Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Yeats Is Dead! (2001) is a cooperative novel written by fifteen Irish writers in aid of Amnesty International. It both utilizes and subverts strongly received ideas about Irish expression. The very device of relay composition, each of its authors taking a chapter in the novel, parodies notions of Irish sociability and loquacity. The novel is gossipy, full of innuendo and knowing insider jokes centered on the pursuit of a lost 600-page manuscript by James Joyce. Throughout, however, moments often hilariously couched but encoding serious concerns puncture supposed common Irishness, the mythology of which was so cemented in the generation of Yeats. For instance, Roddy Doyle presents us with a character who controls “a global empire from the back garden of a corporation house, bang in the middle of the Celtic Tiger's litter tray” (O'Connor 2001: 13). The recent economic pride of Ireland, imaged in such romantic, animate terms masks a story of profound urban rot, acknowledged by Doyle's socially aware subversion of the trope, as well as wider problems of social dislocation with which the old organic national iconographies cannot cope. If the center cannot hold, no one has told Ireland. One of Frank McCourt's characters bitterly complains, “Everyone in Dublin is writing a fucking memoir. Thank God Limerick has been spared” (p. 271), and so points to the metropolitan self-importance of ... log in or subscribe to read full text