Ireland and the Problem of Information. Damien Keane

“The Abyssinian War monopolised our attention and my ears were deafened by the slogans shouted by militarists and war-mongers. Instead of the Red Star, the Hammer and the Sickle, and the Communist slogans of Red Revolution my ears were deafened by cries of Duce! Duce!”⁹² When the first volume of this autobiography had appeared in 1963 as Scholars and Gypsies, it covered, all but identically, many of the same events first presented in The Waveless Plain, although it concludes with Starkie’s engagement just before the March on Rome. The signal difference between these texts, however, is Starkie’s replacement of Mussolini with Gabriele D’Annunzio, the “poet-condottiere” whose magnetism and technique would later be appropriated by his less capable rival: “The voice of the poet rose sharper in tone in continual crescendo. He played upon the emotions of the crowd as a violinist upon a Stradivarius. The eyes of the thousands were fixed upon him, as though hypnotized by his power, and his voice, like that of a shanachie, bewitched their ears.”⁹³ As a textual revision, this image hardly constitutes a reconsideration of listening either as a critical faculty or (with the insertion of the seanchaí, the traditional Irish storyteller) as an essential aspect of transmission and reception: indeed, an identical laurel-wreathed violin emblazons Scholars and Gypsies. Representing the revision of conditions that had been realized with particular force during the thirties, its reappearance visualizes an ideal remediation and has implications extending beyond Starkie’s case. Now absent its martial note and figuring only the relations of learning and poetry, this emblem is instead a meeting point of Cold War anticommunism and the postwar normalization of the literary field, a compression effected alongside the canonization of literary modernism.

2

Dirty Work in New York

      Cosmopolitanism has long been associated with modernism, the two terms often forming a closed circuit in which the sense of one feeds into and affirms that of the other. Speaking equally to literary modernism’s international sites of production and its later disciplinary institutionalization, this circuit is a remarkably durable feature of the modernist field. Like the practice of close reading, the concept of cosmopolitanism has many varieties and inflections; it has similarly remained foundational through a series of transformations and reconfigurations (including the recent “transnational” turn) of the field itself. Whereas close reading seeks to isolate formal features as a means of discovering unique structures of literary knowledge, cosmopolitanism seeks to isolate the effects of “sustained intercultural exposure” as a way of discovering innovative forms of affiliation.¹ Each mode is invested in procedures of isolation. In defining the immediacy of their objects, both depend on the categorical detachment from “parochial” constraints—of biography, local association, and temporal situation, to name three. While there can be eminently good and practical reasons for such procedures, the implications of this categorical detachment are by no means uniquely positive. In perhaps the strongest recent critique of cosmopolitanism, Timothy Brennan brings out the stakes of this linkage through careful deployment of New Critical terminology: “Judgment of cosmopolitanism’s value or desirability... is affected by whose cosmopolitanism or patriotism one is talking about—whose definitions of prejudice, knowledge, or open-mindedness one is referring to. Cosmopolitanism is local while denying its local character. This denial is an intrinsic feature of cosmopolitanism and inherent to its appeal.”² In a pithy summary of his argument, Janet Lyon in turn amplifies this relation: “The very concept [of cosmopolitanism] marks an uneven playing field, which, a priori, awards hermeneutic power to the formulator.”³ In the present context, this “hermeneutic power” serves as an index to categorical detachment by specifying the normative textualist mode of analysis common to both close reading and cosmopolitanism. By examining semiotic isolation against a field of motivated dissemination, this chapter will seem to have little to do with radiophonic production and reception. Yet its closing pages demonstrate how the mediated relations between hermeneutics and dissemination it considers provided the footing on which the distinction of literary transmission from radio broadcasting was to be staked.

      In The World Republic of Letters, Pascale Casanova describes the networks of “cosmopolitan intermediaries” who conduct literary exchanges, an account especially useful in grasping the historically slippery relations of modern Irish writing within the field of literary modernism:

      [The] power to evaluate and transmute a text into literature... involves two things that are inseparably linked: celebration and annexation. Together they form a perfect example of what might be called Parisianization, or universalization through denial of difference.... As a result, the history of literary celebration amounts to a long series of misunderstandings and misinterpretations that have their roots in the ethnocentrism of the dominant authorities (notably those in Paris) and in the mechanism of annexation (by which works from outlying areas are subordinated to the aesthetic, historical, political, and formal categories of the center) that operates through the very act of literary recognition.⁴

      Although one might object that real differences exist between universalization and cosmopolitanism, one might equally observe that their effects are very often elided and, in this way, misrecognized. This possibility for misrecognition is especially prevalent in the second instance of her three-part typology of strategies (assimilation, rebellion, revolution) used by writers from peripheral areas to enter the world republic of letters. Casanova’s principal example of “rebellion” is W. B. Yeats, whose partial rejection of metropolitan standards aimed to reorder Irish national literary space. In selectively combining local and cosmopolitan aesthetic techniques, literary rebels regenerate national literature by revising local categories of evaluation and recognition. These local categories are expanded beyond, and thus partly freed from, the necessity of responding to purely national demands, in this way achieving some measure of aesthetic autonomy. With Yeats as its figurehead, the Irish Literary Revival stands for her as the preeminent illustration of literary rebellion. Evident from its being the second of a three-part typology, however, this strategy can be problematic. Not the “denial of difference” characterizing “Parisianization,” this Yeatsian rebellion asserts difference, even as the categories through which difference is identified are diversified and repositioned. This project refuses to forswear either national or “universal” affiliations, to deny either its local or cosmopolitan aspirations. This is to say, its “cosmopolitan intermediaries” are uniquely liable to misrecognize the stakes of their activities, because they are uniquely positioned to define these stakes. While true of all cosmopolitan projects, it is a risk with specific ramifications for literary rebellion.

      In place of literary authors, however, Casanova argues that the most important agents shaping this world are “cosmopolitan intermediaries.” This stratum of “publishers, editors, critics, and especially translators” serves as the “foreign exchange brokers, responsible for exporting from one territory to another texts whose literary value they determine by virtue of this very activity.”⁵ By placing considerable weight on the role of these “cosmopolitan intermediaries,” Casanova maintains that they are largely responsible for determining the literariness of particular works. Rather than as an expressive quality inherent to certain languages and lacking in others, literariness for her is the product of the intermediaries whose work guarantees the movement of texts into and out of a language, thereby connecting the peripheries to the center of the literary world. It is this relationship that is easily obscured in the reckoning of literary greatness, either by hypostasizing linguistic features (or “language” itself) as the determinant quality or by directly linking prestige to the number of writers and readers a language has.⁶ Each of these misapprehensions bears an affinity to the symbolic and economic forces underpinning aesthetic value (the “upside-down” or restricted field of the avant-garde versus the market-based benchmarks of print runs and sales figures in the general economy), but the analytical virtue of Casanova’s model rests in its attention to the relative autonomy of these procedures for allocating value. Without discounting the very real political machinations at work in the movement of texts in the world of literature, she nevertheless demonstrates how literary space does not ultimately map out according to political or economic geography. That