim of his father’s mythological invention. Similarly, Kathryn Conrad suggests that authors such as Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Elizabeth Bowen, ‘fully acknowledge that technoscientific development was part of a larger network of forms that could not be so easily disentangled from literary form’, thus allowing technology to ‘inform human interaction’ and ‘share agency’ with us.16 Indeed, Joyce’s choice of Daedalus/Icarus for his founding myth of technology fits exactly with this concept of shared agency, in drawing attention to the pleasures and risks that technology represents; the prosthetic wings provided by his father and his own mind and body contribute equally to Icarus’s joyous flight and his ultimate demise.17 Recent critical work on Joyce and specific technologies has often linked them, as I do here, to the theme of changing perceptions of memory, desire, and embodiment within modernist literature; for example, Julie McCormick Weng’s excellent reading of ‘The Dead’, the final story in Dubliners, considers the pivotal confrontation of Gretta and Gabriel with Michael Furey in relation to a technological shift from gaslight to electric lighting.18 My focus on the watch certainly fits with these ideas shared by Morash, Conrad, and

13

14

15

16 17

18

Kathryn Conrad, Cóilín Parsons, and Julie McCormick Weng, ‘Introduction’, in Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism, ed. Conrad, Parsons, and McCormick Weng (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2019), pp. 1–16 (p. 3). Christopher Morash, ‘Technologies of Sound: Telephone/Gramophone’, Chapter 4 in this volume, p. 77. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man, ed. Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 142. Kathryn Conrad, ‘Technology and Irish Modernism’, Chapter 10 in this volume, p. 168–185. Elsewhere, Kathryn Conrad has explored the influence of a Daedalus informed by technology on Joyce’s work via Tom Greer’s 1885 novel, A Modern Daedalus. See Conrad, ‘Infernal Machines: Weapons, Media, and the Networked Modernism of Tom Greer and James Joyce’, in Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism, ed. Kathryn Conrad, Cóilín Parsons, and Julie McCormick Weng (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2019), pp. 77–94. Julie McCormick Weng, ‘John Eglinton: An Irish Futurist’, in Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism, ed. Kathryn Conrad, Cóilín Parsons, and Julie McCormick Weng (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2019), pp. 34–52.

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McCormick Weng of technological immersion and intimacy and a shared agency between devices and bodies; the watch, when worn on the body, becomes a part of the body, even if when removed from the wearer it might appear to be a mere commodity or symbol of our oppression by time, capital, and empire. Across his career, as my past work and that of other critics such as Andrzej Duszenko, Keith Booker, David Ben-Merre, Jeff Drouin, and Ruben Borg has shown, Joyce frequently included reflections on a changing landscape of time in response to Einstein’s ‘new physics’.19 However, while there has been important recent research touching on this topic, as in my wider survey of work in modernist studies, no critic has yet fully centred the watch as a technological index of Joyce’s attitudes to time and embodiment.20 Because of the importance of time in Joyce’s work, as opposed to his life, one of many myths that had arisen about him by 1921 was that he had a surfeit of watches: he reflected to Harriet Shaw Weaver that ‘Mr Lewis told me he was told that I was a crazy fellow who always carried four watches and rarely spoke except to ask my neighbour what o’clock it was.’21 Wyndham Lewis may have made this story up entirely given his own time obsessions, which he would shortly outline in Time and Western Man (1927), but Joyce nevertheless enshrined this anecdote in Finnegans Wake (1939), and the myth persists even in a contemporary book of trivia.22 In this essay, I will look at three specific examples of Joyce’s concern with watch technology, located in the relationship of timepiece and character; first, I will discuss Bertha’s wristwatch in Joyce’s play Exiles

19

20

21 22

See Katherine Ebury, Modernism and Cosmology: Absurd Lights (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Andrzej Duszenko, ‘The Joyce of Science: Quantum Physics in Finnegans Wake’, Irish University Review 24:2 (1994), 272–82, and ‘The Relativity Theory in Finnegans Wake’, James Joyce Quarterly 32:1 (1994), 61–70; M. Keith Booker, ‘Joyce, Planck, Einstein, and Heisenberg: A Relativistic Quantum Mechanical Discussion of Ulysses’, James Joyce Quarterly 27:3 (1990), 577– 86; David Ben-Merre, ‘“What Points of Contact Existed between these Languages?”: James Joyce, Albert Einstein, and Interdisciplinary Study’, James Joyce Quarterly 47:1 (2009), 25–49; Jeffrey S. Drouin, James Joyce, Science, and Modernist Print Culture: ‘The Einstein of English Fiction’ (London: Routledge, 2014); and Ruben Borg, The Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida (London: Continuum, 2007). See the opening of Van Dijck, ‘Time on the Pulse’, which uses Ulysses to open a conversation about Sassoon and Woolf. See also Paul Fagan, ‘Out of Joint: James Joyce and “Irish Time”’, in Boundaries, Passages, Transitions: Essays in Irish Literature, Culture and Politics in Honour of Werner Huber, ed. Hedwig Schwall (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2018), pp. 143–62. Ellmann, James Joyce, 510. See James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Faber & Faber, 2002), 517.36. See also Anon., Mental Floss: Scatterbrained (New York: HarperCollins, 2006): ‘But Joyce sometimes wore five wristwatches on one arm, which was mere eccentric accessorizing’ (p. 21).

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(1918); followed by Bloom’s pocket watch in Ulysses (1922); and, finally, HCE’s timepiece in Finnegans Wake. Freud argues, in his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1916–17), in relation to a young woman who developed pathological symptoms regarding the many watches and clocks that she owned, that this modern technology could have a powerful relationship with female sexuality. At night, he recounts the large clock in her room is stopped, all other clocks are removed, not even the wrist watch on her night table is suffered to remain [. . .] she knows that these precautions are scarcely justifiable for the sake of quiet; the ticking of the small watch could not be heard even if it should remain on the nighttable.23

For this patient, timepieces represented the female genitals, and ‘the ticking of the clock may be compared to the throbbing of the clitoris during sexual excitement’.24 He argues that this might be true for other women as well, ‘owing to their relation to periodic processes and equal intervals of time. A woman may boast that her menstruation behaves with the regularity of clockwork.’25 Her refusal to sleep in a bedroom where timepieces were present, alongside a wish that the connecting door to her parents’ room be kept open, reflected her lack of readiness for an independent sexuality and a fixation on the primal scene. One contemporary psychoanalyst, in exploring the case history of Nanette Leroux from the 1820s, has also conceptualised a French peasant woman’s fantastical demand for a watch as a desire for autonomy, self-regulation, and sexual liberation.26 While I would not go as far as Freud in my analysis of Bertha in Joyce’s play Exiles, it is true to say that at an important moment in the play, her wristwatch (then a new technology that was significant for the ‘New Woman’) reflects her awareness of the possibility of greater sexual liberation. In the context of early modernism, a woman’s possession of any piece of technology, but perhaps particularly a watch, which would enable her to enter the labour market and to make assignations with men, could be impossibly freeing. And, as with Joyce’s sister-in-law Kathleen, the wristwatch functioned for modernist women as it had for Victorian men as portable property that could be pawned or sold. 23

24 26

Sigmund Freud, ‘Lecture XVII: The Meaning of the Symptoms’, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (New York: Liveright, 1920), pp. 221–35 (p. 228). Ibid., p. 230. 25 Ibid., p. 229. See Jan Goldstein, Hysteria Complicated by Ecstasy: The Case of Nanette Leroux (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

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We see advertisements for the wristwatch in the English papers during the 1890s, as well as their presence in fiction such as in Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Man with the Watches’ (1898), but we do not see them in the Irish classifieds until 1910.27 But in all areas of the world, the wristwatch ‘only became a popular fad’ during the First World War.28 In this sense, it is especially important to explore the importance of Joyce’s use of the wristwatch in Exiles, a text which is earlier than any of Van Dijck’s examples in which he focuses on Siegfried Sassoon’s poem ‘Attack’ (1918) and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927). Joyce began taking notes for the play in 1913 and it was written in 1914–15, alongside Ulysses; it was first performed in Munich in 1919, with an English production in 1926. The play is set in the summer of 1912, which makes the character of Bertha a very early adopter of wristwatch technology, the type of an Irish modern woman. Despite her traditional ‘lavender dress’, ‘cream gloves’, and ‘sunshade’ as well as her patient expression in the stage directions, we know before we see her that she is not a conventional Irish woman; she has lived in Italy and borne a child outside of marriage. In this sense the wristwatch is used as an example of one of those ‘machines [. . .] that could advance cosmopolitan impulses in Ireland and Irish literature’.29 Within Joyce’s play the wristwatch represents both Bertha’s capacity for an expression of independent sexuality, her capacity to betray her partner Richard Rowan with his friend Robert Hand, but also reflects the way her body is regulated and circumscribed. We only become aware that she has been wearing a watch all along in Act ii, when she unexpectedly arrives for an assignation at Robert’s cottage. The wristwatch is centred throughout the scene: robert. [From the bedroom.] You have not gone? bertha. No. robert. I am in the dark here. I must light the lamp. [He is heard striking a match, and putting a glass shade on a lamp. A pink light comes in through the doorway. Bertha glances at her watch at her wristlet and then sits at the table.] robert. [As before.] Do you like the effect of the light?30

The watch quickly recurs as Bertha and Robert investigate intellectually and emotionally if they ought to be together, given how much Richard 27

28 30

See Anon., ‘Lost and Found’, The Irish Times, 24 June 1910; Anon., ‘W. Stokes, Westmoreland Street’, The Irish Times, 20 December 1910, p. 3. Van Dijck, ‘Time on the Pulse’, p. 166. 29 McCormick Weng, ‘John Eglinton’, p. 36. James Joyce, Exiles: A Critical Edition, ed. A Nicholas Fargnoli and Michael Patrick Gillespie (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2016), p. 124.

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seems to want their connection in the context of his own infidelities and insecurities. This part of the scene is worth quoting more at length: robert. [Turning towards her.] If it were not only something brutal with this person or that – for a few moments. If it were something fine and spiritual – with one person only – with one woman. [Smiles.] And perhaps brutal too. It usually comes to that sooner or later. Would you try to forget and forgive that? bertha [Toying with her wristlet.] In whom? robert. In anyone. In me. bertha. [Calmly.] You mean in Dick. robert. I said in myself. But would you? bertha. You think I would revenge myself? Is Dick not to be free too? robert. [Points at her.] That is not from your heart, Bertha. bertha. [Proudly.] Yes, it is; let him be free too. He leaves me free also. robert. [Insistently.] And you know why? And understand? And you like it? And you want to be? And it makes you happy? And has made you happy? Always? This gift of freedom which he gave you – nine years ago? bertha. [Gazing at him with wide open eyes.] But why do you ask me such a lot of questions, Robert? robert. [Stretches out both hands to her.] Because I had another gift to offer you then – a common simple gift – like myself. If you want to know it I will tell you. bertha. [Looking at her watch.] Past is past, Robert. And I think I ought to go now. It is nine almost. robert. [Impetuously.] No, no. Not yet. There is one confession more and we have the right to speak.31

Robert gradually confesses that he wished to marry her before she and Richard left Ireland, and as they eventually listen to the rain and put out the lamp it seems, though Joyce does not commit himself, they share what Robert later calls ‘a sacred night of love’.32 Van Dijck argues of the modernist wristwatch in general, that with this technology: Instead of having to retrieve a watch from one’s pocket, [. . .] time was visibly in the open, and could be consulted at will. That act of consultation no longer implied an active gesture; rather, a glance sufficed to read the face of the watch. Checking the time developed into something of an unconscious habit. Most remarkable of all, the appearance of the wristwatch signified that public time was now not merely carried in close corporeal proximity (e.g. in a pocket) but instead literally worn on the body.33 31

Ibid., pp. 131–2.

32

Ibid., p. 165.

33

Van Dijck, ‘Time on the Pulse’, pp. 167–8.

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The function of the wristwatch in Exiles is a little stranger than this. Bertha’s action of checking her wristwatch and ‘toying with’ it at the crucial moment of deciding whether or not to sleep with Robert registers desire for him, especially following from my earlier exploration of the Freudian connection between the watch and the genitals.34 Bertha’s gesture also registers her essential difference from her partner Richard, who is ‘free and easy about time’.35 But the awkwardness of her watch-checking movements, which are much less smooth than Van Dijck suggests, reflects both the newness of the technology and Bertha’s awareness that Richard only wishes her to express her free sexuality, what he calls her ‘complete liberty’ in a situation that he has engineered.36 Her interest in the time reflects her awareness that she will continue to be accountable to Richard, as her partner and the father of her child, after this night of freedom, as well as perhaps an unconscious impatience that this experience is empty for her and something to get over with, given the power of the queer connection between Richard and Robert. She also draws a more metaphysical insight from consulting the watch, in her resigned ‘Past is past’.37 Previous accounts of Exiles, which is still somewhat neglected, have focused on Richard’s feelings in relation to Joyce’s philosophy of love; but my focus on Bertha’s modernist gesture of checking her wristwatch allows us to recentre the play around her dilemma and experience.38 Joyce’s own notes for the play support my contrasting reading of the centrality of Bertha as a character: ‘Through these experiences she will suffuse her own reborn temperament with the wonder of her soul at its own solitude and at her beauty, formed and dissolving itself eternally amid the clouds of morality’.39 Given the intensity of the wristwatch scene in Exiles, Ulysses, set in 1904, represents a return to a slightly older tradition of watch ownership: Bloom 34 38

39

Joyce, Exiles, p. 131. 35 Ibid., p. 67. 36 Ibid., p. 81. 37 Ibid., p. 132. For excellent critical work that centres the male perspective within Joyce’s play, see, for example, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Joyce upon the Void: The Genesis of Doubt (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991); Scarlett Baron, ‘Adultery and Sympathy in Ulysses and Exiles’,‘Strandentwining Cable’: Joyce, Flaubert, and Intertextuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 107–32; Ellen McWhorter, ‘“Deeply and Suddenly Touched”: Homoerotics in James Joyce’s Exiles’, James Joyce Quarterly 53:1–2 (2015–16), 23–36; and James Fraser, ‘“Like Thieves in the Night”: Sexual Betrayal as Dispossession in Exiles’, Joyce & Betrayal (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 103–32. Joyce’s notes for the play could not be reprinted in the 2016 critical edition I am using, as the estate refused permission. They can be viewed here: http://exilespages.blogspot.fr/2016/01/notes.html (accessed 11 July 2022). Joyce’s original notes on Bertha’s experience also point directly towards the technique of Ulysses: ‘Homesickness and regret for dead girlish days are again strongly marked. A persistent and delicate sensuality (visual: pictures, adorned with holly and ivy; gustatious: currant cake, bread and butter, lemonade; tactual: sunshine in the garden, a big fire, the kisses of her friend and grandmother) runs through both series of images’.

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is aware of the wristwatch as a form of new technology but none of the men in the novel, not even his flashy rival for Molly, Blazes Boylan, possess one.40 But the pocket watch as a technology is nonetheless represented by Joyce with the same combination of sexual intensity and social awkwardness as in Exiles. To give just a few examples of how the technology occurs before I move on to a detailed consideration of the ‘Nausicaa’ episode: in ‘Hades’, Martin Cunningham checks his watch when the men are inadvertently hurting Bloom in their remarks about suicide: ‘Martin Cunningham drew out his watch briskly, coughed and put it back. [. . .] – Temporary insanity, of course, Martin Cunningham said decisively’;41 in ‘Scylla and Charybdis’, A.E.’s ‘cooperative watch’ allows him to escape from Stephen’s theory of Hamlet;42 in ‘Wandering Rocks’, Boylan’s eagerness to please Molly sexually is shown as he considers gifts for her in a fashionable shop: ‘He turned suddenly from a chip of strawberries, drew a gold watch from his fob and held it at its chain’s length. – Can you send them by tram? Now?’43 Earlier in the novel, Joyce signals that Bloom allows his watch to regulate his body in a way that foreshadows its role in ‘Nausicaa’. Entering Davy Byrnes, Bloom draws his watch to decide what to order and this behaviour is observed: – God Almighty couldn’t make him drunk, Nosey Flynn said firmly. Slips off when the fun gets too hot. Didn’t you see him look at his watch? Ah, you weren’t there. If you ask him to have a drink first thing he does he outs with the watch to see what he ought to imbibe.44

While many critics have discussed the significance of Bloom’s watch, which stops apparently in response to Molly’s adultery with Boylan, the fact that the watch is also the occasion for his own sexual transgression with Gerty MacDowell has so far gone unnoticed. While we have already considered Bertha’s watch as expressive of sexual desire, in ‘Nausicaa’ Bloom’s technology is explicitly masturbatory. We first see Bloom’s watch from Gerty’s perspective, as her friend Cissy Caffrey determines to ask him the time (‘I’ll ask my uncle Peter over there what’s the time by his conundrum’).45 By this point in the episode, Bloom 40

41 42

While Van Dijck mistakenly argues that Bloom does have a wristwatch, this natural misapprehension comes from connecting Bloom’s thoughts in ‘Nausicaa’ about his stopped watch with the early unreliability of the wristwatch. But earlier in the episode, and elsewhere, we note Bloom’s watch chain and his drawing his watch from his pocket, showing that he has a conventional pocket watch. James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (London: Bodley Head, 1993), 6.337–40. Ibid., 9.269. 43 Ibid., 10.312–14. 44 Ibid., 8.978–81. 45 Ibid., 13.535–6.

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and Gerty have already formed a voyeuristic erotic connection and Gerty jealously watches the interaction: ‘Gerty could see him taking out his watch, listening to it and looking up and clearing his throat and he said he was very sorry his watch was stopped but he thought it must be after eight because the sun was set.’46 Cissy reports suggestively that ‘uncle said his waterworks were out of order’.47 Once Cissy withdraws, Gerty appears to experience an orgasm as Bloom winds his watch: she could see the gentleman winding his watch and listening to the works and she swung her leg more in and out in time. It was getting darker but he could see and he was looking all the time that he was winding the watch or whatever he was doing to it and then he put it back and put his hands back into his pockets. She felt a kind of a sensation rushing all over her and she knew by the feel of her scalp and that irritation against her stays that that thing must be coming on because the last time too was when she clipped her hair on account of the moon.48

It is unclear whether Bloom is really winding his watch, or if he is already masturbating covertly, as he watches Gerty throughout the process. By the time the episode’s perspective switches to Bloom he has come (‘This wet is very unpleasant’)49 and his thoughts are directly about symbolic and real connections between desire, timepieces, and technology: Big he and little she. Very strange about my watch. Wristwatches are always going wrong. Wonder is there any magnetic influence between the person because that was about the time he. [. . .] Back of everything magnetism. [. . .] Magnetic needle tells you what’s going on in the sun, the stars [. . .] Man and woman that is.50

The watch grants him access to a vast cosmic perspective of ‘the sun, the stars’, but also allows him to place his and Molly’s transgressions in a rough equivalence; the watch stops when she and Boylan are having sex and he restarts it by winding it during his encounter with Gerty, as he listens to both the watch and his body. In this sense, Bloom’s watch is decidedly not the equivalent of the stopped mantle clock, ‘a timepiece of striated Connemara marble, stopped at the hour of 4.46 a.m. on the 21 March 1896, matrimonial gift of Matthew Dillon’, to which it is naturally often compared.51 This domestic clock straightforwardly represents Bloom’s marriage; the watch, by contrast, is mutable in its meaning – portable, repairable, regulatory, and liberatory, representing rather Bloom’s body and its desires, its ‘magnetism’. 46 50

Ibid., 13.544–8. Ibid., 13.982–93.

47 51

Ibid., 13.550–1. 48 Ibid., 13.556–63. 49 Ibid., 13.979. Ibid., 17.1334–35. See, for example, Fagan, ‘Out of Joint’, pp. 143–62.

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Finally, in Finnegans Wake, the text is constantly asking variants of the question that HCE, the father figure in the novel, is asked by the cad in the Phoenix Park: ‘could he tell him how much a clock it was that the clock struck had he any idea by cock’s luck as his watch was bradys’ and ‘By the watch, what is the time, pace?’52 Joyce is also generally much more precise than in Exiles or Ulysses in his references to watchmakers and designs, including the Nuremberg Egg,53 Thomas Tompion,54 Waterbury, and Jurgensen.55 While Bloom’s watch type is unidentified, Joyce decided early in the composition of Finnegans Wake, in a notebook kept during 1923, that it was important that HCE had a specific brand of watch: ‘Pop has Waterbury watch’.56 Waterbury was an American clock company, partnered with the Ingersoll Watch Company to make dollar watches: ‘the first truly affordable watch [. . .] the watch was defined by its free distribution with the purchase of a man’s suit’.57 This unique scheme meant that the watch and clothes together, technology and outfit, offered a whole mass-produced ‘style of the flesh’ for lower-middle-class men such as HCE. The peak of their success in Ireland was during the 1880s and 1890s, where we find regular advertising during this time: ‘THE WATERBURY’ WATCH. The ‘Freeman’s Journal’ says: – ‘Serviceable to all, as it is within the reach of everybody. Altogether a capital article.’ The testimony as to the merits of the Waterbury is overwhelming and admits of no dispute. Buy none but the Waterbury Watch.58

HCE’s status as a late Victorian/early Edwardian everyman is thus cemented by the detail of the Waterbury: the ‘E’ in HCE could stand for ‘everybody’, just as the Waterbury was widely described as ‘within the reach of everybody’. The watch, though comparatively reliable, needed a lot of maintenance because of its ‘long wind’ mechanism.59 Ownership of this brand therefore swiftly became associated with a certain amount of 52 55 56

57

58 59

Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 035.18–20; 154.16. 53 Ibid., 151.13. 54 Ibid., 151.18. Ibid., 035.28. James Joyce, The Finnegans Wake Notebooks at Buffalo VI.B.3, ed. Vincent Deane, Daniël Ferrer, and Geert Lernout (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001), p. 130a. Amy Glasmeier, Manufacturing Time: Global Competition in the Watch Industry, 1795–2000 (New York: Guilford Press, 2000), p. 123. “THE WATERBURY” WATCH. Classified Ad 34, The Irish Times, 19 June 1886, p. 8. A set of advertisements sought in vain to challenge this association of Waterbury technology with a tiresome winding action: ‘It is a common fallacy to suppose that the Waterbury Watches take a long time to wind. They do not. They wind as rapidly as any other Keyless Watch’. See Display Ad 1, The Irish Times, 21 December 1892, p. 3.

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buffoonery, which also fits with HCE’s character; in an 1894 column, an anonymous parish priest described how a ‘big, lumbering’ bridegroom took out his watch during the solemn part of the marriage service and began to wind it. I realised that it was a Waterbury, and might last all the rest of the ceremony. So I paused and stared at the man. He smiled at me in a friendly sort of way, but he didn’t understand what was the matter. All this time the steady click of the winder was to be heard.60

This anecdote would have appealed to Joyce and fits with my general emphasis in this chapter on the watch as a technological prosthesis associated with physical, even sexual, excitement, especially in relation to the winding action, as we saw in Bloom’s masturbation amidst this action in ‘Nausicaa’. Indeed, given the 1904 setting, the details of Bloom’s lowermiddle-class position and the sheer length of time that Gerty McDowell seem to observe Bloom taking to wind his timepiece, it is likely that Bloom’s watch is also a Waterbury. Indeed, in one of the hallucinations of ‘Circe’, Bloom is depicted as a youth in a confrontation with his father, ‘In youth’s smart blue Oxford suit with white vestslips, narrowshouldered, in brown Alpine hat, wearing gent’s sterling silver waterbury keyless watch’.61 The most important appearance of HCE’s Waterbury watch, which Joyce marks as a central feature of his character, is, as with Bertha and Bloom, a somewhat scandalous moment during the narration of what Joyce critics term the ‘Phoenix Park incident’. As Paul Fagan argues, the scene in which HCE draws his Waterbury watch and mysteriously loses his reputation reflects Joyce’s views on the Irish colonial situation, including relationships between British Summer Time (forced on Ireland in 1916) and Dunsink Time (removed as a privilege and symbol of difference in 1916), figured through ‘the stopped, slowed, or otherwise misaligned timepiece’.62 The scandalous nature of this moment, in which looking at his watch becomes a trigger for HCE to commit an unspecified crime, gains some energy, as Fagan also suggests, from the Phoenix Park Murders, but I would argue that it cannot be fully understood without placing HCE’s watch in relation to Bertha’s and Bloom’s and exploring the way that, for these earlier protagonists, watches symbolise both enacted and unacted desires. In the Finnegans Wake scene, the Waterbury transforms, becoming first a gun with which HCE is ‘quick on the draw’, pulling the watch ‘from his gunpocket’, then another brand of watch, the Swiss 60 61

Anon., ‘He Wound Up His Watch’, The Irish Times, 30 June 1894, p. 1. Joyce, Ulysses, 15.269–70. 62 Fagan, ‘Out of Joint’, p. 146.

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Jurgensen, and finally an incendiary device, a ‘shrapnel waterbury’. This is all we see HCE do, but from that apparently simple action he gains ‘an impressive private reputation for whispered sins’, leading to theories, both within the text and within its critical history, that in this action of drawing a watch HCE committed either a murder or an act of gross indecency.63 Each of these watches evidence Joyce’s complex feelings about connections between embodiment, sexuality, and technology. In Exiles, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake the watch is an important technological prosthesis, or extension of the self, that corresponds to contemporary ‘wearables’ in the intimacy of their relationship to the body and the sensations they allow characters and readers to register. In these different examples, these devices also regulate the body and function either as a symbol of responsibility to society, as it seems in Bertha’s case (whether she sleeps with Robert or not), or as part of a temporary liberation from that responsibility (for Bloom in ‘Nausicaa’ and HCE in the Phoenix Park). These texts also register, as I have shown, changes in the watch as a form of technology in Joyce’s day, from fashions for cheaper ‘dollar watches’ such as the Waterbury to the more decisive turn to the wristwatch; and, through their somewhat scandalous and transgressive nature, fit in with and transform previous critical traditions of thinking about the radical nature of modernist time.

Bibliography ‘XIX. Miscellaneous James Joyce Material’, Folder 29, James Joyce Collection, University at Buffalo, https://library.buffalo.edu/jamesjoyce/catalog/xix/ Anon., ‘He Wound Up His Watch’, The Irish Times, 30 June 1894, p. 1. Anon., ‘Lost and Found’, The Irish Times, 24 June 1910. Anon., Mental Floss: Scatterbrained (New York: HarperCollins, 2006). Anon., ‘W. Stokes, Westmoreland Street’, The Irish Times, 20 December 1910, p. 3. Baron, Scarlett, ‘Adultery and Sympathy in Ulysses and Exiles’, ‘Strandentwining Cable’: Joyce, Flaubert, and Intertextuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 107–32. Barter, Alexander, The Watch: A Twentieth-Century Style History (New York: Prestel, 2019). Ben-Merre, David, ‘“What Points of Contact Existed between these Languages?”: James Joyce, Albert Einstein, and Interdisciplinary Study’, James Joyce Quarterly 47:1 (2009), 25–49.

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Booker, M. Keith, ‘Joyce, Planck, Einstein, and Heisenberg: A Relativistic Quantum Mechanical Discussion of Ulysses’, James Joyce Quarterly 27:3 (1990), 577–86. Borg, Ruben, The Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida (London: Continuum, 2007). Chambers, Iain, Popular Culture: The Metropolitan Experience (London and New York: Routledge, 2005). Conrad, Kathryn, ‘Infernal Machines: Weapons, Media, and the Networked Modernism of Tom Greer and James Joyce’, in Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism, ed. Kathryn Conrad, Cóilín Parsons, and Julie McCormick Weng (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2019), pp. 77–94. Conrad, Kathryn, Cóilín Parsons, and Julie McCormick Weng, ‘Introduction’, in Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism, ed. Conrad, Parsons, and McCormick Weng (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2019), pp. 1–16. D’Arcy, Michael, and Mathias Nilges, eds., The Contemporaneity of Modernism: Literature, Media, Culture (New York: Routledge, 2016). Drouin, Jeffrey S., James Joyce, Science, and Modernist Print Culture: ‘The Einstein of English Fiction’ (London: Routledge, 2014). Duszenko, Andrzej, ‘The Joyce of Science: Quantum Physics in Finnegans Wake’, Irish University Review 24:2 (1994), 272–82. ‘The Relativity Theory in Finnegans Wake’, James Joyce Quarterly 32:1 (1994), 61–70. Ebury, Katherine, Modernism and Cosmology: Absurd Lights (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Ellmann, Richard, James Joyce, new and revised edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). Fagan, Paul, ‘Out of Joint: James Joyce and “Irish Time”’, in Boundaries, Passages, Transitions: Essays in Irish Literature, Culture and Politics in Honour of Werner Huber, ed. Hedwig Schwall (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2018), pp. 143–62. Ferguson, Trish, ed., Literature and Modern Time: Technological Modernity; Glimpses of Eternity; Experiments with Time (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). Fraser, James, ‘“Like Thieves in the Night”: Sexual Betrayal as Dispossession in Exiles’, Joyce & Betrayal (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 103–31. Freud, Sigmund, ‘Lecture XVII: The Meaning of the Symptoms’, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (New York: Liveright 1920), pp. 221–35. Glasmeier, Amy, Manufacturing Time: Global Competition in the Watch Industry, 1795–2000 (New York: Guilford Press, 2000). Goldstein, Jan, Hysteria Complicated by Ecstasy: The Case of Nanette Leroux (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). Hughes, Thomas P., ‘Einstein, Inventors, and Invention’, in Einstein in Context, ed. Mara Beller, Robert S. Cohen, and Jürgen Renn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 25–42.

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Joyce, James, Dubliners, ed. Robert Scholes, in consultation with Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking Press, 1967). Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (London: Bodley Head, 1993). The Finnegans Wake Notebooks at Buffalo VI.B.3, ed. Vincent Deane, Daniël Ferrer, and Geert Lernout (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001). Finnegans Wake (London: Faber & Faber, 2002). A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man, ed. Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Exiles: A Critical Edition, ed. A. Nicholas Fargnoli and Michael Patrick Gillespie (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2016). Notes for Exiles, http://exilespages.blogspot.fr/2016/01/notes.html. McCormick Weng, Julie, ‘John Eglinton: An Irish Futurist’, in Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism, ed. Kathryn Conrad, Cóilín Parsons, and Julie McCormick Weng (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2019), pp. 34–52. McWhorter, Ellen, ‘“Deeply and Suddenly Touched”: Homoerotics in James Joyce’s Exiles’, James Joyce Quarterly 53:1–2 (2015–16), 23–36. Rabaté, Jean-Michel, Joyce upon the Void: The Genesis of Doubt (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991). Randall, Bryony, Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Schleifer, Ronald, Modernism and Time: The Logic of Abundance in Literature, Science, and Culture, 1880–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Simmel, Georg, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, in Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities, ed. Richard Sennett (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1969), pp. 46–60. Tung, Charles M., Modernism and Time Machines (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019). Van Dijck, Cedric, ‘Time on the Pulse: Affective Encounters with the Wristwatch in the Literature of Modernism and the First World War’, Modernist Cultures 11:2 (2016), 161–78. Zemka, Sue, Time and the Moment in Victorian Literature and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

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chapter 13

Technology, Terminology, and the Irish Language, Past and Present Sharon Arbuthnot

One of the most firmly established technological terms in Modern Irish is ríomhaire.1 Almost universally used to refer to a computer, ríomhaire is based on the verb ríomh ‘count, enumerate; reckon, compute’, but derivatives serve in contexts which have nothing to do with counting. Supplying a rough equivalent of English electronic, for example, ríomh- has been applied as a prefix to words for post, book, and commerce to give ríomhphost ‘email’, ríomhleabhar ‘e-book’, and ríomhthráchtáil ‘e-commerce’. Somewhat surprisingly, in light of its modern technological associations, the word existed also in the medieval period. In its earlier spelling of rímaire, it referred at that time to a human being, a specialist in reckoning time.2 It is difficult to establish precisely the period in which rímaire was current in the Middle Ages, but there is an example of the word in glosses on Latin which probably date from the ninth century,3 and apparently another in an early fifteenth-century manuscript known as Leabhar Mór Leacain, ‘The Great Book of Lecan’.4 Attractive as it might be, the idea of a continuum between the early application of the term to a person and its later use to refer to a device for processing data does not seem to be borne out. No instance of the word can be found in the Historical Irish Corpus, which covers the period from 1600 to 1

2

3

4

For Modern Irish terms, see the online Database of Contemporary Irish Words, which is freely available at www.focal.ie (accessed 31 January 2021). Information on medieval terms has been drawn from eDIL 2019, the electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language, based on the Contributions to a Dictionary of the Irish Language (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1913–76). The resource can be consulted at www.dil.ie (accessed 31 January 2021). Whitley Stokes and John Strachan, ed. and trans., Thesaurus Palaeohibernicus: A Collection of OldIrish Glosses, Scholia, Prose, and Verse, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1901–3), vol. ii, p. 10. eDIL 2019 gives the reference as Dublin, Royal Irish Academy, MS 23 P 2, 172a32. I have not been able to locate the reading at the specified line, however. Images of the manuscript can be viewed at www.isos.dias.ie (accessed 31 January 2021).

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1926,5 and as the entry on rímaire was not added to the electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language (eDIL) until 2019, it even seems unlikely that the medieval usage inspired a twentieth-century revival. Indeed, the only reasonable conclusion to be drawn from a review of the earlier and later evidence is that rímaire/ríomhaire manifested twice in the vocabulary of Irish and was driven by a similar instinct on both occasions – an instinct to employ the root of a verb meaning ‘to count or compute’, along with an agentive suffix, to denote a person or machine involved in counting or computing. The first major lexicographical resources to include Modern Irish ríomhaire in the sense ‘computer’ were Niall Ó Dónaill’s Foclóir GaeilgeBéarla (1977) and the 1978 supplement of ‘Additions and Corrections’ to Tomás de Bhaldraithe’s English–Irish Dictionary. Sponsored by the Government of Ireland, Department of Education, the overarching purpose of de Bhaldraithe’s dictionary was to provide Irish equivalents of English words and phrases which were in general use. In his Preface to the first edition of 1959, however, de Bhaldraithe alluded specifically to ‘new demands made on the language, in fields in which it had been formerly neglected’.6 The main issue here was not a shortage of vocabulary in previously neglected domains but rather a ‘superabundance of conflicting terms’ which had been generated in the decades of radical change leading up to the production of the dictionary.7 With regard to terms for recent inventions and innovations, then, de Bhaldraithe’s work had a standardising effect, as, guided by advice from specialists in particular fields, he aimed to streamline the bulk of neologisms independently suggested by individuals and institutions and, for the most part, to provide a single Irish-language equivalent for each English-language headword. In setting out the rationale for his dictionary, de Bhaldraithe himself offered some sense of the scale of the problem with which he was faced in the mid-twentieth century. He mentioned, for instance, that he had unearthed eighteen different ways of expressing the concept of a telescope, including ciandearcán ‘device for looking into the distance’, súilghloine ‘eye-glass’, gloine fhéachaint ‘looking-glass’, and teileascóp.8 Other indications of the variety of technological terms coined in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries emerge from a review of specialised word-lists which were published around this time. In 1899, a series of 5

6 8

The Historical Irish Corpus comprises over 3,000 texts published in Irish between 1600 and 1926. It can searched at http://corpas.ria.ie (accessed 31 January 2021). Tomás de Bhaldraithe, English–Irish Dictionary (Baile Átha Cliath: An Gúm, 1959), p. v. 7 Ibid. Ibid., p. v, n.3.

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terms pertaining to electricity, telegraphy, and telephony was produced by Father Peadar Ó Laoghaire and printed in Irisleabhar na Gaedhilge.9 In 1907, the same journal published a more extensive list on similar subject matter which had been compiled by Seán Ó Maoláin.10 The suggestions put forward by Ó Laoghaire and Ó Maoláin often do not agree: thus, for ‘electricity’, ‘telegram’, ‘telephone’, and ‘magnet’, Ó Laoghaire has aibhleach, aibhleacht, aibhleach gotha, and maighnéis, while Ó Maoláin prefers aibhléis, sgéalán, guthán, and tracóg.11 The word-lists generated by Ó Laoghaire and Ó Maoláin also offer useful insights into the aims and approaches of early terminologists. Ó Maoláin’s methods of creating vocabulary vary greatly. Some of his terms can be quickly grasped: sgéalán ‘telegram’ is based on sgéal ‘story’ or ‘piece of news’, while guthán ‘telephone’ is derived from guth ‘voice’. On the other hand, he concocts a number of bizarre portmanteau words such as línealbh, which is explained as a blend of líne ‘a line’ and dealbh ‘a shape’ and proposed as an Irish equivalent of English ‘graph’. Most remarkably, throughout his list of more than 400 separate items, Ó Maoláin demonstrates how prefixes and suffixes can be effectively applied to both new coinages and established native words to produce a substantial body of innovative terminology from a relatively limited starting vocabulary. Once aibhléis has been claimed as the Irish for ‘electricity’, saibhléis and daibhléis are advanced as terms for positively and negatively charged current, following the general rule that the Irish prefix so- has positive connotations while do- produces a negative sense. Also, numerous terms are created through the addition of the suffix -óg, such as glacannóg (< glac ‘grasp’) ‘receiver’; cuireannóg (< cuir ‘send’) ‘transmitter’; stadóg (< stad ‘stop’) ‘brake’; and macollóg (? < macalla ‘echo’) ‘gramophone’. The notes which accompany Ó Laoghaire’s word-list reveal some interest in the underlying etymologies of words as well as the same urge to promote terms which are rooted in the history of Irish that we see in Ó Maoláin’s work. In his introductory remarks, Ó Laoghaire recounts how he happened upon the form ‘áibhlech’ while reading Standish O’Grady’s Silva Gadelica, a collection of medieval tales and other texts which appeared in 1892. An extract from the composition which O’Grady entitled Mionannála ‘Minor Annals’, runs co raibe spunc áib[h]lech teined in taer dar 9

10 11

Peadar Ó Laoghaire, ‘Aibhleach’, Irisleabhar na Gaedhilge/The Gaelic Journal 10 (December 1899), 61–2. Seán Ó Maoláin, ‘Aibhléis’, Irisleabhar na Gaedhilge/The Gaelic Journal 17 (December 1907), 440–4. The printed text of Ó Laoghaire’s word-list varies between aíbh- and aibh-. For consistency, I have adopted forms with short -i-.

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a néise ‘and the air behind them was all aglow with sparks’.12 Here, áibhlech is an adjective meaning ‘sparking’, but Ó Laoghaire reasoned that the word might act also as a substantive and be reclaimed in the modern era as a term for electricity. Ó Maoláin followed him in this to some extent in that he allowed aibhleach as an adjective meaning ‘electrical’ but opted for aibhléis as the cognate abstract noun, and it is Ó Maoláin’s suggestion which is still sometimes used as a term for ‘electricity’ today. The other comment which Ó Laoghaire made to explain his choices relates specifically to maighnéis ‘magnet’. Ó Laoghaire notes that ‘a thing is frequently called simply by the name of the place from which it came’. This is, of course, referring to the fact that words for a magnet in various languages derive ultimately from Magnesia, a region in Thessaly. In an age when ‘to be Irish was in many ways not to be English’,13 it seems likely that Ó Laoghaire’s remark was at least partially intended to guard against accusations that maighnéis was simply a Gaelicised version of an English word. In a real – though limited – way, publications like those by Ó Laoghaire and Ó Maoláin represent early experiments in language planning, attempts to dig into the resources of Irish and reuse, reformulate, and repurpose in order to ensure that changing aspects of society could be named and discussed without the need to borrow significantly from other languages. When de Bhaldraithe came to select terms for his dictionary a few decades later, he seems to have had fewer reservations about the influence of non-native words. He included guthán alongside teileafón and fón in the entry on ‘telephone’. Teileagram was given priority in the entry on ‘telegram’, and maighnéad, gramafón, and graf were suggested as Irish equivalents of ‘magnet’, ‘gramophone’, and ‘graph’. That all of these terms are based ultimately on Greek elements was almost certainly an important factor in their admission into de Bhaldraithe’s dictionary. Indeed, in light of the clear classical roots of many technological terms created in Irish over the past century or so, it seems likely that leictreachas (de Bhaldraithe’s preferred term for ‘electricity’, and still the more usual term today) owes something to modern Latin electricus. Meaning literally ‘of amber’, or ‘amber-like’, this form – which is the accepted etymon of English electric – seems to have been coined by English physicist William

12

13

Standish Hayes O’Grady, ed. and trans., Silva Gadelica (I–XXXI): A Collection of Tales in Irish with Extracts Illustrating Persons and Places, 2 vols. (London: Williams & Norgate, 1892), vol. i, p. 412 (Irish text); vol. ii, p. 447 (translation). Maria Tymoczko and Colin Ireland, Language and Tradition in Ireland: Continuities and Displacements (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), p. 10.

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Gilbert around 1600 to denote substances like amber which attract others when rubbed.14 Whatever about the ‘purist’ ideals of Irish Revivalists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, historical evidence attests to a wide range of technological terms loaned into Irish from different languages and adapted to the rules of Irish orthography and phonetics. In almost all cases, there seems to be a direct relationship between how the item or concept was known in Irish and the route by which it was introduced into this new language-community. Thus, peann ‘a pen’ has developed from Latin penna ‘a feather’, illustrating the role played by the Latin Church in the spread of literacy in Ireland from the fifth century onwards.15 After the ninth century, the impact of Norse seafarers and settlers was felt particularly in the vocabulary of maritime technology. Amongst the terms which entered Irish from this source and which have persisted in the language are stiúir ‘a rudder’, sreang ‘string’, cnaipe ‘a button’, and probably bád ‘a boat’.16 An even larger group of loanwords from Norse is attested in medieval Irish texts, including slagbrann ‘a heavy bar or post used to propel missiles’, scellbolg ‘a wall or roof of shields’, and lipting ‘the taffrail of a ship’.17 From the late twelfth century, Irish began to draw increasingly on Norman French, deriving a number of architectural terms – for pillars, gables, watchtowers, and chimneys – as well as miscellaneous other items of vocabulary, including terms for scissors and links in armour.18 As might be expected, English has been a frequent donor language over the centuries. Several Modern Irish words are thought to derive from Old or Middle English, such as seol ‘a sail’, cupa ‘a cup’, and staighre ‘stair(s)’.19 Modern spéaclaí, meaning ‘spectacles’, probably reflects a later borrowing from English. A delve into some of the earliest surviving attestations in Irish suggests that, from at least the fourteenth century onwards, the forerunners of this term were applied to a range of innovations in glass technology. An astronomical tract, translated into Irish in the first half of the fourteenth century, refers at one point to old people who use spechlai glaine to ‘fatten the letters’.20 The fact that spechlai appears to be a plural form may have encouraged the view that the text is alluding here to 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. electric. On the etymology and earliest attestations, see eDIL, s.v. penn. For the underlying Norse words, see eDIL, s.vv. stiúir, sreng, cnap, and bát. For meanings and the underlying Norse words, see eDIL, s.vv. slagbrann, scellbolg, and lipting. For examples, see eDIL, s.vv. 1 pilér, pinniúr, gairéd, seiminér, sisúr, and máille. See eDIL, s.vv. seól, cupa, and staigre. Maura Power, ed. and trans., An Irish Astronomical Tract Based in Part on a Mediæval Latin Version of a Work by Messahalah, Irish Texts Society 14 (London: Irish Texts Society, 1914), p. 28.

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eyeglasses,21 but it is possible that the Irish translator actually had magnifying glasses in mind. Early Modern Irish attests also to the use of a related word to mean ‘mirror’.22 Indeed, an Ulster poem, preserved in manuscripts of the eighteenth century, seems to provide the earliest certain reference in Irish to eyeglasses. In the course of this composition, one of the speakers describes how he puts spéaclóir (as he has it) ‘on my ear’.23 In all likelihood, the influence of English can be detected also in iarann smúdála, the Irish term for a smoothing iron, an early reference to which occurs in a manuscript dating from around 1778–88.24 Here, an tiarann smudála appears alongside phrases such as búclaidhe do bhróga árda ‘buckles for high shoes’ and peignéal gréasaidhe ‘a cobbler’s peg nail’, in a linguistically fascinating verse on items produced by a blacksmith. Early allusions to paper leave no doubt as to the route by which the Irish were introduced to this particular writing material; in a note in Dublin, University College, Franciscan MS A 17, a manuscript produced around the year 1616, a scribe resorts to a hybrid of Irish and English to complain: is olc garb in paper ‘the paper is bad and rough’.25 In time, English paper was assimilated in Irish as páipéar. In what seems to be the only occurrence of the term, English peg nail had already been ‘Gaelicised’ as peignéal in the above-quoted reference from the latter part of the eighteenth century. Other forms mentioned above not only conform to the sounds and spelling of Irish but also take on common Irish suffixes: smúdáil, found as the second element of iarann smúdála, seems to derive from English smooth combined with -áil, a marker of the verbal noun in Irish, while spéaclóir has a well-established agentive suffix. The same techniques for generating vocabulary have been used more recently to spawn a host of new terms in the digital arena. Transliterated English terms of this kind include víreas ‘virus’, tvuít ‘tweet’, and abhatár ‘avatar’. Cliceáil ‘clicking’, tvuíteáil ‘tweeting’, and cúrsóir ‘cursor’ exemplify loaned words which have been combined with or aligned to native suffixes. 21

22

23

24

25

Ibid., pp. 19 and 175; John Alfred Williams, ‘The Irish Astronomical Tract: A Case Study of Scientific Terminology in 14th Century Irish’, unpublished MPhil thesis (University of Sydney, 2002), p. 78. Radharc spéucláire dorcha ‘a vision in a dark mirror’ translates 1 Corinthians 13.12 in the 1602 translation of the New Testament into Irish: see eDIL, s.v. spéclóir. Thomas O’Rahilly, Measgra Dánta: Miscellaneous Irish Poems, Part i, 2nd edn (Dublin and Cork: Cork University Press, 1927), pp. 13, 67. Standish Hayes O’Grady, Robin Flower, and Myles Dillon, Catalogue of Irish Manuscripts in the British Museum, 3 vols. (London: British Museum, 1926–53), vol. i, p. 601. The note can be found at the end of fol. 110r of the manuscript, which can be viewed at www .isos.dias.ie (accessed 31 January 2021).

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Having emerged at different times and through different routes, such vocabulary occasionally shows inconsistences in approach. The letter v, for example, which does not occur in native Irish words, is variously treated: v represents the v- /ˈv/ of virus (Irish víreas), while -bh-, a similarly pronounced cluster in Irish, represents the -v- /v/ of avatar (Irish abhatár). There is also at least one instance where a newly transliterated word happily coincides with a native term which has been in use since the early medieval period. Blog has come into Irish as blag, but in Old Irish, blog or blag referred to a fragment or piece, and was employed in literary contexts to denote a passage or section of text.26 The main current repository for vocabulary of this kind is the website tearma.ie (formerly focal.ie) a terminological database launched in 2006. Amongst other resources, this site has made publicly available word-lists generated by An Coiste Téarmaíochta, the Terminology Committee of Foras na Gaeilge, which is responsible for Irish-language term-creation and management. Lists generated by An Coiste Téarmaíochta are intended to ensure that Irish has equivalents for the vast majority of terms which are presently in use internationally. Inevitably, this has meant that a high proportion of the vocabulary contained in the database has been produced by the committee rather than collected from the testimony of Irish speakers, and a review of the terminological database in 2007 found that it was being accessed mainly by translators, and that around 80 per cent of the Irish terms had never been requested.27 Given that a central aim of the work of An Coiste Téarmaíochta is to provide for future needs of the language, it seems likely that a comparable review conducted today would reveal that the database is being accessed much more extensively and by a more diverse group of users. Transliterations, with and without Irish suffixes, account for many of the technological terms which have either been suggested by An Coiste Téarmaíochta and other official bodies or arisen naturally within Irishlanguage communities. That said, more complex approaches to the creation of new vocabulary are in evidence also, even in some prevalent names for everyday items. Teilifís ‘television’ and grianghraf ‘photograph’ both feature in de Bhaldraithe’s dictionary. The first element of the former and the second element of the latter are essentially transliterations. There can be little doubt that English television and photograph lie immediately below 26

27

See eDIL, s.v. blog. The alignment of these terms is neatly brought out by Dr Elizabeth Boyle in an introductory note to her blog: http://thecelticist.ie/blog/ (accessed 31 January 2021). Úna Bhreathnach, ‘www.focal.ie – A New Resource for Irish’, Translation Ireland 17:2 (2007), 11–18.

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the surface here, but the fact that these elements derive ultimately from Greek τῆλε (têle) ‘at a distance’ and γράφω (gráphō) ‘to draw’, again may have served to allay reservations about their incorporation into twentiethcentury Irish. The final part of teilifís offers a nice example of what is sometimes termed phono-semantic matching, that is to say, fís is not only phonetically similar to English vision but also a common Irish noun with an almost identical meaning.28 The task of providing Irish with an equivalent of photograph was handled rather differently. A form of Greek φῶς (phôs) ‘light’ lies behind the initial part of the English word, but the Irish opted instead for native grian ‘the sun’. In all likelihood, the architects of grianghraf were attracted by the idea that the two elements of the word alliterate.29 At any rate, combining imported elements (suitably Gaelicised) with established native words probably helped the neologisms teilifís and grianghraf to find a receptive audience. Although staple components of Irish today, teilifís and grianghraf are actually extremely unusual formations, each generated as two distinct elements, treated in two distinct ways: teili- + fís and grian + -graf. Other technological terms are loan translations, similarly conducted on an element-for-element or word-for-word basis. Idirlíon ‘Internet’ offers a useful case in point. This is a calque made up of idir, an Irish preposition meaning ‘between’ which functions also as a prefix in compounds such as idirréaltach ‘interstellar’ and idirphósadh ‘intermarriage’, and líon, a common noun which has been used to denote fishing nets, hunting nets, spiderwebs, and so on. Idirlíon ‘Internet’ has surfaced only in the last few decades, but in the 1560s, the same word was written twice by a scribe of a manuscript now preserved in the British Library, London.30 The scribe’s message is somewhat cryptic and, consequently, the sense intended for idirlíon is not easy to grasp. Once, he intimates that he has good material for an idirlíon; later, he repeats the assertion and adds that he is too afraid to write it. In light of the well-established use of líon to denote a means of catching animals, birds, and fish, our scribe may be alluding to a metaphorical trap set with the information he is obviously keen to impart in the pages of the manuscript he was writing. It seems, at any rate, that idirlíon has a similar history to ríomhaire, in that this Irish term had two separate periods of

28 29

30

Both words derive from Latin vīsiō: ‘seeing, sight, vision’. Alliteration has long been a feature of rich expression in Irish and featured particularly in the work of professional poets of the classical period (c.1200–c.1600). See eDIL, s.v. eterlín; O’Grady et al., Catalogue of Irish Manuscripts, vol. i, pp. 125, 139. The manuscript in question is London, British Library, MS Egerton 88.

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existence, cropping up in the late Middle Ages and subsequently remade, in a new context, centuries after the original use had become obsolete. Other calques or loan translations currently offered for digital terminology on tearma.ie include domhainbhrionnú ‘deepfake’ (< domhain ‘deep’ + brionnú ‘forgery, fake’); leathanach baile ‘home page’ (< leathanach ‘page’ + baile ‘home’); and saighead síos ‘down arrow’ (< saighead ‘arrow’ + síos ‘down’). Occasionally, objections have been raised against such terms on the grounds that they presuppose bilingual users who will mentally map these newly coined Irish words and phrases onto their English equivalents in order to extract sense from them. In 2019, Ciarán Ó Duibhín observed that ‘some of the official terms seem to have been designed, not for the benefit of the Gaelic-speaker at all, but for the English-speaker, to whom they suggest an English term through formal similarity’.31 Ó Duibhín took issue in particular with the term eochair ‘a key’ (as in eochairchlár ‘keyboard’) which had been suggested in Foclóir Ríomhaireachta is Teicneolaíocht Faisnéise (‘The Dictionary of Computing and Information Technology’). The difficulty here is that Irish eochair traditionally denotes ‘a key’ in the sense of a shaped piece of metal inserted into a lock, and whereas English key has long referred also to a moving part on a typewriter or piano, Irish eochair has not been used in similar contexts. To an Irish monoglot, then, eochairchlár would be more likely to conjure up images of a rack for hanging door-keys than an input device for a computer. As a term which is more immediately meaningful without recourse to English, Ó Duibhín advocated the use of méarchlár, literally ‘finger-board’, for keyboard. This is listed as an alternative to eochairchlár in Foclóir Ríomhaireachta, and it is a sign of the pace at which technical vocabulary develops that eochairchlár is actually now marked as ‘stairiúil/historical’ in tearma.ie. Arguably, some of the most successful terms currently in use in the digital domain are not the result of transliteration or loan translation but of conscious repurposing of existing vocabulary. Nasc, for example, has a long history as a word for a concrete binding or fastening, often a spancel (for fettering or hobbling an animal), collar, or chain. There is some early evidence of its use also as a legal term, denoting a bond or obligation,32 31

32

Ciarán Ó Duibhín, ‘Intuitive Gaelic Computing Terminology: A Critique of, and an Alternative to, the Official Irish Gaelic Terminology’, online at www3.smo.uhi.ac.uk/oduibhin/tearmai/liosta.htm (accessed 31 January 2021). Similar remarks were made previously by Aodh Ó Canainn, ‘Réamhaithriseoireacht, Athdhéanamhchas, Cainníochtaíocht agus Briseadh Gaoithe’, Comhar 53:11 (November 1994), 4–12. For early uses, see eDIL, s.v. 1 nasc.

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while in the modern language, nasc gaoil is a figurative bond of kinship and nasc ianach serves to denote a chemical ionic bond. In a logical semantic extension of this already versatile word, nasc has come to be used of a weblink, and Foclóir Ríomhaireachta suggests that, in this sense, it might enter into compounds such as nascleanúint, literally ‘linkfollowing’, which neatly provides the Irish for navigation. While nasc was already well placed to deliver a term for a weblink, more semantic steps were involved in the journey which led to cló being employed as a term for a font. The first book printed in Irish was Seán Ó Cearnaigh’s Aibidil Gaoidheilge agus Caiticiosma ‘Gaelic Alphabet and Catechism’, which appeared in 1571.33 The title page of this work announces that it has been printed á gcló Ghaoidheilge ‘in Gaelic typeface’, but cló did not originally apply to the imprint left by the keys of the mechanical printing press; in its earliest uses, cló meant ‘a spike’ or ‘a nail’.34 Progressively, the sense shifted so that the word came to denote the impression formed when a nail is struck against a hard surface. Having made the leap from instrument to effect, cló narrowed in meaning to refer, firstly, to the inked mark created by a printing press or typewriter, and then, as text was increasingly viewed on computer monitors and phone screens, to a digital typeface or font. In sum, cló has been associated with some of the most significant technological developments in history, from nails which facilitated important advances in construction and carpentry, to the printing press which sparked the information revolution, and subsequently to the transformative impact of computing. Amongst other items of medieval vocabulary which have been channelled in new directions in the digital age, turscar warrants a special mention, partly because this represents an inventive way of dealing with a concept for which English has a peculiar, opaque term, and partly because the early connotations of Irish turscar are overturned in its latest usage. English spam, referring to unsolicited messages sent to a large number of recipients, seems to come from a sketch in the British television comedy series Monty Python’s Flying Circus which features a cafe in which every item on the menu includes the luncheon meat sold under the brand name Spam.35 To convey the same sense, both Foclóir Ríomhaireachta and tearma.ie. recommend the use of turscar, a word which had appeared in texts since the Old Irish period to describe debris washed ashore.36 In many 33

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Recently available as Brian Ó Cuív, ed., Aibidil Gaoidheilge & Caiticiosma: Seaán Ó Cearnaigh’s Irish Primer of Religion Published in 1571 (Dublin: Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies, 1994). The various stages in the semantic development of cló are outlined in eDIL, s.v. See Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. spam, v. 36 See eDIL, s.v. turscur, tascar.

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ways, this was an inspired rerouting of a native term – just like spam, turscar comes one’s way unsought – though, unlike its electronic namesake, material turscar was often a boon for coastal communities in medieval Ireland and, in acknowledgement of the rich rewards that could emanate from this source, Dindshenchas Érend, a collection of explanations of place names probably put together in the eleventh or twelfth century, refers at one point to toirthe tíre ocus turscuir ‘fruits of the earth and of matter cast up by the sea’.37 In light of the obvious success of the likes of nasc, cló, and turscar in linking contemporary technological language with the Irish of the past, one cannot help reflecting on missed opportunities to continue early attested terms into the modern era and on the once-current terms which did not survive, even though the items to which they refer are still used today. Tablets, as materials for writing, have been known from antiquity, and in medieval Irish the word taball or tabaill, apparently a borrowing from Latin tabella, was applied to such objects. A Middle Irish religious text mentions how the Ten Commandments were written is-na taiblib clochda ‘on the tablets of stone’;38 in the Irish Life of St Brendan, the famous voyager is seen to receive a waxed tablet (tabhuill ciartha),39 and in the seventeenth century, historian and priest Geoffrey Keating alluded to Hebrew, Greek, and Latin alphabets written on wooden tablets (i gcranntáibhlibh).40 Having persisted for several centuries, it seems somewhat regrettable that the same word was not adopted when the need arose for a means of referring to a portable personal computer. Instead, táibléad, a Gaelicised form of English tablet, has been generally preferred. Lamentable also is the loss of a delightful kenning for a mouse-trap. When the author of a Middle Irish religious commentary on the Commandments wished to make the point that the covetous man pursues wealth ‘just as the mouse loves the food in the trap’, he employed the word fidchat for ‘mouse-trap’.41 Meaning literally ‘wooden cat’, this corresponds exactly to tré·kǫ ttr, a form which appears in an Old Norse translation of the 37

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Edward J. Gwynn, ed. and trans., The Metrical Dindshenchas, 5 vols., Todd Lecture Series 8–12 (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis, 1903–35), vol. iii, p. 10. Robert Atkinson, ed. and trans., The Passions and the Homilies from the Leabhar Breac: Text, Translation and Glossary, Todd Lecture Series 2 (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis, 1887), l. 6637. Whitley Stokes, ed. and trans., Lives of Saints, from the Book of Lismore (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1890), l. 3704. Geoffrey Keating, Foras Feasa ar Éirinn: The History of Ireland, ed. David Comyn and Patrick Dinneen, 4 vols. (Dublin and London: Irish Texts Society, 1902–14), vol. ii, l. 101. I am grateful to Professor Gregory Toner, who first pointed out to me the existence of these references. Atkinson, The Passions and the Homilies, l. 7738.

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Gospel of Nicodemus, comparing Satan crushed by the falling cross to a mouse in a mouse-trap.42 The linguistic correspondence may be indicative of a relationship in some direction. Whatever its origins, fidchat (later spelt fiodhchat) seems to have had a lengthy period of currency in Ireland, and also in Gaelic-speaking Scotland. In addition to the instance in the commentary on the Commandments, the word turns up in manuscript materials as a gloss on Latin muscipula and again in an explanation of the workings of the medieval device,43 and it surfaces also in print in at least two lexicographical resources of the eighteenth century.44 At some point subsequent to this, however, the imaginative ‘wooden cat’ seems to have been thoroughly replaced in Irish by more prosaic gaiste luch ‘trap for mice’. One of the lexicographical resources which lists fiodhchat as a term for ‘a mouse-trap or rat-trap’ is Leabhar A Theagasc Ainminnin, compiled by Scotsman Alistair MacDomhnuill or Alasdair MacDonald. This listing serves as a useful reminder of the potential of modern Scottish Gaelic as a vehicle for the preservation of terms which are witnessed also in early Ireland, and the point is brought home by the unexpected appearance of a form resembling the early Irish term for a pair of compasses in twentiethcentury Scottish Gaelic word-lists. Transliterated compás and combaist are often used in Irish and Scottish Gaelic nowadays to denote a pair of compasses, with the result that the tool for drawing circles is often not properly distinguished from the instrument used for navigation. In the medieval period, however, there was a simple, transparent name for the former. Based on gabul ‘a fork’ and rind ‘a point’, gabulrind was perfectly suited to convey the idea of a device consisting of two arms, one of which ends in a point. Examples of this compound documented from Irish sources seem to date from around the tenth century or earlier,45 and no 42

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See Dictionary of Old Norse Prose, s.v. tré·kǫ ttr, https://onp.ku.dk/onp/onp.php (accessed 31 January 2021). Also, Carl J. S. Marstrander, Bidrag til det Norske Sprogs Historie i Irland (Kristina: I kommission hos J. Dybwad, 1915), p. 46. My thanks to professors Judith Jesch, Aidan O’Sullivan, and David Stifter, who discussed the possible relationship between the Norse and Irish terms with me. Whitley Stokes, ed., Irish Glosses: A Mediaeval Tract on Latin Declension, with Examples Explained in Irish (Dublin: Dublin University Press, 1860), p. 9; Dublin, Trinity College, MS 1337 (H.3.18), pp. 289.13 (as fiacat) and 625c16 (as fíachchat). Online images of the manuscript can be viewed at www.isos.ie (accessed 31 January 2021). The examples are given also in eDIL, s.vv. fid and garman. See the Irish–English dictionary which accompanies Edward Lhuyd, Archæologia Britannica, Giving Some Account Additional to What Has Been Hitherto Publish’d, of the Languages, Histories and Customs of the Original Inhabitants of Great Britain, Vol. i: Glossography (Oxford, 1707), s.v. Fiodhchat; Alistair MacDomhnuill, Leabhar A Theagasc Ainminnin/A Galick and English Vocabulary (Edinburgh: Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge, 1741), p. 89. Based on the evidence contained in the entry on gabulrind in eDIL.

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instance has been located in the Historical Irish Corpus. A listing for gobhal-roinn ‘pair of compasses’ appears in Edward Dwelly’s Scottish Gaelic–English dictionary, however,46 and gabhail-roinn features also in a collection of ‘words used by an old joiner in Dall, Rannoch’ in Scotland.47 Both Scottish Gaelic forms may have been influenced by roinn ‘divide’, but these attestations are unmistakeably versions of the compound we might have otherwise assumed to have been left in the early Middle Ages. There can be little doubt that Ó Laoghaire and Ó Maoláin would have preferred gabulrind to compás, that they would have been impressed by the resilience of this old word which was recorded again after centuries of silence. But even when gabulrind was the established term for the tool used to draw accurate circles in medieval manuscripts, the Irish language was littered with the kind of loan words Ó Laoghaire and Ó Maoláin shunned. Throughout the Middle Ages and after, Irish speakers freely availed of words they first encountered in Latin, Norse, Norman French, and English, if these offered a practical means of reference to technological innovations, and from them they acquired crucial terms for buttons and boats, pens and paper, spectacles and scissors. Transliterating or ‘Gaelicising’ borrowed words was not the only means by which the vocabulary of Irish was extended in previous centuries, however. Simple nouns came together to produce compounds, such as fidchat and gabulrind, which are more than the sum of their parts, while shifts in the meaning of others – like cló – kept pace with technical advances. Similarly, the language of technology in the twenty-first century is an assortment of the old and the new, the barely assimilated and the beautifully repurposed. The alien consonants in víreas and tvuít may jar with some today, but in the seventeenth century one Irish scribe produced the form avvhcoittech to represent borrowed advocate.48 Nasc, turscar, and cló have all slotted into new roles in digital discourse, and nascleanúint ‘navigation’ and ríomhphost ‘email’ prove that the urge to create compounds is still strongly felt by Irish speakers. The fact that ríomhaire ‘computer’ and Idirlíon ‘Internet’ both were made in the likeness of words which existed 46

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Edward Dwelly, The Illustrated Gaelic–English Dictionary (1911; Glasgow: Gairm Publications, 1994), s.v. gobhal-roinn. Fieldwork Archive, Digital Archive of Scottish Gaelic (DASG), University of Glasgow, https://dasg .ac.uk/fieldwork, s.v. gabhail-roinn (accessed 31 January 2021). MacDomhnuill, Leabhar A Theagasc Ainminnin, p. 49, records gobhirreang. I am grateful to Dr Domhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart for drawing this to my attention. Dublin, Trinity College, MS 1337/4, p. 797, line 12. Images of the manuscript can be viewed at www .isos.dias.ie (accessed 31 January 2021).

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hundreds of years ago, is perhaps the ultimate testimony to similarities in word-making in the present and in the past.

Select Bibliography An Roinn Oideachais, Foclóir Ríomhaireachta is Teicneolaíocht Faisnéise/Dictionary of Computing and Information Technology, new edn (Dublin: An Gúm, 2004). Atkinson, Robert, ed. and trans., The Passions and the Homilies from Leabhar Breac: Text, Translation and Glossary, Todd Lecture Series 2 (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis, 1887). Bhreathnach, Úna, ‘www.focal.ie – A New Resource for Irish’, Translation Ireland 17:2 (2007), 11–18. de Bhaldraithe, Tomás, English–Irish Dictionary (Baile Átha Cliath: An Gúm, 1959). Dwelly, Edward, The Illustrated Gaelic–English Dictionary (1911; Glasgow: Gairm Publications, 1994). eDIL 2019,electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language, based on the Contributions to a Dictionary of the Irish Language (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1913–76), www.dil.ie Fieldwork Archive, Digital Archive of Scottish Gaelic (DASG). University of Glasgow, https://dasg.ac.uk/fieldwork Gwynn, Edward J., ed. and trans., The Metrical Dindshenchas, 5 vols., Todd Lecture Series 8–12 (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis, 1903–35). Keating, Geoffrey, Foras Feasa ar Éirinn: The History of Ireland, ed. David Comyn and Patrick Dinneen, 4 vols. (Dublin and London: Irish Texts Society, 1902–14). Lhuyd, Edward, Archæologia Britannica, Giving Some Account Additional to What has been Hitherto Publish’d, of the Languages, Histories and Customs of the Original Inhabitants of Great Britain, Vol. i: Glossography (Oxford, 1707). MacDomhnuill, Alistair, Leabhar A Theagasc Ainminnin/A Galick and English Vocabulary (Edinburgh: Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge, 1741). Marstrander, Carl J. S., Bidrag til det Norske Sprogs Historie i Irland (Kristina: I kommission hos J. Dybwad, 1915). Ó Canainn, Aodh, ‘Réamhaithriseoireacht, Athdhéanamhchas, Cainníochtaíocht agus Briseadh Gaoithe’, Comhar 53:11 (November 1994), 4–12. Ó Cuív, Brian, ed., Aibidil Gaoidheilge & Caiticiosma: Seaán Ó Cearnaigh’s Irish Primer of Religion Published in 1571 (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1994). Ó Dónaill, Niall, ed., Foclóir Gaeilge-Béarla (Baile Átha Cliath: An Gúm, 1977). Ó Duibhín, Ciarán, ‘Intuitive Gaelic Computing Terminology: A Critique of, and an Alternative to, the Official Irish Gaelic Terminology’, www3 .smo.uhi.ac.uk/oduibhin/tearmai/liosta.htm

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O’Grady, Standish Hayes, ed. and trans., Silva Gadelica (I–XXXI): A Collection of Tales in Irish with Extracts Illustrating Persons and Places, 2 vols. (London: Williams & Norgate, 1892). O’Grady, Standish Hayes, Robin Flower, and Myles Dillon, Catalogue of Irish Manuscripts in the British Museum, 3 vols. (London: British Museum, 1926–53). Ó Laoghaire, Peadar, ‘Aibhleach’, Irisleabhar na Gaedhilge/The Gaelic Journal 10 (December 1899), 61–2. Ó Maoláin, Seán, ‘Aibhléis’, Irisleabhar na Gaedhilge/The Gaelic Journal 17 (December 1907), 440–4. O’Rahilly, Thomas, Measgra Dánta: Miscellaneous Irish Poems, Part i, 2nd edn (Dublin and Cork: Cork University Press, 1927). Power, Maura, ed. and trans., An Irish Astronomical Tract Based in Part on a Medieval Latin Version of a Work by Messahalah, Irish Texts Society 14 (London: Irish Texts Society, 1914). Stokes, Whitley, ed., Irish Glosses: A Mediaeval Tract on Latin Declension, with Examples Explained in Irish (Dublin: Dublin University Press, 1860). Stokes, Whitley, ed. and trans., Lives of Saints, from the Book of Lismore (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1890). Stokes, Whitley, and John Strachan, ed. and trans., Thesaurus Palaeohibernicus: A Collection of Old-Irish Glosses, Scholia, Prose, and Verse, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1901–3). Tymoczko, Maria, and Colin Ireland, Language and Tradition in Ireland: Continuities and Displacements (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003). Williams, John Alfred, ‘The Irish Astronomical Tract: A Case Study of Scientific Terminology in 14th Century Irish’, unpublished MPhil thesis (University of Sydney, 2002).

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part iv

The Digital

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Published online by Cambridge University Press

chapter 14

Irish Literary Feminism and Its Digital Archive(s) Margaret Kelleher and Karen Wade

[O]ne of the central tenets of feminist thinking is that all knowledge is situated. A less academic way to put this is that context matters [. . .] Refusing to acknowledge context is a power play to avoid power. It’s a way to assert authoritativeness and mastery without being required to address the complexity of what the data actually represent . . . Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein1

Once we recognize that digital resources, collections, and archives are not static, that they have a history, then we can begin to excavate that history. Moreover, it is a material history; it involves changes in technology, cultural factors, and commercial forces. Stephen H. Gregg2

Feminist literary retrieval projects in Ireland quickly embraced the bibliographical and hypertextual possibilities offered in the early 2000s by the then burgeoning field of digital humanities. Many of these digital projects have an important prehistory in printed form, a genealogy which, as this essay will explore, has shaped the nature and impact of the online archive. Situating these projects in an international context of feminist digital humanities is also an important means of identifying what Irish projects have achieved to date, and their limitations. And looking to the future of the feminist digital, and the potential offered by big data, we will explore how long-standing digital questions of access, interoperability, and sustainability continue to influence the parameters of our field. 1

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Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein, ‘6. The Numbers Don’t Speak for Themselves’, Data Feminism (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2020), open access at https://data-feminism.mitpress .mit.edu/pub/czq9dfs5/release/3 (accessed 6 July 2022). Stephen H. Gregg, Old Books and Digital Publishing: Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), p. 101.

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The Literary Archive: Digital and Feminist The publication in 2002 of Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions, Volumes iv and v of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, was a landmark moment in Irish literary studies, and not only for its feminist members. In their joint preface, the editors close with this invitation: ‘We offer this anthology to all our readers as a sampler of texts which are historically interesting, aesthetically accomplished and politically indispensable.’3 The choice of the term ‘sampler’ is strategic in temporal and gendered terms; the Oxford English Dictionary definitions include: ‘an illustrative or typical instance; a specimen’ (first recorded usage c.1400); a ‘piece of canvas embroidered by a girl or woman as a specimen of skill, usually containing the alphabet and some mottos worked in ornamental characters, with various decorative devices’ (first usage 1523); an ‘electronic device or (occasionally) a piece of software used to sample sounds, excerpts of music, etc.’ (first usage 1985); and ‘a person who uses such a device; spec. a person who obtains digital sound samples (esp. from recordings by other artists) for use in his or her own music’ (first usage 1988).4 Given that these two volumes had contentiously emerged from the disappointment and controversy generated by Volumes i–iii (1991), the shifting claims even within this short line – from meek, through confident, to bold – are also noteworthy. Critical reception of Volumes iv and v, however, was mixed from the outset, and the full impact of the scholarship contained within their pages, specifically its transformative potential for the teaching of Irish literature, is yet to be realised. Some early critics lamented that the very size of the two volumes, significantly longer in page count than their three predecessors, functioned against their use and accessibility, while simultaneously such critics were also keen to identify gaps and omissions. The title of The Guardian’s review usefully illustrates this dual impulse: ‘too much, but still not enough’.5 In one of the most positive and constructive of early reviews, published in the Irish Literary Supplement, Anne Fogarty identified a crucial shift in the modes of knowledge being offered: the volumes, she observed, are ‘far less an anthology, in even the modified current understanding of that term, than a database that assembles a vast quantity of material and affords the possibility of multiple cross-connections’.6 3

4 5 6

Angela Bourke, Siobhán Kilfeather, Maria Luddy, Margaret Mac Curtain, Gerardine Meaney, Máirín Ní Dhonnchadha, Mary O’Dowd and Clair Wills, eds., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing: Vols. iv and v:Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions (Derry and Cork: Field Day and Cork University Press, 2002), vol. iv, p. xxxvi (hereafter FDA). OED, s.v. sampler. Aisling Foster, ‘Too Much, But Still Not Enough’, The Guardian, 4 January 2003. Anne Fogarty, ‘Challenging Boundaries’, Irish Literary Supplement 22:1 (Spring 2003), 3.

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Fogarty’s comment attests to the widespread move to database and hypertextual modes then occurring within archival or large-scale bibliographical projects. In 1992, just a year after the publication of FDA Volumes i–iii, and reflecting in part on his own recently completed collection of romantic verse, Jerome McGann defined the work of anthologies in terms that pointed to his own growing interest in the possibilities offered by digital literary studies: The anthology focuses one’s attention on local units of order – individual poems and groups of poems. As a consequence, these units tend to splinter the synthetic inertia of the work-as-a-whole into an interactive and dialogical scene. Possibilities of order appear at different scalar levels because the center of the work is not so much a totalized form as a dynamically emergent set of constructible hypotheses of historical relations.7

One of the few commentaries on FDA Volumes iv and v to recognise a similar potential is Claire Bracken’s analysis of the anthology as event: here she identifies how the volumes (divided into sections and subsections together with extensive cross-referencing with and between these elements) offer ‘rhizomatic reading paths’ (‘rhizomes operate according to nomadic principles in that they are multifarious and multi-directional’), and contain ‘in their very becoming the potential to extend the space of Irish feminist scholarship into the realm of the desubjectified’.8 In the years immediately following the publication of FDA Volumes iv and v, three projects, two financed by Irish third-level funding and one by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, significantly expanded the known field of Irish women’s writing; two combined print and electronic resources, and one was electronic only. In 2005, the publication of the Dictionary of Munster Women Writers and accompanying website provided bibliographic entries on 560 women writers, including 220 in Irish, who wrote between 1800 and 2000.9 Its stated objective was to advance ‘literary and cultural as distinct from primarily historical research on the region of Munster over the last two centuries’ and to ‘enable a new view, as a whole, of the work of women writers’, one which ‘juxtaposes the work of Irish, 7

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Jerome McGann, ‘Rethinking Romanticism’, ELH 59:3 (1992), 735–54 (p. 745). McGann began work on the Rossetti Archive in 1993, and the project was completed in 2008. See www.rossettiarchive.org/ (accessed 6 July 2022). Claire Bracken, ‘Becoming-Mother-Machine: The Event of Field Day Vols IV and V’, in Irish Literature: Feminist Perspectives, ed. Patricia Coughlan and Tina O’Toole (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2011), pp. 223–44 (pp. 233–4). Tina O’Toole, ed., Dictionary of Munster Women Writers, 1800–2000 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2005).

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English-language, and bilingual writers, and thereby helps to develop an understanding of the province of Munster as a diverse cultural milieu, and focus on the role of regionality in the process of cultural creation’.10 A notable strength of this resource, as with the Field Day volumes, was its extension of the genres of ‘writing’ deemed worthy of inclusion, ranging through ‘unpublished diaries, journals, and letters, together with plays, documentaries, film-scripts and journalism, cookery books and manuals, as well as fiction and poetry’ and, in the case of Irish-language content, ‘contributions to the folk and song traditions rather [than] to more conventional forms of writing’. From the outset, the editor and contributors underlined their ambition that the Dictionary, published ‘in conjunction with (and profoundly influenced by) the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing: Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions’, would work similarly to ‘stimulate further research and inquiry’.11 In 2006, the publication of Rolf and Magda Loeber’s magisterial 1,672page A Guide to Irish Fiction, 1650–1900 transformed understanding of Irish publication history, especially so for the period prior to 1800.12 In 2011, the An Foras Feasa team at Maynooth University’s Humanities Institute launched an online searchable version of the Guide, whereby the bibliographic information for over 5,800 titles and the work of over 1,700 authors was now in electronic form.13 Under gender, search categories were constituted as ‘female named authors’, ‘male named authors’, ‘pseudonymous authors, believed male’, ‘pseudonymous authors, believed female’, and ‘gender unknown’, reflecting the presence and import of women’s literary production during these centuries.14 One of the key objectives of the project was, in the short term, to link users with the increasing number of digital editions becoming available (thus each title contains a hyperlink to known digital editions of the works), but in the longer term to encourage reflection on what Irish works were being digitised, to what effect, and what works remained neglected and inaccessible. 10 11

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O’Toole, ‘Introduction’, in ibid., p. xv. See book description, www.corkuniversitypress.com/Dictionary-of-Munster-Women-Writers-180 0-2000-p/9781859183885.htm (accessed 6 July 2022). Rolf Loeber and Magda Loeber, with Anne M. Burnham, A Guide to Irish Fiction, 1650–1900 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2006). The project team members were John Keating, Aja Teehan, Eamonn Kearns, and Margaret Kelleher and the project was funded by the Irish Research Council. Java Classes were designed and written by the software engineer to parse the basic MS Word files and generate the data structure, which is encoded in XML (Extensible Markup Language). Apache Struts was used as an open-source web application framework and Apache Tomcat as web server environment.

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In 2007, the Women in Modern Irish Culture Database (WIMIC), under the leadership of primary investigators Maria Luddy and Gerardine Meaney, was launched, providing a bibliographical database of 9,647 Irish women writers, who wrote in both Irish and English, between 1800 and 2005. The team created a complex relational database to provide details on individual writers, place and dates of birth, dates of death, and marital and educational status, where such biographical details were available and reliable. An especially valuable aspect of the database is its provision of the various names and known pseudonyms under which women wrote and were published, along with details of printers and publishers for each work.15 Notably, none of the three electronic resources cited here survive in their original form. In the case of WIMIC, the original database is no longer available, but access was restored with a new interface in 2018.16 The Loeber electronic edition is, at the time of writing, in the process of migration to a University College Dublin platform. The original Munster Women Writers website is no longer available, yet the project is enjoying an unexpected digital afterlife; in September 2020, the Dictionary of Munster Women Writers was scanned and uploaded to the Internet Archive, and is now available to the general public (on the basis of individual short-term digital loans), with a searchable text.17 Although a welcome development, this repurposing of a no-longer-supported resource by a third party prompts questions about the survival and afterlife of digital projects, especially given some of the copyright controversies that have arisen in relation to the Internet Archive. The challenges and problems facing Irish digital, feminist resources are not only ones of sustainability and technical maintenance, though these are currently the most obvious. Comparable digital projects elsewhere have generated incisive and unsettling questions regarding the status and achievement of feminist digital literary archives. In her analysis of race and the new digital humanities canon, Amy Earhart has highlighted how many small-scale but significant recovery projects ‘remain but a trace in the current digital literary canon’.18 And, as valuably summarised by Ellen Rooney in her introduction to the Cambridge Companion to Feminist 15

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Women in Modern Irish Culture (WIMIC) Database, https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/irish womenwriters/database/ (accessed 6 July 2022). The following note accompanies search results: ‘Access to the database was restored with a new interface in 2018 by the Digital Humanities team, and is now made available for the public on a “best effort” basis. There are known issues.’ Dictionary of Munster Women Writers, 1800–2000, https://archive.org/details/dictionaryofmun s0000unse (accessed 6 July 2022). Amy E. Earhart, ‘Can Information Be Unfettered? Race and the New Digital Humanities Canon’, in Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew Gold (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

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Literary Theory, key feminist interventions have ‘engendered the insight that systemic exclusions are not easily repaired by a simple additive approach, by the “inclusion” of once marginalized women and communities in a renovated theoretical totalization’.19 This issue is an especially relevant one for Irish literary studies, where a focus on ‘recovery’ is also, as Moynagh Sullivan has incisively observed, ‘in danger of replicating the logic of the oedipal model, which privileges a mode of intergenerational transmission that actually needs the absence of the woman-to-woman intergenerationality for its own continuing’.20 Her comments on what retrieval may at once allow and disallow are still keenly pertinent for digital archival projects: This necessary retrieval has often been called upon to justify itself in terms of the work’s relevance as an antecedent according to the values already established in a self-promoting tradition. However, accepting the terms already set as the means by which a lost work may be validated disallows the potential such work has to alter the model of tradition already in place.21

Relatedly, and building explicitly on Rooney’s observations, Jacqueline Wernimont has warned of the dangers of perpetuating in feminist-led digital work the ‘familiar patriarchal tropes of size, mastery, and comprehensive collection’, and poses the following questions: Perhaps a feminist analysis should be suspicious of any project where bigger is better? Should feminist interventions block the avalanche of undifferentiated data suggested by the impulse to collect everything? Is mere presence – the fact of being there, of having women’s work exist in digital archives – enough to address the continued marginalization of women’s writing?22

The continuing absence from university syllabi, or publishers’ lists, of many of the Irish women ‘discovered’ by digital research projects – coupled with the aforementioned difficulties in maintaining digital feminist resources – indicates that presence is only the first step in securing real engagement with the literary archive of women’s writings.

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Press, 2012), p. 314; open access at https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/projects/debates-in-the-digitalhumanities (accessed 6 July 2022). Ellen Rooney, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Literary Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 3. Moynagh Sullivan, ‘“I Am Not Yet Delivered of the Past”: The Poetry of Blanaid Salkeld’, Irish University Review 33:1 (2003), 182–200 (p. 187). Ibid. Jacqueline Wernimont, ‘Whence Feminism? Assessing Feminist Interventions in Digital Literary Archives’, DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly 7:1 (2013), 1–23 (p. 4).

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More positively, the long process of making digital surrogates available for Volumes iv and v of FDA by Queen’s University Belfast and JSTOR was completed in spring 2021: a process in which complex questions of copyright proved the largest delaying factor.23 In the longer term, the existence of an online electronic version offers new life in what McGann has termed an ‘interactive and dialogical scene’: readily accessible PDFs of the individual sections within the two FDA volumes have the potential to inform and transform modules and syllabi, and to generate new research topics and questions.24 The introductory essays by a wide range of experts in their fields are hugely valuable teaching tools, and the excerpts and selections invite, in the dual mode which characterises the best of anthologies, both extensive reading across a dazzling array of previously unknown sources and intensive reading of individual authors and topics. In the shorter term, however, the searchability of the contents within the larger JSTOR database is still limited and the PDF table of contents for the volumes remains the primary search vehicle; we look forward to their fuller integration within the JSTOR platform so that future browsing can yield rich and surprising results for Irish feminist-related queries.

Connect – Disconnect – Reconnect The establishment of ‘feminist networked connections’ is, as Claire Bracken has observed,25 a key enabling trait of recent Irish feminist literary scholarship; her examples include the Munster Women Writers Project, WIMIC, and Women Writers in the New Ireland (WWINI) network (founded in 2007). As noted earlier, Irish feminist digital projects were keen to support, and build upon, each other’s endeavours, but that network of connections has not been replicated with similar projects internationally, resulting in some remarkable missed opportunities for digital literary feminism. To give one example, the Orlando Project, available by paid subscription from Cambridge University Press and subtitled ‘Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present’, is a valuable, large-scale online project which seeks to create ‘a dynamic inquiry from any number of perspectives into centuries of women’s writing’.26 Its creators self-describe the project as ‘a new kind of electronic 23 24 25

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See www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1fkgbdv and www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1fkgbfc (accessed 6 July 2022). McGann, ‘Rethinking Romanticism’, p. 745. Claire Bracken, ‘The Feminist Contemporary: The Contradictions of Critique’, in The New Irish Studies, ed. Paige Reynolds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 144–60 (p. 155). For more information on the background to the Orlando Project, see www.artsrn.ualberta.ca/orla ndo/ (accessed 6 July 2022).

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textbase for research and discovery’, a choice of term which they explain as follows: ‘Orlando’s differences as literary history arise largely from its integration of readable text and electronic structure. That is why we call it a textbase rather than a database: it returns results in prose rather than in tabular form.’27 The Orlando Project is further distinguished by its aim, through extensive formal markup and conceptual tagging, to enable ‘the investigation of interrelationships’; a key ambition therefore is to supplement ‘a traditional emphasis on the single writer with several possible views of a writer operating in relation with others, either contemporary or across generations’.28 Tag searches are possible by ‘lives’, ‘writings’ and ‘bibliography’, and the specific tags are suggestive and inviting, including ethnicity, cultural formation, nationality, ‘intimate relationships’, pseudonym, given name and self-constructed name, etc. However, the results of searches remain highly reliant on the level of detail within specific entries: ‘Anglo-Irish’ used as a tag of ethnicity in authors’ lives returns just one result; as a tag of cultural formation, it returns a more promising eightyseven results. More concerningly for a project entitled ‘Women’s Writing in the British Isles’, treatment of the vexed category of nationality proves less than satisfactory. The project description explains that ‘Irish-born writers living before the establishment of the Irish Free State on 6 December 1921 are considered British; those living after independence are grouped with “other women writers” and those who bridge the process of political change appear in both groups.’29 A simple search of ‘Irish’ within the tag of ‘nationality’ brings some tortured results wherein worthy categorisation obscures meaningful context: May Laffan, one reads, ‘belonged to the Irish middle class. A Roman Catholic, she came from a religiously mixed household (highly unusual in deeply sectarian nineteenth-century Ireland)’. Charlotte Riddell was ‘of the Irish or Anglo-Irish gentry by predominant heritage’, and novelist and prosopographer Elizabeth Owens Blackburne Casey was ‘Irish by birth and family, presumably white, and probably Protestant, which is to say a member of the Church of Ireland’. These samples are intended less to illustrate the perils of what is likely to have been overly hasty data entry, but more seriously to demonstrate the failure of many digital humanities projects to draw from, 27

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https://orlando.cambridge.org/about/introduction (accessed 6 July 2022). Full access to the project is possible only through subscription, administered by Cambridge University Press. See http://orl ando.cambridge.org/ (accessed 6 July 2022). Information drawn from https://orlando.cambridge.org/about/introduction. Quoted from ‘Scholarly Introduction: Literary History with a Difference’, http://orlando .cambridge.org/about/introduction.

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or ‘harvest’, existing scholarship, especially given the efforts of scholars in FDA Volumes iv and v to provide authoritative and nuanced biographical profiles for these and many other figures. Missed opportunities to deepen our understanding of the interrelationship of gender and literary project have been evident in many early digital humanities quantitative projects. One notable example from the perspective of Irish women’s writings is Matthew Jockers’s book, and related research project, Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History (2013), which offers a detailed quantitative study of nineteenth-century literature. The corpus assembled by Jockers comprises 3,346 nineteenthcentury novels (British, Irish, and American) or, as he estimates, between 5 and 10 per cent of those published during the nineteenth century. Early in the book, Jockers employs what he himself terms ‘the simple counting and sorting of texts based on metadata’ to bring about interesting research results regarding the geographical and chronological distribution of nineteenth-century American fiction and specifically Irish-American fiction.30 His examination of Irish-American literary output in the context of eastern and western demographics, for example, shows that Irish Americans in the west wrote about being Irish in America far more frequently than their compatriots in the east – a finding that challenges earlier assumptions about the operation of ethnic markers within Irish-American literary production. In contrast, his research findings with respect to gender are limited indeed, and while some interesting quantitative results are provided, the absence of a contextual analysis is regrettable, especially so given the body of feminist analyses of nineteenth-century Irish and IrishAmerican culture which preceded Jockers’s work. For example, his statistical evidence that published fiction by Irish-American women writers in the west rose rapidly in the early twentieth century, yields the following comment: ‘It suggests either that the West offered something special for Irish American women or that there was something special about the Irish women who went west, or, still more likely, that it was some combination of both.’31 ‘Something special’ is, despite its vagueness, an improvement on earlier critical terms such as ‘minor’ which have served to occlude many excellent works by Irish women, but the chance offered by this large body of data to further our understanding of how regional, gender, and ethnic

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Matthew Jockers, Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013), p. 48. Ibid., pp. 40–2.

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factors combined to enable women’s literary careers was a tantalising one, and as yet not realised.

Big Data and Digital Feminism A closer inspection of the logic and assumptions operative within the work of Jockers and colleagues yields some critical insights for the future of big data and for digital feminism. One of the key arguments underpinning Macroanalysis can be summarised as follows: in order to gain a truly fair, unbiased understanding of the complete history of literature, it is imperative that we make use of all of the digital resources at our disposal – including the vast and increasing archives of digitised texts, and the tools being developed to explore them – in order to study the entirety of this history. The increasing availability of large-scale digital archives, coupled with the fact that human observation is necessarily biased, Jockers argues, render close reading ‘totally inappropriate as a method of studying literary history’.32 Jockers’s provocative and much-challenged statement employs a logic of supplantation, in which not only is the individual text subordinate to the vast archive in terms of meaningfulness, but the very study of literature through individual works or authors is no longer tenable on any level. Notably, that claim is rather oddly couched in the language of propriety rather than of validity or, say, meaningfulness (‘totally inappropriate’). A similar assumption as to the absolute polarisation between the individual text and the digital archive appears in the work of other high-profile digital humanists at the time, and reflects a larger desire to claim the perceivedly brand-new field of digital literary studies solely as the province of big data, the massive digital archive, and quantitative or ‘distant reading’ methodologies. A further instance may be seen in Franco Moretti’s assertion that quantitative methods are ‘repugnant’ to literary critics because of ‘the fear that they may suppress the uniqueness of texts’; insouciantly, Moretti confirms that ‘indeed they do. But as I don’t believe in the epistemological value of the unique, its suppression doesn’t really bother me.’33 Yet it is only through the process of actually reading those unique texts that it becomes possible to generate meaningful findings, such as the fact that the west offered ‘something special’ to Irish-American women. As 32 33

Ibid., p. 7. Franco Moretti, ‘Narrative Markets, ca.1850’, Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 20:2 (1997), 151–74 (p. 151).

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Barbara Herrnstein Smith argues, ‘if the offense is that many worthy or interesting texts remain unread because of past biases, then what is wanted, surely, is to have those texts read, not just counted’.34 The combination of close reading and careful counting of works is key to a feminist approach to the digital archive: not just the amassing of undifferentiated texts, but the careful consideration of which works are present, which are absent, and what factors determine each of these questions. An argument which is often used to support focusing on large collections rather than individual texts – and one that on first reading might seem hospitable to the aims of feminist critics – is that this will compensate for the tendency of scholarship to elevate a small handful of texts at the expense of, as Matthew Wilkens puts it, ‘pretty much everything ever written’.35 A sufficiently extensive archive, in Wilkens’s argument, represents a more universal human experience than the selective literary canons which we have inherited, and which almost certainly do exclude many texts that are worthy of interest. This view, however, also implies an unjustified confidence that the quantitative study of literature would result – by default – in findings that are fundamentally more meaningful than could be achieved by any way of examining texts in the way in which humans actually read them: that is, one at a time. danah boyd and Kate Crawford have described this concept as the ‘mythology’ of big data: the widespread assumption that ‘large data sets offer a higher form of intelligence and knowledge that can generate insights that were previously impossible, with the aura of truth, objectivity, and accuracy’.36 Part of such a mythos is the presumption that the large data sets in question – in this case, massive literary archives – are both sufficiently complete and sufficiently representative of the history of recorded human thought that any gaps, omissions, or imbalances will be smoothed over by the sheer quantity of text available to scholars. Some of the most frequently employed literary archives have bought into and even exacerbated, if unwittingly, this perception in optimistically declaring their intent towards universality: Google Books declares that it is ‘not done – not until all of the books in the world can be found by everyone, everywhere, at any time they need 34

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Barbara Herrnstein Smith, ‘What Was “Close Reading”?: A Century of Method in Literary Studies’, Minnesota Review 87:1 (2016), 57–75 (p. 65). Matthew Wilkens, ‘Canons, Close Reading, and the Evolution of Method’, in Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew Gold (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), open access at https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled-88c11800-9446-469b-a3be-3fdb36bfbd1e/section/6c7c baa1-5ff8-4439-9ffb-aeccbc6d5734 (accessed 6 July 2022). danah boyd and Kate Crawford, ‘Critical Questions for Big Data’, Information, Communication & Society 15:5 (2012), 662–79 (p. 663).

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them’,37 while the Internet Archive simply states its goal to be ‘Universal Access to All Knowledge’.38 Increasingly, however, recent digital feminist scholarship has challenged the perception of the ‘universality’ of the world’s digital archives – or perhaps more accurately, of that portion of recorded human experience which has so far been digitised. The authors of Data Feminism (2020) argue strongly for the importance of considering context in any type of work involving data analysis, noting a common preconception that data is a ‘raw input’, when in actual fact ‘data enter into research projects already fully cooked – the result of a complex set of social, political, and historical circumstances’.39 Such questions have long been asked about digital archives and their representation of cultural heritage from the perspectives of ethnic, gender, and linguistic minority groups; as early as 2007 Jean-Noël Jeanneney, former head of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, argued that the predominance of English-language texts in Google Books put speakers of other languages at a significant disadvantage, noting that early searches for a number of European authors including Victor Hugo, Cervantes, Dante, and Goethe resulted in just one non-English edition (strangely, a German translation of a work by Hugo).40 The introduction to his book cites two articles from the 2001 UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, which state that ‘while ensuring the free flow of ideas by word and image, care should be exercised that all cultures can express themselves and make themselves known’, and that ‘market forces alone cannot guarantee the preservation and promotion of cultural diversity, which is the key to sustainable human development’.41 It is quite difficult to find information on current levels of representation of different languages in the Google Books corpus, but Jeanneney’s concern about linguistic bias in this giant collection holds continued relevance for other areas of scholarship. A 2021 study by Allen Riddell and Troy Bassett, which focused on works of fiction which were published in the British Isles in the late 1830s, troublingly concluded that novels written by men and novels published in a multi-volume format were significantly more likely to have a ‘digital surrogate’, i.e., to be present in a digital format 37

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https://books.google.com/googlebooks/about/history.html#:~:text=After%20more%20than%20a %20decade,any%20time%20they%20need%20them (accessed 6 July 2022). https://archive.org/about/ (accessed 6 July 2022). 39 D’Ignazio and Klein, Data Feminism. Jean-Noël Jeanneney, Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 11–13. Ibid., p. x.

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in one of the major online archives.42 The specific advantage observed for multi-volume novels suggests that biases reflect both library acquisition practices of the nineteenth century and library digitisation practices of the twenty-first. The authors speculate that specific libraries may tend to specialise in works from male-dominated genres, but also note that ‘the British Library appears to have excluded multi-volume novels published in 1836 from bulk digitization efforts’. Other important challenges to the perceived supremacy of big data have clear origins in feminist critique. Jen Jack Gieseking has argued that the mythos of big data has resulted in the further marginalisation of many communities including people of colour, people living in poverty, and colonised, disabled, and LGBTQ people; for many of these individuals, recording aspects of their lives may be unsafe or simply impossible, and so they are significantly under-represented in contemporary and historical records.43 Digital humanities research has too often failed to recognise the imbalances at the heart of digital collections. As Katherine Bode argues in her groundbreaking study of serial fiction in nineteenth-century Australian newspapers, it is frequently the case in work which utilises mass-digitised collections that ‘the complex relationships between documentary record, digitization, data curation, and historical analysis [are] not fully articulated’, with these relationships and their effects in some cases ‘essentially denied in preference for a view of large-scale literary data and mass-digitized collections as transparent windows onto the past’.44 Crucially, the queer feminist approach to critical studies outlined by Gieseking

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Allen Riddell and Troy J. Bassett, ‘What Library Digitization Leaves Out: Predicting the Availability of Digital Surrogates of English Novels’, Portal: Libraries and the Academy, 21:4 (2021), 885–900. Project MUSE https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2021.0045 (accessed 6 July 2022). Jen Jack Gieseking, ‘Size Matters to Lesbians, Too: Queer Feminist Interventions into the Scale of Big Data’, Professional Geographer 70:1 (2018), 150–6. Katherine Bode, ‘Introduction: Questions and Opportunities for Twenty-First-Century Literary History’, A World of Fiction: Digital Collections and the Future of Literary History (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2018), pp. 1–14 (p. 3). Bode’s volume is available on JSTOR, www .jstor.org/stable/j.ctvdtpj1d.4 (accessed 6 July 2022). Her study of nineteenth-century Australian newspapers, drawing on the National Library of Australia’s Trove collection, examines a curated data set of 9,200 works of long-form fiction using a number of different digital humanities methods. Described by its author as ‘data-rich literary history’, this study represents a significant intervention not only in Australian and global literary studies, but also in digital humanities. As well as complicating previously held ideas about nineteenth-century Australian literary cultures, this work undertook a reassessment of existing approaches to large-scale digital literary research, and suggested the new critical framework of the ‘digital scholarly edition’ as a means of moving beyond the binary of close/distant reading.

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‘requires an acknowledgment of the absences in data as well as dimensions of power of who can form and define data’.45 This issue of absence, of lack, of gaps in the record, is part of the founding impulse for the Irish feminist databases under discussion here, and was a key tenet of the wider critical discourse from which they emerged. In 1991, the same year that saw the publication of the first three volumes of the Field Day Anthology, and the stirrings of a response to its lack of attention to women writers, Patricia Coughlan’s essay ‘Bog Queens’ launched an iconoclastic critical challenge to the perceived supremacy of the male speaker in Irish poetry, specifically that of John Montague and Seamus Heaney.46 Coughlan’s essay identified in their works a failure ‘to perceive their own reliance upon and tacit approval of the absence of women as speaking subjects and of female disempowerment’, arguing that ‘where the fictionality of the poetic speaker is routinely concealed, a responsible criticism must seek to recover the moment of his construction (it almost always is “his”)’.47 FDA Volumes iv and v are an expression of a similar, contemporaneous impulse, a response to the need to interrogate the unquestioned assumptions at the heart of Irish literary criticism, and to clarify who is allowed to speak and whose voices are suppressed. In emerging from such a rupture in Irish literary scholarship, well before any idea of its developing into a digital resource, these volumes in some ways anticipate debates that would erupt within the digital humanities; and the tensions and conflicts in their evolutionary history would ultimately work to their benefit. Editor Gerardine Meaney writes that the final selection of works – determined by a team of more than sixty contributors – ‘usually came down to balanced representation across genres and time periods’.48 Rather than offering a comprehensive, totalising vision of a complete and finished history of women’s writing in Ireland, Field Day’s work – as ‘sampler’ – is reconstructive and contingent rather than constitutive. Modern digital humanities archival scholarship now increasingly incorporates detailed discussions of the data sets under consideration (a practice usefully termed data biography by D’Ignazio and Klein49), and the construction of the digital archive itself has, rightly, begun to attract 45 46

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Gieseking, ‘Size Matters to Lesbians, Too’, p. 151. Patricia Coughlan, ‘“Bog Queens”: The Representation of Women in the Poetry of John Montague and Seamus Heaney’, in Gender in Irish Writing, ed. T. O’Brien Johnson and D. Cairns (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991), pp. 88–111. Ibid., p. 91. Deirdre Flynn and Gerardine Meaney, ‘Research Pioneers 6: Gerardine Meaney’, Irish Women’s Writing (1880–1920) Network, 31 March 2020, https://irishwomenswritingnetwork.com/researchpioneers-6-gerardine-meaney/ (accessed 6 July 2022). D’Ignazio and Klein, Data Feminism.

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scholarly attention. For example, Stephen Gregg’s Old Books and Digital Publishing (2020) gives a detailed history of the life cycle of Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), and, as quoted in the second epigraph above, emphasises the dynamic and material history of ‘digital resources, collections, and archives’.50 For Field Day, the complex and at times controversial origins of the fourth and fifth volumes are inextricably bound with its positioning as a crucial intervention, a response to a lack; and much of the critique it has engendered to date illustrates the tenacity of plenitude and completion as cultural ideals.51 As the authors of Data Feminism argue – following on from Donna Haraway’s crucial work on information and feminism in the 1990s – all knowledge is situated; the final volumes of Field Day are intrinsically so.52

Conclusion In an illuminating interview for the Irish Women’s Writing (1880– 1920) Network (IWWN), Gerardine Meaney describes the complex process of digitising texts during the preparation of the Field Day Anthology, and the editorial team’s reasons for so doing, during a time in which the task of digitisation was neither common nor trivial.53 Her oral history of FDA Volumes iv and v describes the physical effort involved in creating digital copies of texts for the project, using ‘a scanner the size of a small car’ in a basement room at University College Dublin. Meaney recalls that [i]t used to overheat and stick: we took turns giving it a precisely aimed kick to get it going again. It was a long way from Kristevan theory and Angela Carter, but very satisfying. There were many other parts of the academic apparatus I would have merrily kicked back then, so it was an outlet.54

Meaney’s account reminds us that far from being a solely intellectual enterprise, the creation of a digital archive involves embodied labour, of 50 51

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Gregg, ‘Conclusion’, Old Books and Digital Publishing, pp. 100–2. In her valuable essay on the process of digitising Volumes iv and v of The Field Day Anthology, Anne Jamison similarly argues that critical interpretations of Field Day are inevitably ‘bound up with the original debates that surrounded the genesis and aftermath of both the first and second set of Field Day volumes and their significance for women’s literary history in Ireland’. Jamison, ‘Women’s Literary History in Ireland: Digitizing The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing’, Women’s History Review 26:5 (2017), 751–65 (p. 752). See, for example, Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Routledge, 1990). Flynn and Meaney, ‘Research Pioneers 6: Gerardine Meaney’. 54 Ibid.

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a sort which has often been poorly paid and had low prestige, and which has frequently been relegated to women since the earliest days of computing history. An earlier example of the intellectual paradigm which governed computing during much of the twentieth century can be found in Vannevar Bush’s article, ‘As We May Think’, which in 1945 somewhat presciently envisioned the possibilities inherent in computing.55 This essay laid out a clear binary in the distribution of gender roles within the industry, in which the future users of the imagined computer-like device – scientists, engineers, photographers – are men, while the machine itself is maintained and served by women: rooms full of ‘girls armed with simple key board punches’.56 Bush’s deeply gendered vision would prove close to historical reality.57 For future practitioners, Meaney’s narrative of the digital origins of FDA is an unusual and encouraging one, since it depicts the means of data production being seized by women scholars in order to push back against embedded structural inequalities. As feminist scholarship continues to embrace and engage with digital records, archives, and methodologies, it is worth remembering these origins. One means to enable both Irish feminist studies and digital studies to move beyond a paradigm of ‘mere presence’ (or disillusioning absences) is to follow Wernimont’s suggestion that the proliferation of recovery projects and their contents in feminist literary studies might more usefully be seen as ‘representations of a particular moment in feminist engagements with technology’ – the record of which should include a ‘feminist preservation of process’.58 Such a record for Irish literary studies, then, would include a consideration not just of the new research questions made possible but also of the tools tried and developed, the technical expertise acquired and shared, and the users imagined and realised through the digital encounter. And here, feminist-led questions regarding institutional power and authority remain of fundamental relevance. The facilitation of new forms of interaction between digital, creative, and critical practice, and of collaborations that enable participation by those previously marginalised or excluded from technological innovation, is crucial to this agenda and can, we hope, in turn lead to a more dynamic and sustainable future for the feminist digital archive. 55

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Vannevar Bush, ‘As We May Think’, The Atlantic, July 1945, www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush (accessed 6 July 2022). Ibid. For a detailed history of women’s participation in – and exclusion from – the computing industry during the twentieth century, see Mar Hicks, Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2018). Wernimont, ‘Whence Feminism?’, p. 8.

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Select Bibliography Bode, Katherine, A World of Fiction: Digital Collections and the Future of Literary History (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2018). Bourke, Angela, Siobhán Kilfeather, Maria Luddy, Margaret Mac Curtain, Gerardine Meaney, Máirín Ní Dhonnchadha, Mary O’Dowd, and Clair Wills, eds., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Vols. iv and v: Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions (Derry and Cork: Field Day and Cork University Press, 2002), online at https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1fkgbdv and www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1fkgbfc boyd, danah, and Kate Crawford, ‘Critical Questions for Big Data’, Information, Communication & Society 15:5 (2012), 662–79. Bracken, Claire, ‘Becoming-Mother-Machine: The Event of Field Day Vols IV & V’, in Irish Literature: Feminist Perspectives, ed. Patricia Coughlan and Tina O’Toole (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2011), pp. 223–44. ‘The Feminist Contemporary: The Contradictions of Critique’, in The New Irish Studies, ed. Paige Reynolds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 144–60. D’Ignazio, Catherine, and Lauren F. Klein, ‘6. The Numbers Don’t Speak for Themselves’, Data Feminism (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2020), open access at https://data-feminism.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/czq9dfs5/release/3 Earhart, Amy E., ‘Can Information Be Unfettered? Race and the New Digital Humanities Canon’, in Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew Gold (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), open access at https:// dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/projects/debates-in-the-digital-humanities Flynn, Deirdre, and Gerardine Meaney, ‘Research Pioneers 6: Gerardine Meaney’, Irish Women’s Writing (1880–1920) Network, 31 March 2020, https://irishwo menswritingnetwork.com/research-pioneers-6-gerardine-meaney/ Gieseking, Jen Jack, ‘Size Matters to Lesbians, Too: Queer Feminist Interventions into the Scale of Big Data’, Professional Geographer 70:1 (2018), 150–6. Gregg, Stephen H., Old Books and Digital Publishing: Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). Herrnstein Smith, Barbara, ‘What Was “Close Reading”?: A Century of Method in Literary Studies’, Minnesota Review 87:1 (2016), 57–75. Hicks, Mar, Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2018). Jamison, Anne, ‘Women’s Literary History in Ireland: Digitizing The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing’, Women’s History Review 26:5 (2017), 751–65. Jeanneney, Jean-Noël, Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Jockers, Matthew, Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013). Moretti, Franco, ‘Narrative Markets, ca.1850’, Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 20:2 (1997), 151–74.

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O’Toole, Tina, ed., Dictionary of Munster Women Writers, 1800–2000 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2005). Riddell, Allen, and Troy J. Bassett, ‘What Library Digitization Leaves Out: Predicting the Availability of Digital Surrogates of English Novels’, Portal: Libraries and the Academy, 21:4 (2021), 885–900, Project MUSE, https://doi .org/10.1353/pla.2021.0045 Sullivan, Moynagh, ‘“I Am Not Yet Delivered of the Past”: The Poetry of Blanaid Salkeld’, Irish University Review 33:1 (2003), 182–200. Wernimont, Jacqueline, ‘Whence Feminism? Assessing Feminist Interventions in Digital Literary Archives’, DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly 7:1 (2013), 1–23. Wilkens, Matthew, ‘Canons, Close Reading, and the Evolution of Method’, in Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew Gold (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), open access at https://dhdebates .gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled-88c11800-9446-469b-a3be-3fdb36bfbd1e/section/ 6c7cbaa1-5ff8-4439-9ffb-aeccbc6d5734

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chapter 15

Consoling Machines in Contemporary Irish Fiction Claire Lynch

Nestled amongst the Tara Torcs and the Book of Kells in Fintan O’Toole’s History of Ireland in 100 Objects (2013), the Intel Microprocessor becomes a symbol of a globalised and technological Ireland.1 Plucked from its hidden location within the computer, the silicon chip is labelled, mapped, and historicised by O’Toole’s project. The tiny object is enlarged and enhanced in the accompanying illustration, an abstract blur of blues, pinks, and greens. As with the artefacts crafted centuries earlier, readers are invited to admire the human capacity to produce things which are both ingenious and beautiful. Future civilisations, O’Toole’s list implies, might one day marvel at this small object of sophistication in an otherwise primitive culture, just as we might view a Mesolithic Fish Trap or Flint Macehead. Unlike these early tools, however, most of the people who rely upon the microprocessor have never seen one, much less held one in the palm of their hand. Most of the ‘everyday consumers’ O’Toole refers to as the beneficiaries of the ‘billion pentium chips’ have never engaged with them physically (unless on the Leixlip production line), but via the machines which encase and facilitate them – the laptop on the kitchen table, the smartphone pulled from a pocket. As T. L. Taylor argues, despite the promise of a world transformed by ‘magical technologies’, most people’s ‘relationships with technological objects are always moving closer to the mundane’.2 Over the past two decades, such ‘mundane’ technologies have characterised our use of computers as far more practical than magical. While much is made of the cultural and psychological impact of social media, or the futuristic applications of augmented reality, a smartphone is as likely to be used to check the weather forecast, buy the groceries, or find directions on a map. For 1 2

Fintan O’Toole, History of Ireland in 100 Objects (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2013), p. 206. T. L. Taylor, Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009), p. 152.

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many, a laptop is simply the default portal to entertainment, education, work. Whether one chooses to view this as depressing dystopia or exhilarating progress, it is impossible to deny technology’s ‘increasing embeddedness in everyday life’.3 What is clear is that the ubiquity of handheld or portable computers has brought with it an increased physical connection with ‘mundane’ technologies, a sensual as well as intellectual bond. We carry our machines with us now, their beeps and vibrations punctuating real conversation, their capacity for knowledge always on hand to supplement our own. Unlike the silicon chip of O’Toole’s list, tiny and effectively invisible to the user, it is the device, the gadget at the end of our fingertips, which we can truly think of as ‘a technology of the imagination’.4 This chapter draws on a series of contemporary Irish novels, charting the way everyday ‘technological objects’ – phones, laptops, computers – do more than simply sit alongside fictional characters. These are the machines that support their users, distract them, comfort them. They answer their questions, connecting them to people and places out of reach. The console consoles. The fictional characters explored in this chapter use their machines in all the ‘mundane’ ways we might expect. We see characters composing emails, researching medical symptoms, playing games, and checking social media. My contention here is that computers and other gadgets are not just incidental props which situate the character in a particular time and place: on the contrary, they are an essential aspect of the narrative. The machines in these novels are tools which advance the plot, offer insight into a character’s behaviour, and in some cases express a specific framework through which the novel might be most clearly viewed. When we see ‘Connell’s face illuminated by the lit display on [Marianne’s] phone’ in Sally Rooney’s Normal People (2018), we see a moment of intimacy between the characters, a private joke shared on a handheld screen.5 When Sinéad Hynes is shown ‘Googling [in bed] in case I suddenly dropped dead and needed a soft landing spot’ in Elaine Feeney’s As You Were (2020), we learn much about the character’s desire for privacy, her realism, her sense of humour.6 As the unnamed boy in Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (2013) hammers the controls of a computer 3

4

5 6

David Bell, Cyberculture Theorists: Manuel Castells and Donna Haraway (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 12. Michael Simeone, ‘Why We Will Not Be Posthuman: Gadgets as a Technocultural Form’, Configurations 19:3 (2011), 333–56 (p. 356). Sally Rooney, Normal People (London: Faber & Faber, 2018), p. 114. Elaine Feeney, As You Were (London: Harvill Secker, 2020), p. 10.

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game, or Anne Enright’s Gina in The Forgotten Waltz (2011) manages her extramarital affair on her smartphone, we see them finding refuge, expression, and intimacy in the company of their endlessly understanding machines.7 Feeney’s protagonist, Sinéad Hynes, is rarely shown without a smartphone or laptop in As You Were. We see her googling her diagnosis, researching how to write her will, and sending emojis to her children from her hospital bed. At the centre of the novel is Sinéad’s decision to hide her ‘terminal status from Alex’.8 Instead of talking about her illness with her loved ones or doctors, Sinéad turns to her machine, drawn to the comforting numbness it provides, going ‘mad with Google [. . .] the great vantablack hole of it. Letting Go’.9 The particular refuge Sinéad takes in Google is apparent in the text as both serious and frivolous queries are placed side by side, capturing the leaps in logic and imagination that the search engine creates. As she contemplates: I wouldn’t have to Google Tips on Losing Weight for the foreseeable future. But I’d continue to chat to Google under the duvet. For solace. How to Live the Pain-Free Life. Doing the Proper On-Line Will. How to Control Your Dying. [. . .] How to Stand Comfortably in Heels [. . .] Property Prices in Bulgaria [. . .] How to Get the Thigh Gap.10

Sinéad’s growing dependence on Google for answers and distractions creates an increasing sense of alienation from her husband. The intimacy she establishes with Google is preferable because it is infinitely more controllable. If Google provides Sinéad with answers she doesn’t want to see, she is free to skip them, move on, ignore. The scale of online information provided in response to any search query is such that a user is always required to hold two contradictory thoughts in mind at once. This is true; this is nonsense. Throughout the novel, Sinéad remains self-aware about her reliance on her machines, revelling in the appeal of their predictability, in direct contrast to her unpredictable body. Computers and phones offer illusions of comfort for Sinéad when she is in hospital, but they are also the practical means by which her connection to Alex is preserved. As the narrator acknowledges: Talking to Alex via text was much nicer than dealing with his breathing and humming and hawing and real-life him. He was more eloquent or direct in

7

8

Eimear McBride, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (London: Faber & Faber, 2014); Anne Enright, The Forgotten Waltz (London: Vintage, 2012). 9 Feeney, As You Were, p. 9. Ibid., p. 135. 10 Ibid., pp. 12–13.

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texts, and they allowed little room for me to get edgy. Emojis offered due emotion, quickly and without complication or effort. I was ever so grateful for them.11

Alex as mediated through the screen of her phone is more palatable: his on-screen persona fails to provoke the tense and short-tempered exchanges that characterise their in-person discussions. The couple’s message exchanges benefit from additional time, not afforded in spoken conversation. From her hospital bed Sinéad has time to read and re-read, to compose and edit her response. Feeney’s book captures these interactions on the page, ruminating on the way messages pass back and forth, including the device as an interlocutor in its own right. Here Feeney plays with the conventions of online communication by including, not only the content of the messages, but also the paratext that contributes so much to the meaning: ‘A typing . . . not typing. Long pause. A typing again . . . .’12 These words, not a message from another person, but from the phone itself, show the machine as an ally, an intermediary voice of comfort, assuring the user that someone is listening. So much is implied in the gap between messages, the three flashing dots which conjure an imagined reply, or threaten to withdraw it. During these message exchanges, Sinéad imagines Alex ‘sat at home with a large bag of cheese puffs, doors and windows all open, radio blaring’.13 Her image of him spans multiple time frames: simultaneously a memory of her life before her illness, a vision of him now, and a potential imagined future in which he exists without her. Still, as the novel progresses, the ‘mundane’ technologies featured are acknowledged, not just as a communication aid or distraction, but as a direct and disruptive threat to their relationship. When Alex finally witnesses the extent of Sinéad’s illness, her decision to not tell him about her prognosis is read as a betrayal. It is not, after all, that she keeps her illness to herself; she has told the machine over and over. As Alex accuses, ‘“Bet you told Google you were dying – ” he paused – “before me?”’14 Sinéad’s deep reliance on her machine to console her is not unique in As You Were, but rather fits within the technological ecosystem of the hospital ward. From Margaret Rose with her ‘large charcoal Dell laptop sat on her meal table’, to Shane with his ‘laptop on constant charge and the way he’d look at it all day with one eye open, drooling’, we see the patients bonded to their machines.15 Just as their bodies are connected to machines 11 14

Ibid., p. 86. Ibid., p. 294.

12

Ibid., p. 85. Bold font is reproduced from the original text. Ibid., pp. 44, 46.

15

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13

Ibid.

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which monitor heart rates or urine outputs, so they stay connected to some other version of themselves via their movies, photos, and music, a time and a place before their bodies revealed their fallibility. This sense of the computer offering an alternative reality to the sick body is also explored by Eimear McBride in A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. Here, the unnamed boy is shown giddy with pleasure as his on-screen double punches and kicks his way to victory in his favourite video games. The actions in the game punctuate McBride’s prose with strikes on the keyboard and jerks of a joystick. As the novel progresses, the boy’s enjoyment becomes an obsession: the more he plays the better he gets. As the boy becomes increasingly lost to the endless ‘Hours of fun’ provided by the computer, his mother comes to view the machine as dangerously unproductive. His play, as she sees it, is a morally questionable use of time, since the computer ought to be used for ‘further education’, the futuristic work done by enigmatic ‘analysts in rows in shirts’.16 Analyses of video games typically make a distinction between the human player operating the computer and the on-screen character who represents him or her within the game, the avatar. The avatar and the player have a complex relationship which varies according to several factors, including the type of game played, the environment and context in which the game is played, and the experience and skill of the person playing. Still, it would be fanciful to suggest that the person playing ceases to exist in the physical world during gameplay. The kicking, punching avatar doesn’t replace the boy: he joins him. By moving the controls or tapping the screen, the player physically engages ‘with bits of plastic and metal, silicon and glass’.17 As Barry Atkins continues, this human engagement with computers is plainly physical, straining backs and eyes, as the ‘game takes its toll on the body even as it promises a disembodied and virtual experience’.18 The physical body of the player is, paradoxically, both active and sedentary: he sits, paralysed by the screen, as his hands press, twist, and click, to power the endlessly dynamic avatar.19 In A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing the boy establishes a symbolic relationship with his avatar, the body on screen

16 17

18 19

McBride, Girl, p. 80. Barry Atkins, More than a Game: The Computer Game as Fictional Form (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 11. Ibid. The minor injuries and irritations caused by gameplay, typically repetitive-strain conditions in the hand and wrist, are nicknamed ‘Nintendonitus’ by the doctors who treat them. Steven L. Kent, The Ultimate History of Videogames: From Pong to Pokemon and Beyond – The Story Behind the Craze that Touched Our Lives and Changed the World (Louisiana, LA: Prima Publishing, 2001), p. 279.

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capable of things his real body is not. Still, the virtual body is only capable of movement at all if the boy’s actual hands and eyes direct him to do so. In his review of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, James Wood describes McBride’s ‘blazingly daring’ novel as set in ‘an Ireland shorn of dates and obvious historical specificity’, only conceding that the presence of a Walkman hints at the 1980s.20 But what about the computer? Are computers and games consoles really so ubiquitous as to have become invisible to readers? Contrary to Wood’s sense that this is a timeless narrative, the arrival of the first computer in this Irish home could be said to date McBride’s novel precisely.21 The arrival of the new computer fractures the already strained family structure, annexing the son/brother to his bedroom and away from the communal domestic spaces. When the mother complains of her evenings ‘sitting down here on my own’ while her children are upstairs playing video games, she highlights the way computers change how and where we spend our time.22 As Bernadette Flynn describes, the veneration of a games console in the home restructures the domestic space, as well as producing a discernible change in the functionality and symbolism of technology within the home. As Flynn goes on to explain, the etymological root of hearth, the Latin for ‘focus’, is especially apt in describing the technologies which have traditionally trained the domestic gaze before being superseded, from the original fireplace, to the radio, then the television, and, latterly, the games console.23 Flynn’s work describes a process of domestication from the public spectacle of the arcade into the heart of the home, making the point that, although the console is in the home, it is not of it. From the earliest video games consoles onwards, designers have been keen to emphasise the idea of the console as a ‘futuristic dream machine in opposition to the place of its location’.24 In A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, the hearth is symbolically displaced, the mother left alone, the family splintered not gathered. For the boy, a clear distinction emerges, the Before 20

21

22 23

24

James Wood, ‘Useless Prayers: Eimear McBride’s “A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing”’, The New Yorker, 22 September 2014. As the Girl points out to her mother, ‘I don’t think commodores were hanging on the tree Mammy’ (McBride, Girl, p. 105). The Commodore 64 was a hugely popular early home computer, selling up to 17 million machines between 1982 and 1993. For more on the early years of home computing, see Centre for Computing History, www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/1336/commodore-64 (accessed 10 March 2021). McBride, Girl, p. 104. Bernadette Flynn, ‘Geography of the Digital Hearth’, Information, Communication & Society 6:4 (2003), 551–76 (p. 561). Ibid., p. 557.

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Computer era, and after. While the mother continues to insist that playing games on a computer is a waste of ‘God’s good fruits’, its impact cannot be undone.25 As with Sinéad’s self-destructive reliance on Google for ‘solace’, so the boy in A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing reaches a tipping point in his absorption in the world of the game. Attempting to move the virtual violence from the screen to his own body, he recounts: ‘I think I’d like to kick like that. I practise it when there’s no one in. I hiyah’d the clothes line and it broke.’26 While his emulation of video-game violence may seem childish, it is, in many ways, an appropriate response to the immersive experience. To play successfully, to win, the player must collaborate with the computer, learning to think and behave in the way the computer demands. The pleasure of play, one might argue, depends upon the player melding with the computer, sharing its thought processes. As the adult brother and sister share video games in McBride’s novel, they return to childhood play and the sibling alliance which has protected them from their mother’s cruelty. Their regeneration as playmates also marks a further shift in the novel’s complex time frame. As the Girl gets older and more independent of the controlling family unit, her brother’s brain tumour conspires to make him younger, a little boy again, and eventually a baby in nappies needing to be spoon-fed. The video games they play together are a crucial component of this narrative, creating an imagined other, the man he is never to become; a man who might use computers for work, in contrast to the boy who only uses them for play and fantasy: Mad lust of it you get for computer games go blip across a screen. That’s your eighteenth birthday gift improve your mind with . . . The new love take up all your time. Eating sweets and Jupiter Landing. Come on and have a go. No. I don’t want to. It’s killing all your brain cells. So?27

The video games aren’t killing his brain cells but they are dying all the same. Jupiter Landing, one of the early video games available on the Commodore 64 computer, challenges players to probe the planet’s surface, carefully navigating the folds and valleys of the dark landscape, not unlike the surgeons who concede in their efforts to root out the invading tumours in the boy’s brain. The destruction of his brain, caused both by the tumour and the various operations which fail to remove it, results in a hardware fault; the brain is simply unable to process as it once did. 25

McBride, Girl, p. 105.

26

Ibid., p. 94.

27

Ibid., p. 80.

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In Anne Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz, consoling machines are significant in their quiet omnipresence. The novel includes all of the day-to-day technology of the time, so taken for granted that the narrative would seem odd or inaccurate without it. There are iPods, mobile phones, children playing Nintendo, a protagonist who works with ‘European companies, mainly on the web’ married to ‘a happening geek’ with a ‘Masters in multimedia’.28 More significant is the way in which characters’ engagements with technology are shown to be reflections of their personality. Computer technology, in other words, provides metaphors as well as props here. While Claire Bracken’s claim that Enright privileges twentiethcentury technology over the ‘digital and cyber technologies of the new millennium’ in her writing was accurate when made, the analysis must be revised in light of The Forgotten Waltz.29 Here, for example, protagonist Gina Moynihan describes how the ‘internet was made for Conor’, her husband, in order to show that ‘he was always interested but could never settle on one thing’.30 Conor, like the Web, is in constant flux, perennially unfinished. Observations of Gina’s brother-in-law go even further, merging man and machine by noting how he ‘opened a bottle of red, sat on the rug and shut down, massively and at speed’.31 The Forgotten Waltz centres around a relationship which begins at a conference in Switzerland, at which the protagonist, Gina, is speaking on ‘International Internet Strategy’.32 As this first infidelity becomes an established affair, back in Dublin the lovers prioritise taming the technology, keeping liaisons in hotels secret by ensuring ‘No emails, no paper trail, just two, instantly deleted texts.’33 While the narrative is shaped as a reconstruction, recalling the spontaneity and instinctive attraction between the lovers, the computer acts as cyber spy, upholding ‘the verifiable truth, reconstructible through emails here on my computer, calendar entries’.34 This is a novel very clearly couched in human interactions, love, lust, infidelity, guilt, but as an Irish novel of the early twenty-first century, these very concepts are only really explicable via the technology which surrounds and defines them. In the depths of her affair with Seán, Gina observes her husband ‘sitting in the armchair, his face blue in the light of the screen, and nothing moves except the sweep and play of his finger on the mouse pad and his thumb as 28 29

30 34

Enright, Forgotten Waltz, p. 12. Claire Bracken and Susan Cahill, eds., Anne Enright – Visions and Revisions: Irish Writers in Their Time (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2011), p. 185. Enright, Forgotten Waltz, p. 18. 31 Ibid., p. 25. 32 Ibid., p. 32. 33 Ibid., p. 62. Ibid., p. 47.

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it clicks’.35 Conor’s paralysis, at the screen as in life, shows him passive in response to his wife’s adultery; he is illuminated by the light of the screen, but blind to the events taking place before his eyes. Gradually reconstructing the stages of the affair and their ultimate culmination in the same stagnation, marriage 2.0, Gina implicates her husband Conor, blaming him for the encroachment of the virtual in their real lives. Reliving old frustrations, she bemoans the domestic drama of the flooded washing machine he incorrectly installs before going ‘back to play Shattered Galaxy’.36 Shattered Galaxy, a real online multiplayer game, set in a postapocalyptic future (and so appropriately named for the destruction of a marriage), brings together the real conflict of the domestic dispute with online virtual warfare. Gina’s frustration here is multilayered; Conor has neglected his responsibilities as a husband to engage in childlike games, he plays rather than provides. More importantly, by retreating into cyberspace, he becomes necessarily absent from the real world. As Gina recalls, ‘The whole internet thing maddened me, by then ‒ I can’t remember when it happened, when Conor at the cutting edge turned into Conor hanging out with a load of wasters online.’37 Although apparently disconnected in Gina’s recollection, Conor’s withdrawal into cyberspace coincides with her affair. He seeks comfort and company in online gaming just as she later seeks comfort in the ritual of checking her emails when finding it ‘hard to settle’.38 The verb ‘to check’ is revealing in this context, suggesting an anxious desire to confirm that the emails are still there, as well as an implicit threat posed by the messages which demand nurture and attention. When exiled from her family and separated from her lover at Christmas, Gina’s loneliness is underlined by the failure of technology to provide adequate consolation, as she bemoans the sheer ‘nothing on the internet’.39 On this most sociable of days, the Internet fails to distract or comfort, a void despite its supposed endless capacity. The failure of the Internet to soothe Gina is further reinforced as she imagines her lover Seán at home with his family, marking his daughter’s technological coming of age as she unwraps ‘her first laptop’.40 Alone, Gina thinks about her lover ‘all day: his daughter sitting at his feet, writing her first email, Hello Daddy!’.41 The email, sent at redundant proximity, is in the most narrow sense pointless, since father and daughter are within physical touching distance. At the same time, the child’s first email captures the wider theme of frustrated communication on which the whole 35 40

Ibid., p. 70. Ibid., p. 152.

36 41

Ibid., p. 72. Ibid., p. 181.

37

Ibid.

38

Ibid., p. 152.

39

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Ibid., p. 158.

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novel stands: messages which don’t quite convey the intended meaning; compelling games played to the point of oblivion. The contemporary Irish Christmas described in The Forgotten Waltz, shaped by interactions with computers, confirms it as a novel tied to a precise moment. As Hermione Lee puts it, the novel takes place at the end-point of the snow-bound winter of 2009, when Dublin has ground to a halt and the streets are empty and blanketed, as if in a faint tribute to the end of Joyce’s great story of love, loss, family and nation, ‘The Dead’ [. . .] This Ireland of the 2000s is dead, too: the bubble has burst, the boom is over, all the buying has stopped.42

Indeed, it is precisely this lack of buying which holds Gina in stasis. Back in her childhood home, unable to sell her late mother’s property, the Internet provides a ghost archive of memory. She sits alone, aware that the house surrounding her is simultaneously available ‘on the internet for anyone to click on and dismiss’.43 By placing the property details online, Gina opens up the private spaces of her childhood to a public gaze, tuning into the ‘shifts in the cultural imaginary and the relationship between past and present, remembering and forgetting’.44 In this way, the connection with Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, as highlighted in Lee’s review, is revealed further, not least in the way both narratives reveal the unexpressed isolation of individuals within a marriage. The bubble has indeed burst, and not just in terms of the property market. The regression and stagnation which accompany Gina’s failure to sell the house also taint her new relationship. Indeed, the supposed upgrade from Conor to Seán soon reverts to a reconstruction of the same patterns, with her new lover acting as if programmed: ‘He comes home late, he goes out to the gym, he gets stuck on the internet.’45 For Gina, the machine can only offer temporary consolation, a distraction from the present moment but not a lasting form of comfort. As the affair settles into a stagnant relationship, Seán’s daughter Evie becomes the central point of tension and crisis between them. Gina’s conflicted feelings towards Evie, her love, her frustration, and her jealousy, are encapsulated perfectly in the final pages of the novel by the presence and absence of a phone message. Walking together in the snow through St Stephen’s Green, Gina and Evie seem to reach a truce, moving towards a new mutual understanding. When Evie’s ‘phone beeps’ with a message to say Seán’s plane has landed, Gina expects a message of her own: ‘I wait for my phone 42 43 45

Hermione Lee, ‘The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright – Review’, The Guardian, 1 May 2011. Enright, Forgotten Waltz, p. 181. 44 Bracken and Cahill, Anne Enright, p. 5. Enright, Forgotten Waltz, p. 179.

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to jump but it does not.’46 Seán’s failure to communicate to his lover as well as his daughter is a marker of Gina’s position in the hierarchy of his affections. The unsent message saying more than any line of text could have conveyed. In 2017, Sally Rooney’s debut novel, Conversations with Friends, emerged to critical and popular acclaim. Rooney’s status as the defining voice in post-crash Irish fiction was established, in part, by her characteristic use of email and message exchanges as central to the narrative. As she explained in an interview with the Irish Times: the voice that I have when I’m writing emails feels like my voice. That’s me writing, trying to communicate something to someone, who I trust, as I would like to trust a reader. I mean, that is my voice, isn’t it? [. . .] The book itself is almost like one of those emails. Like a controlled outpouring.47

Rooney’s naturalistic use of email as both stylistic trope and plot device was expanded further in her second novel, Normal People (2018), in which protagonist Marianne is described as having ‘a face like a piece of technology, and her two eyes are cursors blinking’.48 Normal People is a coming-ofage novel, exploring the unique physical and intellectual connection between Connell and Marianne over the course of a few years in their early adulthood. As with the other novels explored here, the presence of the technology is entirely unremarkable. Yet the way in which Rooney uses technology to simultaneously capture internal experience and external action is structurally and stylistically innovative. When Marianne sends a text to Connell after one of brother Alan’s bullying episodes, for example, the shake in her hand provides evidence of her distress as we see her ‘repeatedly hitting the wrong key, deleting and retyping’, even if the message, ‘On my way’, fails to convey to her lover that anything is wrong.49 These exchanges play a crucial role in Normal People, conveying the ever-shifting dynamics between the two central characters. In the early part of the novel, Rooney draws out the duality of the relationship, simultaneously public and private. The characters’ phones act as a juncture in this enterprise, a cross-over point where the truth is written out on screens. While roped into selling raffle tickets for the Debs fundraising committee, ‘presumably as some kind of joke’, Marianne texts Connell, witty, flirty, messages, all the while maintaining the public fiction 46 47

48

Ibid., p. 230. Michael Nolan, ‘Sally Rooney: “A Large Part of my Style has Definitely Developed through Writing Emails”’, The Irish Times, 13 November 2017. Rooney, Normal People, p. 9. 49 Ibid., p. 10.

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that they are ambivalent towards each other.50 Marianne is completely aware in this moment of how easy it would be to reveal the truth on her phone, as well as ‘how destabilising it would be, how destructive’.51 When the protagonists’ paths threaten to diverge at the end of school, Connell changes his plans and applies to study at Trinity College, just like Marianne. We see Connell in the act of making this decision: ‘The laptop screen has gone black now and he taps the trackpad to light it up again. The college applications web page stares back at him.’52 Connell’s interaction with the college applications web page is presented as an identity crisis, an opportunity to resolve the consuming ‘sense that he is in fact two separate people’.53 Here Rooney reimagines the existential crisis of a young man by distilling it down, not into an abstract question, but into the simple practicality of the drop-down box on a website. Here are the multiple lives Connell might lead, each accessible via the click of a mouse. As the novel progresses, readers witness Marianne and Connell moving in and out of each other’s orbit. Their initial breakup is characterised by a parallel breakdown in communication, calls unanswered, messages left without a reply. Later, as the physical distance between them grows, an email correspondence develops to bridge the gap. When Connell is travelling in Europe, now in a new relationship, he takes up ‘three rituals of communication’ in each city he visits: ‘he calls Helen on Skype, he sends his mother a free text message from his phone network’s website, and he writes Marianne an email’.54 Through the ‘lengthy’ emails they exchange, Marianne and Connell arguably develop the most successful manifestation of their relationship. When refracted through their machines, they are able to articulate their thoughts with precision. Finally, it seems, these two sensitive and self-conscious characters are able to convey themselves to one another in precisely the way they want to be seen, circumventing the damaging misunderstandings that they suffer from in real life. When Marianne leaves for Sweden for her third year of university, Connell’s fears of missing her are eclipsed by how much he is ‘looking forward to how long and intense their email correspondence will be while she’s away’.55 At this stage in the novel, the email exchange between the characters is so firmly established as the superior track of their relationship that we see Connell viewing the Italian scenery as inspiration for ‘an email to Marianne’, and pausing at the realisation that ‘he can’t email her when

50 55

Ibid., p. 30. Ibid., p. 162.

51

Ibid., p. 31.

52

Ibid., p. 20.

53

Ibid., p. 26.

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54

Ibid., p. 154.

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she’s downstairs’.56 Yet for all that emails seem to resolve their relationship challenges, it is also an email which ultimately causes the final rift between Marianne and Connell. We leave the characters drawing apart again in response to news arriving in Connell’s inbox. As she listens, Marianne continues to dress, her reaction is measured, logical. Connell sits up in bed with her laptop in his hands. The email he receives opens up another imagined future, a plan which signals (another) ending in the relationship. The final moment of intimacy then, is, in fact, between Connell and the machine, the computer already knows: He looks dumbly at the laptop and then back at her. His eyes look red and sleepy. She’s doing the shirt buttons. He’s sitting with his knees propped up under the duvet, the laptop glowing into his face.57

The laptops and phones used by the characters in these contemporary Irish novels are not new or rare. If anything, it is their disarming familiarity which makes them notable. According to David Bell, one of the reasons computers have been so readily accepted into our domestic spaces is the fact that ‘the computer still looks like a television and a typewriter’; we welcome these machines because they ‘bear the impress of previous genres’.58 For now, at least, it remains the case that physical objects are needed to access cyberspace. Laptops, computers, tablets, and mobile devices, whether pocket-sized or desk-bound, are the physical things we touch in order to get access to the virtual world. The swiping of fingers and rotating of screens, the increasingly intuitive ‘natural’ interactions, all place the body in contact with the machine as a portal to the imagination. Yet, as Manuel Castells points out, it is not the machines, but our response to them that matters. Castells is resolute in his assertion that the ‘information age has never been a technological matter’ and should be thought of instead as ‘a process of social change in which technology is an element that is inseparable from social, economic, cultural and political trends’.59 In the case of the novels observed in this chapter, it is most useful to think in terms of the levels of intimacy characters create with machines, and between each other via their machines. The console emerges as a site of consolation in Irish fiction, providing moral support, distraction, and escapism: a comforting alternative to the limitations of the physical. 56 59

Ibid., p. 164. 57 Ibid., p. 262. 58 Bell, Cyberculture Theorists, p. 43. Manuel Castells, The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 3.

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Bibliography Atkins, Barry, More than a Game: The Computer Game as Fictional Form (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). Bell, David, Cyberculture Theorists: Manuel Castells and Donna Haraway (London and New York: Routledge, 2007). Bracken, Claire, and Susan Cahill, eds., Anne Enright – Visions and Revisions: Irish Writers in Their Time (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2011). Castells, Manuel, The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Enright, Anne, The Forgotten Waltz (London: Vintage, 2012). Feeney, Elaine, As You Were (London: Harvill Secker, 2020). Flynn, Bernadette, ‘Geography of the Digital Hearth’, Information, Communication & Society 6:4 (2003), 551–76. Kent, Steven L., The Ultimate History of Videogames: From Pong to Pokemon and Beyond – The Story Behind the Craze that Touched Our Lives and Changed the World (Louisiana, LA: Prima Publishing, 2001). Lee, Hermione, ‘The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright – Review’, The Guardian, 1 May 2011. McBride, Eimear, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (London: Faber & Faber, 2014). Nolan, Michael, ‘Sally Rooney: “A Large Part of My Style has Definitely Developed through Writing Emails”’, The Irish Times, 13 November 2017. O’Toole, Fintan, A History of Ireland in 100 Objects (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2013). Rooney, Sally, Normal People (London: Faber & Faber, 2018). Simeone, Michael, ‘Why We Will Not Be Posthuman: Gadgets as a Technocultural Form’, Configurations 19:3 (2011), 333–56. Taylor, T. L., Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009). Wood, James, ‘Useless Prayers: Eimear McBride’s “A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing”’, The New Yorker, 29 September 2014.

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chapter 16

‘At Me Too Someone Is Looking’: Staging Surveillance in Irish Theatre Victor Merriman

The screw was peeping The lag was sleeping. Brendan Behan, The Hostage1

Irish independence from Britain was secured, in no small measure, by surveillance capacities developed by revolutionaries during a guerrilla war of independence, following the defeated rebellion of 1916. The counterinsurgent outrage perpetrated by Crown forces in Croke Park on the afternoon of 21 November 1920, when police and military fired lethally into football spectators, was an act of retaliation. On that morning, an elite assassination unit known as ‘The Squad’ mounted an operation planned by Michael Collins, Director of Intelligence of the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Their orders were clear – they were to take out the backbone of the British Intelligence network in Ireland, specifically a group of officers known as ‘The Cairo Gang’. The shootings took place in and around Dublin’s south inner city and resulted in fourteen deaths, including six intelligence agents and two members of the British Auxiliary Force.2

Outnumbered and unable to compete in armed engagement with superior forces, the military apparatus of the Provisional Government used detailed intelligence to deadly effect. Many of those involved would go on to hold cabinet office in the Irish Free State, sponsor a reactionary Censorship of Publications Act (1929), and install the economist George O’Brien as the state’s eyes and ears on the board of directors of the Abbey Theatre in 1925. Surveillance, then, has a significant thematic and narrative presence in Irish cultural production, because of its long history in shaping and controlling life in Ireland, both under colonial rule and in the independent successor state. 1

2

Brendan Behan, ‘The Auld Triangle’, from The Hostage, Act ii, in Brendan Behan: The Complete Plays (London: Methuen Drama, 1978), p. 72. https://crokepark.ie/bloodysunday/bloody-sunday-1920 (accessed 5 July 2022).

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The coloniser’s scrutinising gaze is relentless, ceaselessly probing the body politic for signs of subversion, while proclaiming the civilising merits of its modernising projects. Colonial surveillance is the active gaze of institutions projected outward from themselves onto subject populations to coerce compliance and conformity; it is experienced as a form of liberal violence in which ‘the enlightenment subject of emancipation devolves into the alias of domination’.3 Theatrical spectatorship shares, with surveillance, features of Laura Mulvey’s conceptualisation of a male gaze, to the extent that it ‘is overdetermined as an act of knowing, an act of scopophilia, and as the establishment of the boundary between the subject and its other’.4 Thus, the public space of theatre and the concealed observatories of state surveillance, disavow state and corporate coercion even as they act to assert it. This exnominatory economy is abruptly exposed to ethical scrutiny in the plays of Samuel Beckett, as in this moment from Act ii of Waiting for Godot (1953): vladimir. We’re surrounded! [Estragon makes a rush towards back.] Imbecile! There’s no way out there. [He takes Estragon by the arm and drags him towards front. Gesture towards front.] There! Not a soul in sight! Off you go. Quick! [He pushes Estragon towards auditorium. Estragon recoils in horror.] You won’t? [He contemplates auditorium.] Well, I can understand that. Wait till I see. [He reflects.] Your only hope left is to disappear.5

Vladimir implicates the audience in the stage action, asserting that the tramps’ predicament is precisely a function of their positioning in the spectators’ controlling gaze; hence the imperative to disappear. In Endgame (1957), this strategy is sardonically reprised: clov. [picks up the telescope, turns it on the auditorium] I see . . . a multitude . . . in transports . . . of joy. [Pause] That’s what I call a magnifier.6

Clov uses his telescope to observe the outside world, and Hamm constructs from his field notes a self-serving narrative. In Krapp’s Last Tape (1958), the technology is auditory, and the action stages Krapp’s gratification as he eavesdrops on details of his earlier life. Beckett’s later works, Catastrophe 3

4

5

6

David Lloyd, Beckett’s Thing: Painting and Theatre (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), p. 234. Peter Middleton, The Inward Gaze: Masculinity and Subjectivity in Modern Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 7. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, in Samuel Beckett: The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber & Faber, 2006), p. 69. Samuel Beckett, Endgame, in Samuel Beckett: The Complete Dramatic Works, p. 106.

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(1982) and What Where (1983), stage what David Lloyd describes as his ‘unrelenting apprehension of the objectification of the human’.7 In What Where, the Voice is that of the state, mandating torture, which is, in effect, the violent purposes of surveillance given corporal form and effect. In Catastrophe, theatre and its production processes appear as analogues of violent relationships embedded in the national security state. The Director and his Assistant – clad in a laboratory coat, clipboard in hand – objectify, configure, and reconfigure the Protagonist, exposing ‘the whole spectacle of an instrumentality in which [theatrical representation] participates by exhibiting catastrophe as just a commodity’.8 Beckett’s mid- to late twentieth-century plays theatricalise the structuring influence of monitoring and scrutiny on the texture of Irish social experience, personal and public. In the decades immediately following Beckett’s death in 1989, the Irish stage became a platform for a kind of cultural counter-surveillance, enrolling audiences as witnesses to a series of tortured monologues; a confessional theatre for a polity undergoing social ruptures played out in culture wars around abortion and divorce, and the collapse of the hegemony of Fianna Fáil and the Catholic Church. Conor McPherson’s The Good Thief (1994),9 Dermot Bolger’s double bill, The Tramway End (1990), and Marie Jones’s A Night in November (1994), projected unrelentingly back to audiences a series of social realities from which their gaze was not permitted to flinch. This form reached heights of critical engagement with Irish society in Gerard Mannix Flynn’s excoriating memoir, James X (2003),10 David McWilliams’s dissection of privilege and corruption in Outsiders (2010), and Annie Ryan’s 2014 adaptation of Eimear McBride’s novel A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (2013). Beckett’s plays, then, function as a kind of fulcrum in a theatrical history of staging and thematising surveillance, extending from Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon (1859) through Augusta Gregory’s Spreading the News (1904), to Enda Walsh’s Arlington (2016) and David Lloyd’s The Press (2009) and The Pact (2021). Surveillance agencies rely heavily on technology to gather information, but depend on human beings to store, order, and interpret it, and dramatic narratives exploit the inconsistencies and injustices arising from slippages between data and its application. Once classified in an archive or record, or interpreted in policy and implemented in practice, ‘intelligence’ plays out less as a function of rigorous analysis than 7 9 10

8 Lloyd, Beckett’s Thing, p. 231. Ibid., p. 226. Originally staged at City Arts Centre, Dublin, as The Light of Jesus. An early version of James X was presented at the Temple Bar Music Centre, Dublin (September 2002). See http://irishplayography.com/play.aspx?playid=31017 (accessed 5 July 2022).

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ideological determination. This is how the regulation of rural Irish people by the colonial state is staged in Lady Gregory’s Spreading the News,11 set in a square in a small town in the West of Ireland on market day. A recently appointed Magistrate, accompanied by a local officer of the Royal Irish Constabulary, is on an initial reconnaissance tour of his district. He is a seasoned servant of Empire, formed in one of its more notorious outposts, the Andaman Islands, an egregious example of ‘the ruthlessness and bloody repression that stood behind the British Empire [. . .] a camp for political prisoners, complete with torture and forced labor’.12 Established under the British Raj in 1858, following the defeat of the East India Company’s mandate in 1857, a vast cellular prison, organised around a panopticon, was the central, defining edifice of this penal colony. The construction of that prison by forced labour began in 1896 and was completed in 1906, two years after the premiere of Spreading the News.13 A testament to the centrality of close scrutiny and coercion to the imperial project, it is regarded in modern India as a monument to the barbarity of imperialism.14 By figuring the Magistrate as an alumnus of this punitive regime, Spreading the News stages British rule in Ireland as the application of a form of technical knowledge whose claim to truth rests on an image of the world viewed through a taxonomic lens. The Magistrate’s role is that of stern controlling overseer, and Gregory’s dramaturgy exploits the parodic potential of his obsessive quest for evidence of anti-colonial sedition. The dramatic action unfolds in a comedic register, counterpointing the constable’s tacit local knowledge with the Magistrate’s overdetermined anthropological gaze. Where the constable sees neighbours, the Magistrate sees agents of insurrection; where a local Policeman sees only tobacco smoke, the controlling eye divines sedition: magistrate. The smoke from that man’s pipe had a greenish look; he may be growing unlicensed tobacco at home. I wish I had brought my telescope to

11

12

13

14

Lady August Gregory, Spreading the News, in Selected Plays: Lady Gregory, ed. Mary FitzGerald (Gerrards Cross, Bucks: Colin Smythe, 1983). Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (London and New York: Verso Books, 2004), p. 70. Cellular Jail was constructed around a central tower with a turret, from which seven three-storey-high wings, containing 698 cells, spread out like a seven-petal flower. See web.archive.org/web/2010020 9031136/http://www.andamancellularjail.org/History.htm (accessed 5 June 2022). Robyn Wilson, ‘Inside Cellular Jail: The Horrors and Torture Inflicted by the Raj on India’s Political Activists’, The Independent, 11 August 2017, www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/cel lular-jail-india-integral-country-fight-freedom-independence-british-colony-andaman-and-nico bar-a7883691.html (accessed 5 June 2022).

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this district. Come to the post-office, I will telegraph for it. I found it very useful in the Andaman Islands.15

The ‘greenish’ pipe smoke functions, for the Magistrate, as a crude signifier of anti-colonial nationalist sympathies, hilariously dependent on a horticultural absurdity – tobacco cultivation in the cold, damp climate of the West of Ireland. Ireland and the Andamans are homogenised in the colonial imagination as sites recalcitrant to Empire’s improving project. In response, the Magistrate invokes his authority to command technology; the telegraph will procure his telescope. He could easily purchase or requisition a telescope locally, but he sends for a seasoned instrument of the colonial gaze, calibrated to recognise and root out anti-imperial sedition. As the play’s denouement reveals, the telescope, which extends the reach of the Magistrate’s gaze, is less a magnifier of reality than a projector of prejudicial assumptions. Turning on the ludic potential of Mrs Tarpey’s deafness, and the misinterpretation and misinformation it produces, especially when it collides with the Magistrate’s jaundiced perspectives, a chaotic comic ending ensues: magistrate. (Pointing to Jack Smith.) Policeman, put the handcuffs on this man. I see it all now. A case of false impersonation, a conspiracy to defeat the ends of justice. There was a case in the Andaman Islands, a murderer of the Mopsa tribe, a religious enthusiast – –. policeman. So he might be, too. magistrate. We must take both these men to the scene of the murder. We must confront them with the body of the real Jack Smith. jack smith. I’ll break the head of any man that will find my dead body!16

Despite the voluble presence of an outraged – and very much alive – Jack Smith, the Magistrate is unshakeable in his conviction – in every sense of the phrase. His conclusions are a triumph of confidence in his ability to convert surveillance data into intelligence – ‘I see it all now.’ He endorses his conclusion, to his own great satisfaction, with reference to apparently corroborating events in the Andaman Islands. Thus, Lady Gregory’s ‘little play’ both entertains with stock characters and generic conventions, and satirises the imperialist fantasies of racial superiority. In an ironic inversion of the Magistrate’s habits of mind, however, anti-colonial culture proved both portable and transferable, due to the comparability of subaltern 15

Gregory, Spreading the News, p. 30.

16

Ibid., p. 43.

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experience across the Empire’s theatre of operations. The play’s context was thus legible in other colonised zones, and Spreading the News was, according to Lady Gregory, ‘acted very often by other companies as well as our own, and the Boers have done me the great honour of translating and pirating it’.17 The strategic purpose of such appropriations – developing and sustaining counter-imperialist consciousness, solidarities, and resistance – could not have been more at odds with the projects of the transnational power. For early twentieth-century audiences, engagement with British colonial rule –from India to South Africa to the West of Ireland – would seem more suited to tragic rather than comic form. Indeed, as Lady Gregory wrote: The idea of this play first came to me as a tragedy. I kept seeing as in a picture people sitting by the roadside, and a girl passing to the market, gay and fearless. And then I saw her passing by the same place at evening, her head hanging, the heads of others turned from her, because of some sudden story that had risen out of a chance word, and had snatched away her good name. But comedy and not tragedy was wanted at our theatre to put beside the high poetic work, The King’s Threshold, The Shadowy Waters, On Baile’s Strand, The Well of the Saints; and I let laughter have its way with the little play.18

Spreading the News is a comedy thematically haunted by a sense of tragedy, and this double-coding is explicit in the denouement. Initially, in order to assert its comedic credentials (according to a note in the Oxford University Press edition), The earliest printings of this play left the last word to Mrs Tarpey, The two of them in charge now, and a great hoop of people going by from the fair. Come up here the whole of you! It would be a great pity you to be passing, and I not be spreading the news!19

The canonical version ends, by contrast, with a violent vision of colonial incarceration, as Bartley, Jack Smith’s impossible assassin, contemplates his likely fate: bartley. It is what I am thinking, if myself and Jack Smith are put together in the one cell for the night, the handcuffs will be taken off him, and his hands will be free, and murder will be done that time surely! magistrate. Come on! (They turn to the right.)20

17 19

20

Ibid., p. 352. 18 Ibid., p. 351. Cited in John P. Harrington, ed., Modern and Contemporary Irish Drama: A Norton Critical Edition, 2nd edn (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), p. 49, n. 7. Gregory, Spreading the News, p. 43.

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As Bartley appeals to the audience, Lady Gregory makes an anti-colonial statement wholly consistent with her challenge to ‘anyone to study Irish history without getting a dislike and distrust of England’.21

***

Relationships between Irish and American social and political movements frequently operated in counterpoint to Britain’s colonial rule in Ireland. Although, in terms of culture, that relationship is often expressed in sentimental terms, it continues to exert a strong influence on realpolitik in the contested arena of Anglo-Irish relationships, and on cultural production. One figure in whom these energies crystallised was Dion Boucicault, and any discussion of surveillance and technology in Irish theatre must consider his innovative melodrama, The Octoroon. As Adam Sonstegard observes: On the eve of the first conflict America would wage in part with photographic images, the first actor to play a photographer debuted on the American stage [. . .] and enticed the play’s other characters to pose for their portraits. His camera recorded one character’s murder of a character in blackface; his apparatus got smashed to pieces by a character dressed as an Indian brave; and a photograph, found within his apparatus, came to ‘prove’ the murderer’s guilt. With the opening of Dion Boucicault’s drama The Octoroon at New York City’s Winter Garden Theater in December 1859, photography made a remarkable American theatrical debut.22

On grounds considerably more valid than those which condemn Bartley and Jack Smith to a holding cell, Boucicault’s villain is unmasked, before a hastily convened jury of local worthies, as a perpetrator of murder most foul. Both Spreading the News and The Octoroon stage modern polities grounded in appeals to rational public deliberation; dystopian in the former, utopian in the latter, but structured within ‘a political reason of order’.23 Spreading the News critiques a self-exculpatory imperialist vision of an idealised public realm projected outward from an exacting, but wellintentioned, metropole into which compliant colonial subjects could integrate, to varying degrees of participation or agency. The antebellum American South in which The Octoroon is set, is presented as a place where, 21

22

23

Lady Gregory (1898), cited in Colm Tóibín, Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2002), p. 34. Adam Sonstegard, ‘Performing Remediation: The Minstrel, the Camera, and The Octoroon’, Criticism 40:3 (Summer 2006), 375–95 (p. 375). Laurence McFalls and Mariella Pandolfi, ‘Postliberalism’, Academic Foresights 5 (July–September 2012), p. 2, https://michel-foucault.com/2016/08/02/archive-post-liberalism-2012/ (accessed 5 July 2022).

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under ethical citizen government, human rights were set to expand; intelligence-as-evidence corrupts judgement in Spreading the News. In Boucicault’s fictional America, the surveillant eye provides evidence that enriches understanding of the world as it is. In Gregory’s West of Ireland, the world as it is reframed by the telescope in the service of a paranoid authoritarian project. These plays stage reactive – and, frequently, performative – habits of dissimulation inculcated by everyday exposure to the coercive overreach of regulatory power. Whether experienced as the disinterested gaze of a divine eye, or the forceful intrusion of an authoritarian state, personal domains exposed to surveillance are re-positioned as legitimate sites of state interest and regulation. This is the ground on which the dramatic world of Enda Walsh’s Arlington [A Love Story] is pitched. Arlington is a play in three scenes, the first and last of which are set in a ‘realistic waiting room – of no fixed time or place’ in one of many towers in ‘an undefined city’.24 Scene ii, a twenty-minute episode of expressionist dance,25 unfolds in a similar room, in an adjacent building, one among many white tower blocks arranged in an urban landscape, like the pristine headstones in Arlington Cemetery: Silence. There’s a Young Woman in the room. The LED screen changes and flicks onto ‘8461’. Music. She dances her final twenty minutes. At the very end she falls from the window to the outside. The lights change – the music continues.26

A woman dances, with increasing rage and physical risk, testing, resisting, and refusing the crushing confines of a room from which death is the only escape. As Arlington opens, Isla is revealed, incarcerated, her every move observed by ‘small overhead security cameras in each corner’, recorded and reported on by a man, seated downstage right, separated from her space by a ‘ten-centimetre wall’;27 invisible to her, but in plain sight of the audience. She has been imprisoned here since early childhood, waiting for her number to be displayed on an LED screen on the back wall of the room, facing the auditorium. She will then leave the tower, presumably to die at the hands of the powers who confine her there, as her parents and siblings have before her. In Walsh’s drama, surveillance suspends Isla in a circular network of hyperconnectivity, ‘a new shaper of patterns of experience both 24 25

Enda Walsh, Arlington [A Love Story] (London: Nick Hern Books, 2016), p. 5. 26 Choreographed by Emma Martin. Walsh, Arlington, p. 29. 27 Ibid., p. 5.

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synchronic and diachronic, forging and reforging new assemblages of remembering and forgetting’.28 Though she has had no direct experience of a world beyond her room, Isla is required to narrate memories of experiences beyond its walls, to accompany which her surveillant generates imagery which plays on the backdrop as she speaks. Thus, she is figured in woodland or open country, mouthing stock descriptions of the pleasures of pastoral environments: ethnography as repressive practice. In this respect, the world of Arlington is a bitter, inverted recapitulation of Gregory’s dramatisations of folk material; its surveilled domestic/carceral space an intensified postmodern version of Empire’s administrative districts in Spreading the News. Power extorts and archives accounts of simple human experience among those warehoused in tower blocks; synthetic narratives mimic actual folk histories and processes of documentation and preservation. Isla’s post-human condition revises Gregory’s precarious colonial subject, but without compensatory recourse to a lively narrative counterculture. In Spreading the News, action is surveyed and misconstrued by colonial functionaries; in Arlington, action is counterfeited in traces of unlived memories auto-generated by surveillance technologies. Just as these secondary artefacts fabricate and legitimise memories, they repeat and concentrate the mendacious misrecognitions by which the colonial Magistrate performs his authority, and abject denizens struggle to mitigate its lethal consequences. By contrast, David Lloyd’s The Press explores a historical moment in which power, enraged at their commitment to ethical questioning, turns against artists. Ancel, formerly court poet to the Boss’s authoritarian regime, and Gruber, a dissident visual artist, are internees forced to labour on a vanity monument memorialising the Boss’s absolute power. The action unfolds during Gruber’s last day, as the Boss’s emissaries make repeated attempts to persuade Ancel to publish one final inspirational poem in support of his crumbling regime. Reprising the dramatic structure and ethical conundrum of W. B. Yeats’s The King’s Threshold – to which Spreading the News was originally a companion piece – The Press dramatises conflicting positions on power, freedom, and the social responsibilities of artists. The political struggle played out in The Press is between a conflicted liberal democratic tradition and ‘the dark side of the modern democratic state, [. . .] already pregnant with the violent potential which is unleashed under a totalitarian regime’.29 28

29

Andrew Hoskins and John Tulloch, Risk and Hyperconnectivity: Media and Memories of Neoliberalism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 9. Alexandra Poulain, Irish Drama, Modernity and the Passion Play (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 236–7.

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Lloyd’s The Pact presents Blank, ‘an insurrectionary leader, condemned to exile’,30 alone in a woodland cabin, the permanent guest of an authoritarian regime. Blank’s incarceration is minutely scrutinised; cameras are ubiquitous, and functionaries monitor his days. He is visited by Malina, ‘former movement organizer and suspected police spy’,31 who offers the prospect of a return to his former urban haunts, now experiencing a new wave of civil unrest. The Pact references Goethe’s Faust and Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, and, congruent with its central chess metaphor, Blank and Malina interchange roles as Faust and Mephistopheles as power positions advance or retreat during the action. Dramaturgically, Lloyd emphasises the fact and nature of the scrutiny in whose glare Blank exists, by including six short scenes in which the Disembodied Voices (DVs) of two watching functionaries quibble over the detail of their prisoner’s activities, and what they reveal of his state of mind. The Voices, we are told, should speak as far as possible from no identifiable location in the theatre. Above all, they should not seem to emanate from on stage or from behind the blank wall or screen at rear. Their voices should be distinguishable but highly similar in intonation and accent. Ambiguous gender, placeless accents.32

These surveillants, their perspective formed and shaped by the imperatives of the police state of which Blank remains an enemy, have capacities beyond observing, recording, and interpreting. From the outset, it is clear that they are as much drivers as monitors of action. They anticipate and even mandate future events; Malina, for instance, is their agent, even if their interest in her recalls behavioural scientists observing interactions under laboratory conditions: dv1. dv2. dv1. dv2. dv1. dv2. dv1.

She will return. He will depart. The arrangements are made. The traps are set. Now we can only wait and see. The end is near. Let’s see. It is not yet played out.33

There is an indeterminacy in play; the contingencies of emotion, residual loyalties, and aspirations defy logical prediction. The trap is set, but may not yet be sprung. 30 32

David Lloyd, The Pact (unpublished final rehearsal script, 12 March 2021), p. 2. Ibid. 33 Ibid., p. 30.

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31

Ibid.

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At the end of the play, Malina instructs Blank on how to escape his open prison: malina. Two men will be waiting. Trust them. They’ll take you from there. To the station. The train will be waiting.

He departs with injunctions to action from Malina: malina. Remember, you’re the wild card now. Go. There’s no more time. [Long pause] Make me mean.34

The unseen surveillants contemplate Malina, alone now in Blank’s quarters; Mephistopheles become Faust: dv1. dv2. dv1. dv2. dv2. dv1. dv2. dv1. dv2. dv1. dv2.

And yet she did well. Against her will, I fear. Against our will. But according to plan.[. . .] Let’s see what comes to pass. We have the strings. The knot is tied. Let’s see what he can make of it. Given rope enough . . .. For both of them. Damned if they do.35

The notion of damnation at the hands of those with the power to pull strings and twist them into knots echoes Dr Faustus. It also suggests, as in Walsh’s Arlington, the power of the authoritarian state to liquidate, not only its enemies, but any prospect of alternatives to its rigged economic and political order. Alone in what is now her cell, Malina imagines consequences arising from her reinserting Blank into the flow of history: malina. Enough. The sky glows in the west, burning like . . . . Like fire surging over the ridge. Like blood streaming across the sky. Like the city burning beyond. Let it burn. Enough. I’m finished. Check mate? [M. sits in B.’s desk chair, runs her hand a moment across his papers, books. Then swivels to face the audience, hands gripping the armrests. Stares straight out at the audience, a little stiffly. Slowly lowers her head.]36 34

Ibid., p. 38.

35

Ibid., p. 39.

36

Ibid., p. 41.

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Blank is sprung to foment insurrectionary actions, and Malina is sacrificed because the state must hold a hostage, its oppositional other, within its power. When Blank’s state-engineered revolt collapses, as it must, it will have fulfilled the need of the surveillant for an aestheticised spectacle of its repressed other in full frenzy. Malina will then be available, to be framed both as instigator and state’s witness. Her stare, before it dissolves into ‘the downcast eyes and gait of the conforming prisoner’,37 confronts spectators with an ethical shock as ‘the boundary between the subject and its other’ is exposed.38 Her returned gaze asserts that, in watching Blank’s predicament, we have given more than tacit consent to the surveillance regime that held him – and now holds her – captive; our spectatorship implicates us. As in the moment in Catastrophe when Beckett’s Protagonist raises his degraded head in the glare of the theatrical spotlight, audiences must confront their beguilement by the dramaturgy of the surveillance regime. Those present have spent eighty minutes in its grip and played by its rules, and this realisation enables Lloyd’s drama to assert that intervention into history can only take place in the full glare of the state’s framing gaze. Decisive intervention in history as a re-creative force is a risky mandate, a kind of ‘political action [that] requires stepping out of the crowd, while fully grasping what it is we are partaking within – and at what cost – and, critically, it is to step deliberately into something already happening, without apparent beginning or end’.39 On Walsh’s postmodern stage, the investigative eye reduces the most intimate mental processes – memories of being in and of the world – to stock images projected on a wall. Lloyd’s Ancel retains the latent agency of silence-as-refusal, but Isla has been rendered incapable of imagining, let alone participating in, a revolt against a regime that wholly possesses her. Lloyd’s and Walsh’s dystopic visions are differentiated in relationships between persons and the violence of the state. Pleading with Ancel, the Boss’s creatures expose the ultimate contingency of absolute power; the poet’s words can heal and hurt in equal measure. Isla, alone in her cell, is mute before power, devoid of capacity to struggle, experiencing only a continuous present, so drained of human features that the capacity to remember itself degrades. Remorselessly scrutinised, Isla, her family, and 37

38 39

David Lloyd, Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity, 1800–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 177. Middleton, The Inward Gaze, p. 7. Alan Read, ‘We the Divided: Partitions of Performance in the Ceramic State’, Kritika Kultura 30 (2018), 158–88 (p. 163). https://journals.ateneo.edu/ojs/index.php/kk/article/view/KK2018.03019/2 678 (accessed 2 May 2021).

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other denizens of this vast funerary leave no trace of human presence in their wake; already extinct, Isla lingers, pending annihilation when her number is displayed. What might account for correspondences and contrasts across space and time between Boucicault and Lloyd, Gregory and Walsh? These plays combine and collide, thematically, around practices of surveillance, and are better considered as a constellation in space and time than a series of pairings of cognate or incompatible worlds. In Spreading the News, Arlington, and The Pact, surveillance technologies – telegraph, telescope, and digital apparatus – suppress people’s capacities to act on the world, either personally or in concert with others. In The Octoroon and The Press, technologies – camera, paint, paper and pen – enable humans to enter history, by creating communicative artefacts. Across these dramatic worlds, an enduring Ireland/America relationship plays out in episodes in which freedom desired, denied, and designed out is critically staged. The status of Arlington as a drama of American life rests on more than a titular reference to the national cemetery. Its presentation of monitored precarity speaks to the criminalisation of twenty-first-century immigrants by the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE). In constellation, Spreading the News and Arlington dramatise the plight of ‘threat populations’ subjected to and constituted among practices of regulation and control by permanent surveillance. Neoliberal state paranoia in the early twenty-first century is shown to have roots in the social organisation and colonial practices of liberal western economies a hundred years previously. The American ideal of free citizens coming together as a morally responsive liberal polity, staged in The Octoroon, is available both as a residual egalitarian aspiration and an imaginary of possible futures, as the Boss’s repressive state disintegrates, and Blank returns to urban agitation. Boucicault’s and Gregory’s dramatis personae circulate in public space, whereas Lloyd’s and Walsh’s persons are dominated, disciplined, and confined in degraded cells, ‘in which absolute seclusion and withdrawal from the public becomes the condition for perpetual surveillance and the loss of privacy, interiority or free contemplation’.40 The ethical trajectory of these works is set towards a shrinking of human possibility – from humane aspiration in Boucicault to bleached post-human entropy in Walsh and Lloyd (2021). All five plays make violence visible, and in Boucicault and Gregory, the power of camera and telescope to see into 40

Lloyd, Irish Culture, p. 208.

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and interpret events is central to plot function. In The Press, witnessing visceral assaults on incarcerated bodies both deepens audience engagement and provides ‘an ethical ground for emancipatory action, whether in the form of insurrection or of more diffuse, individual or performative modes of resistance’.41 In The Pact, Malina’s Mephistophelian conjuring presents Blank with images of state repression: a row of shadowy prisoners shackled together, wielding picks and mallets, crosses the screen, watched by armed guards. As they move off right, a mother and two children run across to the left, pursued by three figures in paramilitary uniform. At left, two of the militia grab the two children and run back right with them. The third beats the mother. Centre screen, a crowd advances towards the audience, silently falling to the ground as if shot down.42

In Arlington, the invasion and control of the psyche plays out on the bodies of the dancer and the Young Man, ‘sitting (barefoot) in one of the plastic seats. His face is badly beaten – his body extremely weak from incessant torture.’43 He has been brutalised for disobeying instructions to deposit Isla in an adjacent tower, instead walking with her into woods beyond the city of towers. Arlington closes with an end-of-life hallucination, in which Isla returns to the Young Man and they reprise their walk, on a stage saturated with sylvan images. State and corporate surveillance is both tool and shaper, mandating the minutiae of human existence, and, ultimately, the ethical limits within which selves, others, and human worlds may be imagined. In The Octoroon, the authority of the photographic image is asserted in metaphysical terms, as derived from the Cosmos itself: Scudder. The eye of the Eternal was on you – the blessed sun in heaven, that, looking down, struck upon this plate the image of the deed. Here you are, in the very attitude of your crime! [. . .] The apparatus can’t lie. Look there, jurymen. (Showing plate to jury.)44

Since Boucicault’s introduction of the photographic image as a device for plot resolution, a deus ex machina for modern times, the surveillant eye has evolved, in reach and in operational capacity. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, Laurence McFalls and Mariella

41 43 44

Poulain, Irish Drama, Modernity and the Passion Play, p. 242. 42 Lloyd, The Pact, p. 27. Walsh, Arlington, p. 30. Opening stage directions, Scene iii. Dion Boucicault, The Octoroon, in Selected Plays: Dion Boucicault, ed. Andrew Parkin (Gerrards Cross, Bucks: Colin Smythe, 1987), p. 173.

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Pandolfi describe the emergence of a world congruent with that staged in Arlington, where there is no future, there are no politics, only an eternal present in which the veridiction of the market, finally freed from the jurisdiction of the state, leaves the post-liberal biohuman at the mercy of all market-tried-andtrue technologies of the self.45

Surveillance, then, may be considered above all, a technology of the self, whereby the human subject internalises, over time, an expectation that they are subject always to monitoring, scrutiny, and judgement. This consciousness, in turn, produces externalised, performative responses, and the changing forms and impacts of systematic monitoring are reflected in mutations in how surveillance has been represented, not least in the theatre. By the time Waiting for Godot opened, almost a century after The Octoroon, historical experience had made confidence in a beneficent technological eye untenable. After Pozzo – now blind – and Lucky have exited the stage for the final time, Vladimir observes: [. . .] At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, he is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on. [Pause] I can’t go on. [Pause] What have I said?46

The ‘someone’ imagined by Vladimir has powers of detection, analysis, and judgement; their eye is that of a greater power, possessed of a knowledge vested in the capacity to see. The Boy – Godot’s messenger – enters immediately on Vladimir’s question, confirming that Godot will not come today. Vladimir insists that the Boy return to Godot, instructing him to Tell him . . . [He hesitates] . . . tell him you saw me and that . . . [He hesitates] . . . that you saw me. [Pause. Vladimir advances, the Boy recoils. Vladimir halts, the Boy halts. With sudden violence.] You’re sure you saw me, you won’t come and tell me tomorrow that you never saw me! [Silence. Vladimir makes a sudden spring forward, the Boy avoids him and exits running. Silence.]47

As the twenty-first century gets into its faltering stride, questions as to theatre’s public function and, as a live art form, questions of structure, form, and its relationship with technology are sharply posed. In Arlington and The Pact, though surveillance is both theme and narrative driver, the 45 47

McFalls and Pandolfi, ‘Postliberalism’, p. 4. Ibid.

46

Beckett, Waiting for Godot, pp. 84–5.

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works diverge around how relationships of power and resistance are understood. Arlington dramatises a cruel dystopia, in which a nihilistic pastiche of human life plays out as a necromantic melodrama. The dramatic world of The Pact, underpinned by the Faustus myth, is a meditation on the ethics of power, trust, and resistance. Arlington’s protagonists find peace in death, while Malina returns the anonymous controlling gaze of fictional state and actual audience, implicating spectators in an inherently violent epistemology. She encourages Blank, as he leaves to resume his revolutionary activity, ‘Remember, you’re the wild card now’.48 The proliferating contradictions in which contemporary cultural production is embedded notwithstanding, her evocation of the ancient Trickster role is both a historical reminder of theatre’s power and a manifesto for ethical performance practice.

Select Bibliography Beckett, Samuel, Samuel Beckett: The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber & Faber, 2006). Behan, Brendan, Brendan Behan: The Complete Plays (London: Methuen Drama, 1978). Boucicault, Dion, Selected Plays: Dion Boucicault, ed. Andrew Parkin (Gerrards Cross, Bucks: Colin Smythe, 1987). Gregory, Lady Augusta, Selected Plays: Lady Gregory, ed. Mary FitzGerald (Gerrards Cross, Bucks: Colin Smythe, 1983). Harrington, John P., ed., Modern and Contemporary Irish Drama: A Norton Critical Edition, 2nd edn (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009). Hoskins, Andrew, and John Tulloch, Risk and Hyperconnectivity: Media and Memories of Neoliberalism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). Johnson, Chalmers, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (London and New York: Verso Books, 2004). Lloyd, David, Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity, 1800–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Beckett’s Thing: Painting and Theatre (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016). The Pact (unpublished final rehearsal script, 12 March 2021). McFalls, Laurence, and Mariella Pandolfi, ‘Postliberalism’, Academic Foresights 5 (July–September 2012), https://michel-foucault.com/2016/08/02/archivepost-liberalism-2012/ Middleton, Peter, The Inward Gaze: Masculinity and Subjectivity in Modern Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). 48

Lloyd, The Pact, p. 38.

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Poulain, Alexandra, Irish Drama, Modernity and the Passion Play (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Read, Alan, ‘We the Divided: Partitions of Performance in the Ceramic State’, Kritika Kultura 30 (2018), 158–88, https://journals.ateneo.edu/ojs/index.php /kk/article/view/KK2018.03019/2678 Sonstegard, Adam, ‘Performing Remediation: The Minstrel, the Camera, and The Octoroon’, Criticism 40:3 (Summer 2006), 375–95. Tóibín, Colm, Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2002). Walsh, Enda, Arlington [A Love Story] (London: Nick Hern Books, 2016).

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chapter 17

Technology in Contemporary Irish Poetry: Data at ‘the Edge of Language’ Anne Karhio

Irish Literature and the Information Age With the introduction of electronic mass media and computing in Ireland, poetry as well as other forms of cultural practice have sought ways to address how the surge of information, and new technologies producing, storing, and disseminating it, tests ‘the limits of cognition, perception, and memory’, as Paul Stephens writes in The Poetics of Information Overload.1 Like so many other scholars focusing on the impact of emerging media technologies on culture and society, Stephens turns to James Joyce and his Ulysses as a starting point for his study, to demonstrate how the phenomenon of ‘information overload’ was well underway before the digital age, but also how exponential increase in computer processing power has profoundly changed the scale of the phenomenon. With one small handheld device, the twenty-first-century Bloom would have access to a virtually unlimited amount of information, as ‘[more] data has been created and stored since the turn of the millennium than in the entire history of humanity’.2 Almost every action we take produces more data in the smart economy. Much of this data is processed in Ireland, or flows through it, as the Republic has in recent decades become the home for the European headquarters of several multinational IT giants. In Joyce’s time, Ireland had already become the geographical, if not political, centre of the emerging global telegraph network, as the first transatlantic telegraph connection had been opened in the mid-1860s between Valentia Island and Newfoundland, Canada.3 If Ireland during colonial rule, John Horgan 1

2 3

Paul Stephens, The Poetics of Information Overload: From Gertrude Stein to Conceptual Writing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), p. 2. Ibid., pp. x–ix. For a more detailed account of the telegraph’s history in Ireland, see Christopher Morash, ‘Ghosts and Wires: The Telegraph and Irish Space’, in Ireland and the New Journalism, ed. Karen Steel and Michael de Nie (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 21–33.

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and Roddy Flynn argue, was ‘not just on the periphery of Europe, but an extremely remote part of that periphery, in an age in which transport was primitive and slow’, it was also at the centre of the developments that anticipated the emergence of the digital economy.4 And yet, access to the new communications infrastructure was strictly regulated according to ‘the political administrative needs of the colonizers’,5 just as the Irish public, or even the Irish government, have little control over how – and what – data is processed via the cable networks and data centres of the Republic’s rapidly growing digital infrastructure that is owned by multinational IT corporations. This is no small issue, since, as Lisa Gitelman and Virginia Jackson stress, in this data economy, ‘every click, every move has the potential to count for something, for someone somewhere somehow’, and it is thus crucial to recognise the fallacy of the idea of ‘raw data’ as transparent, neutral, pre-interpretative, objective, or ‘given’.6 For scholars, poets, and creative practitioners, this raises new questions regarding technology’s impact on personal and social dimensions of everyday life. It also underlines the new responsibilities, Paul O’Neill argues, in scrutinising ‘the social, political and environmental complexities of Ireland’s role in this global network on which all our lives rely so heavily these days’.7 Against this backdrop, the following discussion considers Irish poets’ responses to emerging digital technologies and networked communication, particularly in the context of data, data infrastructure, and information exchange. It examines how poets have addressed the interrelated (if not identical) concepts of ‘data’, ‘information’, and ‘knowledge’ through social and material practices of meaning-making, their impact on personal and cultural memory, and the role of language in new media platforms and the evolving network society. Stephens emphasises the distinction between ‘data’ and ‘the term “information,” [which] at least as understood by information theory, must by definition convey meaningful data’.8 Implicitly or explicitly, many of the poems discussed below also explore this relation between data and information, how they may or may not yield various kinds of ‘knowledge’, and how these questions must be situated 4

5 6

7

8

John Horgan and Roddy Flynn, Irish Media: A Critical History (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2017), p. 11. Ibid. Lisa Gitelman and Virginia Jackson, ‘Introduction’, in ‘Raw Data’ is an Oxymoron, ed. Gitelman (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2013), pp. 1–14 (pp. 2–3). Paul O’Neill, ‘Underwater Cables Leave Ireland Tangled – and Implicated – in the Internet’, Dublin InQuirer, 20 February 2019, www.dublininquirer.com/2019/02/20/paul-underwater-cables-leaveireland-tangled-and-implicated-in-the-internet (accessed 29 May 2021). Stephens, Poetics of Information Overload, p. 9 (my emphasis).

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and contextualised in relation to history, language, narrative, or material relations. As a term, ‘data’ appears everywhere, yet it often remains vaguely defined, or assumes different or even conflicting meanings in different contexts. Nevertheless, data technologies are now ubiquitous to the point that the increasing use of ‘data’ as the singular form of a mass noun is quickly replacing the plural use of the term (as the plural form of Latin datum) in most non-specialist discourse (and, in most instances, in this chapter). This indicates how, as the amount of digital data processed and stored in the global network infrastructure reaches a point we are unable to grasp in any meaningful way, and saturates all aspects of the everyday environment, it has become conceived more as a material, if somewhat ephemeral substance, or an element – as the metaphor of the Cloud illustrates – than a set of individual records, or units. Data flows and streams, like molecules of water.9 In his prescience regarding mass communications and new media technologies, Joyce envisioned Dublin as a pre-digital smart city, and his ambition was to produce Ulysses as ‘a super-catalog of the mundane’, as Geoff Manaugh notes, a back-up file, of sorts, of Dublin, for the city’s restoration or ‘reconstruction’ should it one day disappear.10 But the influence of Joyce can also illustrate how the language of poetry, too, can be vulnerable to the ruptures arising from the rapidly changing information society. Joyce no doubt ‘knew us, the Net besotted, before we knew ourselves’, Karlin Lillington wrote in a note to her poem ‘Portrait of the Artist as Webmaster’, published on Bloomsday in 1998.11 However, the poem also demonstrates how our language struggles with its own living memory in the digital age. The lines ‘Blue halo of computer / screen, the rasping electronic / siren song of the modem’ now have an aura of digital nostalgia for those who can remember the dialling sounds of the 1990s modem. The challenges of digital obsolescence go beyond the ephemeral qualities of digital objects and devices. Online platforms, too, come and go. A rapidly falling number of readers in the third decade of the millennium will share the memory of setting up ‘Bebo access’ for the social networking site that closed in 2013, as referenced in Vona Groarke’s 2009 poem 9

10

11

On grammatical usage of ‘data’, see, for example, Simon Rogers, ‘Data Are or Data Is?’, The Guardian, 8 July 2012, www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/jul/16/data-plural-singular#:~: text=The%20word%20data%20is%20a,Datum%20is%20the%20singular (accessed 21 May 2021). Geoff Manaugh, ‘The City That Remembers Everything’, The Atlantic, 23 February 2018, www .theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/02/james-joyce-as-police-operation/553817/ (accessed 21 May 2021). Karlin Lillington, ‘Portrait of the Artist as Webmaster’, The Irish Times, 16 June 1998, www .irishtimes.com/culture/portrait-of-the-artist-as-webmaster-1.163564 (accessed 22 March 2021).

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‘Away’.12 The names and terminology referring to the latest device, application, or platform are often here today, but gone tomorrow. And yet, as our everyday vernacular is unavoidably steeped in the idiom of the data economy, this highlights the importance of finding the language and expressive forms best suited for describing and also critiquing its various manifestations. The overwhelming societal transformations related to data technologies demand tools for thinking, speaking, and writing about it. Perhaps understandably, Irish poets have frequently approached the rise of the digital society with no small degree of suspicion, as the following discussion will also show. It is a suspicion that developed alongside mass media in the twentieth century, as Jahan Ramazani has noted, prompted by their contribution to the ‘capitalist hell of mechanical buying and selling’, or the noise of ‘roaring business’ as Louis MacNeice would describe it in Autumn Journal in 1939.13 Yet poetry’s relationship to new communications technologies is not necessarily antagonistic either. As Brian M. Reed has highlighted, we encounter language ‘always already in a mediated form, and poetry is a language-based art with a penchant for reflecting on its channels of communication’.14 Consequently, while ‘poetry may seem the most non-technological of literary genres’, poets too have often been ‘obsessed by the changing nature of information and its dissemination’.15 As Eavan Boland’s ‘Code’ (which will be discussed in this chapter) demonstrates, poetry, as well as data and code, involves the process of translating the non-verbal domain into language. If for Matthew Fuller, ‘data is produced in the interface between the convolutions of computing and the other elements of the world that it enfolds’, poetry similarly occupies an interface between language and ‘the world that it enfolds’.16 This essay does not claim to offer a comprehensive overview of the relationship between information technology and poetry in Ireland. A number of poets whose writing is not included in the remainder of the 12 13

14

15 16

Vona Groarke, ‘Away’, Spindrift (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 2009), p. 14. Jahan Ramazani, ‘Irish Poetry and the News’, in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry, ed. Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 548–65 (p. 555); Louis MacNeice, Autumn Journal (London: Faber & Faber, 1939), p. 35. Brian M. Reed, ‘Visual Experiment and Oral Performance’, in The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound, ed. Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009), pp. 270–84 (p. 284). Stephens, Poetics of Information Overload, p. xvi. Matthew Fuller, ‘Data’, in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media, ed. Marie-Laure Ryan, Lori Emerson, and Benjamin J. Robertson (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), pp. 125–6 (p.126).

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chapter would deserve close attention, including, for example, the wry yet serious humour and sensibility of Leontia Flynn’s poems on social media and quotidian life; Sinéad Morrissey’s media archaeological critique of new technologies; Alan Gillis’s visual interfaces and politically charged stabs at popular culture; or the technologically informed processual and experimental poetics of Trevor Joyce. What connects the poems examined here is their addressing of data and data technologies, and their impact on how we may consider the changing relations between language, information, and the environment. Data is, in turns, presented as treacherous or enabling, as situated or abstract, or as connecting or disconnecting people and places. It shapes memory as well as forgetting, and is closely linked to questions of power, embodiment, and environmental change.

Data Memory: Meehan and Muldoon In Paula Meehan’s work, the fate and function of memory, and its relationship to the phenomenal present, often inform encounters with communications technology. These encounters frequently present a somewhat disheartened view on how new media environments are increasingly invading the space of memory as a connective tissue between people, places, and ecosystems. The personal and cultural imaginary that also fosters poetry is threatened by the utilitarian efficiency of depersonalised data storage. Through digitisation, language, embodied perception, and narrative memory become data within a system of what Yann Moulier Boutang has termed ‘cognitive capitalism’. Production takes place through ‘the cooperative labour of human brains joined together in networks by means of computers’, and ‘consumption is also oriented towards [technologies] that set mental faculties into operation through interaction with the new technical objects’.17 These processes appear in ‘The Clouds’, which adopts a spatial metaphor used in everyday idiom, as well as by poets and ICT professionals: the ‘clouds where the students’ heads ought to be’ that have also given their name to ‘the digital zone’.18 Students willingly yield to machine memory and ‘put all their work up on the cloud: / dream song and secret and story’. The lines echo Billy Ramsell’s ‘Memory House’, and the speaker who has ‘outsourced all [. . .] memories to machines’, making them mere ‘droplets in the Cloud’.19 Rather than preservation and transmission, 17 18 19

Yann Moulier Boutang, Cognitive Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), p. 57. Paula Meehan, ‘The Clouds’, Geomantic (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2014), p. 24. Billy Ramsell, ‘Filíocht Nua: New Poetry’, New Hibernia Review 18:1 (Spring/Earrach 2014), 50–7 (p. 52).

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such digital memory becomes an omen of forgetting. Spatial metaphors of this kind are popular in the vocabulary of digital technologies, as Wouter Van Acker and Pieter Uyttenhove note, as they help ‘conceptualize information and knowledge’. In rapidly transforming media environments, ‘the creative and explanatory powers of metaphors and analogies [are] directly linked to their capacity to transfer concepts among fields of knowledge’.20 But as Meehan demonstrates, they can also be adopted as a means of critique. In his essay titled ‘Clouds’, Derek Mahon, too, observes the distance between ‘the clouds in the sky’ that ‘evade human thought’ while ‘giving time for reflection on this and that’, versus the digital cloud’s greedy ‘monetarization of life and the rule of system’.21 A more extensive contemplation on the precarity of human memory in the machine age occurs in Meehan’s ‘The Last Poet’, a sequence published in the centenary year of 2016.22 Rather than journey back into history, the poem reaches forward by a hundred years. The view from Dublin’s Howth in 2116 presents a bleak and dystopian landscape of a city administered by the ‘New Machines’ (the phrase which also concludes ‘The Clouds’). The poem’s world is something of a mixture of the machine-run planet of the 1999 film The Matrix, in which human bodies are harvested and used as energy sources, and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), where fertile women are used as breeders for new bodies. The last poet anticipates how she will ‘be rendered for my fat / My bones for fertilizer’, while lamenting the fate of ‘the girl children, classified Breeders’.23 When memory is detached from the body, as the poem suggests, both become commodities, whether as data or as an energy resource. This split, a development that originates from the Cartesian mind–body dualism, is seen as a direct result of the technological developments of the early twenty-first century, the time of ‘the Old Machines’. The smartphone, as 20

21 22

23

Wouter Van Acker and Pieter Uyttenhove, ‘Analogous Spaces: An Introduction to Spatial Metaphors for the Organization of Knowledge’, Information and Space: Analogies and Metaphors [Special Issue], Library Trends 61:2 (2012), 259–70 (p. 260). In computing, the term ‘cloud’ was first explicitly used in documentation for internal communications at Compaq in 1996, shortly after the emergence of the Web, though Tung-Hui Hu, for example, has discussed in some detail how the digital ‘cloud’ was preceded by various exchange and storage networks, well before the emergence of present-day computer infrastructure. See Tung-Hui Hu, A Prehistory of the Cloud (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2015). Derek Mahon, ‘Clouds’, Olympia and the Internet (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 2017), pp. 30–3. According to a note to the poem, it was written and published as ‘part of the series Dublin in the Coming Times’, which was ‘a free, citywide programme of creative writing run by Fighting Words [a support programme for children and young people] in partnership with Dublin Unesco City of Literature’. See Paula Meehan, ‘The Last Poet’, The Irish Times, 19 November 2016, www .irishtimes.com/culture/books/the-last-poet-1.2868805 (accessed 20 March 2021). Meehan, ‘The Last Poet’.

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an attention-consuming handheld device, has hypnotised the young generation ‘on the buses, on the trams’, with children constantly seen ‘gazing into the machines’, or ‘feeding them scenes / Of this world and our dreamworld’.24 The human society has detached itself from embodied memory, and the present-day smartphone is portrayed as a portent of ‘the Great Uploading’ that is to coincide with ‘The Law Against Print’; now ‘Every human utterance’ has been subjected to machine processing, storage, and filtering. The chronicle of this development is presented in the title of an imagined future volume, ‘The End of Memory: / Modernist Irish Poetry of the Early 21st Century’. If machine data stands for the ‘end of memory’ in ‘The Last Poet’, its opposite is oral memory, in which language, place, and embodiment are inseparable. Such memory is not stored externally, but is transmitted and sustained through human interaction and performance. In the age of the New Machines, such memory is also near-obsolete. Standing at Howth Head, ‘the last poet’ utters a rhyme that her grandmother passed on to her, and that will not be passed on to another generation: Hannarafe, my grandmother taught me This old rhyme: Howth for its honey Its hives, its hawks, its hounds Its handsome boys, its humdudgeon And hobthrush, its hasps and hobblers, Its hylegs, its hyponyms, its hames. She named herself aboriginal In a world gone totally institutional25

The rhythmic and alliterative sound patterning of ‘humdudgeon’, ‘hobthrush, ‘hobblers’, and ‘hylegs’, is in itself a technology for remembering, a device where language has a connotative as well as denotative connection to landscape. The data of oral verse cannot be separated from context, and knowledge about Howth is woven into person and place through the pleasure of enunciation. But as the speaker’s granddaughter has joined others escaping the dystopian city to discover a place that would nurture the ‘machine-free zones of the human heart’, the intimate connection between place experience through the senses and translated into intergenerational memory is severed. Here too Meehan connects with Ramsell, who in ‘Cradles, Their Circuity’, considers the rupture between embodied 24

Ibid.

25

Ibid.

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versus engineered memory: the material foundation of memory is transferred from ‘[c]arbon to silicon’, and the speaker’s generation will thus ‘bequeath this worn world, / not to our children, nor to our children’s children’, but ‘to those digital souls / I have heard calling out / in beeps and clicks under the strip-lights’.26 Finally, it is important to recognise that the above instances of technopessimism in Meehan’s work do not indicate a categorical rejection of technology per se, but rather of the socio-economic values and epistemological consequences of the Cartesian split in the service of instrumentalisation and economic determinism. In her Ireland Chair of Poetry lecture, ‘Imaginary Bonnets with Real Bees in Them’, Meehan distinguishes between those who ‘use’ and those who ‘abuse’ the ‘inner space of the hive mind’ of the World Wide Web.27 In the lecture she describes ‘being moved’ by an encounter with an image of a 100-million-year-old Myanmar honeybee, preserved in amber, on the Internet, and reading an email on beekeeping which leads her to Yeats’s Autobiographies, where the poet wrote about smelling honey ‘in places where honey could not be’. Now Meehan, too, suddenly detects the scent of honey while sitting at her desk.28 Memory can thus cross the boundaries between different media, and pass on from one person and generation to the next within the ‘hive mind’, if it is allowed to assist the creative diversions of the wandering mind. The kinds of intimacy and authenticity that are threatened by the commodification of memory in Meehan’s poems were always deemed suspect in the writing of Paul Muldoon. While no more fooled by the utopian promise of data technologies than Meehan, Muldoon recognises how any record of the past or present, regardless of the technology of its replication and transmission, is inevitably sprinkled with errors, slips, and biases. Systems of classification and organisation often have a distorting effect on meaning-making, but distortion is also an occasion for poetic licence. Mechanical or instrumental memory is thus only dangerous if believed to be infallible. For Muldoon, data lies and forgets, or yields to its imaginary other, all the time. Muldoon’s approach to technology, predigital or digital, is marked by curiosity towards its unavoidable imperfections, beguiling and enticing. This approach extends beyond information 26 27

28

Ramsell, ‘Filíocht Nua’, p. 54. Paula Meehan, ‘Imaginary Bonnets with Real Bees in Them’, Ireland Chair of Poetry Lecture, 2014, https://moli.ie/radio/series/ucdscholarcast/paula-meehan-imaginary-bonnets-with-real-bees/ (accessed 28 May 2021). Ibid.

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networks and computerised processes, and perhaps for this reason Muldoon’s poetic style has changed surprisingly little during the proliferation of digital media in recent years. A poetics of commitment to unknowing rather than knowing, or to multiple possibilities rather than a single truth, is validated rather than threatened when ‘we’re assailed by information’ – indeed, it is the sheer influx of more and more information, even about the most mundane phenomena, that confirms that in the end ‘one has no idea’.29 The same commitment to the idea of unknowing as always infiltrating the structures of the knowledge economy is foregrounded in ‘Dirty Data’, the concluding poem of Muldoon’s collection One Thousand Things Worth Knowing (2015). In computing, the term ‘dirty data’ refers to ‘data that contains erroneous information’ or ‘data that is in memory and not yet loaded into a database’, and, crucially, ‘the complete removal of dirty data from a source is impractical or virtually impossible’.30 All data is, in other words, to some extent ‘dirty’. In Muldoon’s poem, ‘dirt’ is also literal as the material constituent of the bog, which is also a literal as well as figurative archive of Ireland’s past. The bog, like the computer data archive, is a storage of preserved yet not immutable records, and consists of layered, accumulated data. Direct and indirect references to ‘data’ appear in several places in the poem, as ‘data capture’, ‘mash-up’, ‘cache of linen-factory data’, ‘some data’.31 It also appears in frequent references to collected facts and records, which nevertheless remain imperfect, incomplete, or unverified. Just as with the physical archive or the digital database, the records stored in the bog age and break, and contain elements of ‘dirt’ as gaps, errors, and imperfections, as well as the literal dirt of the bog itself. It is the bog that also demonstrates how without dirt, there would be no data. Of all Irish poets, the bog as a governing metaphor is particularly associated with the work of Seamus Heaney. ‘Dirty Data’ acknowledges this connection through its reference to the collection’s opening poem, ‘Cuthbert and Otters’, dedicated to Heaney who passed away two years prior to the volume’s publication. ‘Dirty Data’, too, becomes a homage to the older poet, or the poetic relationship between the two poets’ writing. This link extends to the combined cartography of the poems: where ‘Cuthbert and Otters’ visits 29

30 31

Alice Whitwham, ‘Interview with Paul Muldoon’, The White Review (July 2013), www .thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-with-paul-muldoon/ (accessed 12 March 2021). ‘Dirty Data’, Technopedia, www.techopedia.com/definition/1194/dirty-data (accessed 12 March 2021). Paul Muldoon, One Thousand Things Worth Knowing (London: Faber & Faber, 2015), pp. 106, 107, 117.

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the Ballynahone Bog nearby Heaney’s childhood home in Bellaghy, Co. Derry, ‘Dirty Data’ moves just over 70 kilometres southwards to the bogs around Slieve Gullion mountain, a prominent archaeological site in Muldoon’s childhood Co. Armagh. Via the literal terrain of Ireland’s North, Muldoon transfigures the bog archive into a digital database, and this is more than an update of a media platform. As Brian McHale has argued, in Heaney’s poetry the bog archive is a modernist literary trope of an ‘archaeology of knowledge’ (à la Foucault), a space of ‘historical depth and stratification’, and a means of ‘foregrounding the vertical dimension of language’.32 For McHale, it reflects the modernist ethos of the vertical coexistence of previous texts in the present space of a poem or an artwork. Consequently, the (figurative) digitisation of this archive allows Muldoon to foreground what was perceived as the key difference in the two poets’ writing from the beginning of his career: Heaney’s commitment to depth and groundedness versus Muldoon’s restless fascination with sprawling surface aesthetics and mobility. ‘Dirty Data’ merges the symbolic form of the archive and the poetics of free play to compose a three-dimensional system of storage and transmission, and the preservation and perpetual transformation of memory. The poem’s opening lines present the image of the ‘bog [. . .] fenced up there on Slieve Gullion’, but instead of probing downwards, it then proceeds horizontally, via ‘chain[s] of events’ and ‘link[s]’ and often tenuous connections between ‘records that are fragmentary’.33 The poem’s first page also introduces the material image of a willow basket as a metaphor for an entwined process where ‘[a] ring wants nothing more than to intertwine / with another ring’. As well as a poetic epistemology of depth and surface, through this image Muldoon merges the symbolic structures of the database and the narrative. This approach has been described by N. Katherine Hayles, who, challenging Lev Manovich’s idea of database and narrative as ‘natural enemies’, has argued that ‘narrative and database are more appropriately seen as natural symbionts’. Drawing on Ed Folsom’s work on the Walt Whitman Archive, Hayles stresses that ‘[if] narrative often dissolves into database [. . .], database catalyzes and indeed demands narrative’s reappearance as soon as meaning and interpretation are required’.34 Importantly, ‘[the] flip 32

33 34

Brian McHale, ‘Archaeologies of Knowledge: Hill’s Middens, Heaney’s Bogs, Schwerner’s Tablets’, New Literary History [Special Issue], Poetry & Poetics 30:1 (Winter 1999), 239–62 (p. 244). Muldoon, One Thousand Things, pp. 99, 100, 106. N. Katherine Hayles, ‘Narrative and Database: Natural Symbionts’, Remapping Genre [Special Issue], PMLA 122:5 (October 2007), 1602–8 (p. 1603).

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side of narrative’s inability to tell the story is the proliferation of narratives as they transform to accommodate new data and mutate to probe what lies beyond the expanding infosphere’.35 ‘Dirty data’ has a promiscuous relationship to narrative: the accumulation of incomplete, contradictory, and constantly evolving data in a database requires constant rearticulation through multiplying narratives. At the same time, attempts to forge jumbled, fragmented material into a single, purpose-driven, and consistent narrative becomes an act of violence: it requires control, disfiguration, and cutting, a dismembering of objects as well as bodies. The more intense the scrutiny and the desire for information, the more extensive the amount of imperfections, or ‘dirt’ to be eliminated: ‘the records are [. . .] fragmentary’, the data ‘incomplete’, there are ‘old truths and old-style spelling errors’, ‘disinformation about / a dawn scoop’, a ‘disinformative call’.36 In order to coerce such material to yield a truth, the poem’s unspecified investigators turn to torture, interrogation, imprisonment, confinement, or amputation, resulting in attempts to force the data to yield desired information while ‘evidence is scant’.37 Yet a ‘fact-finding mission’ is merely another detour, and an ‘informant’ or an ‘investigative team’ disclose more questions than answers.38 The bog archive, as well as the database, if pressed for a desired meaning, highlights the violence involved in the fantasy of ‘pure’ data as a record of ‘the story’. This, the poem proposes, is the alarm of the final line’s ‘Wikiup call’.

Data of Embodied Knowledge: Sirr and Mahon The unattainable dream of a perfect record of accumulated historical or geographical data also informs Peter Sirr’s ‘The Mapmaker’s Song’ (The Rooms, 2014). In Sirr’s poem, an ambitious cartographer begins with a declaration that he has succeeded in mapping all the details of his city: ‘every alley, every street / every fanlight and window-ledge’.39 According to the poet, the mapmaker is based on the historical figure of John Rocque and his map of Dublin from 1756, ‘in which he claimed to have represented every single building in the city’40 – a version of Joyce’s fantasy of a ‘supercatalogue’ of the capital. Yet no sooner has one map been completed than it is recognised as lacking, and the speaker’s hunger grows to map ‘everything else’, all the minutiae of life, and to become ‘a cartographer of hemlines and 35 38 40

Ibid., p. 1607. 36 Muldoon, One Thousand Things, pp. 106, 107, 111, 112. 37 Ibid., p. 104. Ibid., pp. 105, 114, 115. 39 Peter Sirr, The Rooms (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 2014), p. 11. Peter Sirr and Ailbhe Darcy, ‘Peter Sirr Interviewed by Ailbhe Darcy’, Poetry Ireland Review 114 (December 2014), 90–9 (p. 94).

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eyelids’ and the ghostly populations of ‘graveyards’.41 This ‘everything else’ would then be contained in an ‘unlosable database’ of all the people and all their itineraries that have filled the city, ‘the repeating place’ of ‘kings stalking the server farms [. . .] where / brushstrokes flicker on a bank of screens’. The mapmaker would become a ‘historian of footsteps’, his database a perfect temporal as well as spatial record. In the poem’s final lines, he imagines himself lying ‘in the atrium / of the museum of the fingertip / and touch, touch, touch’.42 The lines evoke the fingerprint both as an evidence for matching person and place, and as a metaphor for embodied knowledge, presenting the human fingertip as a sensory interface. The speaker’s yearning for complete knowledge becomes an intimate, physical desire. Blinded by ambition that draws its inspiration from the exponential growing potential of digital data storage, the mapmaker fails to recognise that the ‘everything’ he wants to catalogue can never be extracted from its material form. In this sense, Sirr’s poem reiterates the conclusion of Ciaran Carson in ‘Revised Version’: ‘The city is a map of the city’.43 Dublin as an embodiment of its own past and present is also its only complete, ‘unlosable database’. Though Sirr, like Muldoon, recognises the perpetually dialogic relationship between database and narrative, stored data and its temporal arrangement, his poem also points to the limitations of a database archive in capturing an embodied, perceptual present, the hopelessness of the speaker’s aspiration of becoming ‘a geographer of breath / a curator of hands’.44 A twofold understanding of ‘data’ as recorded fact or sensory perception is also apparent in many poems by Derek Mahon, whose writing approaches emerging technologies from the perspective of the often awkward relationship between technological operations and phenomenal perception. The poet’s views on the network society have typically been more than a little sceptical: in The Yellow Book (1997), the decadent solitary poet, observing the world through his window above street level, shrinks from a society where ‘computer talks to computer, machine to answering machine’.45 A later short essay titled ‘Olympia and the Internet’, outlines the reasons for the poet’s mistrust of the Web: ‘Something to do with its strategical origins as military hardware, software; the gold rush, the data mining, the intrusive sense of entitlement. It wants to know everything 41 43 44 45

Sirr, The Rooms, p. 11. 42 Ibid., p. 12. Ciaran Carson, Collected Poems (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 2008), p. 175 (original italics). Sirr, The Rooms, p. 12. Derek Mahon, The Yellow Book (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 1997), p. 15.

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about everyone everywhere.’46 The seemingly offhand use of ‘something’ is accompanied by a detailed list of issues related to the growth of the digital infrastructure within the system of cognitive capitalism, including ‘the manufactur[ing] of Apple products to a notoriously inhumane Chinese megafactory’ and the ‘tax avoidance games’ of Apple and Google, an issue much debated in the Irish media.47 Despite the author’s suspicion of the network economy, Mahon’s poetry also manifests a degree of self-deprecation regarding the poet’s urge to withdraw from advances in media technology. In ‘Domestic Interior’, the breakfast table is the domain of news, now accessed both via ‘iPhone’ and ‘newspaper’, while the living room walls help the poet to avoid ‘the out-ofsight / disasters’ which media – digital and analogue – bring to our field of vision.48 Implicitly, the desire to retreat to the solitary peace of the living room also signifies a lack of willingness to witness the calamities that fill media, digital or analogue. But instead of facing the news, the poet extends his sense of responsibility to a more-than-human world. In his final collections, technology, too, is placed within a framework that recognises more complex, entangled relations between human-made apparatuses, microscopic life, organic and inorganic matter, computerised data, and human versus non-human experience. The ‘skittish bacteria, fungi, viruses, gastropods / squirming in earth and dirt’ that fill ‘A Country Road’, are part of the overall material, planetary assemblage and thus ‘return as other things’; as the poet writes in ‘Thing Theory’, these include ‘high tech and virtual play’ or ‘things . . . in the rubbish heap and litter bin’.49 This material-ecological perspective combined with a suspicion of corporate network economy is also foregrounded in ‘Data’, where data appears as sensory phenomena, rather than units of digital information circulating in computerised networks. The poem opens with a recognition of ‘the singular things / I noticed as a boy’: materially present perceptual phenomena – visual, aural, tactile, olfactory. There is also a familiar sense of discord between phenomenal perception and the world of information networks: of ‘things material’ that defend themselves against ‘knowledge instrumental’, or ‘facts unreal / because unlived, unfelt’.50 The poem expresses a degree of melancholy nostalgia for the world of the ‘boy’ of the opening line – for life where we do not ‘need computers to contemplate / that morphic resonance where swifts migrate’ – but also invites 46 47 49 50

Derek Mahon, Olympia and the Internet (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 2017), p. 82. Ibid., p. 83. 48 Derek Mahon, Against the Clock (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 2018), p. 74. Derek Mahon, Life on Earth (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 2008), pp. 42, 67–8. Mahon, Against the Clock, p. 32.

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a consideration of all of its encounters as instances of its title word. The speaker considers the ‘scrambling interface / of ebbing tide and incoming tide’, and the ‘reflected or intrinsic glow’ of the ‘intentional world’ that also evokes the interface of a computer screen, as a framed opening to a ‘world we think we know’.51 The repeated ‘w’ points to the ‘www’ of the World Wide Web, and its false promise of ‘knowledge’ as unlimited data. Such information is incomplete and lacking, not because of the scarcity of digital data, but because such data falls short of accounting for embodied, phenomenal encounters with the material world, or a non-utilitarian knowledge that is not a product of the knowledge economy. Like Meehan, Mahon does not aim his critique at technology as such, nor does he prioritise a non-human natural domain over the human, or the human-made; furniture or buildings are of equal order with weather, or plant life. Rather, the key word in the poem is ‘instrumental’, the kind of approach to knowledge, data, or the environment that serves a purely functional purpose. ‘Data’ maintains that not just technology, but all encounters at the ‘scrambling interface’ connecting human and nonhuman (or human and human, or non-human and non-human) phenomena produce data, though it is of a different order from the intrusive ‘“totality and simultaneity” of data’ from which the walking tourists flee in the poem ‘High Water’.52 Therefore, the question is the conflicted relation ‘between stored information and immediate sensory data’, as Stephens phrases it in the context of Gertrude Stein’s poetics,53 or, rather, data as quantifiable product in service of ‘commodification of thought’ versus data as Joycean ‘signatures of all things’.54 Furthermore, Mahon proposes in ‘Olympia and the Internet’ that poetry and technology are far from incompatible: ‘poetry survives and even thrives in the digital age; thrives, perhaps because of digitization’ – it is ‘a form of resistance, [. . .] an insistence of private truth and fantasy in the face of a dominant paradigm [that is] increasingly invading public space’.55 Rather than being a victim of technology, poetry becomes a means of reclaiming data from the control of the digital economy.

The Material Politics of Data: Healy and Quinn Randolph Healy’s 1997 sequence, Arbor Vitae, similarly rejects the premise of ontological distinction between human, technological, and natural domains. However, instead of perceptual phenomena versus data as 51 53

Ibid. 52 Derek Mahon, Harbour Lights (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 2005), p. 23. Stephens, Poetics of Information Overload, p. 4. 54 Mahon, Olympia, p. 84. 55 Ibid., p. 86.

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technological commodity, Healy focuses more emphatically on the ethical and political issues that underpin various sign systems as material contexts for communication. The sequence was written, as Healy explains in a footnote to the poem, as a response to his family’s experience of discovering that their daughter was deaf, but also to the realisation that the Irish state, based on Catholic Church doctrine, had banned sign language earlier in the twentieth century; this ‘suppression of [deaf people’s] natural language is based on the belief that a deaf child allowed to sign will never learn to speak’.56 Such religious-political refusal to acknowledge the coexistence, difference, and equal value of different sign systems, and their embodied forms of expression, prompts Healy to explore their mutual connections and disconnections in socio-historical context through formal as well as thematic relations of meaning-making. Alex Davis valuably suggests that ‘the text’s artifice does justice to conceptual schemes marginalised as either primitive or somehow non-normative not through empathetic understanding but by recognising their otherness’.57 Healy’s reference points oscillate between prehistoric cave paintings and digital computing, covering visual, auditory, and gestural modalities. The poem’s signifying forms respond to hand painting, sign language, and cellular data, alongside typewriters, telegraph machines, and programming language, within this historical timespan. Arbor Vitae portrays the perceiving and communicating body itself not as a discreet entity but as ‘home’: Home is an array of data arising out of membranes, pressure, chemo- and light sensors and, even more so, out of post-sensual processing. But I am a fragment of a shadow cast by the coherence of energies necessary to co-ordinate a colony of six trillion cells.58

Like a computer or any other medium of communication, the biological body produces, processes, transmits, and receives data. The poem foregrounds the importance of transmission and processing, storage or other essential qualities of data as entity (or individual entities). This includes the organisation of the body’s own functions at the cellular level: the body is 56

57

58

Randolph Healy, Arbor Vitae (Bray: Wild Honey Press, 1997); text available at www .wildhoneypress.com/BOOKS/AVCOM/AVMENU.html (accessed 20 March 2021). All subsequent references are to this same version of the poem and its note section. Alex Davis, ’Deferred Action: Irish Neo-Avant-Garde Poetry’, Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities 5:1 (April 2000), 81–93 (p. 85). Healy, Arbor Vitae, section i.

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a technology for processing information through encounters with its surroundings (or Mahon’s ‘scrambling interface’). Organic life forms are made with the transmitted data of DNA: ‘The negation of AND leads to all gates: / (aNANDa)NAND(bNANDb)’.59 We are, in other words, ‘stitched from information’ and ‘digital language’, as Billy Ramsell writes in ‘Code’.60 The survival of the ‘six trillion cells’ that constitute the human body is dependent not on the preservation of any individual, but rather on their ability to transmit genetic information between bodies by traversing the boundaries of an individual organism.61 For Healy, ‘DNA is intended to represent something that extends beyond an individual life while also suggesting uniqueness.’ The coded data of the DNA is another form of communication, and in Arbor Vitae Healy reiterates the idea that ‘genes can be thought of as a metaphor for the sheer persistence of language’.62 While the poem uses the vocabulary and idiom of science and technology, it also further demonstrates how various sign systems and processes of data transmission cannot be addressed in abstract or mechanical terms only, but are always historically, culturally, and politically situated. When certain ways of transmitting data, or certain modes of transmission are favoured while others are marginalised or banned, communication becomes a privilege of those fitting the norm. This marginalisation fails to recognise that ‘knowledge might be in the conn / Ections rather than in a change of state / Of any isolated unit of the system’ – and, conversely, that knowledge can be denied to some by severing these connections.63 Where Healy draws on examples across historical periods and continents to underline the misuse of political and historical power in twentiethcentury Ireland specifically, Justin Quinn’s 2002 collection, Fuselage, adopts a more global perspective on the dark underbelly of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century cognitive capitalist system. Mahon’s misgivings with this system in ‘Olympia and the Internet’ are akin to Quinn’s fervent critique of multinational trade and global supply chains of goods, of which data is merely one. The sequence of thirty-one poems in the second part of Fuselage describe a planet-wide apparatus where economic and political power, military control, and consumer capitalism are intrinsically and highly problematically intertwined. Fran Brearton has described Fuselage as presenting ‘the world as one of 59 60 61

Ibid., section ii. Billy Ramsell, The Architect’s Dream of Winter (Dublin: Dedalus Press, 2013), p. 74. Healy, Arbor Vitae, section i. 62 Ibid., Footnote. 63 Ibid., section ii.

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unstoppable sound and furious movement’, and observes how the long sequence ‘shape-shifts, like the old house, with its various forms, its unnumbered and untitled poems that make up their own “give and flow”’.64 The governing metaphor of the sequence is not the house, however, but the term ‘fuselage’, as the material body of an aircraft, the human body, and also the body of planet Earth: ‘the world / is spinning fuselage’.65 The body itself becomes a datafied target of surveillance, an object of gaze, and a resource for cheap labour. It is consumed through a dizzying array of ‘flows’ and ‘systems’, the visual imagery on screens and in marketing, and the exploitation of other bodies that produce the consumer goods advertised in media. Where Meehan and Mahon are suspicious of how digital technologies marginalise lived, embodied experience, Quinn’s bodies are controlled, constituted, and consumed through the networks and interfaces of a global political and economic apparatus. The sequence’s opening poem is a sonnet that presents the key motifs and themes that then recur across the following pages. The first lines describe how ‘Suddenly small islands / of colour’ become visible ‘through the drizzle’, as if seen from an aircraft descending through clouds, only to be located on the ‘screen’ of a computer. In the second quartet, these two entities are connected to the maelstrom of currents that underpin images circulated via online interfaces: thousands of words and signs exchanged in the transaction, eddying. Then one black zone is flesh and flowing violence: so beautiful the skin, so starved and yet so silken [. . .].66

The key word here is ‘transaction’. The poem intentionally refuses to specify what, exactly, is seen, or traded. No specific context is given for the ‘starved’ and ‘silken’ dark skin, and the imagery evokes associations to fashion, pornography, or media coverage of famine victims. In the context of the entire sequence it becomes clear that the reference is to all of these, and more. A similar ambiguity characterises the islands of the opening line: this is the surface of planet earth, an alternative view of the ‘curved and 64

65

Fran Brearton, ‘News of the World’ [A Review of Breaking News by Ciaran Carson and Fuselage by Justin Quinn], The Irish Review 31 (Spring–Summer 2004), 141–7. Justin Quinn, Fuselage (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 2002), p. 28. 66 Ibid., p. 19.

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coursing’ body, but also a corresponding part of the concluding image of the poem, where ‘Two eyes watch the earth’. In the system of an incessant current of ‘words and signs’, each person is the voyeur, but is also the object of another’s gaze. The poem thus visualises not only the body and the planet but also networked data and the transactions it enables: each person is both the buyer and the product. Fuselage appeared two years after the publication of Naomi Klein’s bestselling volume No Logo, in which the full extent of exploitation by western clothing brands in the Far East was brought to the centre of media attention. While Klein’s book became best known for its reproach of the global clothing business, it also directed its critique at the multinational ICT industry, which was seen as complicit in the system of exploitation. Quinn similarly recognises the connection between the two, and how textiles and data technologies are inseparable in an exchange network where credit card numbers ‘wielded for the purchase’ are ‘connected with the barcodes, / the tiny fibres // furiously knitting me into the flows, the circuits, the systems / as data’.67 Klein demonstrated how global IT giants, while maintaining that they would connect the people of the world, instead built an ‘international presence [which] takes the form of cheap Third World labour producing the computer chips and power sources that drive our machines’.68 Increasingly, in the first decades of the millennium, we have come to realise how their dubious business practices extend from the material exploitation of workers to the exploitation of individuals and communities that produce and buy their products (whether clothing, computers, or smartphones) through data mining and network capitalism. The flow of transactions and exchanged goods and images runs through the entire sequence, including poems which focus on specific situations, from everyday supermarket visits to news reports on military strikes, or from scenes in textile factories to meetings of leaders of the world’s economic and political organisations. Data connects all of these elements and processes, as ‘[the] thick dark current runs, flows out from us [. . .] full of data and vast funds’.69 This current traverses scenes of a spinning planet, where goods, bodies, vehicles, and images are in constant, orchestrated motion, detected and sometimes destroyed by military drones, or carried by commercial passenger jets, but always connected by the streams of data that link transactions across continents with the overall structure. Writing at the turn of the new millennium, the poet foregrounds issues that have 67 69

Ibid., p. 40. 68 Naomi Klein, No Logo (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2000), p. 19. Quinn, Fuselage, p. 20.

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since become topics of intense media attention, as well as scholarly conversation: digital consumerism, the role of state surveillance and control, and the questionable aspects of privacy and data harvesting via digital platforms and applications. This, too, is ‘dirty data’, not as imperfections in records, but as tainted by the ethical failures of political, economic, and military interests. Quinn’s collection was published considerably earlier than Shoshana Zuboff’s much-discussed work on ‘surveillance capitalism’, and other similar scholarly interventions into the corporate exploitation of consumer data in the ‘big data’ economy. But it anticipates Zuboff’s key theme, namely the ‘unexpected and often illegible mechanisms of extraction, commodification, and control that effectively exile persons from their own behavior while producing new markets of behavioral prediction and modification’.70 For Quinn, everyday consumerism and distant locations of labour exploitation are connected via the near-invisible network and data infrastructure which is discreetly built into landscapes around the globe as ‘nondescript low buildings / bevelled gently into hillside of Vermont and Meath’, and filled with the steady ‘layered hum of cooling fans and airconditioning, / & a mainframe’.71 This is the same sound that permeates Conor O’Callaghan’s ‘The Server Room’, with its ‘interior’s hiss / of dehumidifiers, fans and ohms’ which allow ‘data like rain meltwater cold / to pool to brimming point, to cascade down’.72

Boland and Code ‘at the Edge of Language’ The technologies and interfaces that now saturate the everyday environment rely on ‘the layered structure of the computer (from assembly language to graphical user interface)’, as Christian Ulrik Andersen and Søren Bro Pold have observed.73 A layered structure is also an important characteristic of the language of poetry, which relies on the interaction between visible and hidden meanings, literal and figurative expression, and multiple associations. Code, as the language of computing, also enacts a poetics of its own, whereby data – whether sensory, digital, or some other kind – is translated into information, speech, writing, narratives, or images. 70

71 72 73

Shoshana Zuboff, ‘Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization’, Journal of Information Technology 30:1 (2015), 75–89 (p. 75). Quinn, Fuselage, p. 40. Conor O’Callaghan, ‘The Server Room’, The Sun King (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 2013), p. 33. Christian Ulrik Andersen and Søren Bro Pold, The Metainterface: The Art of Platforms, Cities, and Clouds (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2018), p. 10.

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Such likenesses are examined in Eavan Boland’s poem ‘Code’, which the poet dedicated to ‘Grace Murray Hopper 1906–88, maker of a computer compiler and verifier of COBOL’.74 Boland’s own reputation was to a significant extent built on her extending of the scope of Irish poetry, in particular to the gendered space of the home and the suburb, and making visible women’s lives in a society foregrounding a public, masculine national narrative. ‘Code’ is less preoccupied with Irish history and society, but is nevertheless faithful to Boland’s focus on gender in addressing the work of a woman programmer in a field which would become, despite the early prevalence of women, a largely male domain. The most prominent theme in ‘Code’, however, is its curiosity as to the intersection of poetry and the idiom of information technology: how the work of a writer attentive to the scope and strength of her craft aligns with another way of creating with language. Boland’s aspiration to connect the language of poetry and the language of the computer is stated in the first lines, which address Hopper directly: ‘Poet to poet. I imagine you / at the edge of language, at the start of summer / in Wolfeboro New Hampshire, writing code.’75 The author of poetry and the author of code are both engaged in a creative process. The phrase ‘edge of language’ thus has a twofold connotation: of non-verbal existence at the brink of becoming language through the poet’s work, but also the emergence of code as something between an algorithmic or mathematical pattern and a natural language. In her 2003 essay, ‘Virtual Syntax, Actual Dreams’, Boland wrote: [. . .] for any poet, the tension between a language of power and a lexicon of true limits is a daily, chastising struggle. [. . .] Time, power and language: themes shared between the poem and the new technology. And so, when history catches up, when the computer arrives primed with power and language, in a certain sense, and with a certain irony, the poet is particularly well prepared to comment.76

Here, Boland anticipates Reed’s words on poetry as ‘a language-based art with a penchant for reflecting on its channels of communication’, and poets as well positioned to ‘experiment with transmediation’.77 ‘Code’ marks an encounter between two authors, separated by five decades and thousands of miles of ocean, and their respective ways of creating new worlds with language, crossing the boundaries of gender, history, and geography – but also of established forms of authoring. As Claire Lynch argues, the poem 74 76 77

Eavan Boland, Code (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2001), p. 28. 75 Ibid. Eavan Boland, ‘Virtual Syntax, Actual Dreams’, PN Review 29:4 (March–April 2003), 25–8 (p. 26). Reed, ‘Virtual Experiment’, p. 284.

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focuses on ‘rejecting romantic notions of ethereal inspiration or mechanical assembly which respectively limit each type of writer’.78 Both encounter the world by charting and stretching the limits of ‘what you can translate’; prelinguistic phenomena, perceptions, intentions, and desires are given a language through encounters between the human and the machine. Boland goes into some detail in considering the development of the computer as a machine ‘primed with power and language’: By the 1970s a computer could check eight binary digits of data with every cycle. A group of such digits was called a byte. A byte contained over two hundred patterns of ones and zeros. And each pattern was urging and instructing the computer to do something. To read. To compare. To remember. [. . .] But the builder, the true architect of the computer was different. It was not really silicon nor plastic nor the hot drip of a soldering iron. It was language itself. Language that had odd names and poignant old-fashioned descriptions. High-level language for instance that made an abstract of machine language, that issued declarations and control statements.79

If for Meehan, computerised interfaces and storage now appear to threaten meaningful human memory, Boland’s essay is characterised by curiosity and fascination. The computer program is a structured and layered medium where material is translated between the machine and the human user – from binary digits of data to bytes, patterns, code, and language. ‘Code’, as well as Boland’s essay, is energised by a fascination with the constant shifts and changes between different modalities and systems of transmission and translation. Consequently, writing poetry with a computer became, for Boland, a dialogue between ‘two opposites of language’ – the familiar domain of poetry, and ‘a new culture of language, one long implied by science and made inevitable by technology’.80 It is the contact zone between these two opposites that also informs ‘Code’. The form and shape of the poem itself resemble the structure of a block of code, with indented lines: You have no sense of time. No sense of minutes even. They cannot reach inside your world, your grey workstation with when yet now never and once. You have missed the other seven. This is the eighth day of creation.81

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Claire Lynch, Cyber Ireland: Text, Image, Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 37. Boland, ‘Virtual Syntax’, p. 26. 80 Ibid., p. 27. 81 Boland, ‘Code’, p. 28.

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Rather than being a divine act, writing is an intimate process of creation: the programmer, like the poet, is lost in a world of her own making. The poem in the shape of code seeks to bridge the temporal distance of fifty years between the writing of the poem and the time when Hopper worked on COBOL. Grace Hopper was convinced that a programming language should be built to resemble English, a natural language; as Kurt Beyer has observed, ‘for Hopper computer languages were no different than any other human language’.82 The world-making of poetry and of programming is thus an act of allowing the world to organise itself as language. If the earth and the moon are formed from the tiniest components, when ‘Atoms, energies have done their work’, it is the poet or the programmer who translates these energies into language: ‘You are compiling binaries and zeroes. / The given world is what you can translate.’ This language is always at ‘the edge’, in a process of becoming, reaching out to multiple possible words, phrases, and lines that constitute the imaginary domain of what may or may not come to being: ‘the single file / of elements and animals, and all the facts / of origin and outcome, which will never find / their way to you or shelter in your syntax’. The poet and the programmer inhabit this edge and move between the material and the imaginary dimensions. Both programming and the crafting of verse are a means of ‘sensing a way in which syntax could release power’, as composition and translation of sensory or digital data.83

Conclusion The poems discussed here have suggested, in different ways, that data as the material of computing or communication technologies is to be situated within frameworks of language and memory, historical imaginaries, the relations between human and other-than-human entities, and the social and political underpinnings of information exchange. Similarly to the arguments posed by Gitelman and Jackson, the poets recognise the perils of the fallacy of ‘raw data’, or of a society built on such a fallacy. Like ‘objectivity’, our relationship to data ‘is situated and historically specific; it comes from somewhere and is the result of ongoing changes to the conditions of inquiry, conditions that are at once material, social, and ethical’.84 The languages of data and digital technologies, as figurative and literal 82

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Kurt Beyer, Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009), p. 308. Boland, ‘Virtual Syntax’, p. 26. 84 Gitelman and Jackson, Raw Data, p. 4.

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idiom, allow poets to reassess preconceptions of language, technology, environment, and materiality, and the ideological foundations of established categories. In line with posthumanist and new materialist philosophy, Irish poets have increasingly approached data as a way to cross the boundaries raised by essentialising philosophies, rejecting the idea of clear, defined distinctions between nature, culture, and technology. Data is the matter out of which information is composed, but matter is also data, encountered through ‘scrambling interfaces’ and embodied exchanges connecting organic and inorganic processes. In recent decades, data, particularly as ‘big data’, harvested through digital platforms and applications, has been harnessed to service a rhetoric of enhanced efficiency, objectivity, and authority. Ireland’s economy, too, has become increasingly reliant on the operations and interests of the state agencies and multinational corporations responsible for collecting, storing, and selling data in a global system of supply chain networks, the ‘dark currents’ that connect all parts of the globe in Quinn’s poems. When the ontological boundaries between technology, biology, and language are revealed as illusory, data, too, loses its abstract and objective character. Data as a neutral component processed by information systems may be subjected to critique, but can also be reclaimed as a means of demonstrating the entangled relations between technological, biological, and sociocultural assemblages. It is through data that poets, too, renegotiate the deceptive ideological boundaries between human beings, nature, and technology, and revisit the idea of poetry as a technology that, equally to the work of the programmer, can serve to ‘translate [. . .] the given world’.

Select Bibliography Andersen, Christian Ulrik, and Søren Bro Pold, The Metainterface: The Art of Platforms, Cities, and Clouds (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2018). Beyer, Kurt, Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009). Boland, Eavan, Code (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2001). ‘Virtual Syntax, Actual Dreams’, PN Review 29:4 (March–April 2003), 25–8. Carson, Ciaran, Collected Poems (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 2008). Gitelman, Lisa, ed., ‘Raw Data’ Is an Oxymoron (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2013). Groarke, Vona, Spindrift (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 2009). Hayles, N. Katherine, ‘Narrative and Database: Natural Symbionts’, Remapping Genre [Special Issue], PMLA 122.5 (October 2007), 1603–8.

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Healy, Randolph, Arbor Vitae (Bray: Wild Honey Press, 1997); text available at www.wildhoneypress.com/BOOKS/AVCOM/AVMENU.html Lynch, Claire, Cyber Ireland: Text, Image, Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). MacNeice, Louis, Autumn Journal (London: Faber & Faber, 1939). Mahon, Derek, The Yellow Book (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 1997). Harbour Lights (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 2005). Life on Earth (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 2008). Olympia and the Internet (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 2017). Against the Clock (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 2018). Meehan, Paula, ‘Imaginary Bonnets with Real Bees in Them’, Ireland Chair of Poetry Lecture, 2014, https://moli.ie/radio/series/ucdscholarcast/paulameehan-imaginary-bonnets-with-real-bees/ Geomantic (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2014). ‘The Last Poet’, The Irish Times, 19 November 2016, www.irishtimes.com/cul ture/books/the-last-poet-1.2868805 Moulier Boutang, Yann, Cognitive Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011). Muldoon, Paul, One Thousand Things Worth Knowing (London: Faber & Faber, 2015). O’Callaghan, Conor, The Sun King (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 2013). Quinn, Justin, Fuselage (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 2002). Ramazani, Jahan, ‘Irish Poetry and the News’, in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry, ed. Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 548–65. Ramsell, Billy, The Architect’s Dream of Winter (Dublin: Dedalus Press, 2013). ‘Filíocht Nua: New Poetry’, New Hibernia Review 18:1 (Spring/Earrach 2014), 50–7. Reed, Brian M., ‘Visual Experiment and Oral Performance’, in The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound, ed. Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009), pp. 270–84. Sirr, Peter, The Rooms (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 2014). Stephens, Paul, The Poetics of Information Overload: From Gertrude Stein to Conceptual Writing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). Zuboff, Shoshana, ‘Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization’, Journal of Information Technology 30:1 (2015), 75–89.

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chapter 18

Irish Digital Literature James O’Sullivan

In the summer of 2018, a curious picture appeared on Twitter streams. Irish writer Doireann Ní Ghríofa was standing ankle-deep in Cork’s River Lee, a photographer crouched at her feet. Ní Ghríofa was in situ to record a video that would showcase a new project with The Salvage Press, a Dublin-based publishing house run by artist and designer Jamie Murphy. The hallmark of Salvage is their letterpress-printed books, a fading craft kept alive through Murphy’s commitment to the process of setting type by hand. The picture and its context are striking because they pose an apt summation of Ní Ghríofa’s literary career to date: the river and the camera, the natural and the mechanical.1 That image from 2018 reveals something intriguing about her process and perspective. It speaks, in a way, to Ní Ghríofa’s fascination with technê: the tweet did not feature a final, press-ready still or clip from the video, but rather the work-in-progress, an image of an image being made. Ní Ghríofa’s work with Salvage, a collaboration with Irish artist Alice Maher entitled Nine Silences, is steeped in technique – literary, visual, material. It is as multimodal as can be achieved with print, a consequence of its synergistic origins. It is striking, almost refreshing, to see how Salvage Press has foregrounded the role of collaboration in cultural production. The project’s Web presence2 accounts for every artisan who had a part in the textual and paratextual aspects of the piece: Ní Ghríofa’s words are offered in response to Maher’s artwork, while its design and printing are attributed to Jamie Murphy, with assistance from Sarah O’Neill, Lorcan 1

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Having come to writing in her late twenties, Ní Ghríofa has established herself as one of contemporary Irish literature’s eminent figures. She has received such accolades as the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary Award, a Seamus Heaney Centre fellowship at Queen’s University Belfast, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry. Her novel-length prose debut, A Ghost in the Throat (2020), won An Post Irish Book of the Year, Foyles Non-fiction Book of the Year, and Hodges Figgis Irish Book of the Year. The aforementioned promotional video and the production information on Nine Silences can be found on the Salvage website: thesalvagepress.com/nine-silences-deluxe (accessed 16 June 2022).

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Rush, and Lauren Shannon O’Brien of the Distiller’s Press at the National College of Art and Design. Adrian Frutiger is recognised for designing, in 1954, the Méridien typeface that was set atop ‘150gsm Hodgkinson handmade paper produced for the Stanbrook Abbey Press in 1974 and kept dry until now by John Purcell in London’. Jemma Lewis used Irish Carrageen Moss to prepare the marbling, and Tom, Pat, Tommy, and Patricia Duffy bound Nine Silences at their workshop in the Five Lamps, Dublin. Such explicit detail shows an appreciation for what can be achieved through collaboration; it is, like the image of an image being made, a text about a text being made. Collaboration has an uneasy relationship with the Irish sense of what literature should be – a singular voice using a singular medium to tell a singular story or related set of stories. This aversion to collaboration is partly responsible for the lack of digital literature being produced on this island. Typically, the term ‘digital literature’ refers to ‘a first-generation digital object created on a computer and (usually) meant to be read on a computer’.3 Digital literature is entirely different to literature which has been digitised, which is, aesthetically, really quite close to print. As Serge Bouchardon explains: If an e-reader simply displays text in the way a printed book displays text – the only difference being that to advance the text one scrolls rather than turns a page – this is not ‘digital literature.’ It is printed work digitized for optimal display in a portable computational environment. Digital literature is algorithmic. It changes as the reader engages it.4

Certainly, it would be dangerously prescriptive to say that print cannot have a part in digital literature, but for any act of expression to be truly digital in the way it is meant here, ‘computation should constitute some inherent component of the piece’s aesthetics’.5 If the text on a screen could be readily transferred to print and nothing of significance to the essence of the piece were lost in that transfer, then it is difficult to see how said text might be considered to be inherently digital, to be born digital.

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N. Katherine Hayles, Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), p. 3. Serge Bouchardon, ‘Towards a Tension-Based Definition of Digital Literature’, Journal of Creative Writing Studies 2:1 (2016), 3, http://scholarworks.rit.edu/jcws/vol2/iss1/6/ (accessed 16 June 2022). Davin Heckman and James O’Sullivan, ‘Electronic Literature: Contexts and Poetics’, in Literary Studies in the Digital Age, ed. Kenneth M. Price and Ray Siemens (New York: Modern Language Association, 2018), https://doi.org/10.1632/lsda.2018.14 (accessed 16 June 2022).

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Writing elsewhere about digital literature in Ireland (or what is more commonly referred to in academic circles as ‘electronic’ literature),6 I note how it is striking that relatively few authors have experimented with computers.7 My suspicion is that such a dearth is attributable to two factors: networks of practice play an essential role in Irish cultural production, and print literature remains the priority for individuals and institutions in control of our national literatures. The latter is not as damning as it might sound. There is an abundance of contemporary works of digital literature – or literary games,8 as they might be described – that demonstrate the incredible narrative affordances of digital storytelling: Dear Esther, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, All the Delicate Duplicates, The Stanley Parable, and Gone Home. Digital literature shows much promise, but until a cohort of practitioners capable of consistently achieving the richness which print has given us starts to mature, the older form deserves to retain its place of privilege. But a modicum of support for the digital would be a start. In 2018, when novelling, published by the now defunct New Binary Press,9 won the prestigious Coover Award for works of digital literature, an annual prize given by the international Electronic Literature Organization, the achievement was not acknowledged by any of the state-funded bodies in Ireland tasked with the promotion of literature. A small, fledgling independent press in Ireland had published a piece of digital literature that claimed one of the world’s major international prizes, and the occasion did not even warrant a congratulatory tweet. It would be unwarranted to overtly fault anyone for valuing print literature over digital literature. Artists, writers, and cultural organisations are right to be suspicious of the digital, particularly when conversations surrounding emerging technologies are often hijacked by suspect, typically politically motivated discourses that superficially push ‘innovation’ and ‘digital creativity’.10 But to almost completely 6

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For a comprehensive examination of electronic literature in a broader context, see Hayles, Electronic Literature, and Scott Rettberg, Electronic Literature (Cambridge and Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2019). James O’Sullivan, ‘Electronic Literature in Ireland’, Electronic Book Review, 2018, https://doi.org/10 .7273/5mgv-mc25 (accessed 16 June 2022). See Astrid Ensslin, Literary Gaming (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014). I should note, for transparency, that I was the Founding Editor of New Binary Press. For further reflections on my efforts to publish digital literature, see James O’Sullivan, ‘Publishing Electronic Literature’, in Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities: Contexts, Forms, and Practices, ed. Dene Grigar and James O’Sullivan (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), pp. 255–66. Anne Karhio, ‘Between Aesthetics and Institutions: Irish Electronic Poetry’, in Digital Art in Ireland: New Media and Irish Artistic Practice, ed. James O’Sullivan (London and New York: Anthem Press, 2021), pp. 29–51; Trish Morgan, ‘Sharing, Hacking, Helping: Towards an Understanding of Digital Aesthetics through a Survey of Digital Art Practices in Ireland’, Journal

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ignore an emerging art form, an art form that might be construed as one of the most popular, is also problematic:11 state agencies have a responsibility to support and amplify all literatures. And it would seem that the same marginalisation occurs throughout Europe, where digital literature tends to exist outside the mainstream.12 The absence of creative networks is a more pressing matter, as like all literatures, it is at the grassroots that Irish digital literature will find its start. The sociology of artistic community has been thoroughly theorised, but, even trivially, it is very easy to see the influence that communities of practice have within Irish literature by simply turning to the acknowledgements in any recent print publication; evidence of those individuals, editors, and publishers who have supported authors on their way to establishment is readily encountered, as the same names often feature repeatedly. In community gatherings like Ó Bhéal and in the many festivals, workshops, launches, and competitions run by the Munster Literature Centre, one can see, quite plainly, just how literary spaces encourage literary production.13 Such communities operate as vital spaces in which writers can be inspired, gain feedback, and learn and improve their craft. Some exceptions aside – such as the Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI), the Ó Bhéal International Poetry-Film Competition, SoundEye,14 and the Irish Electronic Literature Community – Irish writers looking to avail themselves of the digital have very few sites wherein they can consistently gain encouragement and support and refine their process. It should be noted and commended that the state does make contributions to some of the arts and community organisations accommodating digital writing, but this is a consequence of the people sustaining such endeavours

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of Media Practice 14:2 (2013), 147–60, https://doi.org/10.1386/jmpr.14.2.147_1 (accessed 16 June 2022). I make this argument in the following short essays: James O’Sullivan, ‘Electronic Literature’s Contemporary Moment: Breeze and Campbell’s “All the Delicate Duplicates”’, Los Angeles Review of Books, 7 November 2017; and James O’Sullivan, ‘Good Literature Can Come in Digital Forms: Just Look to the World of Video Games’, The Conversation, 5 December 2019. Markku Eskelinen, Raine Koskimaa, and Giovanna Di Rosario, ‘Electronic Literature Publishing and Distribution in Europe’, in Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice: A Report from the HERA Joint Research Project, ed. Scott Rettberg and Sandy Baldwin (Morgantown: ELMCIP and Center for Literary Computing, West Virginia University Press, 2014), p. 235, https://elmcip.net/sites/default/files/media/critical_writing/attachments/rettberg_baldwi n_elmcip.pdf (accessed 16 June 2022). I hope that readers do not think this regional bias, but living in Cork city, these are the events that spring to mind. Trevor Joyce, Introduction to ‘Soundeye 12: Festival of the Arts of the Word, 3–6 July 2008, Cork, Ireland’, ed. James Cummins, Fergal Gaynor, and Trevor Joyce, Poetry Salzburg Review 15 (2009), 82–4.

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rather than any public policy. Substantial, strategic investment is needed if we are to develop robust networks of practice for Irish digital literature. That such networks and spaces are a rarity for digital literature is particularly damaging because this literature is often, by necessity, collaborative. Like the pages of Nine Silences, works of digital literature often rely on authors gaining access to practitioners capable of contributing the technical aspects of the envisaged piece. This can be seen from the international canon, wherein many of the most notable pieces have been collaboratively produced (though it is notable that they are often represented as the brainchild of a sole authorial figure or pair). Digital literature, certainly, when at the scale of the aforementioned exemplars, can rarely be produced by a sole author, and it is in such pragmatics that we find the major barrier to the form’s further development: collaboration is not the norm in literary writing, and collaboration cannot thrive without networks of practice. And so, the situation in which Irish digital literature finds itself is one of stagnation. Contrast this with what is being achieved internationally. Over in neighbouring Great Britain, studios like The Chinese Room are producing critically and commercially successful walking simulators, like Dear Esther and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture.15 Walking simulators are a new genre that privilege experiential exploration and narrative over objective-driven play. The genre is comprised of titles which present fully fledged immersive virtual worlds in the fashion of most video games, but these worlds are structured entirely in the service of story – artistic expression rather than challenges and tasks.16 In Dear Esther, the reader/player inhabits a virtual impression of a Hebridean island wherein they are presented with a series of letters as they move from one side of the landscape to the other.17 Dear Esther is essentially an epistolary narrative set in a video game-esque world, 15

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Readers who are completely unfamiliar with these works and who would like a better sense of how they ‘look and feel’ will be very well served by some of the various walkthroughs that can be found on YouTube. Even better, download both titles from Steam. See https://store.steampowered.com (accessed 18 June 2021). Melissa Kagen’s work is essential reading for anyone interested in learning more about walking simulators. See Melissa Kagen, ‘Walking Sims, #GamerGate, and the Gender of Wandering’, in The Year’s Work in Nerds, Wonks, and Neocons, ed. Jonathan P. Eburne and Benjamin Schreier (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), pp. 249–74; Melissa Kagen, ‘Walking, Talking and Playing with Masculinities in Firewatch’, Game Studies 18:2 (2018), http://gamestudies.org/18 02/articles/kagen (accessed 18 June 2021). For a more in-depth treatment of Dear Esther, see James O’Sullivan, Towards a Digital Poetics: Electronic Literature & Literary Games (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 85–92; or, alternatively, James O’Sullivan, ‘“The Dream of an Island”: Dear Esther and the Digital Sublime’, ed. Astrid Ensslin, Pawel Frelik, and Lisa Swanstrom, Paradoxa 29 (2017), 313–26.

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with much of the story revealed through the textual fragments read by the game’s narrator. It is literature, but it also affords of the immersive aesthetic possibilities of the digital. Dear Esther does not simply display text on a web page, static and completely indifferent to how it might appear on paper; it does not use digital tools and platforms to achieve some gimmicked textual behaviour. It is an exemplary piece of digital fiction in that these two elements are intrinsically subsumed: the text tells the story, while the rich, immersive virtual world in which this text is set completely alters the literary experience to something that would not be possible in print. Irish digital literature has not yet made its Dear Esther. The scene in Ireland is not entirely bleak. Dundalk’s Michael J. Maguire is considered a pioneer within the international community of ‘e-lit’ scholars and practitioners, programming his first text adventure, Lost in Coolock, back in 1983.18 Maguire’s artistic career began on the stage under the tutelage of Tomás Mac Anna, three-term Artistic Director of the Abbey Theatre. Maguire founded the Travelling Hibernian Ensemble, and, in the early 1990s, produced a multimedia show, Ham-Let Loose. Maguire later founded Táintech Creative Studios and secured publishing agreements with major video-game developers, but, starved of funding, was unable to bring any projects to fruition.19 Táintech closed its doors in January 2000, and Maguire shifted his attention to promoting, studying, and teaching digital literature in Ireland, while also developing his own individual practice. The River Poem by Jeneen Naji,20 Pauric Freeman, and Mark Linnane, a collaboration with Maynooth University’s Building City Dashboards project, casts text generated by a GPT-2 machine learning algorithm, trained using Finnegans Wake, onto a 3D-printed model of Dublin.21 The River Poem represents the ideal of hybridity, merging the algorithmic with the recovered as remixed; the digital with the material; the opacity of hidden, complex computational procedures with the reassuring certainty of architecture and a familiar landscape. It is noteworthy that The River Poem trains its model using Joyce, as he has proven to be a particularly popular source for digital literature and new media adaptations.22 In this sense, The River Poem illustrates how long-established themes can find new 18 20 21 22

O’Sullivan, ‘Electronic Literature in Ireland’. 19 Ibid. Naji also created The Rubayaat. See Karhio, ‘Between Aesthetics and Institutions’, pp. 43–4. See https://web.archive.org/web/20210516140859/jeneeninteractive.com/?p=373 (accessed 4 July 2022). Kenneth Keating, ‘“to Shine upon the Original All the More Fully”: Contemporary New Media Adaptations of James Joyce’, in Digital Art in Ireland: New Media and Irish Artistic Practice, ed. James O’Sullivan (London and New York: Anthem Press, 2021), pp. 53–70.

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forms, how important contributions to national literatures can persist throughout and even be rejuvenated by cultural upheavals. Graham Allen uses a database to write his autobiographical poem Holes, expanding it by a line each day since 23 December 2006.23 Many of the works produced by digital artist Conor McGarrigle ‘have a strong literary and textual component’,24 while Geoffrey Squires has previously published ‘digital texts which departed from traditional publishing processes’.25 National University of Ireland, Galway’s Justin Tonra, Brian Davis, David Kelly, and Waqas Khawaja used biometric data and natural language generation to create Eververse, a piece in which Tonra’s quantified self was translated into literary output.26 Fallow Media, which might now be considered the major publisher of digital literature in Ireland, has published a slate of web-based works, often elementary from a technical standpoint, but rich and vibrant nonetheless.27 But these and some other exceptions aside, Irish digital literature has not yet achieved anything near the heights of what has been seen across many other forms of cultural production on this island. Of course, Irish literature is not simply from but also of this island, and the influence of Irish culture can be found across the international canon of digital literature. Michael Joyce’s connection to Ireland should not go unnoticed in an essay on this topic. As the author of afternoon, a story (1990), Joyce was once called the ‘granddaddy of full-length hypertext fictions’.28 In addition to being a frequent visitor to Irish shores – where he once spent a summer attending lectures by Louis de Paor at the Centre for Irish Studies, NUI Galway – Joyce’s great-grandfather came from Mayo, from ‘under the shadow of Glenn Nephin’.29 Samantha Gorman, who founded Tender Claws studio with Danny Cannizzaro, is one of contemporary digital literature’s most accomplished figures. In 2014, 23

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See holesbygrahamallen.org (accessed 20 June 2021); Graham Allen and James O’Sullivan, ‘Collapsing Generation and Reception: Holes as Electronic Literary Impermanence’, ed. Helen J. Burgess, Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures 15 (2016), https://doi.org/10.20415/hyp/015.e01 (accessed 20 June 2021); Anne Karhio, ‘The End of Landscape: Holes by Graham Allen’, Electronic Book Review, 2017, https://doi.org/10.7273/c2j2-ra97 (accessed 20 June 2021). Karhio, ‘Between Aesthetics and Institutions’, p. 45. Kenneth Keating, ‘Repetition and Alterity: Geoffrey Squires’s “Texts for Screen”’, Irish University Review 46:1 (21 April 2016), 145–57 (p. 145), https://doi.org/10.3366/iur.2016.0207 (accessed 20 June 2021). See eververse.nuigalway.ie (accessed 20 June 2021); Karhio, ‘Between Aesthetics and Institutions’, pp. 44–5. See fallowmedia.com (accessed 20 June 2021). Robert Coover, ‘The End of Books’, The New York Times, 21 June 1992, https://archive .nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/09/27/specials/coover-end.html (accessed 20 June 2021). O’Sullivan, ‘Electronic Literature in Ireland’.

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Gorman and Cannizzaro published PRY for Apple iOS, a piece of interactive fiction that would achieve extensive critical acclaim and popular recognition. Gorman was raised ‘with a strong sense of Irish heritage’, and credits a summer she spent in Dublin as somewhat influential in her shift towards combinatory aesthetics; specifically, encountering the Book of Kells made her ‘realise what hybrid or illuminated writing could be’.30 But Ireland cannot quite claim PRY. Irish digital literature has not yet made its PRY. Anne Karhio examines this stasis in her assessment of Irish electronic poetry, questioning whether the state of the art is possibly a consequence of a general ‘relative conservatism and near absence of an avant-garde culture’ in Irish literature.31 It may be that Irish digital literature has lagged behind its international counterparts because of a wider malaise in this island’s literary culture; but any broader assessment of Irish literature’s overall conservatism or radicalism sits far beyond the scope of this essay. Far more certain and relevant here is digital literature’s lack of creative networks of practice, and consequentially, the collaborations that have never been. No writer aspires to the penumbra of literary culture, so it is unsurprising that digital literature has not attracted more authors, publishers, and artists. Digital literature ‘is not a market-driven literary phenomenon, but a community-driven scene with an accompanying set of aesthetic, social, and cultural values and practices’.32 To be part of that community, one typically needs the privilege of an academic job or similar, affording the freedom to experiment with writing and machines without concern for earning a living; and if one does even a quick scan of the field, it will be found that many of its figures are indeed scholar-practitioners.33 Writers have long had to sell their labour beyond what they produce on the page, but digital literature is a particularly hard sell, and a few lucrative large studio-based exceptions aside, a feasible model for small-scale commercial publishing of digital literature is yet to be devised. In such a context, who would want to be an author of digital literature? In Ireland, there is no tribe, extremely limited institutional support, and few prospects.34 If anything, experimenting with digital literature might hinder a career’s progression, placing its dabblers, in the minds of our 30 32 33 34

31 Ibid. Karhio, ‘Between Aesthetics and Institutions’, p. 29. Eskelinen, Koskimaa, and Di Rosario, ‘Electronic Literature Publishing’, p. 235. Karhio, ‘Between Aesthetics and Institutions’, p. 42. It should be noted that Fallow Media receives support from The Arts Council, for which the latter should be commended.

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national canon-makers, on the periphery of literary culture. That periphery is dominated by a form that has come to be known as ‘video-poetry’ or ‘film-poetry’.35 Film-poems are precisely as described: fragments of text accompanied by video and sound that are passively consumed. Film-poems are strange creatures, technically unsophisticated yet often intriguing. When one has seen the rich, immersive, interactive story spaces produced by digital literature’s new wave – in walking simulators like Dear Esther and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, or in a cinematic novella like PRY – it can be difficult to see what is radical, even worthwhile, in a film-poem: passages from print literature transposed atop video recordings and uploaded to YouTube. That is not to say that the film-poem genre cannot be considered digital literature – Astrid Ensslin convincingly argues that digital writing encompasses a myriad of forms, or ‘various degrees of hybridity’36 – but the dominance of this mode shows precisely how Irish literature ‘has so far failed to adequately embrace the radical potential of [computer] technologies’.37 And yet, one can appreciate why the film-poem has proven so attractive within Ireland’s literary and artistic communities. The film-poem is accessible, both in terms of the tools and practices of production, and in how it is disseminated and consumed. Artistic merits aside, most people are now capable of making a video, overlaying text, and uploading such content to their social media platform of choice. If a writer wants to explore the digital as aesthetic, film-poetry presents an intuitive entry point. Spaces like YouTube now hold significant influence over the cultural conversation, so it is good to see poetry adapted to such platforms. Uploading video-poetry and born-digital literatures to social media may reclaim a small portion of these important cultural spaces from the other vapid sorts of content of which they are invariably comprised. Online videos reach those who do not read; they reach an increasing number of people who expend much of their leisure time on their mobile devices. If people no longer read literature, at least they might watch it. The form also represents less of a departure from the national sense of literature than other modes: the term ‘film-poetry’, itself conjoining two familiar and institutionally accepted practices, warrants less exposition and justification than something like ‘literary game’. Not everyone is convinced that video games are literature, particularly in circles where national canons 35 37

O’Sullivan, ‘Electronic Literature in Ireland’. 36 Ensslin, Literary Gaming, pp. 43–5. Kenneth Keating, ‘Irish Poetry Publishing Online’, Éire-Ireland 52:1–2 (2017), 321–36 (p. 334), https:// doi.org/10.1353/eir.2017.0015 (accessed 22 June 2021).

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are made and reformed. And it is because of this that it is surprising to see that a figure like Ní Ghríofa has frequently experimented with digital forms of writing. Considering the number of film-poems she has produced, their quality, and the fact that some have been exhibited in such spaces as the Illuminations gallery at Maynooth University and MoLI, it is not unreasonable to suggest that Ní Ghríofa is slowly becoming central to contemporary digital literature in Ireland. I once wrote that Ní Ghríofa ‘is unafraid as a poet’.38 She is unafraid because she seems willing to jeopardise her place in the national literary tradition in the name of experimentation. Experimentation among writers is far from rare; what is rare are established authors who consistently explore maligned forms. This is why Ní Ghríofa is unafraid; she has risked her status by experimenting with forms which are not at all held in high regard by Ireland’s canon-making critics, bodies, and publics. She is a bilingual author in the truest sense: she writes in Irish and English, apart and reciprocally. And she mirrors her ability for changeable tongues with an affinity for changeable interfaces. The latter is particularly brave, and among Irish authors with her profile, she stands somewhat alone. In A Ghost in the Throat, Ní Ghríofa uses the life and writing of eighteenth-century poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill to frame her own memoir and craft. A telling moment with regard to the latter comes when Ní Ghríofa rejects the emphasis on authorship that one typically encounters in scholarly treatments of the Irish caoineadh.39 Literary historians and critics are often enticed by the task of concluding the degree to which a particular individual contributed to a work composed extempore in the oral tradition. Ní Ghríofa thinks this perspective too ‘suspicious’, and instead is content to view the caoineadh form as that which is ‘worked and woven by women, entwining strands of female voices that were carried in female bodies’.40 Her own literary career pays tribute to this stance, much of her work emerging from collaborative weaves. Print-based interdisciplinary projects like Nine Silences, her willingness to collaborate with those whose practice can give her words a materiality and visuality they could not achieve alone, show this fascination. And it certainly emanates

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O’Sullivan, ‘Electronic Literature in Ireland’. A definition and discussion of the caoineadh, a public lament for the dead usually offered by a woman for a man, can be found in Patricia Lysaght’s survey of the form: ‘Caoineadh Os Cionn Coirp: The Lament for the Dead in Ireland’, Folklore 108:1–2 (1 January 1997), 65–82, https://doi.org /10.1080/0015587X.1997.9715938 (accessed 22 June 2021). Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat (Dublin: Tramp Press, 2020), p. 74.

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from her digital work, which has seen Ní Ghríofa collaborate with many artists and practitioners. Whatever the piece, the caoineadh tradition has left its mark on Ní Ghríofa’s digital writing. Her works of digital fiction are weaves, of her voice, of other voices, voices both known and unknown, reused, amplified, visualised. She weaves language – Irish and English – as much as she weaves sound and image, so that her digital literature not only possesses modal combinatories, but also forms linguistic amalgams; the language and materiality mirroring each other’s hybridity. Ní Ghríofa’s digital oeuvre41 begins with Glaoch/Call,42 a collaboration with the filmmaker Peter Madden, whom she befriended in college. Like many works of digital literature – think Inkubus by Andy Campbell and Christine Wilks – Glaoch/Call reflects on the grim reality of human conditions in a culture that is increasingly immersed in the digital. Many of Ní Ghríofa’s film-poems are produced in collaboration with Madden, including Rondelet on the Alchemy of Bacon Fat,43 FéinPhic le Línte/Selfie with Lines,44 Chronosequence,45 and Today, Buried.46 The latter three also feature music by Linda Buckley. Ní Ghríofa also worked with Buckley on Recipe for the Bad Times, the Sad Surprise Times, the No Light Times.47 Readers of A Ghost in the Throat will find familiar thematic rhizomes throughout her digital work: desire, daydreaming, recovery, the freedom and drudgery in routine, hidden things. The text of Today, Buried tells of 41

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Some years ago, Doireann was kind enough to come and meet me in the basement of UCC’s Glucksman gallery, at Bobo Café (sadly, now closed), to speak of some of her experiences creating digital literature. Doireann Ní Ghríofa and Peter Madden, Glaoch, Vimeo Video, 2014, https://vimeo.com/87665470 (accessed 22 June 2021). The text was originally published in Dúlasair (Dublin: Coiscéim, 2012) and in translation in Lies (Dublin: Dedalus Press, 2018). Doireann Ní Ghríofa and Peter Madden, Rondelet on the Alchemy of Bacon Fat, Vimeo Video, 2014, https://vimeo.com/110987344 (accessed 22 June 2021). The text was published in Clasp (Dublin: Dedalus Press, 2015). Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Peter Madden, and Linda Buckley, FéinPhic le Línte/Selfie with Lines, YouTube Video, 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZZZQ4HJ9NQ (accessed 6 June 2021). The text was published in Oighear (Dublin: Coiscéim, 2017), and in translation in Lies (Dublin: Dedalus Press, 2018). Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Peter Madden, and Linda Buckley, Chronosequence, 2018, www.youtube.com /watch?v=EtjAlMpfoq8&t=300s (accessed 6 June 2021). The text was published by New Dublin Press (2016). Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Peter Madden, and Linda Buckley, Today, Buried, YouTube Video, 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6U1Pjav2OQ (accessed 6 June 2021). The text was originally commissioned by Crash Ensemble and published in the first issue of The Well Review (2017). Doireann Ní Ghríofa and Linda Buckley, Recipe for the Bad Times, the Sad Surprise Times, the No Light Times, YouTube Video, 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiHFIgwNtCo (accessed 6 June 2021). The text was originally commissioned by Poetry Ireland to mark Poetry Day 2018.

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a stone ‘buried in clay’.48 These words seem almost typological; there always seems to be something buried, be that in gravestones, ruins, or faces, words or code, language or images. With the exception of Rondelet on the Alchemy of Bacon Fat – which parodies the style of Golden Age America – the pacing is often slow, the hues grey, the score augural. Like Ní Ghríofa’s prose-length text, many of her digital works have something ghostly to their narrative. But any maleficence is tempered with stillness, by the intentional emptiness of Madden’s scenes, in the expanded notes of Buckley’s music, and in the way that we are often left alone with singular, rich sounds, be that the crack of bacon or the hum of bees. This approach is favoured throughout Lorg/Remains,49 where a soundscape by Mick O’Shea emphasises the breakage being explored.50 Like many film-poems, these works are slow, surrealist, often abstract in their approach, but they also hold a more intuitive sense of narrative than is common for this genre. Ní Ghríofa believes that poetry should be accessible, that it should be an ‘ordinary communication with people’: It took me a long time to realise that when you come to a poem, it is possible to come to it like you would with a song on the radio – to just listen to a poem, to take pleasure in the music of a poem, to read it out loud, to see what it conjures in your own imagination.51

Her digital poetry seems like a realisation of that ambition: complex words articulated by the familiarity of film and music, the dominant modes of consumption in contemporary culture. As previously mentioned, four of Ní Ghríofa’s film-poems were exhibited at Maynooth’s Illuminations gallery in 2018.52 This was a significant moment because art exhibitions which foreground digital literature are rare on this island,53 so such an 48 49

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Ní Ghríofa, Madden, and Buckley, Today, Buried, 0:28. Doireann Ní Ghríofa and Mick O’Shea, Lorg/Remains, YouTube Video, 2016 (not currently available). The text was published in Oighear (Dublin: Coiscéim, 2017) and in translation in Lies (Dublin: Dedalus Press, 2018). O’Shea is one of Ireland’s most distinguished soundscape artists, and the sound from Lorg/Remains is redolent of his contributions to Beckett on Barracka, a multi-modal performance by the Gaitkrash Theatre Company, which I was fortunate enough to experience live in the old Mr Bradley’s Bar on Barrack Street in Cork city, back in November 2013. Marjorie Brennan, ‘Doireann Ní Ghríofa: From Ghost in the Throat to Star the Dark’, Irish Examiner, 5 April 2021, www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle/artsandculture/arid-40257494.html (accessed 11 June 2021). Ní Ghríofa gives considerable credit to Colin Graham, Professor of English at Maynooth University, for approaching her with this opportunity. It motivated much of her digital writing. Included among the few other examples of such exhibitions are: Moving Words, curated by Dene Grigar (with support from Jeneen Naji) in 2014, again for Illuminations; at NUI Galway’s Other Codes/Cóid Eile conference, organised by Anne Karhio in 2017; and Peripheries at the Glucksman gallery in UCC, curated by Chris Clarke and James O’Sullivan as part of the 2019

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event, particularly one featuring a popular figure like Ní Ghríofa, represented an important milestone in terms of the public’s engagement with the form. A further breakthrough came with the foundation of MoLI in 2019. A partnership between University College Dublin and the National Library of Ireland, MoLI has already spearheaded a number of digital initiatives, and is fast becoming a major sponsor of multimodal practices. To mark St Brigid’s Day in 2021, MoLI and the Department of Foreign Affairs commissioned a series of film-poems called ‘Three Poems for Brigid’.54 Ní Ghríofa’s At Bridget’s Well was among the commissioned pieces,55 alongside other works by Paula Meehan56 and Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe.57 Ní Ghríofa has also operated as a sole author of digital literature. Her solo practice – like that of many of her international contemporaries who work without the support of studios or technically proficient collaborators – is based on found technologies. As is the tendency with late modernist and postmodern aesthetics, many practitioners in the digital space rely on whatever is available to them in the realisation of their vision. Digital literature is, in many respects, an act of bricolage. When one cannot program, when one cannot render digital imagery or compose music, one must turn to remix and assemblage, to user-friendly tools and tinkering.58 Ní Ghríofa’s description of how she came to produce Faoi Mhaignéidín Cuisneora, tá Grianghraf de Mhamó mar Chailín Scoile/Under a Fridge Magnet, a Photo of Grandmother as a Schoolgirl typifies this ethos.59 When an iPad came into her possession by chance, Ní Ghríofa decided to use the device to start making digital pieces ‘on her own’, to become a bricoleur in her own right, fashioning her assemblages through

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Electronic Literature Conference & Media Arts Festival. The latter featured a film-poem by Cork poet Colm Scully entitled The Origin of Superlatives; see https://cora.ucc.ie/handle/10468/8138 (accessed 6 June 2021). See ‘Three Poems for Brigid’, Museum of Literature Ireland, 2021, moli.ie/digital/three-poems-forbrigid/ (accessed 6 June 2021). Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Osaro Azams, and Syn, At Bridget’s Well, YouTube Video, 2021, www .youtube.com/watch?v=kL1YHXwGThs&t=17s (accessed 6 June 2021). Paula Meehan, Ruth McCabe, and Dowry, Old Biddy Talk, YouTube Video, 2021, www .youtube.com/watch?v=3w7vSHyEx8o (accessed 6 June 2021). Nidhi Zak /Aria Eipe, Caitríona Ennis, and Dreamcycles, i mbolc/an invocation, YouTube Video, 2021, www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiO-i8_ZlKA (accessed 6 June 2021). O’Sullivan, Towards a Digital Poetics, p. 65. Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Faoi Mhaignéidín Cuisneora, tá Grianghraf de Mhamó mar Chailín Scoile/ Under a Fridge Magnet, a Photo of Grandmother as a Schoolgirl, YouTube Video, 2016, www .youtube.com/watch?v=YV_SV0BpY7U (accessed 6 June 2021). The text was published by the Poetry Society, and subsequently in Oighear (Dublin: Coiscéim, 2017) and in translation in Lies (Dublin: Dedalus Press, 2018).

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a mishmash of free apps and public domain images and tracks. When capturing images, she would fashion the iPad to her (as she describes it) ‘primitive rig’ – stacks of books or the laundry basket or whatever else was at hand in lieu of a tripod. That tension between the natural and the mechanical surfaces here: Ní Ghríofa is at ease with language, less so with artificial interfaces; equipped with some skills and tools, lacking in others; but as is the hallmark of the bricoleur, she is prepared to toil in meeting the two. And it is all, as she herself puts it, a simple attempt at ‘giving text a different type of life through the internet’. Ní Ghríofa’s collaborations with Tim Keane, specifically Craquelure60 and Le Tatú a Bhaint/Tattoo Removal,61 represent a stylistic departure from her norm. These pieces are more reminiscent of the style of Seoul-based duo Young-Hae Chang and Marc Voge, better known as Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries. Encountering the expeditious, concrete-style poetic fragments of the Ní Ghríofa–Keane collaborations, one thinks immediately of Young-Hae titles like Dakota and Lotus Blossom.62 YoungHae Chang is Korean and Marc Voge American, and they produced Dakota and Lotus Blossom in 2001 and 2002 respectively. It is noteworthy to see such semblance between works created across such removed cultural and temporal contexts. Furthermore, Ní Ghríofa admits to knowing very little about the critical contexts and legacy in which digital/electronic literature is steeped. Digital literature is a field dominated by scholar-practitioners and may consequently be an exclusionary space that is often very disconnected from practitioners beyond academia. Ní Ghríofa is a rare creature as far as Irish digital literature is concerned – she has never been a professional academic. This suggests a positive future for digital literature in Ireland; while there are not many other practitioners from beyond the academy already, there may be many others soon. Institutes of education have an important role to play in the promotion and development of this form, as evidenced by the many scholars who have worked tirelessly to sustain and 60

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Doireann Ní Ghríofa and Tim Keane, Craquelure, YouTube Video, 2018, www.youtube.com/wat ch?v=7n0gWniA-3Q&t=44s (accessed 6 June 2021). The text was first published in The Poetry Review (Spring 2018). Doireann Ní Ghríofa and Tim Keane, Le Tatú a Bhaint/Tattoo Removal, YouTube Video, 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVBwsyyQ5Xw (accessed 6 June 2021). The text was published in Oighear (Dublin: Coiscéim, 2017) and in translation in Lies (Dublin: Dedalus Press, 2018). As these pieces were originally created in Flash, which is now, essentially, obsolete, it is difficult to find a citable example of the works, though they are readily enough available in various locations online. Further details on the works can be found in the ELMCIP Knowledge Base: elmcip.net/ node/565 (Dakota), elmcip.net/node/2387 (Lotus Blossom) (accessed 6 June 2021).

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advance digital literature, both in Ireland and elsewhere. But teaching and research in this domain needs to cast a wider net, beyond those cohorts that have been defined by academic associations, so that digital literature can thrive as art, so that communities of practice can develop beyond campus walls. There are other instances of digital literature’s past being rejuvenated by Ní Ghríofa. Two of her works with Ian Maleney’s Fallow Media – Postcards from a Hospital63 and Mandible64 – offer traces of firstgeneration digital literature. Postcards from a Hospital, in particular, is constructed in the fashion of early hypertextual fictions typical of the Eastgate School.65 In an essay titled ‘Fidelity’ in Maleney’s Minor Monuments, he recounts a period in his life when he was frequently making sound recordings, and how some of these recordings were ‘natural and realistic’ while others were ‘distorted, synthesised, or out of whack in some way’.66 Mandible seems to be the literary manifestation of this mix: the words are clear, the imagery gnarled.67 Maleney’s discussion of fidelity provides a useful metaphor for what digital literature is, the ‘immaculate’ mixed with the ‘strange and unexpected’. Code, the underlying mathematical structure, is the immaculate; precise and rigidly constrained. The literary is strange and unexpected, using the affordances of computerised constraint to do something other than what might be possible with print. And in Ní Ghríofa’s digital literature we find a challenge to our critical perceptions of what digital literature should be, what fidelity looks like in this context. As noted, many scholars contend that digital literature is an impossibly broad term, or what Scott Rettberg deems a ‘moving target’.68 Ní Ghríofa’s work certainly satisfies many of the prevailing definitions: these works are inherently digital in that they cannot function without 63

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Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Postcards from a Hospital, ed. Ian Maleney (Dublin: Fallow Media, 2016), https://fallowmedia.com/2016/mar/postcards/ (accessed 6 June 2021). Doireann Ní Ghríofa and Linda Buckley, Mandible, ed. Ian Maleney (Dublin: Fallow Media, 2017), https://fallowmedia.com/2017/nov/mandible (accessed 8 June 2021). The text from Mandible was first published in the ninth issue of gorse (2017). The ‘Eastgate School’ refers to the group of authors who used Storyspace, a web-authoring tool created by publishing company Eastgate Systems, to launch what is considered the ‘golden age’ of hypertext fiction. It included such titles and figures as afternoon, a story by Michael Joyce (1990), Victory Garden by Stuart Moulthrop (1992), and Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson (1995). Ian Maleney, Minor Monuments (Dublin: Tramp Press, 2019), p. 111. It is also worth noting that the three pieces she did with Fallow Media – A Jaw, Ajar (2016) being the third – are prose works, which was, at the time of their publication, a rare departure from poetry for Ní Ghríofa. Scott Rettberg, ‘Editorial Process and the Idea of Genre in Electronic Literature in the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1’, Archiving Electronic Literature and Poetry: Problems, Tendencies, Perspectives 29:1–2 (2010), 85–95 (p. 93).

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a computer. Her Fallow works, and the film-poetry genre as a whole, feel like a throwback to previous generations of digital literature, but that is not a negative thing. While the hyper-interactivity and immersion of ‘gamelike’ spaces are fashionable among some critics and commentators, Ní Ghríofa’s canon, perhaps the wider Irish digital canon, shows the value in older digital modalities. Such a realisation may be Ireland’s main contribution to the international state of the art: that the digital as old can have a place alongside the digital as new. There is something profoundly immersive about Chronosequence and Today, Buried, and a hint of agency, even exploration, in Postcards from a Hospital. Whatever classifiers we apply to these works – filmic, born-digital, multimodal, hypertextual – they are rich literary experiences. Certainly, they are not print. Many have existed as print, but in such acts of remediation these works have become something different, not lesser or greater, just different. One cannot read Today, Buried in The Well Review and get the same experience as one would by watching/hearing/absorbing it in its digital form. Ní Ghríofa herself admits that new things about her texts are revealed to her through this process. That she has allowed her work to exist in both states shows her allegiance to form over convention, even expectation. Ní Ghríofa says that she works with computers because it allows her to show how a poem she has written ‘feels’ to her. The digital allows her to do that, to show that feeling. The natural and the mechanical. In The Architect’s Dream of Winter (2013), Cork poet Billy Ramsell reflects on our world of machines, how our culture is determined by the digital.69 In ‘Code’, Ramsell collapses the (perhaps artificial) separation between nature and machine, between life and information. The natural is mechanical. The present and future of Ireland’s digital literatures should be more widely and thoroughly considered and supported so that the general national malaise, the lack of institutional supports, and absence of communities of practice might be corrected. There is some urgency to this matter, because digital literature has an essential role to play in reclaiming digital culture – and thus so much culture – from forces that see digital technologies only in terms of power, commerce, and surveillance. As we become increasingly digital – and perhaps we are already entirely so – it is vital that literature adapts so that it does not become obsolete to a great many people. Print will always be fundamental to literature, but if authors, publishers, and public bodies continue to diminish the value of digital 69

See Anne Karhio’s contribution to this volume, ‘Technology in Contemporary Irish Poetry’ (Chapter 17), for a more in-depth analysis of Ramsell’s poetry.

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forms of writing, generations will be lost to mindless scrolling and vapid apps. The strategic and sustained development of digital literature in Ireland can ensure national and local challenges are problematised through some of the most influential modes and platforms. Ireland needs both its Ramsells and Ní Ghríofas: those who use literature to reflect on the digital, and those who use the digital in the service of the literary. Film-poetry is a good start. As accounted for by Álvaro Seiça, other countries have a similar origin story: E. M. de Melo e Castro with Roda Lume (Portugal, 1968), Peter Weibel’s Augentexte (Austria, 1975), Tom Konyves’s Sympathies of War (Canada, 1978), the ‘poetronica’ of Gianni Toti like Per Una Videopoesia (Italy, 1980), and Partitions by Richard Kostelanetz (United States, 1986).70 It is to be hoped that Ireland’s filmpoets will add further to the genre’s national canon, and those works which have already been produced will be properly recognised for their foundational part in Irish digital literature. And we might also hope to see more authors like Ní Ghríofa – figures who are both popular and critically acclaimed – explore the narrative affordances of new media, or even old new media. As difficult as it may be for lesser-known artists already working in this space to acknowledge, when high-profile practitioners put their name to digital literature, it reifies the form in the public consciousness. It will be interesting to see the trajectory of Ní Ghríofa’s future career, how her experimentation with forms beyond print responds to the pressures of fame and expectation. She mentions her own fallibilities throughout A Ghost in the Throat and in subsequent interviews;71 it is easy to imagine an author who writes and speaks so openly about vulnerability as someone who might not be entirely comfortable with their fame; but if that has proved a burden, Ní Ghríofa carries it well, using the daises afforded to her to speak with authority on women’s issues, difficult issues, often effaced issues, her own issues. Ní Ghríofa, whose writing appeals to multiple generations and shifts between Ireland’s two dominant languages, whose words can be compelling while their delivery measured, seems suited and qualified to assume a pivotal role in the cultural imagination of this island. Recognising that figure’s affinity for the digital can bring about a major 70

71

Álvaro Seiça, ‘Kinetic Poetry’, in Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities: Contexts, Forms, and Practices, ed. Dene Grigar and James O’Sullivan (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), pp. 173–202 (pp. 186–8). Aoife Barry, ‘“It’s so Astounding that a Woman Can Disappear to that Extent”: Rediscovering the Author of Ireland’s Greatest Love Poem’, thejournal.ie, 20 September 2020, www.thejournal.ie/doir eann-nii-ghriofa-interview-new-book-a-ghost-in-the-throat-5204383-Sep2020/ (accessed 23 June 2021).

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upheaval in the literary culture of this island by drawing digital literature in from the margins. Such re-centring would cast light on the work of effaced digital practitioners already in existence, while encouraging other authors and artists, both emerging and established, to explore the literary possibilities in computers and code. Speaking at University College Cork in the summer of 2019, Ian Maleney of Fallow Media warned of how the digital ‘remains subordinate to print’, that the general perception among authors, critics, audiences, and policymakers is that digital content is trivial to produce, and that should that perception fail to change, these new forms would not survive.72 Ní Ghríofa’s sustained engagement with the digital might change that perception, but whatever she does next, Doireann Ní Ghríofa has already done much for Irish digital literature. This War of Mine,73 released by Warsaw-based 11 Bit Studios in 2014, manipulates the false sense of agency offered by games – specifically, the inevitability of a bleak ending regardless of how ‘well’ the player does – to show the inescapable horror of war as experienced by civilians. Set in a fictional war-torn city, suggestive of eastern Europe, the piece mixes play and storytelling in a way that both rejuvenates and defamiliarises the war theme in a manner that has arguably not been achieved by any other work of fiction in recent years. Digital literature offers authors and storytellers an opportunity to transform readers into active participants in fictional commemorations, explorations, and retellings of national myths, societal failings, and human struggles. Ireland is a country steeped in storytelling, steeped in history both great and good, steeped in so much that could be made new through digital modes of writing. And yet we have produced nothing comparable to This War of Mine, or indeed, many of the other contemporary works of digital literature offered as exemplars of what might be. Ireland’s authors and artists often speak of experimentation, but until they have the collaborative, infrastructural, and financial frameworks necessary to create digital literature of real international significance, this island’s contributions to the artistic and cultural fabric of the ongoing digital turn will remain unrealised.

72

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Ian Maleney, ‘New Models, New Forms: A Practical Guide to Web-Native Publishing’, in ELO2019 Programme and Book of Abstracts, ed. James O’Sullivan (Cork: University College Cork, 2019), 104, https://cora.ucc.ie/handle/10468/8128 (accessed 23 June 2021). As previously suggested with Dear Esther and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, readers who are unfamiliar with This War of Mine can get a sense of the piece by searching for walkthroughs and commentaries on YouTube. It is also available for compatible mobile devices through the various app stores, or for desktop from Steam.

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Select Bibliography Bouchardon, Serge, ‘Towards a Tension-Based Definition of Digital Literature’, Journal of Creative Writing Studies 2:1 (2016), http://scholarworks.rit.edu/jc ws/vol2/iss1/6/ Ensslin, Astrid, Literary Gaming (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014). Eskelinen, Markku, Raine Koskimaa and Giovanna Di Rosario, ‘Electronic Literature Publishing and Distribution in Europe’, in Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice: A Report from the HERA Joint Research Project, ed. Scott Rettberg and Sandy Baldwin (Morgantown: ELMCIP and Center for Literary Computing, West Virginia University Press, 2014), pp. 187–242, https://elmcip.net/sites/default/files/media/criti cal_writing/attachments/rettberg_baldwin_elmcip.pdf Hayles, N. Katherine, Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008). Karhio, Anne, ‘Between Aesthetics and Institutions: Irish Electronic Poetry’, in Digital Art in Ireland: New Media and Irish Artistic Practice, ed. James O’Sullivan (London and New York: Anthem Press, 2021), pp. 29–51. Keating, Kenneth, ‘Repetition and Alterity: Geoffrey Squires’s “Texts for Screen”’, Irish University Review 46:1 (21 April 2016), 145–57, https://doi.org/10.3366 /iur.2016.0207 ‘Irish Poetry Publishing Online’, Éire-Ireland 52:1–2 (2017), 321–36, https://doi .org/10.1353/eir.2017.0015 ‘“to Shine upon the Original All the More Fully”: Contemporary New Media Adaptations of James Joyce’, in Digital Art in Ireland: New Media and Irish Artistic Practice, ed. James O’Sullivan (London and New York: Anthem Press, 2021), pp. 53–70. Maguire, Michael J., ‘Digging Digital Long Grass: Creative Path Finding in Our Era of Digital and Electronic Literature’, PhD dissertation (Dublin: University College Dublin, James Joyce Library, 2014). Morgan, Trish, ‘Sharing, Hacking, Helping: Towards an Understanding of Digital Aesthetics through a Survey of Digital Art Practices in Ireland’, Journal of Media Practice 14:2 (2013), 147–60, https://doi.org/10.1386/jmpr .14.2.147_1 Naji, Jeneen, Digital Poetry (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). O’Sullivan, James, ‘Electronic Literature in Ireland’, Electronic Book Review, 2018, https://doi.org/10.7273/5mgv-mc25 Rettberg, Scott, Electronic Literature (Cambridge and Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2019). Rettberg, Scott, Patricia Tomaszek, and Sandy Baldwin, Electronic Literature Communities (Morgantown: ELMCIP and Center for Literary Computing, West Virginia University Press, 2015). Seiça, Álvaro, ‘Kinetic Poetry’, in Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities: Contexts, Forms, and Practices, ed. Dene Grigar and James O’Sullivan (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), pp. 173–202.

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Index

11 Bit Studios, 226, 325 1688 Revolution, 158, 160, 162 1745 Jacobite rebellion, 172 1798 rebellion, 40 1913 lockout, 110 2001 UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, 246 2BE, 105, 120, See also BBC Northern Ireland 2RN, 99, 102, 109, 120, 125, See also Radio Athlone; Radio Éireann (RÉ) Abbey Theatre, 75, 102, 267, 313 Act of Union with Great Britain, 39 advertising, 108, 207, 212 and type design, 33 selling books, 3, 27, 33, 35–8, 45–6 allegory, 93, 131, 159 Allen, Graham Holes, 314 alliteration, 141, 146, 224, 290 almanacs, 27, 35, 37 alphabets, 236 Irish, 13–16, 21 Latin, 138–40, 227 Roman, 14, 139 America, 90, 94, 109, 243 and book trade, 40, 47, 155 and watch technology, 203, 212 in theatre, 273–4, 319 television programmes from, 107–8, See also Irish-American women An Coiste Téarmaíochta, 223 An Comhar Drámaíochta, 102 An Teagasg Críosdaidhe, 23, 24 Anglicanism, 155–6, 158, 161–2, 179 Apollo Library, 38 Apple, 296, 315 archives, 198, 201, 262, 269, 275 bogs as, 292–4 feminist, 5, 235, 239–42, 244–6, 248–50 Arnold, Matthew, 84–6

Articles of Religion, 15 Ashmolean Museum, 22 Auraicept na nÉces (The Scholars’ Primer), 140 authority, cultural, 2, 14–19, 22, 138 Banville, John, 112, 171, 196 Barrett, W.F., 70–1 battle of Moytirra, 142, 143, 150 Battle of the Boyne, 29, 151 BBC Northern Ireland, 106–7, 113–15, 120 Beckett, Samuel, 6, 111, 126, 132, 171, 173, 268–9, 278 being-at-the-telephone, 76 Belfast Harp Festival, 11 Belfast Radio Players, 106 Bennett, Jane, 94–5 Berman, David, 156, 165 Bible, the, 37, 155–6, 157–9, 161 in Irish, 24–5 big data, 235, 244–8, 302 blag (blog), 223 Bloom, Emily The Wireless Past, 74 Bode, Katherine, 247 Boland, Eavan, 4, 6–7, 123–4, 125 ‘Code’, 303, 304–5 ‘Virtual Syntax, Actual Dreams’, 303–4 Bonaparte, Louis Lucien, 13 Book of Common Order, 14 Book of Common Prayer, 18, 22, 24 Book of Kells, 253, 315 Book of Leinster, 142 Bornstein, George, 197 Bouchardon, Serge, 309 Boucicault, Dion The Octoroon, 269, 273–4 Bowen, Elizabeth, 84, 173, 204 The Heat of the Day, 182–3 The Last September, 74, 181–2 To the North, 180–1 Boxall, Peter, 72

327

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328 Boyle, Danny, 115 Bracken, Claire, 237, 241, 260 Brady, Hugh, 17–18 British Library, 224 British Museum, 24 British Summer Time, 213 Broadcasting Act of 1960, 107 Broadcasting House, 113 broadsheets, 11–13, 19–20, 26, 57, See also pamphlets Brougham, Henry Peter, 168 Brown, Wendy, 87, 95 Buchanan, George ‘Conversation with Strangers’, 122–3 Buckley, Linda, 318–19 Burrowes, Wesley The Riordans, 110 Bush, Vannevar, 250 calques (loan-translations), 224–6, See also loanwords Calvinism, 14, 156, 157, 164 Cammack, Suzanne, 74 Campbell, Matthew, 83–4 Cannizzaro, Danny PRY, 314–15 caoineadh tradition, 317–18 Carswell, John, 14 Castells, Manuel, 265 Catholic Church, 104, 111, 155, 179, 269, 298 Catholicism, 93, 107, 242 and literacy, 23–6 and sola scriptura critique, 155–6, 158, 160–2 Celtic Tiger era, 87, 96 censorship, 104, 114, 131 at BBC, 107, 114 Censorship of Publications Act, 267 Chang, Young-Hae, 321 child audiences, 30, 59, 66, 102, 289 Christian, John, 156 Church of Ireland, 156–7, 161–2, 164–5 Churchill, Caryl The Legion Hall Bombing, 114 Cille, Colum, 137–9 Clandillon, Séamus, 101–3, 115, 126 Clarke, Austin, 4, 105, 119, 126–8 ‘As the Crow Flies’, 128–32 cló, 226–7, 229 cognitive capitalism, 288, 296, 299 collaboration, 250, 259, 308–9, 312, 317–18 colonialism, 25, 172–3, 180, 191, 203, 213, 279, 284–5 and surveillance, 267–8, 270–3, 275 connectivity, 86, 88–9, 91–2, 96, 274, 288 Conrad, Kathryn, 172, 180, 203–5

Index consolation, 6, 193, 254, 256, 260, 261–2, 265 Coover Award, 310 copper-plate printing, 33 copyright, 38–40, 239, 241 Cosgrave government, 100, 101 Cosgrave, William, 102 Coughlan, Patricia, 248 Cox, Richard Hibernia Anglicana, 21 Cox, Walter (Watty), 56, 58 Dáil, 99–100 darkness, 73, 85–6, 90–2, 94, 130, 259, 301, 306 de Bhaldraithe, Tomás, 218, 220–1, 223 de Valera government, 103 de Valera, Eamon, 192 Dear Esther, 310, 312–13, 316 Defoe, Daniel, 157, 158 Robinson Crusoe, 163 Department of Foreign Affairs, 320 Department of Posts and Telegraphs, 100, 107, 120 Derrida, Jacques, 76–8, 180, 196 dictionaries, 12–13, 169, 218, 220, 223, 237–9 Dictionary of Munster Women Writers, 239 digital humanities, 5, 247 and Swift studies, 154, 157, 166 feminism in, 235, 239, 242, 247–9 digital literature, 6, 309–10, 312–15 film-poetry as, 315–17, 324 future of, 324–5 Ní Ghríofa’s work in, 317–23, See also digital literature Ramsell’s work as, 323–4 studies of, 237 support needed for, 310–12 digitisation, 244, 246–8, 249–50, 288, 297 Dindshenchas Érend, 145–6, 150–2 Distiller’s Press, 309 Donaghadee, 50–2 druids, 144, 148–9 Dublin Castle, 54, 56 Dublin Journal, 45 Dublin Magazine, The, 37, 130, 131 Dublin Telegraphic Society, 55 Dublin Theatre Festival, 109 Dublin University Magazine, 37 Dublin University Review, 197 Dunne, J. W., 187–8 Dunsink Time, 213 Easter Rebellion (1916), 110, 267 Eastgate School, 322 echolalia, 130, 137, 199, 219 and Alfred Tennyson, 83–4, 86

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Index and Elizabeth Bowen, 181 and Mike McCormack, 96 ecological critique, 89, 94–7, 296 Edgeworth, Lovell, 51 Edgeworth, Maria ‘On the Education of the Poor’, 57 on the telegraph, 49–54, 57–8, 62–3 ‘The White Pigeon’, 58–62 Edgeworth, Richard, 51 Edgeworth, Richard Lovell, 49, 51, 52, 53 Edinburgh, 14, 39 Edinburgh Review, 37 Edison gramophone, 69 Edison phonograph, 69 Edison telephone, 70 Edison, Thomas, 71–2 education, 43, 46, 218, 321 and policy, 111 computers for, 254 gender in, 30 of Seaán Ó Cearnaigh, 15–16 of the poor, 57, 62 Edwards, Hilton, 104, 108, 109 Eglinton, John (William Kirkpatrick Magee), 173, 191–2 Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), 249 Einstein, Albert, 5, 188, 194, 202–3, 205 Electronic Literature Organization, 310 Elizabeth II, Queen, 17, 22 Ellmann, Maud, 180–2 Ellmann, Richard, 201–2 email as ríomhphost, 217, 229 as trope, 124, 254, 260–5 embodiment, 13, 74, 87, 204–5, 214, 249, 257, 300 and knowledge, 187, 190, 288, 295, 297–8, 306 and memory, 290–1 emigration, 50, 90–2 enframing, 76–7 Enright, Anne The Forgotten Waltz, 255, 260–3 etymology, 141, 146, 148, 150, 219, 258 of technology, 5, 168–71 Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, 310, 316, 325 exile poetry, 138 Exshaw, Edward, 36–7 Gentleman’s and London Magazine, 35 Fairclough, Mary, 52, 55 Fallon, Padraic, 104, 129–30 Fallow Media, 322–3, 325 Faulkner, George, 44–5 Feeney, Elaine As You Were, 254–7

329

feminist digital archives, 5, 235, 239–42, 244–6, 248–50 Fenian Cycle, 128 Fenian dynamite campaign, 174–5 Fiacc, Padraic ‘Enemy Encounter’, 123 Fianna Fáil, 103, 269 fidchat, 227–9 Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (FDA), 236–8, 241, 243, 248–50 film-poetry, 6, 315–17, 324 Ní Ghríofa’s work in, 318–23, See also digital literature Finn’s Leinster Journal, 36 First World War, 99, 173, 207 Fleissner, Jennifer, 177–8 Flynn, Bernadette, 258 Flynn, Leontia, 4, 288 The Radio, 124–5 Foclóir Ríomhaireachta is Teicneolaíocht Faisnéise/ Dictionary of Computing and Information Technology, 225 Fogarty, Anne, 236–7 Ford, Ford Madox, 201 Foucault, Michel, 280, 293 founts, 14, 15, 16–18, 20, 43, See also script; typefaces; typefounding; writing Fourdrinier, 41 Franciscans at Leuven, 23–4 Frankfurt School, 87 Franklin, Benjamin, 154–5 Freeman, Pauric The River Poem, 313–14 Freud, Sigmund, 72, 206, 209 future of digital feminism, 5–6, 244, 250 future of digital literature, 321, 323 gabulrind, 228–9 Gaelic League Oireachtas, 69 Gaelic myth, 186, 193, 197 Gaelic New Testament, 17–18, 22 Gaelic praise poets, 16 Gaelic Revival, 26, 101 Gaelic Scotland, 14 Galway, 49, 65, 68, 72, 77 National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG), 314 Gentleman’s Magazine, 36 Gentleman’s and London Magazine, 35 Gieseking, Jen Jack, 247–8 Gilligan, Patrick The Spike, 111 Good Friday Agreement, 92 Google Books, 245–6 Google corporation, 87, 296

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330

Index

Google searches, 254–6, 259 Gorman, Samantha PRY, 314–15 Gort Workhouse, 66, 67, 77 gramophone, 3, 4, 74–5, 77, 181, 204 and wordmaking, 219–20 gramophone recordings, 69, 72 Great Famine, 50, 83, 84, 113, 300 Greek, 168–9, 220, 224 Greer, Tom A Modern Daedalus, 174–5, 204 Gregg, Stephen Old Books and Digital Publishing, 235, 249 Gregory, Lady Augusta, 4, 66–9, 75, 77, 106, 198, 274, 279–80 Spreading the News, 269–73 grianghraf (photograph), 223–4 Groarke, Vona ‘Away’, 286–7 Grub Street, 158–9, 162, 163–4 Guthrie, Tyrone, 105–6, 115 Guyau, Jean-Marie, 72 Hayles, N. Katherine, 293 Healy, Randolph, 6, 297–9 Heaney, Seamus, 4, 124, 137, 248, 292–3 and Austin Clarke, 105, 130 Nobel Prize acceptance, 118–19 Heidegger, Martin, 76–7, 180 hereness, 119, 132 hermeneutics of informing, 58 Hibernia, 52–3, 76 Hibernian Chronicle, 36 Hibernian Magazine, 35, 37, 45 Higgins, Frances (‘Sham Squire’), 56 Holmqvist, Caroline, 172, 180 Hopper, Grace Murray, 6, 303, 305 House of Lords debate ‘The State of Ireland’, 168 Hyde, Douglas, 101, 120 Songs Ascribed to Raftery, 66, 69 hyperproximity, 177 hypertexts, 159 hypertextual modes, 235, 237, 314, 322 Idirlíon (Internet), 224–5, 229 immigrants, 279 imperialism, 59, 172, 180, 203–5, 270–2, 273 In Beithe-luis-nin (The Birch-Rowan-Ash), 140 In Lebor Ogaim (The Book of Ogam), 141 indigenous programming, 106–8, 111, 124 indigenous publishing, 46 Intel Microprocessor, 253 intelligence wars, 3, 50, 58 interactivity, 237, 241, 315, 316, 323

Internet Archive, 239, 246 intimacy with technology, 51, 205, 214, 254–5, 265 Irish Board of Works, 84 Irish Broadcasting Company, 99 Irish constitution eighth amendment, 111 Irish Electronic Literature Community, 311 Irish Free State, 84, 99, 100, 120–1, 242, 267 Irish Literary Revival, 119, 127–8, 130, 187, 191–4, 195, 221 Irish Revolution, 116 Irish School of Wireless Telegraphy, 120 Irish War of Independence, 99, 267 Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions, 236. See Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (FDA) Irish Women’s Writing (1880–1920) Network, 249 Irish-American women, 243, 244 Jeanneney, Jean-Noël, 246 Jockers, Matthew, 243–4 Johnston, Denis, 74, 104, 106 Jonathan Swift Archive, 154, 157, 165 Joyce, James, 84, 171, 173, 201–2, 313 and darkness, 86 and orality, 166 and science, 5 and sound technology, 180 and watch technology, 203–6, 214 Exiles, 206–9 Finnegans Wake, 212–14 ‘The Dead’, 204, 262 Ulysses, 209–11, 284, 286, 294 Joyce, Michael afternoon, a story, 314 Joyce, Trevor, 288 Jupiter Landing, 259 Kavanagh, Patrick, 126, 132 Keane, Damien, 126 Ireland and the Problem of Information, 74 Keane, Tim, 321–2 Kearney, Michael, 21 Kearney, William, 18, 22 Keating, Geoffrey, 227 Foras Feasa ar Éirinn, 21 Kelleher, Margaret Ireland and the Contemporary, 192, 196 Keogh, John, 22 Kiberd, Declan After Ireland, 195–6 Handbook of the Irish Revival, 193 Kiernan, T. J., 103, 126 Killeenan, 65, 68, 76 kinematograph, 173, 192 Kittler, Friedrich, 68, 71, 72, 74, 89

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Index Klein, Naomi No Logo, 301 laptops, 6, 253–4, 255, 256, 261, 264–5, See also mobile devices Latin, 169, 217, 220–1, 228, 258, 286 alphabet, 138–40, 227 Laverty, Maura Tolka Row, 110 Leabhar Mór Leacain (The Great Book of Lecan), 217 Lebor Gabála Érend (The Book of Invasions), 142, 146, 152 Lee, Hermione, 262 Leonard, Hugh Insurrection, 110 Levine, Caroline, 170, 181, 182 Leys, Ruth, 94–5 libraries, 13, 25, 26, 224, 320 circulating, 26, 32, 37–8, 165, 196, 247 private, 13, 19, 24, 42, 46, 66, 186 Lillington, Karlin ‘Portrait of the Artist as Webmaster’, 286 Linehan, Graham Father Ted, 116 linguistic bias critique, 246 Linnane, Mark The River Poem, 313–14 Lloyd, David, 269 The Pact, 276–8, 280 The Press, 275 loanwords, 221–4, See also calques (loantranslations) Locke, John, 194, 195 Loeber, Magda, 238 Loeber, Rolf, 238 London, 70, 86, 92, 121, 124 broadcast programming, 105, 110 culture of, 65, 68, 158–9, 162, 163, 175, 182 early print trade in, 18, 20, 23–4, 38–40, 42 London Corresponding Society, 55 London Magazine, 36–7 Lugnasad, 149, 150 Lyric Theatre Company, 127 Mac Anna, Tomás, 109, 313 Mac Eachmharcaigh, Niall C. U. Burn, 112 mac Elathan, Ogma, 141, 143–4 MacDomhnuill, Alistair Leabhar A Theagasc Ainminnin, 228 MacNeice, Louis, 4, 106, 121–2, 125, 131–2, 287 Madden, Peter, 318–19 Máel Sechlainn mac Domnaill, 150 Maguire, Michael J., 313

331

Maher, Alice, 308 Mahon, Derek, 6, 115, 299, 300 ‘Clouds’, 289 The Yellow Book, 295–7 Maleney, Ian, 322, 325 Marconi, Guglielmo, 119 marginalia, 12, 24, 140, 188 Mathews, P.J. Handbook of the Irish Revival, 193 Matthews, Arthur Father Ted, 116 Maxwell, James Clerk, 83–5 Maynooth University, 238, 313, 317, 319 McBride, Eimear, 6 A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, 254, 257–9, 269 McCormack, Mike, 2 Solar Bones, 95–7 McCormick Weng, Julie, 172, 173, 180, 203, 204 McDowell, Nicholas, 158 McDowell, Paula, 158 McFadden, Roy ‘Stringer’s Field’, 122 McFalls, Laurence, 280–1 McGee, Lisa Derry Girls, 116 McHale, Brian, 293 McIntosh, Gillian, 105, 106 McLoone, Martin, 113, 114 McPherson, Conor The Weir, 73 McQuaid, John Charles, 104, 116 Meaney, Gerardine, 239, 248–50 Meehan, Paula, 6, 288–9, 290–1, 300, 304, 320 memory, 204, 262, 284, 285–91, 293, 304, 305 as prosthetic, 72–3 Middle Irish, 137, 227 Mide (Meath), 148–9 Mills Harper, Margaret, 189–90 mobile devices, 116, 255, 260, 265, 289, 316, 320, See also laptops modernism, 2, 126, 163, 183, 204–5, 293, 320 and etymology of ‘technology’, 168 and excess, 90 and public infrastructure, 84–5, 87 and sound technologies, 73–5, 119 and stupidity, 95–7 and technoscience, 170–1, 173, 180–1 and watch technology, 201, 202–3, 206–9 time and space in, 171–3, 214 Morash, Christopher History of the Media in Ireland, 49–50, 109, 120 Morin, Emilie, 73, 75 Morrisson, Mark, 170, 171 Muldoon, Paul, 6, 115, 291–3, 295

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332

Index

Mulvey, Laura, 268 Munster Literature Centre, 311 Munster Women Writers Project, 239, 241 Murphy, Jamie, 308 Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI), 311, 317, 320 Naas, Co. Kildare, 150. See Nás (Naas, Co. Kildare) Naji, Jeneen The River Poem, 313–14 Nás (Naas, Co. Kildare), 150–1 nasc, 225–6 National Library of Australia, 247 National Library of Ireland, 320 National University of Ireland (NUI) Galway, 314 nationalism, 36, 49, 52, 65, 106–7, 119, 191–2, 197, 271 neoliberalism, 87, 95 New Binary Press, 310 New Verse Competition, 127 Newberry Library, 13 news broadcasts, 103, 113, 120, 122, 123 newspapers, 12, 26, 45, 49–50, 76, 102, 122, 247 and paper production, 40–2, 68 and the telegraph, 55–6 historical significance of, 34–7 online, 61, 296, See also individual titles Newton, Isaac, 194 Ní Ghráda, Máiréad, 4, 102 An Triail (On Trial), 109 Ní Ghríofa, Doireann, 6, 308, 320, 324 A Ghost in the Throat, 66, 308, 317–19 collaborations with Ian Maleney, 322–3 collaborations with Peter Madden, 318 collaborations with Tim Keane, 321–2 noise, 65, 68, 73, 75–6, 77 Northern Ireland, 105–7, 113–15, 119, 123, 125 Northern Star, 50–3, 55–6, 63 novels multi-volume, 29, 38, 42 Ó Bhéal International Poetry-Film Competition, 311 Ó Cearnaigh, Seaán, 15–18, 20–1 Aibidil Gaoidheilge agus Caiticiosma (Gaelic Alphabet and Catechism), 17, 19, 22, 226 Ó Ciosáin, Niall, 43, 46 Ó Cléirigh, Mícheál Foclóir nó Sanasán Nua, 13 Ó Cuív, Brian, 16, 17, 18 Ó Domhnuill, Uilliam, 22, 24 Tiomna Nuadh, 24, 25 Ó Dónaill, Niall

Foclóir Gaeilge-Béarla, 218 Ó Duibhín, Ciarán, 225 Ó Faracháin, Roibeárd, 127 Ó hEódhusa, Giolla Brighde, 23 Ó Laoghaire, Peadar, 219–20, 229 Ó Maoláin, Seán, 229 Ó Raifteirí, Antoine (Raftery), 65, 66–7, 68, 69, 76, 77 Ó Súilleabháin, Eoghan Rua Fiannaíocht, 13 O’Brien, Edna, 2 The Country Girls, 90–2 O’Brien, Flann, 84, 171 The Third Policeman, 88–9 O’Brien, Kate, 124 O’Casey, Sean, 104, 108, 111 O’Connor, Arthur, 56, 59 O’Grady, Standish History of Ireland, 67 Silva Gadelica, 219 O’Leary, Philip, 102, 103 O’Neill, Eugene Long Day’s Journey into Night, 90 O’Shea, Mick, 319 O’Shea, Thomas, 11–13, 26 O’Toole, Fintan History of Ireland in 100 Objects, 253–4 occult, 73–4, 85, 190 ogham, 13, 139–43 Old Irish, 11, 223, 226 optical telegraph, 3, 49–50, 62 orature, 2, 4, 66–7, 69–70, 77 Ordnance Survey, 171–3 Orlando Project, 241–2 orthography, 15, 221 Paineite reading clubs, 55 pamphlets, 29, 33, 35, 42, 53 Pandolfi, Mariella, 281 panopticon, 58, 270 paper, 39, 62, 68 allusions to, 222 production of, 3, 40–1, 46, 309 paratextual devices, 54, 256, 308 Parker, Matthew, 19–20 Parker, Stewart, 2, 92–3, 106, 114 Parsons, Cóilín, 171–3, 180, 203 patriarchy, 95, 111, 240 patriotism, 16, 17, 52, 55, 103 Patten, Eve, 191–2 periodicals, 34–5, 45 philology, 13, 22 Philosophical Society, 70 Phoenix Park Murders, 213 Phoenix Park, Dublin, 100, 212, 213

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Index Plato, 155, 160, 165 Plunkett, James, 112 Big Jim, 104 Strumpet City, 110 poesis, 187, 198 Pope, Alexander, 154, 155, 161 Portpatrick, 50–1 posthumanism, 275, 279, 306 Pound, Ezra, 75, 187, 201 poverty, 26, 57, 58, 62, 90, 201, 247 Presbyterians, 156–7 Press, The (newspaper), 56 printing press, 5, 15, 23, 30–4, 40, 46, 226, 309 Swift’s critique of, 154, 157–8, 159, 162, 163–4 Protestantism, 115, 192, 242 and Gaelic perspective, 12, 15–16, 18–20, 22–6 and sola scriptura, 155–8, 161, 164 protomodernism, 173, 177, 179 pseudonymous authors, 238–9, 242 psychic phenomena, 73–4 public utilities, 84, 87, 93, 94 publicity, 11, 54, 56, 59 queer feminist critique, 247 Quinn, Justin, 6, 306 Fuselage, 299–302 radio, 4, 65, 99–107, 118–133, 258 and Austin Clarke, 119, 125–8 and Broadcasting Act of 1960, 107 and Fianna Fáil, 103–5 and history of Ireland, 119–22 and the Troubles, 122–5 and traditional culture, 101–3 in Northern Ireland, 105–7, 113 plays of Austin Clarke, 128–32 plays of Denis Johnston, 74 positionality of, 118–19 Radio Athlone, 120–1, See also 2RN; Radio Éireann (RÉ) Radio Éireann (RÉ), 100, 103–5, 120, 127 Raftery, 77. See Ó Raifteirí, Antoine (Raftery) Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ), 107, 109, 110–12, 120 Ramsell, Billy, 6 ‘Code’, 299, 323 ‘Cradles, Their Circuity’, 290 ‘Memory House’, 288 The Architect’s Dream of Winter, 323 Reformation, 14, 16, 17, 21, 23, 155 Reid, Graham, 114–15 Reis, Philip, 70 relativity theory of, 188, 196 reprint trade, 36–7, 39, 42

333

Republic of Ireland, 107, 119, 120, 123, 284 rhizomatic reading paths, 237 ríomhaire, 217–18, 224, 229 ríomhphost (email), 217, 229 romanticism, 83, 85, 86, 237 Ronell, Avital, 87, 88, 96 Rooney, Ellen, 239–40 Rooney, Sally, 264 Normal People, 116, 254 on voice, 263 Ros na Rún, 112 Roth, Edward, 107–8 Royal Dublin Society, 70 Royal Irish Academy, 43, 53 Royal Society, 163, 164 Rubenstein, Michael, 84–5, 87 Salvage Press, The, 308 Schödinger, Erwin, 188–91, 196–9 science Newtonian, 186, 188, 189, 194 scientific revolution, 157, 162–3 Scotland, 22, 39, 41, 50, 52, 68 Gaelic, 14, 228–9 Scottish National Theatre, 106 Screen Ireland, 116 script, 2, 11–14 Gaelic, 18, 19–22, 25–7, See also founts; writing seanchaí, 103 search tags, 238, 242, 246 Second World War, 122, 123, 126, 127 self technologies of, 122, 187, 214, 280–1 Shakespeare, William, 69, 104 Shattered Galaxy, 261 Sidney, Henry, 15, 17 Sirr, Peter, 6, 294–5 smartphones, 290. See mobile devices soap operas, 109–10 Society of United Irishmen, 52, 55–6, 59 sola scriptura doctrine, 155–7 Swift’s critique, 157–8, 160–4 Sophocles, 69, 102 SoundEye, 311 spam, 226–7 Special Committee on Wireless Broadcasting, 100 Spenser, Edmund, 30, 197 Stanhope printing press, 31–2 steel engraving, 33 STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), 157, 162, 164–5 Stembridge, Gerard The Truth About Claire, 111 Stephens, Paul, 284, 285, 297

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334

Index

Stoker, Bram, 5, 183 Dracula, 173–9 stupidity, 87–9 and constitutional politics, 92–4 as ecological critique, 95–7 as geographical critique, 90–2 surveillance, 6, 267–8, 300 and the telegraph, 3, 50, 57–8, 62 and theatre spectatorship, 268 capitalism, 302 staged as regulatory overreach, 269–78 staged as technology of self, 278–82 Swift Poems Project, 154, 157, 165, 166 Swift, Jonathan, 2, 4, 29, 42, 43–5, 154–7, 165–6 A Tale of a Tub, 157–62 Gulliver’s Travels, 34, 162–5 Synge, J.M., 4, 67, 171, 193 Playboy of the Western World, 67, 69 The Well of the Saints, 108 Tailtiu, 149–51 Táintech Creative Studios, 313 Tara Torcs, 253 technê, 2, 308 technology etymology of, 168–71 technoscience, 170, 172–3, 175, 179–81, 204 Telefís Éireann, 104, 107–9, 110 Telefís na Gaeilge (TnaG), 112–13 telegraph, 3, 49, 61, 91, 174, 219, 271, 279, 284, 298 and radicalism, 55–8, 61–3 and sound technologies, 76, 83–5, 119 Maria Edgeworth on, 49–54 telephone, 4, 68, 70–2, 74, 75–6, 77–8, 180, 182, 204 and wordmaking, 219, 220 television, 107–116, 123, 258, 265 adapting Irish dramas, 109–12 and radio golden age, 104 and the Troubles, 113–16 etymology of teilifís, 223–4 in Irish, 112–13 temporality, 1, 66–7, 171, 180–1, 203, 236, 295, 305, 321, See also time Ten Commandments, 227–8 Tennyson, Alfred, 83–4, 86, 96 theatre, 90, 106, 109, 127 and printing, 29, 33, 35, 44 public functions of, 278–82 spectatorship, 69, 268 staging regulatory overreach, 6, 269–78 theological controversies, 155, 160, 162 Thorne, Christian, 154 time, 217 and space, 5, 141–2, 171, 176, 179, 182, 279

marked by technology, 208–14, 254, 256–60, 289, 303, 316 theories of, 188, 197, 202–5 timelessness, 274, 277, 304 Tories, 158, 160, 162 Scriblerus Club, 154, 157 trauma, 68, 74, 91, 123, 124 Trevor, William, 111, 112, 115 Trinity College Dublin, 29, 156, 192, 264 Troubles, the, 94, 114–15, 123–5 turscar, 226–7, 229 Twitter, 124, 308 typefaces, 14, 32, 43, 226, 309, See also founts; typefounding typefounding, 3, 32–3, 309, See also founts, typefaces typewriting, 177–9 UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, 237 Ulster, 13, 46, 107, 113, 222 TV, 113 Worker’s Council, 92 Union Star, 56–7, 58, 61 unionist community, 93, 95, 107, 113–14 United Irish press, 50, 56, 59 United Telephone Company, 71 University College Dublin, 239, 320 US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), 279 Van Dijck, Cedric, 203, 207, 208–9, 210 Verbeek, Peter-Paul, 170, 181 Verse Speaking Society, 127 Victorian era, 191, 206, 212 and materialism, 170–1 novels, 201, 203 video games, 255, 257–9, 262 as literature, 312–13, 316, 325 Voge, Marc, 321 voice, 128, 152, 219, 248, 269, 309, 317, 318 and Austin Clarke, 130 and Seamus Heaney, 118–19 disembodied, 73, 74, 276 living, 67–8, 77 Sally Rooney on, 263 singing, 75 walking simulators, 312 Walsh, Enda Arlington [A Love Story], 269, 274–5, 277 Walsh, James Joseph, 99–100 Walsh, Marcus, 159 Walt Whitman Archive, 293 watch technology, 5, 171, 201

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Index and sexuality, 206–11 Waterbury, 212 Waterford, 24, 29, 33, 41 Waterford Herald, 36 Welsh, 21, 43 Wernimont, Jacqueline, 240, 250 West of Ireland, 270, 271, 272, 274 Whigs, 157–9, 162, 164 Whitehead, Alfred North Science and the Modern World, 188–9 wireless broadcasting, 75, 99, 102, 105, 122–5 Special Committee on Wireless Broadcasting, 100 Wolf, Nicholas Ireland and the Contemporary, 192, 196 Women in Modern Irish Culture Database (WIMIC), 239, 241 women writers, 5, 112, 237–43 and digitisation, 248–50 Irish-American, 243 Women Writers in the New Ireland network (WWINI), 241

woodblock printing, 31, 33, 163 word-lists, 218–20, 223, 228 writing as sola scriptura critique, 155–6, 160 as technology, 137–43, 152, 222–3, 227, 303–6 Yeates, Stephen Mitchell, 70 Yeats, George, 73, 75, 189–90, 191 Yeats, William Butler (W. B.), 275, 291 A Vision, 186–91, 195, 198 and nationalism, 121, 197–9 and science, 4, 5, 191–6 and sound technologies, 65–71, 72, 75 ‘Meru’, 195 resistance to technology, 73, 77–8, 85–6, 95, 204 Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, 321 YouTube, 312, 316, 325

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335

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009182881.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press