Beckett and story

The English writer E. M. Forster admitted of the novel as a form: 'Yes - oh dear yes-the novel tells a story.' It is difficult to imagine many Irish novelists so regretting story as the basis of their craft. Indeed, the novelist and playwright Thomas Kilroy has perceptively observed that that chromosome of story, the anecdote, is in the DNA of the Irish fictional tradition from at least the end of the eighteenth century. He advises, with reference to Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800):

Origins of the Gothic novel

After 1757, a large number of novels in English adopted, explored, adapted and perverted the aesthetic theories set out in Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. They did this through new attention to landscape, through the deployment of historical settings and themes, and through an interest in the sensational and the supernatural. The most obvious influence of Burke's treatise is found in the subgenre of terror fiction that quickly identified itself as Gothic.

The sublime is produced by great and terrible objects, including natural phenomena like oceans, mountains and waterfalls, as well as great buildings whose size overwhelms the spectator. Burke emphasises that a certain amount of obscurity is necessary for the creation of terrible effects. To enter a ruined abbey on a moonlit night would be to invite the experience of the sublime. Small and pleasing objects are beautiful, and, in terms of landscape, the beautiful is associated with domesticity and cultivation. Burke leads his readers to associate the sublime with masculinity and the beautiful with femininity.

Catholicism and the novel

During the funeral of Mrs Daly in The Collegians (1829), Gerald Griffin's narrator notes that 'two or three clergymen made their appearance and were, with difficulty, accommodated with places'. Griffin was a Catholic and was later to join a religious order, yet there is little direct reference to Catholic life in The Collegians. The novel's reticence about religious practice belies its theme of Ascendancy decadence and rising Catholic leadership in rural Irish society, but is typical of the treatment of religion by mainstream Catholic writers.

The nineteenth century witnessed a 'devotional revolution', an extraordinary growth in the institutional cohesion of the Catholic Church in Ireland and in the conformity of ordinary Irish Catholics to orthodox religious practice. However, this was not matched by an assertive advocacy of Catholicism in fiction, except by a number of literary priests who had international experience of the struggle between Catholicism and modernity. Ireland also experienced modernisation, largely as a result of changes to the land system, but it was of a special form which favoured the farming family rather than the urban individual. Its emphasis on collective - or at least family - identity rather than on individual identity created a favourable environment for the Church. The Irish Catholic cultural environment thus diverged from the European mainstream in which urban experience and the triumph of individual experience were prized, especially in fiction.

Beginnings

The Irish novel emerged in the tangle of social, cultural, commercial and literary interrelations of Great Britain and Ireland. It shares its genesis with the English novel, as do all English-language national traditions of the genre, though much older and distinctively native Irish narrative forms and energies influenced its course later. When we write of the eighteenth century (the century in which the novel written by Irish authors decisively appeared) and use the phrase 'the Irish novel', we are necessarily referring to novels written by authors who, irrespective of birthplace, inhabited both England and Ireland, but chiefly England, and who thought of themselves as English or possibly both English and Irish, with the first identity being the defining one. The once standard History of the English Novel (ten volumes, 1924-39) by Ernest A. Baker, and the once standard short histories of the English novel that took much from Baker - The English Novel: A Short Critical History (1954) by Walter Allen and The English Novel: A Panorama (1960) by Lionel Stevenson - like the once standard history of the genre's starting decades, The Rise of the Novel (1957) by Ian Watt, do not normally identify as Irish those early novelists who had in fact some claim to the title. If they did (Baker calls Thomas Amory 'half an Irishman'), the Irishness of the authors was regarded as of little consequence and this seemed to be a view derived from these almost exclusively Protestant or Anglo-Irish authors themselves, who failed to stake their claim to Irishness.

Tales and novels

To discuss the regional novels of nineteenth-century Ireland under the heading of 'the national tale' is to acknowledge the primacy of national tales among nineteenth-century regional fictions. I intend this acknowledgment in both historical and literary senses. National tales are the earliest Irish novels centrally concerned with definitions and descriptions of Ireland, but it is equally the case that examples of this genre are widely considered among the best and most significant of nineteenth-century Irish novels. Yet although it is a characteristically Irish form, the national tale is not limited to Ireland. Moreover, not every nineteenth-century Irish regional novel is best categorised under that rubric, though all in their different ways have at least some roots in the genre that it names. The label 'national tale', in short, is historically and aesthetically significant and at the same time slippery, still open to question or argument.

Despite this uncertainty of definition, the emergence of the genre is easily identified historically. The national tale is a distinctively Romantic genre. It belongs to the period bordered by the French Revolution in 1789 and the passage of a Reform Bill by the British parliament in 1832. In specifically Irish terms, it thrives in the stretch of time between the 1801 Act of Union, which dissolved the Irish parliament that had legislated domestically since 1782 and folded all its legislative functions into the jurisdiction of Westminster, and Catholic Emancipation in 1829, which put a final end to political disabilities by allowing Catholics to sit in parliament. Despite its distinctively Irish form, the genre shares motifs and concerns with other kinds of European Romantic fiction. In documenting the strengths and diagnosing the failings of the past, and in tracing the force of history on the present, it inspired and continued to influence the historical novel associated with Walter Scott. Its anatomies of the contemporary political economic scene resemble contemporary reformist fictions by such writers as William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft.

The Gaelic Revival

The novel came late in Irish. Despite an unbroken literary tradition that predates the arrival of literacy and Christianity, the fortunes of history decided that secular prose composition for the ordinary reader would be much attenuated. While the major world languages were developing the novel for the growing literate public in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Irish language was retreating both socially and geographically. There may have been more Irish speakers than ever before on the cusp of the Great Famine in 1845, but they were almost exclusively poor and unlettered. Had somebody written a novel in Irish at that time, its readership would have been confined to a small coterie of scholars (many of whom were learners), some members of the new Catholic middle class - a class that in large measure was trying to forget the language as quickly as it could - and whatever scribes remained, who would have looked down upon it as a poor substitution for the traditional literature. We can be sure that it never entered the head of William Carleton, a native speaker of Irish, to write in his native tongue.

The term 'big house' - an ambivalently derisive expression in Ireland - refers to a country mansion, not always so very big, but typically owned by a Protestant Anglo-Irish family presiding over a substantial agricultural acreage leased out to Catholic tenants who worked the land. As rural centres of political power and wealth in Ireland, most big houses occupied property confiscated from native Catholic families in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Their presence in the landscape, unlike that of England's 'great houses', long asserted the political and economic ascendancy of a remote colonial power structure. Whereas by the nineteenth century the English country mansion could be incorporated into a triumphal concept of national heritage, for most of Ireland's population, Ascendancy houses signalled division, not community. In a colonial country, such division reflected not just the typical disparities of class and wealth between landlords and tenants, but also difference of political allegiance, ethnicity, religion and language. Thus in a speech advocating the 1800 Act of Union, Lord Clare notoriously described Irish landlords as 'hemmed in on every side by the old inhabitants of the island, brooding over their discontents in sullen indignation'.

The un-Englishness of Modernism

'Modernism' does not just refer to the literature of a certain period of time, say 1890 or 1910-1940. The '-ism' suggests it was a distinctive doctrine, or at least a distinctive practice. Yet it is best not to attempt a strict definition of the typical modernist work. No two writers wrote to one formula (though Ezra Pound, an impresario of the modern, tried to get many to do just that). Modernist works deploy devices or manifest traits that include the following: (a) perspectivalism: knowledge limited to the point of view of specific persons (the most radical form being 'stream of consciousness'); (b) juxtapositions without copulas: the omission of transitional matter that would indicate grammatical, chronological or logical relationships; (c) presentation of images or events without commentary or explanation; (d) style of presentation so radically in service of subject matter that, paradoxically, style becomes the subject of attention; (e) parody of popular literary styles and, by implication, mockery of the general readership that made such styles popular; (f) learned allusions to literary classics; (g) mythic parallels to contemporary life and demythologising treatment of Christianity; (h) a governing principle of 'art for art's sake': self-conscious neglect of a utilitarian purpose for the work, such as to teach a moral or move the public to action; and (i) the manifestation of literary art in every sentence or line, as Joseph Conrad demanded of prose writers equally with poets.

The post-national novel

Since the mid-1980s, the rapid transformation of the Republic of Ireland's domestic and international profile has been accompanied by a heightened political engagement in Irish fiction. With a confidence bolstered by the 1990 election to the Irish presidency of a female reformist lawyer, Mary Robinson, the Irish began to face up to their position as modern Europeans who had 'not so much solved as shelved the problem of creating a liberal nationalism'. Where political culture led, writers followed, and in the publishing boom of the 1990s, the Irish novel repeatedly highlighted the institutional and ideological failings of the country, tracing the halting progress of Ireland's cultural, sexual and economic evolution, and foregrounding its voices of dissent. The works categorised by critic Gerry Smyth as the 'New Irish Fiction' were distinguished by a sociological purpose, which, with a few noteworthy exceptions, bypassed philosophical abstraction. 'Less of an intellectual and more of an artisan', wrote Smyth, 'the new Irish novelist is concerned to narrate the nation as it has been and is, rather than how it should be or might have been'.

Issues of genre

The novel has always borne a close relationship with the 'literature of fact' - history, travel writing, confession, letters and the diary - and the parallels between fiction and life writing are similarly deep and long-standing. James Joyce chronicles his coming of age in a third-person narration about young Stephen Dedalus, and writers as diverse as Patrick Kavanagh, Mary Costello and Seamus Deane offer as novels thinly disguised versions of their early years. Calling his three-volume autobiography, Hail and Farewell (1911-14), a 'novel about real people', George Moore draws attention to the blurring of genre endemic to life writing, as does Oliver St John Gogarty when he prefaces As I Was Going Down Sackville Street (1937) with the disclaimer, 'The names in this book are real, the characters fictitious.' Yet while autobiographical fiction and the fictionalised autobiography both play fast and loose with facticity, the two genres are not synonymous, and a consideration of their differences elucidates the contributions life writing has made to the development of prose narrative in modern Ireland.

Irish regionalism

'Regionalism' is a topical theme, kept before us by the regional policies of the European Union, of which Ireland is a member, and by recent discussions of regionalism in connection with the contemporary phenomenon of economic globalisation. But the concept of 'region' or 'regionalism' in Irish fiction is not straightforward, either before or after the establishment of Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State in 1920-2. Within the tradition of regional fiction in English, Maria Edgeworth made a pioneering contribution with her Irish novel Castle Rackrent (1800), and this was generously acknowledged by Sir Walter Scott, who helped to pass on the lessons to subsequent regional writers. But Edgeworth's example did not of itself produce strongly localised Irish fiction. The main market for Irish fiction has always been outside Ireland, and from the outset this rather discouraged a regional or sub-regional specificity which would not be appreciated at a distance. In consequence, the whole of Ireland, or at least rural Ireland, tended to be identified as a single non-metropolitan 'region', the literary province of nineteenth- and indeed twentieth-century Irish writers in English, just as a largely undifferentiated Scotland tended to be seen as a single region, the province of Scottish writers.

Joyce the modernist

James Joyce (1882-1941) was the international modernist par excellence of his day, yet the question of where his modernism sprang from is difficult to answer. While the conditions of national life during his formative years in Ireland are often regarded as pre-modern, the point is worth observing that the capital in which he was born had one of the most advanced communication systems in Europe when he left it in 1904 - a fact which made its imprint on his novel Ulysses, in the shape of trams and telephones. At that time, Ireland was gripped by a mood of romantic nationalism which did not readily embrace modernist ideas in politics and religion, other than those which confirmed the importance of the 'imagined community' (in Benedict Anderson's famous epithet for the nation); and just as romanticism seemed preferable to realism for nationalists of the day, archaism rather than innovation was the dominant mode for literary revivalists (though that inevitably involved some degree of literary experiment). Joyce turned away from nationalists and revivalists alike, and identified strenuously with a 'movement already proceeding out in Europe' which he identified as 'the modern spirit', before quitting Ireland in 1904 to become part of it.

Uses of romance

'When we speak of the People, we ought carefully to make a Distinction between Irish and Irish.' The voice is not that of a stage-Irishman committing a blunder, but a cosmopolitan Englishman in William Chaigneau's novel, The History of Jack Connor (1752). He continues: 'that is, we ought to regard the Protestants of Ireland as ourselves, because, in Fact, they are our Brethren and our Children; and so to manage the poor Natives, who are mostly Papists, that by Clemency and good Usage we may wean them from ill Habits, and make them faithful and useful Subjects'. Use of the adjective 'Irish' clearly required distinctions. There may be a huge gap between Irish and Irish, but none between Irish and English: Irish Protestants are different from poor Irish natives, but essentially the same as the English speaker of Chaigneau's text. Acts of positioning, literary and geographical, of readers as well as characters, are crucial to eighteenth-century Irish fiction. Often, those acts are complicated by the fact that they are also, as in the present instance, silently redrawing earlier demarcations, correcting previous distinctions between 'ourselves' and 'them'.

Most eighteenth-century Irish fiction was produced by Irish Protestants, either the descendants of early Norman settlers (the Old English) or more recent arrivals. Yet the identity such writers shared determined neither their relationships with native culture - which ranged from the intimate to the remote - nor the strength of their attachment to the English mainland.

In this chapter I offer a brief account of some central issues in Hayek's political thought, by way of discussing four important building blocks which play a role in their construction. I discuss several strands that go to make up his work, and some of the problems to which they give rise. I conclude with a suggestion about the relative priority that different themes might usefully be given, and with some remarks about the more narrowly political implications of Hayek's work. What are these different strands?

First, there are ideas stemming from the debate about economic calculation under socialism, and Hayek's related views concerning the use of knowledge in (commercial) society. Hayek thought that there was no alternative - for commercial societies - but to make use of price mechanisms, to aspects of whose significance he drew attention. At the same time, Hayek argued - for example, in his “Trend of Economic Thinking” ([1933] 1991) - that these also imposed certain constraints over what we might be able to accomplish, politically. This strand of argument - and its later extension into the claim that within such commercial societies the ideal of “social justice” is unrealizable - plays a significant role in his political thought.

F. A. Hayek occupies a peculiar place in the history of twentieth-century liberalism. His influence has, in many respects, been enormous. The Road to Serfdom, his first political work, not only attracted popular attention in the west but also circulated widely (in samizdat form) in the intellectual underground of Eastern Europe during the years between the end of the war and the revolutions of 1989. His critique of central planning has been thoroughly vindicated, if not by the demise of communist economic systems, then at least by the recognition by socialists of many stripes of the importance of market processes. Books and articles on his thought continue to appear and there is plenty of evidence that his ideas are widely discussed in Europe, South America, and even in the United States. Hayek's political influence has been no less remarkable. He persuaded Antony Fisher to abandon his plans for a political career and to devote himself instead to establishing an organization for the dissemination of classical liberal ideas. The Institute of Economic Affairs founded by Fisher not only played an important role in changing the policymaking climate in Britain but also became the model for many classical liberal ”think-tanks” around the world. But Hayek also influenced political leaders and activists more directly through his writings and public speeches, and also through personal correspondence. By any reasonable standard, Hayek has been a significant public intellectual whose influence has roamed across the disciplines of social science into the realms of public policy.

Hayek's theory of knowledge is his most distinctive contribution both to economics and to social science. Its foundation is “our irremediable ignorance” (Hayek 1982a, p. 13), both as social actors and as social theorists. “The dispersion and imperfection of all knowledge are two of the basic facts from which the social sciences have to start” (Hayek 1952a, p. 50). The knowledge which members of modern societies possess is necessarily imperfect and incomplete, and can never be perfected. This is so for several reasons which are all interlinked; first, because in any modern society knowledge is fragmented and dispersed among millions of individuals; second, because the limits of human reason mean that many things remain unknown and unknowable to individual members of society whether in their roles as social actors or social theorists; and third, because the unintended consequences of human action and the tacit nature of so much of the knowledge that individuals do possess means that modern societies have to be understood as organisms evolving through time, representing extremely complex phenomena which defy the normal methods of science either to explain or to control.

INTRODUCTION

The passage of time reduces the Cambridge debates of the 1930s to family quarrels. On the flattened surface stand the twin peaks of Hayek and Keynes. Their intellectual antipody seems the more palpable, because they rarely found a common ground on which to engage. “Both sides launched their broadsides, and that was about it.” In economics they were so far apart that, except for one inconclusive and bad-tempered theoretical encounter in 1931-32, they worked out their theories independently of each other. In his brief 1944 comment on Hayek's Road to Serfdom, Keynes in effect accused Hayek of lacking a short-period theory of statesmanship; while Hayek accused Keynes (in many writings after Keynes' death) of being blind to the long-term consequences of the “dangerous acts” Keynes sanctioned for a “community which thinks and feels rightly.” But again they did not engage directly, because whereas Hayek wrote systematic treatises on political and social theory, Keynes did not live long enough to answer him in his own coin.

INTRODUCTION

As a rule, Hayek has not been treated kindly by scholars. One would expect that a political theorist and economist of his stature would be charitably, if not sympathetically, read by commentators; instead, Hayek often elicits harsh dismissals. This is especially true of his fundamental ideas about the evolution of society and reason. A reader will find influential discussions in which his analysis is described as “dogmatic,” “unsophisticated,” and “crude.” In this chapter I propose to take a fresh start, sketching a sympathetic interpretation of Hayek's accounts of social evolution and mind as fundamental to his thinking. My basic claim is that Hayek's views on social evolution and reason are not only intimately bound together, but they also depend on his analyses of complex orders, scientific explanations of such orders, and the place of rules in complex orders. Because so few commentators recognize that his claims about evolution are embedded in a system of ideas, most misunderstand him.

THE COMPLEX ORDER OF ACTIONS

Complex phenomena

Hayek repeatedly refers to “the twin ideas of evolution and spontaneous order.” Although some commentators question whether these ideas are related, Hayek’s insistence on the link between evolutionary analysis and spontaneous orders in writings spanning a number of years indicates that we need to make sense of the “twin ideas thesis” if we are to grasp what he has in mind.