Crazy John and the Bishop, and Other Essays on Irish Culture. - Review - book review

Criticism, Wntr, 2000 by Anthony Bradley

Crazy John and the Bishop, and Other Essays on Irish Culture by Terry Eagleton. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998. Pp. x 345. $19.95 paper.

Terry Eagleton is the only member of the British Left since the days of Marx and Engels to have taken a serious interest in Ireland and Irish culture. He deserves great credit for this, and for having to tolerate as a consequence of his interest a certain amount of begrudging hostility and suspicion from some Irish intellectuals and academics who feel one has to be Irish to really know what is going on in Ireland, and that Marxism has never been a good fit for the Irish predicament. Eagleton has naturally aligned himself with Field Day literary intellectuals such as Seamus Deane, Declan Kiberd, Luke Gibbons, and others whose work is informed by Marxist and postcolonial thought, and just as naturally taken issue with the revisionist historians such as Roy Foster who have rewritten Irish history in the last generation. The perspective from which the revisionists have rewritten Irish history is dogmatically opposed not just to a nationalist, but also to a materialist or radical account of Irish history and politics. This collection of essays is a significant and valuable installment in Eagleton's continuing contribution to Irish intellectual life, and especially to the argument between the revisionists and the anti-revisionists.

Eagleton's intervention is most apparent in the essay entitled "Revisionism Revisited." Eagleton convincingly subjects the revisionists to a scrutiny that reveals their entirely unconscious (and certainly undesired) affiliation with postmodernist thought: "their nervousness of grand narratives, their preference for pragmatic explanations rather than big ideas, their embarrassment with the ethical, their emphasis on regionality, complexity, ambiguity, on plurality rather than monocausality, on heterogeneity and discontinuity, on the role of sheer happenstance in historical affairs: all of this places them firmly within the postmodern camp whether they know it or not, which for the most part they do not" (324). This is utterly persuasive, and needs to be put in general terms, yet the essay as a whole would be more to my taste if it proceeded to name names. Which revisionist's tone is described as "suavely hardboiled and emotionally anaesthetised"? (310). I think I know, and the description seems to me exact and entirely justified, but I can't be certain if my identification is correct. By the same token, who exactly are the anti-revisionists Eagleton refers to variously in this essay as "nationalists," "traditionalists," "materialists," "radicals"? Who occupies a traditional nationalist position in this debate, I wonder? Doesn't that position need to be distinguished from the position of the Field Day intellectuals? Perhaps the anti-revisionists are more diverse in their views than the revisionists? The whole essay would be more illuminating if names were used, not because it would personalize everything, but because it would make the essay more specific in its analysis of particular texts. It's a little unreal to talk about "the nationalists" without more discrimination--are we talking about the politics associated with Gerry Adams? John Hume? Seamus Deane? There are also some things that seem odd, or curiously inflected, at least. Although Eagleton subjects one side (the revisionists) to a devastating intellectual scrutiny, he seems occasionally to want to act as mediator between the two sides, blaming the anti-revisionists as well as the revisionists for wrangling with and talking past the other side instead of seriously engaging in debate and discussion. The IRA comes in for some blame for lending credibility to revisionist historiography by their militarism, but surely the writing of revisionist history, which corresponds to official policy, has been much more significantly encouraged by government, the media, and the universities. Eagleton also blames the IRA for subjecting the Protestant community in the North to "permanent military assault for the past few decades [sic]" (309). The IRA has committed despicable acts of violence and political murder against many completely innocent Protestants (and Catholics, too, for that matter), but if one talks about a community being under a military assault in the North for twenty-five years, it is surely the working class Catholic community which has been systematically subjected to the whole militarized apparatus of repression levied by the British Army and the RUC, not to mention Loyalist paramilitary murder gangs. The new British inquiry into the events of Bloody Sunday cannot but focus on the whitewashing by the first inquiry of what was a "military assault" par excellence by the British army upon the Catholic community, an assault that finished off the civil rights movement in the North and understandably recruited a large and long-lasting supply of volunteers for the IRA.

Again, Eagleton's description of the typical ideological position of revisionist and anti-revisionist invites a demurrer in the case of such generalizations as this: "It is almost certain that those who think that the Famine was planned genocide are also likely to draw attention to the quasi-fascistic elements of Yeats." But the first significant article on Yeats's politics and their affiliation with fascism was written by Conor Cruise O'Brien ("Passion and Cunning ..."), who in his roles as both revisionist historian and popular commentator would deplore the idea of the Famine as genocide as a spurious and self-indulgent manifestation of Irish nationalism. Such generalizations on Eagleton's part would prove to be more accurate if he were more specific about his instances. Like lesser mortals he seems to get carried away by his rhetoric on occasion, and ends up saying something that is witty and pointed, but that also seems--and here I wonder at my own temerity--just wrong.