In his article on this page last Thursday on the state of contemporary Irish fiction, Fintan O'Toole suggested that the Celtic Tiger boom throws up major problems for our novelists in terms of their ability to engage with it as a reality. Perhaps it was unintentional on his part, but his remarks do strike rather a gloomy note.
The whole thrust of his argument assumes that contemporary Ireland is a new Ireland, offering our writers challenges unknown to previous generations who apparently enjoyed a world of relative stability and certainty. Contemporary writers, he seems to be saying, are thus disconnected from a literary tradition and have no points of reference from which to draw guidance.
The main difficulty with this assertion is that it sets up a false opposition between past and present. To claim that, in the contemporary moment, a distinctive sense of Irish place no longer holds, is to ignore the fact that Irish writers have always had to contend with the problem of reimagining the often brute realities of place.
Place has never been a stable concept in Irish society or Irish writing. How could it be? Questions about ownership and possession obviously loom large in an Irish context and it could be argued that much of Irish writing, in reflecting this reality, is an attempt to engage productively with the uncertainties associated with place.
W.B. Yeats, for instance, never really describes places in his work; he merely names them in an effort to repossess them. Elizabeth Bowen presents an Irish landscape that is ever shifting despite all her efforts - and those of her characters - to fix it imaginatively. So fluid can our sense of place be that a writer like Patrick Kavanagh can reimagine Dublin city as an extension of Inniskeen, Co Monaghan.
While there can be no doubt that our relationship to, and experience of, place has been transformed with the advent of motorways, malls and the mayhem of suburban sprawl, contemporary writers can, like their predecessors, confront this difficulty and try to make the world their own through writing.
It is also argued that the concept of an accepted and shared idea of what the big story of Ireland might be is no longer viable today. As with a sense of place, Irishness is now fragmented, uncertain and dislocated. James Joyce, however, thought that the perfect symbol for Irish art should be a cracked mirror reflecting the reality of multiple Irish identities. He recognised long before the arrival of the Celtic Tiger that Irish identity can never be contained within a single unifying framework.
Ignoring these obvious antecedents hints at a certain distrust of the past. Fintan O'Toole says that some writers are tempted to retreat into the past, so unwilling are they to confront the difficulties of the present. It is as if the past is debased and must be escaped from. The irony, of course, is that it is precisely this type of manoeuvre (imposing a single view of the past) that produces uncertainty and detachment on the personal and national levels.
Giving retrospective coherence to the past in this way makes it something of a closed book and robs it of its energetic potential in the present. The best Irish writing of the last 200 years is concerned with trying to make connections between past and present in order that a future can be imagined.
After outlining these impediments preventing a fictional mapping of the contemporary moment, O'Toole concludes his article by declaring that the wait for the "great realist Irish novel" will have to continue. There is an implication here that in some way Irish writing suffers from a lack, an absence, that other literary traditions possess. The logic of the argument thus far has been to disconnect writers of the present from those of the past, and to imply that Irish writing must now look elsewhere for a genre that will allow the story of Ireland to be expressed.
Why, though, should Irish writers have to aspire to a literary form mostly associated with the late 19th-century imperial literatures? What exactly is "realism" in terms of an Irish literary engagement with it? In other words, whose reality are we to begin mapping - our own or someone else's? This kind of critical approach of trying to understand Ireland in terms of other cultures fails to recognise what our writers have always known: to write Ireland is to write it on its own terms.
Of course, O'Toole knows this only too well, as his final definition of the Irish novel as "angular, perverse, and countercultural" would suggest.
What other country could produce writers as diverse as John McGahern, John Banville, Eil is Ni Dhuibhne and Colum McCann? With novelists like these, aware of the potential inherent in a literary tradition outside any constricting mainstream, the Celtic Tiger is being written. It is only in the future that we will know how well.
Derek Hand is Faculty of Arts Fellow in the Department of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama, UCD.
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