#irish literature
Write in prose.
by Jonathan Swift
What’s it about?
Printed three years before A Modest Proposal (a more obvious satire) Gulliver’s Travels can be read as a harmless children’s story. As with Animal Farm, however, in the hands of a politically-aware adult, it becomes something dangerous: an instrument of thought.
Yeah. That’s very clever. What’s it about?
It’s a record of travels to exotic lands. There are four parts to the book. By far the most well-known is the section dealing with the tiny people called Lilliputians, but there are other sections dealing with his travel to a land of giants, a land of wizards and scientists, and lastly to a land ruled by horses who consider their Yahoo subjects as ignorant peasants.
These Yahoos bear more than a passing resemblance to humans. A full understanding of Gulliver’s Travels would require a brief explanation of 18th-century English politics.
There is no way. No.
Don’t worry. The broad themes of greed, pride and inveterate political stupidity will be familiar to all. Although if you’ve read Game of Thrones and you’re put off by having to keep a bunch of political stuff in your head in order to understand the text, you should present yourself to the relevant authorities at first light.
What should I say to make people think I’ve read it?
“Political satire is always relevant.”
What should I avoid saying when trying to convince people I’ve read it?
Anything about the yahoo website.
Should I actually read it?
Yes. It’s a lot of fun and there’s a certain kick out of “getting” the sharper jokes.
by Bram Stoker
What’s it about?
It’s about pre-Brexit Britain, when an unemployed violent criminal from Eastern Europe could just wander into Whitby, Yorkshire and cause all sorts of chaos before, during and after the journey.
This is nothing like the movies.
No, it’s not. Modern readers will be confronted with a book made up of letters between the characters, diary entries and the occasional news clipping for context.
Wait. When is this bit happening? Did we go back?
The narrative skips around a bit. Don’t worry about it. It all comes together. Well, it doesn’t, but it’s fine (because it serves the narrative) and anyway, if you’ve read Game of Thrones and you can’t handle a bit of skipping around then you should present yourself to relevant authorities at first light.
Wait. Is this a sex thing?
We’ve all been conditioned by movie adaptations who are motivated to push the sexy angle, so probably not. There’s no way to be entirely sure but it’s worth pointing out that it certainly works as a sex metaphor.
And?
And it works as a metaphor for disease. So, no connection there, then. And certainly no explanation for the sudden explosion of vampire movies in the mid-1980s.
Wait. Is this a feminist thing?
Probably not. But it’s worth pointing out that most of the vampires in the book are women and they all aggressively pursue male victims.
What should I say to make people think I’ve read it?
“Real estate deals never go according to plan.”
What should I avoid saying when trying to convince people I’ve read it?
“My favourite Dracula is Tom Cruise.”
Should I actually read it?
Yes. It’s lots of fun. Just don’t expect a movie script.
by Samuel Beckett
What’s it about?
Famously, it’s a play where “nothing happens, twice”.
I can get “nothing” at home. Tell me something else.
Fair enough. It’s a surreal comedy about two guys who spend their lives waiting for something, and as the play goes on, it becomes obvious to everyone except these two guys that it’s never going to happen. Although if you’ve read Game of Thrones and you can’t handle the idea of something that’s never going to happen, you should present yourself to the relevant authorities at first light.
Sounds like my life.
That’s very much the point. While the audience laughs at the two idiots on stage who can’t see the obvious, at some point around the middle of the second act, you’ll understand that you’re laughing at yourself. Beckett is starting right into your soul and laughing.
You know satire is working when it feels like it’s mocking you personally.
What should I say to make people think I’ve read it?
“I’ll tell you tomorrow.”
What should I avoid saying when trying to convince people I’ve read it?
“That surprise ending though.”
Should I actually read it?
You can, but like all dramas, you’re better off seeing actors read the lines out on a stage. Do that if you can.
by James Joyce
What’s it about?
It’s about a man walking around Dublin and all the things he sees and thinks about. The whole book takes place over the course of one day. It might be the first book which takes longer to read than the events it portrays.
I’ve heard … things. Dark mutterings.
Yes. It’s a famously “difficult” read. One entire chapter is a single sentence. There are lots of chunks of text that seem to be sound effects, and it often transliterates the play-by-play of someone’s interior monologue. A lot of the time it’s less something you read and more something you allow happen to you.
That sounds awful. I’m out.
No! I don’t want to give you the wrong idea here, so I should probably mention that it’s very funny. As with Lolita, it’s full of word games, puns, straight-up jokes with proper punchlines, and complicated language puzzles for you to solve which most people won’t even notice.
When asked for a summary of this book, Joyce himself said, “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant”. It sounds like a pretentious intellectual boast, but when you read the book you will see that the quote is better understood as the frank admission of some next-level trolling.
InUlysses, Joyce trolls everyone. He trolls his friends, his enemies, his family,Irish people in general and some specific Irish people. There’s probably some part of the book that trolls you. Like Beckett’s advanced trolling operations, he gets around to everyone eventually.
Basically, if you’ve read Game of Thrones and you can’t handle a book that gets around to destroying everyone at some point, you should present yourself to the relevant authorities at first light.
What should I say to make people think I’ve read it?
[Believe it or not]: “I never managed to get through the whole thing.”
What should I avoid saying when trying to convince people I’ve read it?
“The Jews again, of course. Yeah.”
Should I actually read it?
You’re not going to make it all the way through, but you should definitely try. The secret to Ulysses is that it doesn’t really matter if you finish it or not.
Fashion is a strange disease. You wear dark glsses so you can see people but the people can’t see you. They can’t see into your eyes. So people who wear dark glasses on sunless days must be guilty about something. Popstars wear them all the time. It’s obvious what they’re guilty about. Their music.
Shane Connaughton - “Watery Lanes”
I felt like a stranger to myself, like I was no longer living my life but instead being propelled through it by interesting forces beyond my control.
— Sally Rooney, Concord 34.
Books to Get Out of the UK and Ireland: May Edition
Books to Get Out of the UK and Ireland: May Edition
Are you looking for your next great read? Why not try out the books from across the pond? Despite from what governments say, books are essential and are needed now, more than ever. So if you are need of a variety and want to read diverse stories, then I suggest you try out some British and Irish titles!
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What I’ve Been Reading Lately: May 13
What I’ve Been Reading Lately: May 13
Welcome to What I’ve Been Reading Lately, a feature where I’ll be giving short reviews of what I’m currently reading:
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Hey, Dorian, want to go to the art gallery and look at some portraits of- oh my- um… Never mind…
In the great cities we see so little of the world, we drift into our minority. In the little towns and villages there are no minorities; people are not numerous enough. You must see the world there, perforce. Every man is himself a class; every hour carries its new challenge. When you pass the inn at the end of the village you leave your favourite whimsy behind you; for you will meet no one who can share it. We listen to eloquent speaking, read books and write them, settle all the affairs of the universe. The dumb village multitudes pass on unchanging; the feel of the spade in the hand is no different for all our talk: good seasons and bad follow each other as of old. The dumb multitudes are no more concerned with us than is the old horse peering through the rusty gate of the village pound. The ancient map-makers wrote across unexplored regions, ‘Here are lions.’ Across the villages of fishermen and turners of the earth, so different are these from us, we can write but one line that is certain, 'Here are ghosts.’
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The version of this magnificent, awful essay collected in The Modernist Papers (2007) omits the dedication. I wonder why. In general, I find Jameson both loathsome and impressive, loathsomely impressive, impressively loathsome. How both? Because of the inimitable frisson he creates by casually endorsing not just a civil rights movement but what was in effect a terrorist paramilitary campaign, which he conflates in true Leninist style with the will of “the people”—this in an essay about a quasi-pacifist skeptical of nationalism no less—before calmly assuming his customary perch on the peak of absolute knowledge from which all culture can be surveyed and measured.
Anyway, my main interest in the essay is his assessment of Ulysses’s class character:
Now for a certain conservative thought, and for that heroic fascism of the 1920s for which the so-called ‘masses’ and their standardised city life had become the very symbol of everything degraded about modern life, gossip— Heidegger will call it ‘das Gerede’—is stigmatised as the very language of inauthenticity, of that empty and stereotypical talking pour rien dire to which these ideologues oppose the supremely private and individual speech of the death anxiety or the heroic choice. But Joyce—a radical neither in the left-wing nor the reactionary sense—was at least a populist and a plebeian. ‘I don’t know why the communists don’t like me,’ he complained once, ‘I’ve never written about anything but common people.’ Indeed, from the class perspective, Joyce had no more talent for or interest in the representation of aristocrats than Dickens; and no more experience with working-class people or with peasants than Balzac (Beckett is indeed a far sounder guide to the Irish countryside or rural slum than the essentially urban Joyce). In class terms, then, Joyce’s characters are all resolutely petty-bourgeois: what gives this apparent limitation its representative value and its strength is the colonial situation itself. Whatever his hostility to Irish cultural nationalism, Joyce’s is the epic of the metropolis under imperialism, in which the development of bourgeoisie and proletariat alike is stunted to the benefit of a national petty-bourgeoisie: indeed, precisely these rigid constraints imposed by imperialism on the development of human energies account for the symbolic displacement and flowering of the latter in eloquence, rhetoric and oratorical language of all kinds; symbolic practices not particularly essential either to businessmen or to working classes, but highly prized in precapitalist societies and preserved, as in a time capsule, in Ulysses itself. And this is the moment to rectify our previous account of the city and to observe that if Ulysses is also for us the classical, the supreme representation of something like the Platonic idea of city life, this is also partly due to the fact that Dublin is not exactly the full-blown capitalist metropolis, but like the Paris of Flaubert, still regressive, still distantly akin to the village, still un- or under-developed enough to be representable, thanks to the domination of its foreign masters.
This is clever, very, but then if colonialism plays the role he here attributes to it, what was Dickens’s excuse for also creating petit-bourgeois utopias in the heart of Victorian London (Orwell on Dickens: “the strange, empty dream of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century middle bourgeoisie…a dream of complete idleness”)? What, for that matter, is the class character of The Waste Land, with its clerks, typists, and (Phoenician) merchants? I mostly got this from my own dissertation advisor, and she mostly got it from Rita Felski, but I want to run with it to the end of the line: modern literature is the paradise of the lower middle class.
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“When you sat down on the side of the bed, the springs gave a little, but not much. You looked around and recognised that this room was her secret, that you shouldn’t have been there. Not that it was wrong, no, not that, but something more. You could feel it without having the words to say it, a kind of sorry. Not the sorry from robbing or getting hit or chased or even the sorry when you’d find your ma in a state or when your brothers jeered at your da behind his back. It was a new sorry that you felt you’d have for always.”
Karl Geary, Montpelier Parade
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Eskra rose daily at sunrise and went as usual about her work. She fetched the water and mucked out the horse and fed the animals and the remaining chickens. At the start of the week she baked the rationed black bread. But something within her had changed. A wheel in the middle of her was pulling tighter the strings that held every part of her, and she stared out the kitchen window and imagined what it would be like to let that wheel loose, to let the parts of her be flung upon the wind that came down wild off the mountains a hunter of souls.
Paul Lynch, The Black Snow (Quercus, 2014)
The ground where she sat was turfy and springy. She leaned over a little tussock and examined it carefully, teasing out with her fingers the tiny plants of which it was composed, the mosses and the lichens. The combination of smallness and complexity in the plants fascinated her. She put her head right down on the tussock as though it were a pillow, and closed her eyes, listened to the sea, the birds, the wind. She never regretted having come to live here. She opened her eyes and saw, inches from her face, a tiny spider scale a blade of grass.
Deirdre Madden, Nothing Is Black (Faber and Faber, 1994)
The ancient sky was charged for him with the memory of the countless men and women who had also looked at the stars down the years, down the centuries. Now they were so completely forgotten that to think of them, as he did, was not true remembrance but an act of imagination. That this would be his fate too did not disturb him, but consoled him rather. He felt close to these men who worshipped strange gods, to these women who spoke dead languages.
Deirdre Madden, Authenticity
It was a deliciously hot spring day – a day when there is both sun and crispness in the air and flowers look young and well groomed and dewy, not swooning and languid. And beech leaves are light as spring muslins, not black-green shrouds as later they come to be.
Molly Keane, The Rising Tide
The sensation of this came most clearly to her one afternoon in late summer. She had fallen asleep in an armchair in the kitchen, and when she awoke, for a few moments her life was completely without context. She did not know if she was in bed beside her husband or not, did not know the time of day or night, nor the year nor the season. She could have been a child, a single woman, a wife or a widow, and it did not seem to her to have a jot of importance. A moment later, when she came to full consciousness, it was like birth; like falling out of nothingness to a precise point in time and space, as if her whole life had been sublimated so that she came from birth to this place in time with a complete personal history, like a gift which had been given to her. It was as though her past was not something which she had lived, but which was a story put in her mind to placate her, and to make her be – or appear to be – like other people. She lay back in the chair and she closed her eyes, protecting herself for a few moments from time and action.
Deirdre Madden, The Birds of the Innocent Wood (Faber and Faber, 1988)
so true agnes
She was going to murder the only thing which could be said to live in her heart.
Kate O’Brien, The Ante-Room
