Joseph Th. Leerssen

[ top ]

[ top ]

Criticism
Alan Harrison, review of Mere Irish & Fíor-Ghael, in Eigse, Vol. XXII (NUI 1987), pp.155-[59].

C[ top ]

Commentary
Andrew Hadfield, ‘Rethinking Early-Modern Colonialism: The Anomalous State of Ireland’, in Irish Studies Review, April 1999), remarks that Joseph Th. Leerssen’s ‘encyclopaedic study of Anglo-Irish representations relies on the assumption that national stereotypes have an intimate binary relationship and can be studied in pairs’ (p.13).

Rolf & Magda Loeber, A Guide to Irish Fiction, 1650-1900 (Dublin: Four Courts Press 2006), cites Joep Leerssen’s Hidden Ireland (xxxx), ‘One of the paradoxes of Irish literary history is that the majority of authors who developed an interest in Ireland, Irish problems, and the Irish language did not spring out of the Catholic Irish peasantry or middle classes. Instead, as Leerssen explained, “a massive cultural transfer” took place in Ireland “between the Gaelic tradition and the urban, English-speaking, educated classes”. This constituted an as yet poorly-understood cross-cultural exchange, which was more complex than cultural changes found in “monocultural or monolingual societies”. This change in the expression of the culture in fiction was all the more remarkable because of the growth of “an educated English-speaking, city-dwelling middle class” which began to identify itself with Gaelic culture.’ (Leerssen, Hidden Ireland, 2006, pp.13-15, 23-24; Loeber, p.lx.)

Further: Loeber goes on to say that ‘[t]he complexity of cultural transfer was increased by the fact that (a) many Irish legends were in ancient Irish, which was no longer current in the countryside, and was initially studied and made available through German, French and English scholars; (b) in certain parts of the countryside and even as late as the nineteenth century, the Irish peasantry (not to mention the clergy) knew Latin and had read classical authors.’ (Idem, citing Norman Vance, Irish Literature since 1800, London 2002, p.113.)

[ top ]

Diarmuid Ó Giolláin, Locating Irish Folklore: Tradition, Modernity, Identity, (Cork UP 2000): Ó Giolláin summarise Leerssen’s thesis to the effect that the Anglo-Irish Romantics portrayed their Irish characters as living ‘in remote glens, on islands in lakes, on the shore or even off-shore, in crumbling ruins that are leftovers from the past, almost as if they do not really belong to the same time-scale as the other characters’ - calling this a procedure auto-exoticism, while adding that it established the subsequent convention which represents Ireland ‘primarily in terms of an anomaly, a riddle, a question, a mystery’. [Quotes:] “To put it crudely: Ireland, if it cannot be a nation in its own right is reduced to a province, is increasingly described in the discourse of marginality and in terms of its being different or picturesque. The implied audience for Irish literature is English rather than Irish, and the choice of an Irish setting shifts increasingly to the wilder, more peripheral and distant parts of the country. Paradoxically, the most peripheral areas of Ireland are canonized as the most representative and characteristic ones.” (Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination, pp.37-38.) ‘There was a temporal as much as a spatial distancing in the representation of Gaelic Ireland. Antiquarians had characterized Gaelic culture by its pastness since “the most genuine and least adulturated form of Gaelic culture was that of the past, before the contamination of the English presence in Ireland”. So it was understood as “a survival of bygone ages, a living fossil of older times, existing only in those places where it had not yet been adulturated by the influence of contemporary European civilization ...” (Leerrsen ibid., 49.)

—Ó Giolláin, Locating Irish Folklore, 2000, p.29. See further in Library > “Criticism” > Celtica - as attached.

[ top ]

Quotations

Mere Irish & Fíor-Ghael: Studies in The Idea of Irish Nationality, Its Development and Literary Expression Prior to the Nineteenth Century (Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins 1986): ‘[...] Thus, in the social and economic ruin of Northern Ireland, the enmities of past generations continue even today, as if preserved in amber; their memories help to perpetuate them and to create fresh bitterness, whose memories may in turn, it is to be feared, burden future generations. / It would be illusory to think that what I have written in the preceding pages will change all that: and yet the desire to change all that is what lies behind much of their content. Perhaps the greatest lie that is perpetrated on both sides - in this and other nationally-defined conflicts, iks the contention that the categories, the terms of conflict, the “nations” involved, are timeless, extra-historical entities. If I have spent much laborious argument I in tracing the historical roots of these ideas, it was, ultimately, with a view to disrupting the imperviousness and perpetual self-reenactment through which they have preserved immunity against historical change for so long.’ (p.455; end.)

Creative impulse?: ‘The past is something that the poetic subject looks back upon and mines for the ore that he or she can appropriate and assimilate and turn into some sort of creative impulse.’ (Quoted in Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, in Ireland of the Welcomes, ed. Derek Mahon, Sept. 1996, p.27.)

[ See also Leerssen’s account of Lessing's Nacheinander/Nebeneinander distinction in Joyce > Notes > “Proteus” (in Ulysses) - as supra.]

[ top ]

‘Ireland and the Orient’, in Oriental Prospects: Western Literature and the Lure of the East, ed. C. C. Barfoot, Theo d’Haen (Amsterdam & Atlanta: Rodopi B.V. 1988), pp.161-74: ‘It was not until the late 1960s that the growing intellectual bankruptcy world-wide of nationalism began to hit Ireland. Even so, nationalism finds stalwarth defenders amongst the Irish intelligentsia. In the historical profession, especially, a debate has been raging over the past years in which scholars have crossed swords over the degree in which the Irish past ought or ought not to be read in a predominantly national context, that is in the light of the Irish struggle against English oppression. / Irish Studies, then, had only since a comparatively recent date been apprehended of the intellectual and moral defects of a nationalist parti-pris in scholarly research; and I am sometimes led to suspect that many critics have adopted the post-colonial, anti-hegemonistic critical discourse a la Said merely to be able to take the moral high ground, as it were, and to point the old-fashioned accusing anti-British finger in more acceptable phraseology.’ (p.163.)

‘Ireland and the Orient’ (1988) - further: ‘Even Mangan himself subscribes to this Irish-Orientalism parallelism - though he does so, as [David] Lloyd demonstrates [in Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism, 1987), not from a superciliously Anglocentric point of view, but from the standpoint of the marginalized. In some rare instances the sens eof shared hegemonistic oppression linking Ireland to the oriental colonies becomes explicit, for example, in Mangan’s invective against John Bull who is apostrophized through an oriental persona as the Khafir Dzjaun Bool Djenkinson. In most other cases a parallel remains implicit. Mangan’s Siberia is a poem of icy death-in-life, comparable to the icy hallucinations of Coleridge in the “Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner” or “Kubla Khan”; but Mangan’s “Siberia” is more, it is a place of political exile and oppression, and and in that respect Mangan’s orientalism differs from Coleridge’s reveries. Again, it is a telling fact that Mangan, who translated much poetry from the Gaelic, chose to phrase an Irish-Oriental parallelism: the Gaelic word for “head” is ceann; Mangan uses this (solecism though it be) in the sense “head of a family or tribe” and [168] thus can come to spell the Gaelic ceann as Khan. What is more, Mangan, a century and a half before [Edward] Said, already denounced the fashionable sort of British couleur locale [in Orientalism, 1978], and argued the irreducibility of oriental culture to European exoticism. Thus, in his review of Edward William Lane’s translation of Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, he calls that version:

the most quackish jackassicality of latter days. Mr Lane is a good writer and a shrewd observer, but he cannot - no man can - Europeanize Orientalism. One might as well think of introducing Harlequin’s costume into the Court of Chancery.

Lloyd rightly places Mangan’s orientalism in a context that is party German - for example, Goethe’s West-ostlicher Divan - and partly peculiar to Ireland. In both of these aspects, then, Mangan does not quite fit the type of colonial “hegemonistic” orientalism as analysed by Said. Mangan’s odd “oversettings”, not translations proper, but paraphrases and adaptations from various exotic languages, range from Gaelic to optic, German to Arabic, and clearly cannot be subsumed within an English-language tradition from Beckford’s Vathek to Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát.
  Yet at the same time there is a danger of overstating the uniqueness of Anglo-Irish orientalism, or of explaining it from Ireland’s political subjugation. There is no reliable basis on which to say that Mangan’s topos of “the fall of Oriental empires” (in poems like “The Time of the Barmecides” or “Gone in the Wind”) is distinct from similar musings in English romantic poetry - for instance, Shelley’s “Ozymandias” or The Revolt of Islam.
 There is a tendency in nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish literature which I have called auto-exoticist: by that I mean a habit, in Anglo-Irish authors, of looking at their own country in terms of its strangeness, its foreignness. I have explained the habit from an ingrained tendency to write about Ireland for an English readership, to whom the country had to be mediated, explained, introduced. [Ftn. ref. to Remembrance & Imagination, pp.33-38.] What makes Ireland exotic is its being different from England; and under that heading its non-English uncouthness can be described with vocabulary borrowed from the opposite end of the Empire, where equally strange and unknown lands lay. That is part of the self-orientalization of Ireland as we see it in Magnan, who with equal [169] exoticist gusto can turn to thirteenth-century Gaelic Ireland or to Siberia or to the Middle East. The curious result is that Mangan’s nationalism (for it is as a nationalist that he delved into his country’s antiquity and evoked it in his poems and “oversettings”) becomes almost indistinguishable from his exoticism. [Goes on to cite Samuel Ferguson’s ‘cycle of prose fiction .. set a the time of the Elizabethan wars [...] entitled, interestingly, The Hibernian Nights’ Entertainment, thus evoking for a scrupulously historical Irish story the aura of fantastic adventure and exoticism implied in the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments as they had shortly earlier been translated by Lane.’ (pp.168-70; available at Google Books - online; accessed 16.02.2015.) ]

[Ftn.: Leerssen adds: ‘The stratagem of using the nomenclature of “exotic tales” for an Irish collection was prefigured a century before in Mrs Butler’s Irish Tales, and in a venture contemplated briefly by Charles O’Conor and Robert Digby.’ Cf. Mere Irish and Fíor-Ghael, 2nd. edn., Cork, 1996, pp.324-25.)

‘Ireland and the Orient’ (1988) - conclusion: ‘The ambiguous case of Ireland, both part of Europe and part of a denigrated colonial periphery, hugely complicates this straightforward binariness [of Brecht’s concluding lines in Threepenny Opera - Denn die einen sind im Dunkeln, und die anderen sind im Licht / Und man siehet die im Lichte - die im Dunkeln seiht man nicht [Brecht: Because some are in the dark, and the others are in the light / And the one who sees it is in the light - while the one in the dark sees it not]. Ireland is subjected to hegemonistic representation, but also has access to it. English exoticism did not silence the Irish voice as it silenced the native voices from the colonies; conversely, when Ireland uses the language of exoticism, it does so in less ethnocentric ways than in England. With Irish authors, it is not just a matter of watching or being watched, seeing or being seen: Ireland is in the Twilight between First and Third World, between the ones in the dark and the ones in the light. Ireland watches now it is watched by England; Ireland watches itself watching the Orient.’ (p.173; end.)

Irish fiction: Foreword to Guide to Irish Fiction 1650-1900, by Rolf & Magda Loeber (Four Courts Pres 2006): ‘[...] The two underlying assumptions on which literary history rests have lost credit: the self-justified importance and separate status of something like a canon based on artistic merit/importance, as well as the author as the premier organizing focus of literary praxis and of the analysis of literary praxis. This shift has affected literary criticism more than literary history, however. True, counter-canonical revisionism has made its voice heard: for example, in the rise of feminist-inspired historiography or postcolonial studies (preceded by the earlier attention for “Commonwealth Literature”); and there has been an increasing awareness that “literature” is not easily cordoned off from other media genres, or from orality and manuscript cultures. Still, when it comes to the writing of literary history, all these critical innovations present themselves as revisions rather than revolutions, as additions and correctives to the established historiography rather than as fundamental overhauls. But there is also a truly revolutionary, fundamental change in perspective emerging, one which will present the most thorough overhaul of how we deal with the diachronicity of literature. That challenge comes from the field of book history; and although Rolf and Magda Loeber are not card-carrying book historians, their magnus opus presents one of the most impressive examples to date of what literary history must reckon with in the future.’ (p.xvi.)

Hidden Ireland, Public Sphere (2006): ‘How did the political climate of “ancien régime” Ireland, with its colonial-style landlord system, its Penal Laws, and its total cultural segregation, give way to the mounting nationalist groundswell of the nineteenth century? This pioneering study attempts to sidestep ingrained and outworn debates and argues that Irish developments around 1800 can be fruitfully studied in the light of historical models elaborated for Continental Europe.’ (See Syracuse Univ. Press website, online; accessed 23.03.2010.)

[ top ]

Notes
Imaginaire: Leerssen ascribes his ‘imagological’ approach - tracing dichronic rather than synchronic aspects of national identity (that is, ‘traditions and historical recognitions and appropriations rather than appurtenances and current attitudes) - to the school of Hugo Dyserinck, viz., Komparatistiche Imagologie jenseits von Werkimmanenz and Wektranszendenz, Synthesis 9 (1892), pp.27-40, and other authors writing in the same journal. This throws up the concept of the ‘imaginaire in literature’. (‘Táin after Táin: The Mythical Past and the Anglo-Irish’, in History and Violence in Anglo-Irish Literature, ed. Joris Duytschaever & Geert Lernout [Conference of 9 April 1986; Costerus Ser. Vol. 71], Amsterdam: Rodopi 1988, pp.19-45.)

[ top ]