Ireland must be important ...

When it came to the choice of an MA course at University College Dublin in 1969, for me and for almost all my friends who had graduated with a BA in English, there was only one real option--Modern English and American Literature. One or two specialists, of course, would choose Old and Middle English or Linguistics, but these were unloved by the bulk of us, who had resented being required to devote what felt like a disproportionate amount of time to them during our undergraduate years.

The only other possibility was Anglo-Irish Literature, but this was almost automatically rejected. It consisted, as we perceived it, of uninspiring courses in such matters as Anglo-Irish speech patterns, the Abbey Theatre, short stories, and Nineteenth Century novelists, with even the risk of the dreaded Irish language, remembered with distaste from its compulsory imposition at school, making an appearance. Dullsville, in short. Anyway, Anglo-Irish Literature, as we saw it, was meant for Americans, and mainly Americans took it.

No, Modern English and American Literature was where the action and the intellectual stars were. It promised access to the great world, to the world of contemporary and even avant-garde fiction and poetry, of the nascent but already inspiring literary theory--Writing Degree Zero had just appeared in translation in a cheap paperback: I read it with great excitement and without understanding a word--and of political consciousness--an important issue at the time; a world, in short, far removed from the provincialism, narrow perspectives and cultural isolation of our origins. And from these origins we could not get far enough away.

Even then, though, some of us were conscious of a small contradiction. At the threshold of this new world was a couple of writers who themselves were Irish. The presence of James Joyce was longstanding; a more acute issue at the time was the emergence of Samuel Beckett, a writer whose Irishness was then almost unacknowledged and, indeed, disowned. The problem was acute because Beckett had just won the Nobel Prize and could no longer be ignored. Nevertheless, it was possible then (just) to write as if Beckett's Irishness was irrelevant, an embarrassment, an accident of birth. More Pricks Than Kicks, his most obviously Irish work, was still generally unavailable, facilitating the view of him as a quintessentially stateless writer. (1)

Joyce's case was different. The nature and subject matter of his writing left no room for the pretence that his Irishness was irrelevant. But the peculiar mixture in his work of a radical literary technique and an essentially local subject matter meant that he tended to fall between two stools, as he probably did literally, once or twice, in life. Joyce was too Irish for the Modern English and American Literature Department, too modern for the Anglo-Irish Literature Department. If to study his work one had to take an Anglo-Irish Literature MA, most of us would, for the reasons I have mentioned, still say No.

I am convinced that something more than the normal exercise of choice of interest by postgraduate students is involved here: this is demonstrated by the fact that no fewer than six of the people in my UCD year and the one immediately preceding, who are now working, in one way or another, in Anglo-Irish studies, did not take the Anglo-Irish MA course; they opted for Modern English and American Literature. The area they chose for their first postgraduate studies--when some specialization is supposed to begin--did not subsequently become their major focus of interest. It is hard not to see such a fact as symptomatic.

It scarcely needs saying that all the attitudes I have been describing were callow, crude and naive; yet it is also the case that they were not baseless. Our perception that the Anglo-Irish Literature Department was not the most hospitable or appropriate place for the study of a still avant-garde writer like Joyce, while partial, corresponded to a certain reality. Yes, Joyce was taught there; two of the senior people, Roger McHugh and Maurice Harmon, had plenty of time for him. But the intellectual environment was not conducive to an intensive engagement with his work. For one thing, the department possessed no specialist in Joyce studies, nobody whom one could really call a Joycean. (It still does not, and it never has.) There was no sense that one might rush there to study Joyce at the feet of anyone in particular, with whatever salutary disillusionments or enlightenments such an exercise might bring. But apart from that signal absence, there was also a more subtle resistance to pursuing Joyce studies in such an environment. The reasons for that deserve some elucidating.