A time to stop making up history - and start making it

One of the clichΘs that governs perceptions of the Irish is that we are a people obsessed with the past. The shortest route to apparent profundity in the analysis of the Northern Ireland conflict is to talk of ancient hatreds and an inability, as the wonderfully ludicrous tautology has it, to "put the past behind us". The habit of mistaking the contemporary employment of historical propaganda for an actual concern with history is hard to break.

In reality, one of the great driving forces of Irish culture is the desire to escape the past. One of the things that animated the founders of Irish republicanism in the 1790s was a yearning to let bygones be bygones and to make a new beginning. One of the recurrent themes of Irish literature is the need to awake from the nightmare of history. One of the big subjects of modern Irish drama is the illusory nature even of personal memories. In an emigrant culture, the ability to move on is at a premium, and the capacity to forget is an essential aspect of survival.

Vacuums have to be filled, however. If the past is too dangerous, too awkward and too uncomfortably ambiguous for us to confront it directly, we seek simpler, more comforting, more manageable versions. From Drumcree to Glasnevin Cemetery, from heritage attractions to packaged childhood memoirs, we consume historical substitutes.

Roy Foster's combative, incisive, supple and immensely enjoyable new collection of essays illuminates the murky terrain where history and historical substitutes meet. Neither Foster's admirers nor his detractors will be surprised to find that The Irish Story has quite a kick. Phrases like "self-indulgent idiocy" and (in relation to Malachy McCourt) "slack, whoozy, flatulent style" add roughage to Foster's elegant prose.

What may surprise those who caricature Foster as an ideologically driven revisionist, however, is the intellectual openness of these essays. Unrelenting as he may be in his attacks on pseudo-history, he is also alive to the limitations of a purely "scientific" model of the historian's task. In the midst of his herculean biography of W.B. Yeats, his concern is to pick a path between, on the one hand, the necessary imaginative element of personal and national stories and, on the other, the distorting effects of the selectivity that makes a good story.

On the one hand, Foster finds the recent breaking down of the barriers that separate "historical narrative, personal history and national fictions" both "exciting and intellectually stimulating".

He believes, as he writes in an essay on the work of Leland Lyons, that history should be "written to illustrate ambiguities" and ambiguity is the natural element of poets, novelists and biographers. In the seminal opening chapter, an extended version of his inaugural lecture at Oxford, he acknowledges the inseparability of the fictive impulse from the writing of Irish history, going so far as to suggest that "in Ireland history - or historiography - is our true novel".

On the other hand, he sees very clearly that the breakdown of the barriers between fact and imagination also opens the way to selective memory, special pleading and sheer mendacity. Foster is deeply suspicious of the way postmodern theory has been taken as a sanction for a cavalier attitude to historical reality, an "aggressive sentimentalism" and a widespread indulgence in wishful thinking.

Some of the targets of his brilliantly scathing attacks might have been predicted from his previous essays and from the obvious desire for a pluralist Ireland that makes him so deeply sensitive to sectarian and political annexations of the Irish past. He highlights the gulf in contemporary Irish culture between a massively heightened self-esteem on the one hand and a "sneaking nostalgia for the verities of the old victim-culture". Into this gap have moved versions of the past as diverse yet ultimately compatible as the childhood memoirs of Frank McCourt and Gerry Adams, the Famine Theme Park in west Limerick and the vogue for all things Celtic. Foster's demolition jobs on these and similar phenomena are exhilarating.

Less predictable to those who like to caricature him, however, is his thoughtful reflection on a different kind of distortion: the tendency to sanitise the past to serve the entirely admirable aim of reconciliation. Foster's concluding essay on the commemoration of the 1798 Rising is a superb summary of the twin dangers through which he tries to set his course.

First, he gives us an anatomy of the centennial celebrations in 1898. Headed by Father Patrick Kavanagh, a popular historian who also wanted to impose a boycott on Protestant businesses in Wexford town, they appropriated the United Irishmen to a conventional narrative of Catholic suffering. Then Foster suggests that the commemorations of 1998 had no less distorting an effect. In tune with the mood music of the Belfast Agreement, they played down the element of sectarian conflict of 1798 and projected the desire for a "pluralist, Europeanized, dynamic Ireland" backwards in time.

The challenge that Foster lays down is that we stop making up history and start making it. One of the things he knows from history is that people inevitably look at the past from their own particular vantage point in the present. He does this himself.

What makes his engagement with Yeats, Anthony Trollope, Hubert Butler and Elizabeth Bowen in these essays so vital, indeed, is precisely his search for ways of opening new possibilities in the here and now. The period that most fascinates him, the supposedly dull decades between 1890 and 1914, does so because he sees in it an upsurge in Irish culture that resulted from a new willingness to question received wisdom.

The desire that underlies these essays is that our own time might be another such period in which the willingness to be open about the past is itself an opening out of the present. "We can," he writes, "make history by re-reading it, and by realising and accepting the fractured, divergent realities, and the complications and nuances behind the various Stories." Foster's tough-minded grace and clear-headed appreciation of nuances are themselves an important part of that process.

Fintan O'Toole is an author and an Irish Times journalist