Some great Irish 'novels' may not be regarded as novels in 300 years' time, argues Declan Kiberd.
'How can you write a novel of manners about a society that has none?" Henry James used that question to justify his move to Europe and away from the US. He argued that 19th century America lacked the social density, the range of judicial, military and educational institutions, the great annual events such as Ascot or the Trooping of the Colour, which made the panoramic novel possible in England. He said all this in his short study of Nathaniel Hawthorne, an author who denied that he wrote novels, preferring to call The Scarlet Letter a "romance".
Some decades later, in Ireland, Sean O'Faolain made a similar set of observations, suggesting that the form of the novel presupposes a made society, whereas the Free State was even yet a society still in the making. For such a transitional civilisation, the short story, with its emphasis on exceptional individuals and marginal visionaries, seemed a more appropriate form. This analysis seemed to be vindicated by the brilliance of O'Faolain's own tales and by those of his fellow-Corkman, Frank O'Connor. It may be no accident that both men wrote the two finest studies of the possibilities of the short story genre in the English language in the last century. But both were also novelists and devoutly wished for the evolution of an Ireland better fitted to treatment in that form. The problem in a word was one of "adequacy".
Throughout the 19th century social conditions in Ireland had been too inflamed to allow such treatment, in a land of extremes where a few were wealthy and a majority poor. This was not a state of things calibrated to the middle range of experience, which was the subject matter of the classic novel. It was, of course, possible to write a novel if you confined it almost exclusively to the uppercrust, as George Moore did in A Drama in Muslin or Somerville and Ross in The Real Charlotte. But a panoramic work, such as George Eliot's Middlemarch, registering all layers of a settled society and offering equal play to many voices from different strata, seemed all but impossible.
Even well into the fourth decade of the 20th century, when Kate O'Brien sought to render in The Ante Room the intense, narrow world of the Victorian Catholic upper-class, she found it impossible to extend her focus much beyond the Mulqueen family. There is no suggestion in that book that the Mulqueens might be a metaphor of the nation or even of the upper-middle class in general. In fact, what strikes the reader is the difficulty which even this most gifted artist has in realising the details of that way of life. It is as if she has to invent its very rituals before she can report them, as if the Catholic bourgeoisie depicted here has not yet fully come into being. The characters in The Ante Room seem hardly able to credit their own bourgeois world. At a formal dinner, they talk as if unsure how to behave in such a setting: and that uncertainty finally seeps back into Kate O'Brien's own narrative.
If epic was the literary form which rendered the military values of the aristocracy of old, then the novel was to be the genre of the middle classes which supplanted it. The novel began with Cervantes, who used the story of Don Quixote to mock the world of medieval romances. But, in its early days, it was not called "the novel", being as yet a genre without a name, a mischievous parody of something old rather than a wilful creation of something new.
A radical parody of the sort produced by Cervantes was not limited by its target. By the early 17th century, the romantic tales had declined into mere formula, but he, in mocking them, came up with a dynamic new form. For, as Walter Benjamin would observe centuries later: "Every great work of literature not only destroys one genre but, in doing so, helps to create another". Even in art the urge to destroy is also a creative urge.
This is the reason why so many authors of what are called the great early novels could not recognise them as such. When Henry Fielding wrote Joseph Andrews he called it "a comic epic poem in prose" and used the form to laugh at the ancient "runs" of military epics. "Hardly had the day dawned", he gleefully wrote, "than Caesar . . . ran yelping from his kennel," because his Caesar is not the great general of Rome but a family's pet dog. In such ways was epic domesticated in a new form which sought to capture the outer details and inner consciousness of bourgeois life, and which substituted for the hauteur of a violent old upper-class a more passive, thoughtful and tractable type of man or woman.
Similar developments might have occurred in the Irish language in the early and middle years of the 18th century. In Stair Éamuinn Uí Chléire, Seán Ó Neachtain offered a hilarious Cervantean parody of Gaelic romances and tried to furnish his characters with modern psychological motivations. And in Siabhra Mac na Míchomhairle, Brian Dubh Ó Raghallaigh produced just the kind of anti-hero who would make the novel a racy new genre. Instead of amour courtois-style courtesy, the new protagonist displays a modern vulgarity, breaking into cold sweat on the eve of a battle and trying desperately to trundle a lady into the nearest bed without any ritual of courtship. There would be little enough difference between such figures and the Tom Joneses and Joseph Andrewses of Fielding. What prevented the further development of such tales into the form of the novel was the widespread lack of printing presses for secular texts in Irish. Remarkably, the first recognised modernist novel in Irish would emerge only in 1910, Deoraíocht, by Pádraic Ó Conaire.
All of which may help to explain the strangely belated and oddly angular arrival of the novel in Ireland - and also the weirdly experimental and jagged shape of most of our prose masterpieces in English from the early 18th century to the time of Joyce and Beckett. Although shopkeepers and librarians routinely file books such as Gulliver's Travels, Castle Rackrent, Ulysses, At Swim-Two-Birds or Malone Dies along with conventional novels under the label "fiction", there is a real sense in which each of them is a collection of short stories and experimental anecdotes in the "drag" of the novel form.
Swift's masterpiece is composed of four short books and in each Gulliver starts all over again as a tabula rasa, having learned nothing from his previous adventures (as the protagonist of a novel surely would have done). Castle Rackrent is also divided into sections, done in oral rather than printerly style - and the works of Joyce, Beckett and even Flann O'Brien seem to be collections of micro-stories (much as the Dublin which gave rise to these authors seems more a collection of joined-up villages than a centrally planned city). There may be good reason for this. In more prosperous lands, the replacement of the aristocracy by the bourgeoisie happened with relative speed, leading to the supplanting of epic by novel. But it was in the changeover period of "latency", that extended pause during which one order dissolved without yet being fully replaced by its successor, that some of the most original works, such as Sterne's Tristram Shandy, were written.
In Ireland, the native aristocracy was toppled after the defeat at Kinsale in 1601 but it wasn't replaced by a fully-formed native middle class until well into the 20th century. So, the period of latency lasted for an immensely long time and produced some of the greatest prose experiments in the culture of modern Europe. It's extremely doubtful, however, whether these works, or even an Irish-language text, such as Cré na Cille by Máirtín Ó Cadhain, should be classified as novels at all.
For this reason, when The Irish Times and the James Joyce Centre asked me to name three favourite Irish novels I didn't include any of the masterpieces from the "latency" period in my list. While it is perfectly proper to file them under "fiction", it's unlikely that they will be regarded as novels in 300 years' time. Rather, they are radical, emergent forms in a still undefined genre, for which as yet there is no satisfactory name, assemblages rather than novels, pastiches rather than plots.
They are the works of authors who created in conditions of extreme freedom, in that liberated space between the collapse of the feudal order and the emergence of the new ethics and culture of the bourgeoisie. They were written at a time when the new idea of human freedom had not yet been congealed into a programme for middle-class privilege, when form was possible rather than formula, and when (as Samuel Beckett would say) the boredom of existence made way for exposure to raw Being. The astonishing forms of such works - so rare, unprecedented and new - stand in judgment over the social world which gave rise to them.
Declan Kiberd is Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at UCD. His book, Irish Classics, won the Truman Capote prize for English-Language Criticism in 2002