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Mock Mockers: Cynicism, Suffering, Irish Modernism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 April 2021

Ronan McDonald Open the ORCID record for Ronan McDonald [Opens in a new window]
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Abstract

Cynicism styles itself as the answer to the mental suffering produced by disillusionment, disappointment, and despair. It seeks to avoid them by exposing to ridicule naive idealism or treacherous hope. Modern cynics avoid the vulnerability produced by high ideals, just as their ancient counterparts eschewed dependence on all but the most essential of material needs. The philosophical tradition of the Cynics begins with the Ancients, including Diogenes and Lucian, but has found contemporary valence in the work of cultural theorists such as Peter Sloterdijk. This article uses theories of cynicism to analyze postcolonial disappointment in Irish modernism. It argues that in the “ambi-colonial” conditions of early-twentieth-century Ireland, the metropolitan surety of and suaveness of a cynical attitude is available but precarious. We therefore find a recursive cynicism that often turns upon itself, finding the self-distancing and critical sure-footedness of modern, urbane cynicism a stance that itself should be treated with cynical scepticism. The essay detects this recursive cynicism in a number of literary works of post-independence Ireland, concluding with an extended consideration of W. B. Yeats’s great poem of civilizational precarity, “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen.”

Keywords

cynicismaffectIrelandmodernismYeatsJoyceSloterdijk
Type
Article
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 8 , Special Issue 2: Special Issue: On Postcolonial Suffering , April 2021 , pp. 177 - 194
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© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 Often this was refracted through the revisionism-nationalism debate that marked Irish studies as postcolonial studies rose in the international academy and the Troubles raged in Northern Ireland. For a summary of those historical debates see Ciarán Brady, ed., Interpreting Irish History: The Debate on Historical Revisionism (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1994). A seminal work for analyzing Irish literature through the lens of postcolonialism is Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: Literature of the Modern Nation (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995). Other postcolonial approaches were spearheaded by David Lloyd beginning with Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Postcolonial Moment (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1993). See also Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). Historians who have disputed the colonial model in Ireland include Stephen Howe, Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), and Liam Kennedy, Colonialism, Religion and Nationalism in Ireland (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1996). For recent assessments of Ireland and postcolonialism, see Joe Cleary, “Postcolonial Writing in Ireland,” The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature, vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 539–42, and Calvin W. Keogh, “The Critics’ Count: Revisions of Dracula and the Postcolonial Irish Gothic,” The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 1.2 (2014)L 189–206. For a wider history of Irish studies since 1980, including the waxing and waning of postcolonialism, see Ronan McDonald, “Irish Studies and Its Discontents,” in Irish Literature in Transition, vol VI: 1980–2020, eds. Eric Falci and Paige Reynolds (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 327–43.

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