LITERARY CRITICISM:A landmark volume provides us with the first rigorous history of a genre in which Irish writers excel, writes ANNE FOGARTY
THE IRISH SHORT story is a celebrated but oddly under-examined phenomenon. It has only aroused sporadic academic interest since the landmark studies by Frank O’Connor and Sean O’Faolain, although numerous anthologies have capably canvassed the terrain. Indeed, critical and popular views of the short story often tend to be ambivalent.
It is certainly seen as a quintessentially Irish art and one at which our writers excel. Yet the mode itself is viewed with suspicion. It is dismissed as secondary and seen as a poor relation of the novel. Its imminent demise is also often predicted. Given these misgivings, there is little clarity about what precisely constitutes a short story. Above all, the question as to whether the Irish contribution to the genre may validly be seen as distinctive remains open to debate.
Heather Ingman’s engrossing, gracefully composed and wide-ranging new study engages expertly with all of these issues and dispels any doubts about the importance of the short story in the evolution of Irish fiction. It also consistently probes prevailing preconceptions about this form – especially in an enlightening introductory chapter – and puts forward many robust and thought-provoking theses.
Ingman convincingly shows, for example, that while the Irish short story has a peculiar indigenous history, it has always been susceptible to external influence. She thus scotches the view that it is a product of our insularity and parochialism, Rather, she holds that it is, in fact, one of the most pliant and open of aesthetic forms. She demonstrates that 20th-century Irish short story writers, in particular, tended to have conspicuously cosmopolitan tastes: Liam O’Flaherty was influenced by Maxim Gorky and Guy de Maupassant, while Mary Lavin was a devotee of Anton Chekhov and Eudora Welty.
Importantly, she also stresses that the Irish short story was not just intended for domestic consumption. A significant number of Irish writers published regularly in the New Yorker, including Sean O'Faolain, Frank O'Connor, Mary Lavin, Maeve Brennan, Brian Friel and William Trevor. Ingman makes the telling point that the preferred criteria of this publication, such as brevity, an unembellished style and an elliptical plot, became the hallmarks of the Irish short story in the 20th century.
It is often mooted that one of the peculiar features of the Irish short story is that it is rooted in traditional story-telling. Ingman proposes a more nuanced view. She suggests that it is more apt to see it as a hybrid that fuses the artfulness of the literary construct with some of the traits of the traditional oral narrative. Moreover, the links with oral tradition are used in varying ways by Irish writers. Frank O’Connor, who insisted that the short story is a product of the alienation of the modern world, nonetheless tailored his texts for radio broadcast so that they would more nearly mirror the human voice. Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, by contrast, often self-consciously draws on elements of the folk-tale but fuses them with post-modern narratives.
The pluralism and shape-changing nature of the short story particularly capture Heather Ingman’s interest. She puts forward the compelling thesis that this form has particularly flourished in Ireland because of its ability to register the fragility of identity. Her survey is especially rich and instructive because it ranges widely across two centuries. In tracing the beginnings of the modern Irish short story to the 19th century, she is able to uncover numerous hitherto unnoticed connections between writers whose work is never ordinarily juxtaposed. Her examination ranges far beyond any notional canon and focuses attention on a host of neglected figures, including William Maginn, Rosa Mulholland, Michael McLaverty, Norah Hoult, Brinsley McNamara, Olivia Manning and Liam O’Flaherty.
Ingman's facility for picking up on intertextual links is one of the strengths of her impressive study. Her interchapters, which construct close readings of two representative stories in the historical periods under review, create illuminating conjunctures. Gender politics is shown to cross-connect Yeats's John Shermanand A Cross Lineby the fin de siècle, feminist writer George Egerton, while a shared interest in exploring psychological states intertwines Mary Lavin's A Cup of Tea and Sean O'Faolain's Lovers of the Lake. Numerous enlightening comparative readings punctuate this investigation, enriching and often disrupting fixed notions of literary interrelations. Joyce's The Dead, for example, is subtly read not just as an attempt to outdo George Moore's naturalism or to break loose from Irish cultural nationalism but as an implicit engagement with Yeats's portrayal of mystical states in The Secret Rose.
Intertextual influence, indeed, is revealed to shape the history of the Irish short story, often in surprising ways. The anthropological nature of the work of 19th-century authors such as William Carleton, Gerald Griffin, Anna Hall, and the Banims, which was designed to mediate Irish culture and society to an English audience, continues to be a feature of the Irish short story. Even though political circumstances changed, it has never shed this function. It is still hedged with the expectation that it can dissect reality and is viewed as a sociological tool as much as an art form. Indeed, Ingman provocatively claims that the short story is more adept at keeping pace with change than the novel. Its practitioners hence have been better equipped to represent the recent upheavals in Irish society.
Yet, conversely, the Irish short story is also shown to be peculiarly informed by aesthetic debates. The seeming realism of O’Connor and O’Faolain is as much an attempt to evade the influence of Joyce and the fragmentation of the modernist narrative as to cope with the restrictive conditions of the Irish Free State. Ingman, moreover, underscores more fully than any other history of the Irish short story has done to date the extent to which Mary Lavin’s work from the 1940s onwards represented a radical new departure. The latter’s claim that the short story is capable of being plotless and encompassing irrelevancies and her preoccupation with female-centred experience initiated an entirely novel approach to this literary form and firmly upended many of the provisos of O’Connor and O’Faolain.
Crucially, Ingman reorientates received views of Irish literary history by taking pains to track the writing of women authors. She consistently probes how their work resonates with that of male practitioners and investigates how a female line of influence might also be envisaged, stretching from Rosa Mulholland to Elizabeth Bowen, Mary Lavin, Edna O’Brien, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne and Claire Keegan. She notes that one of the marked changes that has taken place in recent decades is the feminisation of the genre and intimates that a volume focusing solely on Irish female short story writers would be able to supply us with an instructive alternative history of the genre.
Pace the many proclamations of its decline, her final chapter makes plain that the short story now actually enjoys an enhanced status in Ireland. This is borne out by the many competitions for writers, most prominently the Cork-based Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, and the recently announced Sunday TimesEFG Private Bank Short Story Award, (open to authors who have had work published in Ireland as well as Britain) as well as the advent of numerous new voices in recent years, such as Philip Ó Ceallaigh, Colum McCann, Kevin Barry and Claire Keegan. As Ingman avers, the Irish short story continues to reinvent itself and to elude fixity.
A History of the Irish Short Storyis a landmark volume which provides us with the first rigorous history of this key literary form. It is a magisterial study which adeptly synthesises two centuries of Irish writing and constructs dexterous comparative readings of an inclusive and diverse array of authors and texts. Ingman succeeds too in combining acute scholarly insight with lively critical opinion. Her monograph is to be applauded as a definitive guide to the Irish short story, but it also warrants attention because of the way in which it opens up the field and points to several enticing lines of inquiry for future scholars.
Anne Fogarty is professor of James Joyce Studies at University College Dublin and co-editor with Luca Crispi of the Dublin James Joyce Journal