THE gestation period of Seamus Deane's first novel, Reading in the Dark was so protracted that, to deflect his embarrassment, he began to tell more persistent inquirers that it was already published and had sunk without trace.
As years went by 10 by some estimates, eight by others Deane found himself "lost in the labyrinth" between different versions, with "more in the deletions file" than in the main text. And then, of course, there was the matter of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, of which he was the general editor a "massive intervention", as he says, with dry understatement.
In a series of separately named episodes that accrete into a mosaic, Reading in the Dark portrays an unnamed boy's Derry childhood and adolescence in the 1940s and 1950s, vividly evoking a city of bonfires, marches, feuds, police informers and mysterious disappearances, most notably that of his uncle Eddie. Making sense of this sectarian world, with its codes and rituals, is perplexing enough for this bright, observant child, but his attempt to fill in the lacunas in his own family history draws him into perilous territory, a tunnel of secret knowledge from which there is no retreat.
Everywhere around him he hears stories about the past and versions of the present. Fairy tales throw up smoke screens, ghost stories become political parables every narrative seems to be a way of evading the truth, or at least, the facts. The more adept the boy becomes at negotiating the different discourses that are presented to him from school, church and home, the more estranged he becomes from his parents, and the more burdened and isolated he is by his knowledge.
The themes of the novel language and definition, narrative and identity are entirely consistent with the preoccupations of the Field Day company of Northern Irish writers, critics, playwrights and poets, of which Deane is a founder member. The critic who stated in the introduction to his Short History of Irish Literature that an egregious feature of Irish writing was "a critique of the idea of authority" and unease with the very medium of communication", has written a novel about his native city whose young narrator is both recusant and preoccupied with linguistic nuances.
Yet, simplifications aside, this is much more than a bald novel of ideas written to flesh out abstract themes in some programmatic way. "I don't make a huge distinction between so called critical and so called creative work," Deane says "the identity of the boy is created by the variety of discourses around him. Gaining an identity is always more difficult in a coercive political situation." In response to the suggestion that it might, in fact, be easier to gain an identity where there are a number of strong, defining blueprints, he elaborates "I'm talking about gaining access to a sense of self without being maimed in the process, without having constantly to patrol the borders of your identity in an anxious fashion" without succumbing to "life long dereliction".
"When we were growing up, all of the narrative codes, whether from the education system, from folklore or from Catholicism, were telling us something about our selves. But we knew the police version couldn't be trusted, the government version couldn't be trusted, almost all the versions of the world were not to be trusted." So, in the novel, the boy is trapped by language, recognising that all the stories tell him nothing about "reality", and that he himself has to become only what words make him. It's a pessimistic view, or as Deane puts it "a melancholy recognition, yes. A degree of critical self consciousness in a diseased society is not going to make you merry.
To the inevitable question about autobiographical elements in the novel he responds "it's not a memoir. It's a conflation of about three or four families' histories, but a good deal of it I directly experienced. The fundamental story about Eddie and, in fact, all the disappearances, is family history." Reluctantly, he concedes some therapeutic effect in having transmitted the story, though baulks at the word "catharsis".
"For me, the novel is really a rewriting of the Rumours collection of problems I wrote about 20 years ago, though the story achieves a much higher degree of articulation. It is also he acknowledges with a rare smile, a lot less cryptic, more realised, than those poems.
Although he resigned in 1993 from the Chair of Modern English and American Literature in LCD to take up a lecturing post in the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, Dean& still spends a large part of each year in Ireland. There is a certain measure of relief" in being out of Ireland for a while and, compared to his time as Professor in UCD, where, he says, he was being turned into an administrator, his teaching responsibilities are now "feather light", allowing him more time for writing.
With a new series of essays, Critical Conditions, being published under the Field Day banner by Cork University Press, Deane describes the state of the 16 year old Field Day enterprise as "slumberous" rather than moribund, although other directors of the company including Seamus Heaney, Stephen Rea and Tom Paulin are pursuing their individual interests and it is often difficult to bring them all together.
IN a somewhat muted assessment of Field Day's record of plays and publications, and its aspiration that a cultural enterprise could be an agent for political change, Deane says "I do think, because of the hostility we provoked from the usual suspects that we opened up a variety of kinds of debate. By our insistent claim that the relationship between art and politics had to be affirmed and explored in a complex and careful way, and that art was one field of discourse among many, we helped to develop a healthy dialogue.
"I reject the accusation that we have only looked at politics from the standpoint of a nationalist or republican tradition," he says, wearily. "Of course, if the term political is so narrowly defined, you can be accused of various kinds of vulgarity. If you think that looking at politics in relation to literature is automatically performing a propaganda operation, you re falling back on some archaic, late 19th century view of the autonomy of the artistic realm, of art for art's sake, which, of course, is itself an intensely political notion. So what you've got are political positions disguised as non-political ones."
With an air of disappointment, Deane talks about his dismay at the criticisms of the three volume Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, published in 1991 under his general editorship. He was dismayed, first because he recognised the justice of the opprobrium it received for its neglect of women authors but also because of the way "the anthology was used as a stick with which to beat Field Day. It was represented as some kind of `pan-nationalist' anthology, which is profoundly inaccurate.
"I felt angered by the low level of debate, and by the fact that a lot of what was in the anthology was not interpreted, or was deliberately misinterpreted. Many of the people who commented on it were deficient in information and intelligence, had failed to see the ironies and had not considered the relationship between its various parts."
The forthcoming fourth volume, edited by a panel of eight women academics, will attempt to "put the record straight, or straighter, on the feminist issue, or at least reduce the distortion that's there," he says. "I take responsibility for that. Seeing the work I progress and the sheer bulk of the material has taught me a great deal. I hope that if a single volume digest is eventually published, incorporating material from Volume Four, the narrative of the anthology will be made more visible.
"I used to be angry, now I'm indifferent," he adds. I think that the anthology stands on its own and I am pleased that I was able to shape it as I did. I have been forced to re think and my own ignorance has been overcome some people's ignorance, though, is invincible."
