Ireland and the Problem of Information. Damien Keane

Defence.¹⁴

      While this administrative legacy was evidence of an incorporative transfer, it also reflected and confirmed a culture of secrecy that characterized many powerful institutions of national life, from the Catholic Church and national army to journalism and the medical professions.¹⁵ As Gerard O’Brien notes, this ethos was especially marked among the state’s founding political generation:

      Much of the reluctance of such men and of their civil service advisers (some of them of the same age) to confront the need for archival reform related to their ambiguous attitude to their personal past. Evidence has emerged, though slowly, that the alternating bumptuousness and self-confident serenity of many veterans sometimes concealed a sense of guilt over horrors perpetrated or connived at by them, or simply because they had survived where other less fortunate comrades had perished.... Through all the warnings and prohibitions issued by politicians and officials to applicant-researchers, even to the end of the 1960s, there reverberated the central statement that the people of Ireland were not yet ready for too thorough a presentation of the past.¹⁶

      Driven by the persistence of “applicant-researchers,” a younger generation of civil servants led the reform of closed archives, bringing Irish policy into line with North American, Australian, and (eventually) European access protocols. In doing so, this generation undermined a foundational relationship: “Many of the civil servants who made that freedom of information revolution possible ‘subverted’ the system from within. Many of their predecessors would not have been best pleased. But the democratic institutions of the state are stronger for the ultimate ‘betrayal’ of the imported Westminster model of administration.”¹⁷ Rather than return to some authentic “Irish” model, this subversion instead instituted new conditions of openness to Ireland’s historical record, one potent effect of which has indeed been a destabilization of the compatible narratives of Irish inwardness and Irish exceptionalism. As a national “revolution,” that is, this betrayal of the “imported Westminster model of administration” in favor of international alignment adduces a critical fact about the Irish habitus: that the specificity of Irish national self-determination takes form only in relation to international, “worldly” engagement.

      There is no reason to regard international alignment as uniformly positive or as a relation founded in equality of power or transparency of motivation: a dense and growing record of evidence suggests otherwise. This point is acutely important to note in the midst of modernism’s “transnational” turn. For all of their startlingly expansive effects, many of the more recent conceptions of “globalism” or “worldliness” in modernist studies have a propensity to the paranational, in assuming or announcing the (beneficial) supersession of nation- or state-centered models by more fluid recognitions of global interpenetration. In its reliance on a notion of supersession, however, this recent turn risks embodying the paranational in Williams’s sense, as that “represented as socially new and therefore as creating a new political situation.” Greater access to Irish archives has indeed provided a more complex sense of Irish cultural production in its widest scope at midcentury, one realized perhaps most fully in a number of historiographical studies that have confronted long-standing perceptions. By graphically intensifying the contests between nationalism and internationalism that defined Ireland’s relationship to the world, the Second World War upended the modern Irish cultural field. As a result, struggles between nationalism and internationalism can now in much finer detail be understood in tandem with the forces structuring nationalism and internationalism as alternate modes of aligning Ireland with the world, as competing poles of worldly engagement. While they were often still communicated as opposed stances taken in regard to the qualities of Irish life, nationalism and internationalism were increasingly and knowingly mobilized on institutional footings that no longer recognized this opposition. If nationalism and internationalism could serve as ideological markers of Ireland’s place in the world order, it was because there were now specific institutional possibilities for their realization: as matters of strategic positioning, they were operationalized by Irish and non-Irish players alike. Nationalist poetry could function as the vehicle for cosmopolitan connection; lucid comprehension of global diplomacy could justify protective withdrawal; broadcast appeals to Ireland’s history could be made to sanction any postwar settlement: specific prerogatives such as these were foundational to the Irish field because they were necessitated by its oscillating practical conditions. These relations are absolutely political, but they skew—sometimes severely—any tidy or desired sense of political correspondence, in producing disquieting alliances articulated through unexpectedly common vocabulary.

      Whereas the work of Irish writers has been paramount in conventional accounts of literary modernism, Ireland itself only rarely occupies a meaningful position in accounts of modernism’s historical trajectory. By 1940, Irish writing appeared at once to recede from its high modernist apogee and to fall back on a worn set of insular precepts: what had once been a fitting place to renounce or flee could not, after Yeats and Joyce, seem to offer even these hopes to its writers. In order to begin to redress this situation, Ireland and the Problem of Information examines the pivotal mediations through which social knowledge was produced in the mid-twentieth century. It considers how the meaning of cultural work assumed new weight amid wartime strategic imperatives, as the manipulation and redirection of literary expression came to reflect not only the immense totality of total war, but also literature’s increasingly explicit position among—rather than above or apart from—technological media of transmission and reception. In doing so, the book queries the privileged place still frequently accorded to isolated, individual authors, works, and “voices” in both modernist and Irish studies. For this reason, the motivated crossing of borders—between states and nations, cultural and social fields, institutions and formations, media and formats—serves as the governing current running through each chapter. Transcription, recording, collation, redaction, translation, rediffusion: this mediating practice took many forms. Even as the forces behind them were misrecognized (and often remain categorized) as distinctly non- or extraliterary forms of agency, they were transforming the contours and coordinates of the late modernist field into those recognized in today’s “information age.” These border crossings were not only motivated by specific and identifiable interests, but carried out under the aegis of particular agencies elided by subsequent reports of the volitionless “unfolding” and spread of global networks. Precisely because of its “national” focus, the book argues that these motivated border crossings significantly alter relations within and among national fields, but in no way obviate the necessity of these “inter-national” relations for understanding broader, more “global” circuits of transmission and reception. Far from happening somewhere between chance and fate whenever someone opens a book, these worldly mediations underscore the formative labor of classification in the literary, cultural, and political configurations of the late modernist period. This signal moment in the history of the Irish cultural field is indeed an early indicator of the antagonistic cooperation that has since come more generally to structure the cultural field of the “information age.”

      Because Irish literary expression was believed to evince a singular national identity having both aesthetic value and political utility, modern Irish writing was forged and continually animated by controversies over literary autonomy versus political intervention, pedagogy versus propaganda, and the ideal virtues of art versus the practical effects of direct social engagement, as D. George Boyce notes: “It was these problems and possibilities that quickly destroyed any neat symmetry of political decline paralleled by cultural revival: for, just as the political crisis of 1891 [the Parnell split] gave an impetus to the literary movement, so the literary movement helped shape and release new political forces that threatened Yeats’ hope of an imaginative Irish literature tailored for a critical yet appreciative audience, that would enable Ireland to make a distinctive contribution to the common European cultural heritage.”¹⁸ Caught between calls for a national literature free of external constraints and demands for a didactic literature of political utility, Irish writing came to manifest a truly stereophonic relationship to and for its audiences. Without ever locating a stable or final balance, it began dynamically to pan between coterie groupings and mass movements, domestic and foreign expectations, and national and international readerships. Exacerbating these controversies was the concurrent recognition that Ireland was what Christopher Morash terms “an informational field,”