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<i>Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland</i> (review)

2009; Philosophy Documentation Center; Volume: 13; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/nhr.0.0067

1534-5815

Nathaniel Myers,

Irish and British Studies

Reviewed by: Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland Nathaniel Myers Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland, by Joseph Cleary, pp. 320. Derry: Field Day, 2006. $36.88 (paper). Joseph Cleary’s Outrageous Fortune is an ambitious and confidently executed study that engages topics from almost two hundred years of Irish cultural and literary history. Though essayistic in form—a feature the author unapologetically acknowledges—Cleary nevertheless attempts to tie together each chapter by framing his study in relation to the cultural, literary, and theoretical approaches currently practiced in Irish Studies. His analysis begins with an examination of the relationship between revisionism, feminism, and postcolonialism, three theoretical approaches that dominate Irish intellectual circles today. For all their differences, Cleary claims these approaches share an antagonism for de Valéra’s Ireland, or what he calls the era of “soul-killing Catholic nationalist traditionalism.” In sharing this common ground, these critical approaches unwittingly ally themselves with an ideological stance under which [End Page 155] tradition is contrasted with modernity, the implication being that Lemassian modernity saved Ireland from its own insular demise. Throughout, Cleary questions and complicates the essentialist dichotomy that “associates one whole epoch with static repressiveness and another with dynamic reformism.” Cleary negotiates the theoretical issues skillfully, but he does, at times, fail to provide hard evidence to support his claims. For example, while he makes convincing declarations about the anti-de Valéra ideological bent of feminist theory, he cites no examples. In his defense, Cleary admits this limitation; the book is littered with such deflective phrases as, “part of its agenda is to at least nudge cultural criticism in such directions,” or, “The object of this chapter, then, is to essay some scattered speculations towards this end.” Such phrases serve not only to relieve Cleary of certain academic responsibilities but also place that responsibility on future researchers. In the end, this may be Outrageous Fortune’s greatest strength, and what will ensure its lasting value. Chapter One underscores the ambition of Cleary’s work, as it attempts to take on the complex, almost thirty-year-old debate on Ireland’s status as a colonized nation. (The chapter has been published a number of times before, most recently in Ireland and Postcolonial Theory [2003].) His argument is itself unavoidably complex, but in large part, he asserts that a postcolonial approach gives to the question of Ireland’s colonial status a unique and productive angle that is otherwise lacking within modernization and revisionist discourses. Cleary redefines the intended goals of a postcolonial approach: it cannot consist merely of debates over, say, the ramifications of Ireland’s geographic propinquity to England or of the complicated constitutional relationship between the nations. Instead, the approach must carry out an analysis within a wider, global frame, and he spends a large portion of the chapter arguing that “a specific national configuration must be conceived as a product of the global.” The result is an engaging examination of socioeconomic forces during a time when Europe was increasingly prosperous and influential, and England was in its imperial heyday. This largely Marxist and postcolonial perspective informs several other chapters, among them “Capital and Culture in Twentieth-Century Ireland: Changing Configurations.” Cleary attempts to reconfigure Ireland’s relationship to modernity and postmodernity as defined within a capitalist, modernization discourse. At the time when modernism was most prevalent across Europe, he notes that modernist ideas found limited expression in Ireland, and the movement was almost exclusively confined to literature; even then, much of that literature was written in European countries of exile. Furthermore, any later modern success comes not only as a result of capitalist commercialization and consumption, but also at the expense of the high modernist ideals that [End Page 156] originally generated Ireland’s artistic ingenuity. A similar argument about the relationship between Irish modernism and capitalism informs the final chapter, in which Cleary examines the success of the famed musical group the Pogues and their frontman, Shane MacGowan. He asserts that the success of the band as a carnivalesque image of rebellion was contrastingly, but necessarily, dependent, on the presentation of hedonistic excess encouraged by a capitalist modernization machine. Other chapters concentrate...