literature and the historian

literature and the historian. History is both an art and a science, dealing with ideas and assumptions as much as the more tangible records of administration. Ireland has provoked many writers of stature: for many people, indeed, Irish history is better known through literature than through the formal works of historians. For this reason, and because Irish writing has long been deeply implicated in politics, it is impossible for historians to do full justice to Ireland's past without coming to terms with its literature.

At one time Irish universities contained joint chairs of history and literature. This reflected not only a relative lack of academic specialization, but also a definition of literature which extended beyond purely imaginative works to cover other types of public discourse such as parliamentary speeches and historical texts. The divide between the two relates both to the development of history as a professional discipline modelled on the sciences (a doctrine articulated in its extreme form by the Irish classicist J. B. Bury (1861–1927) ), and the increasing identification of literature with the private and subjective. In recent years both disciplines have again extended their ranges to take in much of the material excluded by the previous tightening of boundaries: this cross‐fertilization has produced some valuable new approaches but has also created a certain amount of interdisciplinary tension between historians and literary critics.

The use of literature as a resource for historical analysis presents a range of problems. There is a natural tendency to focus more on the great individual writer than on the wider conditions governing the production of literature. In addition, certain viewpoints are by their nature under‐represented in literature. Like any other source, writing produced at a certain time and place for a particular purpose requires critical and sometimes sceptical interrogation. But there is also the particular problem, illustrated for example in current debates on the significance to be attributed to the political sentiments expressed in medieval bardic poetry or in the 18th‐century aisling (see Literature In Irish), of distinguishing between intended representations of reality and the observance of literary convention.

Literary merit and historical value are not conterminous; the obscure or mediocre writer, when placed in the right context, can be a valuable source. Yet the bulk of 19th‐century Anglo‐Irish literature, to take one example, remains in the obscurity to which it was dispatched by the pre‐1914 literary revival; much of the information on lesser‐known writers accumulated by literary historians and by feminists looking for evidence of women's achievements has yet to be assimilated by mainstream historical scholarship.

Current debates on the relationship between literature and history are overshadowed by an earlier attempt, partly successful and partly catastrophic, to subsume the latter into the former. Owing to the colonial/romantic identification of England with rationality and Ireland with art and dreaming, there is a strain of Irish thought which regards ‘history as science’ as a colonial imposition and sees literature as a superior substitute. This is related to the fact that the 19th‐century pioneers of Irish professional history, because of differential access to higher education, the state‐centred outlook of early professional historians everywhere, and the nature of surviving archives, were predominantly of Protestant/unionist background, concentrated on the history of the Anglo‐Irish colonial elite and the British administration in Ireland, and equated their political position with reason, progress, and modern civilization. On the other hand, much 19th‐century nationalist history was the product of a self‐conscious counter‐culture, propagated through mass produced literature, often heavily polemical, and regarding the ideals of progress and rationality as masks for a parasitic elite. For many writers in this tradition, their uncertain social position and the absence of a coherent literary ancestry mirrored the plight of a nation cut off from a heroic past where art, religion, and society had complemented one another; the presentation of that past could inspire its re‐creation. From a different perspective some unionists, alarmed by the inroads of metropolitan values and by their own social and political marginalization, also looked to literature as a solution. From both viewpoints, history in the modern sense was a gigantic imposture, while literature had privileged access to Irishness: indeed Ireland itself became a gigantic unfinished artwork, to which its inhabitants/characters are subordinated like the builders of a Gothic cathedral. Thus Standish O'Grady said that those trying to write history from archives were like a man observing a stained‐glass window from outside, while the artist saw the same window from within; Daniel Corkery wrote that those acquainted with 18th‐century Munster Gaelic poetry could not possibly see state papers as anything more than a tedious irrelevance.

At the same time, literature seen as a protest against British utilitarianism was often wielded in a surprisingly utilitarian manner. For example, the Young Ireland concept of ‘a balled history of Ireland’, conceived as romantic protest, was carried out through the systematic dissemination of didactic mass literature using methods borrowed from English radicals. Sixty years later Gaelic revivalists were to protest that by disseminating nationalist literature in English their predecessors had actually promoted Anglicization and undermined the Gaelic identity which they were trying to preserve; yet Irish Ireland images of Ireland were themselves heavily influenced by preconceptions inherited from those same predecessors.

These suspicions were inherited by post‐independence professional historians who tried to separate Irish history from the controversies of the past by studying its materials dispassionately. For traditional nationalists this amounted to treason; in the 1940s the Republican balladeer Brian O'Higgins (1882–1963), who inherited the pedagogic methods of the Young Irelanders, called for the removal of ‘unpatriotic’ academics from their positions and demanded that the expression of unorthodox views on Irish history should be made a criminal offence. More recently (and reasonably) it has been pointed out that the ideal of a definitive and purely dispassionate history is unattainable: sources bear different interpretations; selection is unavoidable and must take place in accordance with some order of priorities, explicit or unstated. Thus the historian must always be to some extent an artist employing techniques of persuasion: yet at the same time few would argue that no interpretation is truer than any other.

To some extent this dispute between ‘history’ and ‘literature’ lies behind recent debates over ‘revisionism’, in which some of the most impassioned ‘anti‐revisionists’ have been literary critics rather than professional historians (though practitioners of both disciplines are found on each side). ‘Anti‐revisionists’ accuse ‘revisionists’ of positivistic reverence for state documents, producing an unacknowledged identification with the wielders of power against the voiceless and restless oppressed, and dismissing popular versions of history out of hand as irrational. ‘Revisionists’ complain that ‘anti‐revisionists’ wish to ignore the complexities of Irish history, supersede professional standards, impose their own arbitrary will on the people whose experiences they profess to recover, and raise their own preconceived ideas above criticism, much as nationalist protestors of the early 20th century objected when writers failed to conform to their preconceptions about national literature. While recent developments in literary theory can make important contributions to decoding the assumptions implicit in certain texts (for example, the colonial rhetoric of self‐justification, the maintenance of gender roles) they are sometimes applied simplistically (e.g. the equation of appeals to a romanticized past by previous generations of nationalists opposing colonial claims to represent ‘modernity’ with present‐day postmodernism and the privileging of this over other past expressions of nationalism less appealing to postmodernist sensibilities). It is to be hoped that a new generation of cultural historians will ultimately produce a synthesis of the contending positions.

Bibliography

Dunne, Tom (ed.), The Writer as Witness (1987)
Kiberd, Declan , Inventing Ireland (1995)
McCormack, W. J. , Ascendancy and Betrayal (1994)

Patrick Maume