Carla De Petris and Maria Stella, (ed.), Continente Irlanda. Storia e scritture contemporanee.

Lonergan, Corinna Salvadori

Carla De Petris and Maria Stella, (ed.), Continente Irlanda. Storia e scritture contemporanee. Rome: Carocci, 2001. 303 pages. EUR 20.66.

Continente Irlanda has been generated by passione irlandese, a passion that has fired an excellent collection of eighteen academic essays that gives Italians seriously interested in Irish culture an original and imaginative view of Ireland, North and South; it is presented not as a small island (that is mere geography), a last stop before the brave new world, but as an entire continent with many cultures, both of colonizers and colonized, with a plurality of traditions, characterized by vibrant modernity rooted in past centuries, paradoxically both archaic and young, both unmistakably Celtic and international.

The essays--all in Italian, with those originally written in English translated--are grouped under four headings: Storia, Parole, Scenari, Scritture; and a particularly felicitous feature of the volume is that each section is introduced by a poem that gives the tune for what is to follow; for example, Desmond O'Grady's 'My Country' appropriately introduces Storia, Eilean NI Chuilleanain's 'Studying the Language' opens Parole. Their poems (in both English and Italian translation) are the leitmotiv that unifies the collection--Ireland and its languages--and bring it to a close in the fifth section, Commiato.

The editors introduce the book by expanding on its epigraph--Anthony Butler's 'Dublin is not a city, it is a lazy man's continent'--and giving a clear over-view of a highly diversified collection. The very positively European opening essay, appropriately by Joseph Small, then Irish Ambassador to Italy and strong promoter of Irish Studies there, focuses on Ireland at the beginning of the third millennium; he touches on economy, defence, emigration, and immigration, and his forward-looking stance strikes a very good balance with the following historical essay by Eva Guarino on the three '98s. She evaluates changes while noting constants in three landmarks: the Battle of the Yellow Ford (1598), the rising of 1798, and 1998 with its Good Friday Agreement, and a Celtic Tiger about which the question is will it roar. The author of the next essay, Donatella Abbate Badin, links to 1798 with Lady Morgan whose writings on the 1799 Neapolitan uprising gave implicit praise to the preceding Irish insurrection as she placed herself firmly on the side of the oppressed, be they Neapolitans or Irish.

Parole opens with an essay of remarkable breadth and depth in its brevity, by Diego Poli who writes on the Irish language without ever dissociating it from an all-Ireland, socio-political and socio-cultural context, moving from the major impact on it of the Plantations and the Flight of the Earls through to the Celtic revival, the Gaelic League, the designation of the Gaeltacht, and ending with the very recent Body for Languages, and a placing of Gaelic alongside the lesser spoken languages of the Union. It is a smooth transition to Clara Ferranti on Hiberno-English, or l'inglese d'Irlanda, and her juxtaposing evidence of similarity from two entirely dissimilar authors, J. M. Synge with his exclusive idiom, and Frank McCourt's Hiberno-English characteristics particularly obvious in the use of direct speech. The orality of the English of Ireland, with its Gaelic substratum, with its demotic and proletarian diversity, codified and reproduced even graphically in its fillers without semantic value, is the subject of Fiorenzo Fantaccini's essay on Roddy Doyle's The Commitments; there he finds a community of human sound that is both ancient and contemporary.

The section entitled Scenari, introduced by O'Grady's poignant extract from 'Darkness and Light', opens with a piece by anthropologist Ciro De Rosa on parades in Northern Ireland; he argues that they are public rituals which allow the externalizing of ethnicity by groups with conflicting ideologies based on denominational differences. He looks at them and their intimidatory practices from the perspective of history, traditions, and linguistic differences. This sombre essay, written in a specialized and detached linguistic register, is well off-set by a creative piece in which the musician Kay McCarthy reflects on how deeply embedded the roots of Irish culture are in the Gaelic tradition of narration and song. She is critical of pseudo-druids and bards, and elegiac on how destructive certain colonization tactics were against harpists even though Giraldus Cambrensis had found the Irish ones much more skilled than their continental counterparts; they were proof of a strong musical tradition, a symbiosis between language (gaelic not bearla) and music. The symbiosis between word and man is brought out by Margherita Giulietti in her writing on the qualities of Jack MacGowran's voice as a perfect vehicle for Beckett's characters; as an actor he used that particular quality of Irish speech rhythm that could simultaneously convey the tragic and the funny, while sounding as if dissociated from the human being. The theatrical power of the word rather than of plot is a marked feature of leading contemporary playwrights, as is cogently argued by Carla De Petris. In differing ways, their characters exploit, through a circular and repetitive process, all the verbal potential of the situation that holds them captive, be it in Friel's Translations, or Kilroy's Double Cross, so strong is the Irishman's capacity to imagine himself in the situation of others, in the language of the colonizer; this can extend to the presence of borders and divisions, of a morally dubious neutrality as in the work of McGuinness, and to Irishness reread as a new colonizer, the American mega-industry, as it appears in Stones in His Pockets. Film appropriately ends this section and Ruth Barton writes on the successful challenge to stereotypical Irishness created by the American industry; she ranges from feature films to television documentaries, to films focusing on social crises, often giving expression to a feminine voice, and coexisting with regressive traditional ones that present a nostalgic Ireland well dead and gone.

Scritture is the longest section, dedicated to Ireland's writers. Agostino Lombardo expresses gratitude to Joyce for saving the written word in a world that debases it in favour of the visual, for making the reading experience unique and irreplaceable, for creating an anti-hero who teaches an invaluable human lesson, the rejection of the egocentric. Joan FitzGerald in writing on Cathleen ni Houlihan and the aisling tradition draws on gaelic poetry and mythology to illustrate the play's strong patriotic features, and she links well with the earlier essay on 1798. This is followed by fascinating reflections on contemporary Irish elegiac poetry, features of which draw on the centrality of memory in a tradition which has with its power of synthesis and interpretation, a choral quality which Giuseppe Serpillo traces to classical Greek poetry. Romolo Runcini finds Gaelic roots in the fantastico irlandese, that form of gothic that he identifies, using a musical term, as ben temperato, and that links Yeats, Wilde, and Stoker. The two following essays companionably give space to great female voices. Anglo-Irish place, the house as an island, these are motifs in Bowen's fiction that reveal both identity and non-identity, argues Maria Stella; and that same Big House, with its cruelty, its silence between the classes, its strait-jacketing good behaviour is the legacy of Molly Keane, as Viola Papetti shows. This section is brought to a close by Francesca Romana Paci whose perceptive, albeit condensed, overview of Heaney's poetry admirably does justice to its continuity, its complexities, its roots in the 'stability of truth'; the problem expressed in 'The Riddle' is used as a lead to finding cohesion in his poetic and critical work.

This is an excellent, original, carefully edited book; only because I look to its remaining in print for a long time, I suggest some minor corrections: Lovett Pearce (p. 261), St Patrick's Purgatory (p. 290), file (p. 219, p. 281), and are the Wild Geese (p. 62) 'anitre selvatiche'? Finally, I hail this as a celebratory volume. 1960 gave us Giorgio Melchiori's The Whole Mystery of Art, a landmark and the first great work on Anglo-Irish literature to come out of Italy. There have been giant strides in four decades. In 1968, at a very inauspicious time for universities in Italy, I was sent by the then named Department of External Affairs on a lecture tour to five Italian universities to promote Irish literature. I spoke to Melchiori's students of Clarke and Kavanagh, and introduced them to two new voices whom I believed would last: Heaney and Kennelly. Now, 'Irish' literature is flourishing in Italy with translations (generally of a high standard), from both English and Gaelic of prose, poetry, and drama; and Irish studies in Italy are also flourishing with the development in universities of irlandesistica as a separate entity within the anglophone area. From this have come important conferences like the 1998 one at the Istituto Universitario Orientale (Naples) which is the genesis of this volume, co-edited by one of those students who must have been listening attentively in 1968.