Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism

By Cóilín Parsons, Seán Hewitt, Luke Gibbons and 10 more

Since W. B. Yeats wrote in 1890 that "the man of science is too often a person who has exchanged his soul for a formula," the anti-scientific bent of Irish literature has often been taken as a given. Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism brings together leading and emerging scholars of Irish modernism to challenge the stereotype that Irish literature has been unconcerned with scientific and technological change. The collection spotlights authors ranging from James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Flann O’Brien, and Samuel Beckett to less-studied writers like Emily Lawless, John Eglinton, Denis Johnston, and Lennox Robinson. With chapters on naturalism, futurism, dynamite, gramophones, uncertainty, astronomy, automobiles, and more, this book showcases the far-reaching scope and complexity of Irish writers’ engagement with innovations in science and technology.

Taken together, the fifteen original essays in Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism map a new literary landscape of Ireland in the twentieth century. By focusing on writers’ often-ignored interest in science and technology, this book uncovers shared concerns between revivalists, modernists, and late modernists that challenge us to rethink how we categorize and periodize Irish literature.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Release date: Sep 13, 2019
• ISBN: 9780815654483

Book preview

SELECT TITLES IN IRISH STUDIES

All Dressed Up: Modern Irish Historical Pageantry

Joan FitzPatrick Dean

Irish Questions and Jewish Questions: Crossovers in Culture

Aidan Beatty and Dan O’Brien, eds.

J. M. Synge and Travel Writing of the Irish Revival

Giulia Bruna

Kate O’Brien and Spanish Literary Culture

Jane Davison

Laying Out the Bones: Death and Dying in the Modern Irish Novel

Bridget English

The Rebels and Other Short Fiction

Richard Power; James MacKillop, ed.

Respectability and Reform: Irish American Women’s Activism, 1880–1920

Tara M. McCarthy

Trauma and Recovery in the Twenty-First-Century Irish Novel

Kathleen Costello-Sullivan

__________________________________________

For a full list of titles in this series, visit

https://press.syr.edu/supressbook-series/irish-studies/.

Copyright © 2019 by Syracuse University Press

Syracuse, New York 13244-5290

All Rights Reserved

First Edition 2019

19 20 21 22 23 246 5 4 3 2 1

∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

For a listing of books published and distributed by Syracuse University Press, visit https://press.syr.edu.

ISBN: 978-0-8156-3593-2 (hardcover)

978-0-8156-3598-7 (paperback)

978-0-8156-5448-3 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Available from the publisher upon request.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Kathryn Conrad, Cóilín Parsons, and Julie McCormick Weng

PART ONE: Revival Dynamics

1.Natural History and the Irish Revival

Seán Hewitt

2.John Eglinton: An Irish Futurist

Julie McCormick Weng

3.The Easter Rising as Modern Event: Media, Technology, and Terror

Luke Gibbons

PART TWO: Machine Fever

4.Infernal Machines: Weapons, Media, and the Networked Modernism of Tom Greer and James Joyce

Kathryn Conrad

5.Machinic Yeats

Gregory Castle

6.Accelerate: Why Elizabeth Bowen Liked Cars

Simon During

PART THREE: Sounds Modern

7.Gramophonic Strain in Lennox Robinson’s Portrait

Susanne S. Cammack

8.His Remastered Voice: Joyce for Vinyl

Damien Keane

9.Broadcatastrophe!: Denis Johnston’s Radio Drama and the Aesthetics of Working It Out

Jeremy Lakoff

PART FOUR: Body Trouble

10.Corrigan’s Pulse, Medicine, and Irish Modernism

Enda Duffy

11.Sassenachs and Their Syphilization: The Irish Revival, Deanglicization, and Eugenics

Alan Graham

12.De generatione et corruptione: Samuel Beckett and the Biological

Chris Ackerley

PART FIVE: Strange Experiments

13.Science, the Occult, and Irish Drama: Ghosts in Yeats and Beckett

Katherine Ebury

14.The Uncertainty of Late Irish Modernism: Flann O’Brien and Erwin Schrödinger in Dublin

Andrew Kalaidjian

15.John Banville, Long Form, and the Time of Late Modernism

Cóilín Parsons

Notes

Bibliography

Contributors

Index

Illustrations

3.1.Charlie Chaplin impersonators line up in Dublin

3.2.Title page, The Only Way

3.3.Military checkpoint, Mount Street Bridge, 1916

3.4.Ruins of the Coliseum Theatre, Henry Street, 1916

3.5.Count Plunkett speech, Butt Bridge

3.6.Publicity postcard for The Only Way

4.1.Cover, first edition of A Modern Daedalus

7.1.Mainspring mechanism, from Common Things Explained

8.1.James Joyce’s design for the label of the Aeolus gramophone discs

8.2.Gramophone disc label, with Joyce’s signature

8.3.Detail of back sleeve of 1971 Caedmon recording from James Joyce Reading

9.1.Radio Times feature on Denis Johnston

Acknowledgments

The editors of this book wish to thank the following for their help:

At Syracuse University Press: Deborah Manion and all the editorial staff; Kate Costello-Sullivan; and two anonymous readers.

For financial support: the Hall Center for the Humanities at the University of Kansas; the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Kansas; the Center for Research, Inc., at the University of Kansas; the Provost’s Office at Georgetown University; the English Department at Georgetown University; and the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University.

For editing support: Luke Brown, Jeanne Barker-Nunn, and Hannah Ekeh.

For archival materials and images: The Board of Trinity College, the University of Dublin; the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo; Harper-Collins Publishers; the Kenneth Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas; Ulster University, Coleraine; the Immediate Media Company; the National Gallery of Ireland; the National Library of Ireland; Michael and Rory Johnston; the BBC Written Archives Centre; the Special Collections Research Center, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University Carbondale; and the Archive and Special Collections Centre at the James Hardiman Library, National University of Ireland, Galway.

Introduction

Kathryn Conrad, Cóilín Parsons, and Julie McCormick Weng

Since W. B. Yeats made his infamous proclamation in 1890 that the man of science is too often a person who has exchanged his soul for a formula, the antiscientific and Luddite bent of Ireland’s Literary and Cultural Revivals has been taken as a given.¹ Coming from the self-appointed spokesperson of revivalism, Yeats’s rejection of the man of science established a tone and direction for twentieth-century Irish literature that appeared dismissive of emerging sciences and technologies, and this approach was adopted in much of the popular artistic production of the revival period. A few years later, in John Eglinton and Spiritual Art (1899), Yeats underscored his dismissal of hard science, issuing a call for Irish poets to create poetry not of physical science but of transcendental science—he appealed to writers to liberate the arts from ‘their age’ and from life and instead seek an exaltation of [their] senses, one found only in beauty and old faiths, myths, dreams. On this basis, he felt, the poet could transform into a seer who reveals great passions that are not in nature . . . ‘the beauty that is beyond the grave.’²

Yeats’s position reinvigorates the Arnoldian conviction that it is not in the outward and visible world of material life, that the Celtic genius of Wales or Ireland can at this day hope to count for much; it is in the inward world of thought, though Yeats recodes Arnold’s argument into an unabashed endorsement of the poet of great passions.³ Arnold’s view of Irish incompetence in practical matters is reinforced, then, by Yeats’s aesthetic philosophy, and it stands as an enduring stereotype that hinders a view of Ireland’s centrality to scientific and technological discoveries and debates. For all Yeats’s resistance, however, he was far from entirely skeptical of the world of science and technology; he nurtured, for example, an enthusiasm and talent for natural science as a youth. Although he drifted away from this attachment to naturalism, he cultivated a lifelong interest in questions of scientific epistemology, as Katherine Ebury shows in her contribution to this volume.⁴ Nevertheless, Yeats’s particular antimaterialist brand of literary revivalism is too often a primary lens through which Irish culture of the early twentieth century is characterized in scholarship and taught in the classroom today.

Such ambivalence about the place of science and technology in Irish culture, the contributors to Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism prove, is not the province only of revivalism but also of Irish modernism. This line of argument goes against received wisdom: while revivalists may have a reputation for being technophobic, modernists are often cast as embracing wholeheartedly the new sciences and technologies of the early twentieth century.⁵ The reality is, of course, more nuanced, and this volume joins a broad conversation in recent scholarship that aims to capture more accurately the messy entanglements of Irish literature and scientific and technological developments.⁶ We can find an example of these entanglements in the Aeolus episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), where we meet the ultimate voice of skepticism about the claims of science and technology, and about their capacity to underwrite human progress: Professor MacHugh. MacHugh admires not the Romans’ ability to build infrastructure (to instrumentalize learning), an expression of their cloacal obsession, but the Jews’ desire to build altars.⁷ His later homage to the Irish attachment to lost causes is a continuing reminder of the ethical place of failure in the face of the potential violence of progress and success, as he reminds his listeners that success for [the Irish] is the death of the intellect and of the imagination.⁸ MacHugh’s voice belongs to the world of revivalism, but his appearance in Ulysses gives him a place at the table of modernism, even if that place is hazily rendered. He is a sympathetic character who makes a compelling case, but his appearance in a chapter that is so mechanically and technologically exuberant produces a profoundly unstable image of the politics of scientific and technological modernity. As such, MacHugh stands as a fitting emblem for all of the writers whose work is analyzed in the pages of this volume: straddling a revivalist politics and a modernist moment, grappling with the cultural implications of science and technology, and questioning the logic of empire.

To write of science, technology, and Irish modernism is, almost by default, to make an implied argument about the relationship between the experience of empire and the aesthetics of modernism.⁹ This is thanks in no small part to the looming presence of empire in the practice of science in the nineteenth century. In Eve Patten’s survey of the history of colonial scientific control, she suggests that

the comparatively early professionalization of Irish scientists, resulting from systematic government funding for a series of scientific and technological ventures in Ireland, served to consolidate the association of science with manipulative British policy, while individual contributions from Irish sessions of the British Association for the Advancement of Science to subjects such as mapping or statistics were seen to underpin imperial development, the fruits of research being visibly digested by the Empire and not the nation.¹⁰

In addition, J. W. Foster argues that the Irish experience with colonial land management and applied science led to a resistance to a scientific worldview.¹¹ Certainly, texts such as Robert Kane’s The Industrial Resources of Ireland (1845) and the memoirs of the Ordnance Survey of Ireland focus on the country’s potential for industrial and economic development, a possibility also acknowledged by Bram Stoker in The Snake’s Pass (1890). Throughout the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, Irish science and technology were largely sponsored by or created in the service of the British empire, and they often provided legitimacy to the empire. We might therefore reasonably attribute any Irish resistance to the claims of science to the lack of evidence for any of their practical benefits being shared with the indigenous population.

Given that the empire was seen by the vast majority of the population of Ireland as an alien force, were science and technology then necessarily alien impositions on the Irish experience? Gyan Prakash, in his study of science in colonial India, describes the assumptions about modernity and the civilizing mission that patterned the practice of science in the British empire, writing that the British saw empirical sciences as universal knowledge, free from prejudice and passion and charged with the mission to disenchant the world of the ‘superstitious’ natives.¹² Such assumptions emerge at least in part from scientific exceptionalism, or the conviction that there is only one recognizable form of science.¹³ This is an insidious enough conviction even in London or Paris, but entirely ruinous elsewhere, where scientific and technological advancements, narrowly conceived along European lines of rationality, are seen as the only markers of progress. The effects of this exceptionalism are evident first in the dismissal and then in the quiet appropriation of indigenous knowledge systems throughout the colonized world—as when, for instance, indigenous knowledge is harnessed and monetized by Big Pharma, which we see happening today.

In Ireland, while Gaelic culture was in many ways instrumentalized in the Irish anticolonial struggle, indigenous scientific knowledge was not. For an example of this we need only look to Éamon de Valera’s establishment of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, an organization founded to promote the study of theoretical physics and Celtic studies, which Andrew Kalaidjian discusses in his contribution to this volume. De Valera’s move reveals an assumption that the future of knowledge in the postcolonial state would be underwritten by a mixture of local culture and imported science. Prakash diagnoses the deformations that result in newly independent states buying into scientific exceptionalism wholesale: Introduced as a code of alien power and domesticated as an element of elite nationalism, science has always been asked to accomplish a great deal—to authorize an immense leap into modernity, and anchor the entire edifice of modern culture, identity, politics, and economy.¹⁴ As decolonization movements seek to identify the newly emerging nation-state with modernity and progress, scientific achievement becomes the guarantor of success.¹⁵

The exceptionalist thinking that allows for the triumph of a particular form of knowledge is not simply a matter of antiquarian interest, as debates over what counts as scientific evidence have erupted in the public sphere over, for instance, the question of the human causes of climate change. While antiscientific and anti-intellectual claims that there is no evidence at all for climate change or its human causes are deeply problematic, banners and t-shirts that proclaim that Science is Real are symptoms of another troubling set of assumptions. The assertion that debate of any kind can be shut down by science enacts its own sort of illiberalism. The study of science, technology, and literature—and particularly Irish modernist literature—emerges from a particular space and time, and it offers a corrective reminder that science is also profoundly imaginative, deeply human, and unavoidably political.

The essays in this collection are arranged into five sections—Revival Dynamics, Machine Fever, Sounds Modern, Body Trouble, and Strange Experiments—which offer fresh interventions into key areas of debate in the field of modernist studies today, both in Ireland and elsewhere. These chapters capture not only the varied ways that Irish writers were plugged into the scientific and technological impulses and networks of the age, but also how those writers shaped modernist attitudes, aesthetics, and ideologies, and how they shaped the cultural and political forms in which they were enmeshed.

The collection’s opening section, Revival Dynamics, features chapters that explore the relationship between science, technology, and the Irish Literary Revival, examining a selection of revivalists who wrote in conscious opposition to Yeats’s disdain of the material world. Their expansive treatment of science and technology reveals the Revival’s intimate relationship with literary modernism and inhibits an easy separation between the two. This confluence between the Revival and modernism is supported in part by Irish artists who were amateur scientists themselves. Seán Hewitt’s chapter underscores this fact as he surveys a burgeoning interest during the period in the science of the natural world and considers the work of Emily Lawless, John Millington Synge, and Seumas O’Sullivan (James Starkey). All three were active participants in their fields of inquiry—Emily Lawless’s investigations, for instance, impressed Charles Darwin, who urged her to publish in the academic journal Nature. These writers’ scientific practice, Hewitt emphasizes, preceded their literary pursuits and informed their later creative writing. While John Eglinton (William Fitzpatrick Magee) was not a scientist himself, Julie McCormick Weng writes in her chapter that the essayist was recognized publicly as a keen observer and philosopher of the material world, who challenged Irish writers to render lived experiences of technologies in art. She concludes that Eglinton formed a renegade revivalism that, like later modernist movements such as Italian Futurism, reconfigured the relationship between technologies and literature, and between machines and artists.

While the material turn at the core of these chapters’ studies of science and technology sits at odds with Yeats, Hewitt suggests that a revivalist interest in materialism shares with Yeats a rejection of the Enlightenment effort to disenchant the material world. Indeed, this notion is the crux of Hewitt’s argument: that Lawless, Synge, and O’Sullivan composed texts that bridged science and spirit, placing the spiritual experience within, rather than beyond, physical nature. Luke Gibbons takes a different approach in his chapter, offering a historical study of media technologies, including film and photography, used during and after the 1916 Easter Rising, and he considers their interrelations with a range of transnational historical and literary texts. Through this array of media, he proposes a counternarrative of the Rising, declaring that it is an event belonging to a world illuminated by electric light as well as the Celtic Twilight. Drawing from the work of Walter Benjamin, Gibbons claims that Easter 1916 was an enchanted event, with photographs of the destroyed city featuring billboards that captured coming attractions never realized. These images froze the present and its possibilities while deferring the future; they expose a Rising that did not occur as imagined but was forced to engage alternative futures for its realization.

At the same time, the chapters in Revival Dynamics underscore the often occluded transgressive politics of the Revival. As Hewitt writes, Irish field clubs became hotbeds for navigating social and political issues, with Anglo-Irish naturalists in particular seeking in nature a new way to defend their diminishing influence and authority, and to burnish their nationalist credentials. Weng reveals that Eglinton’s cosmopolitan leanings provoked his turn to modern machinery, his belief that technological tales could counter what he saw as the Irish Revival’s dangerous fostering of cultural nationalism. In a different vein, Gibbons paints an irreverent picture of the Easter Rising as not a hallowed national rebellion but a Chaplinesque tragicomedy, with images of the Rising’s many sideshows cultivating a spin-off of modernism through their montage-like effects.

Machine Fever, the second section of the book, builds on the explorations of Revival Dynamics by focusing more explicitly on Irish modernist literary engagement with technology and tracing an arc from the late-1880s novelist Tom Greer, through Yeats and Joyce, to the 1930s writing of Elizabeth Bowen. This collection of chapters may appear, at first glance, to mark a shift from a protomodernism that shares a profound ambivalence toward technological innovation (Greer) to a late modernism that anticipates and celebrates such innovation (Bowen). But just as the chapters in Revival Dynamics mark a material turn in Revival literature that refuses a simplistic binary between material and spiritual, so too do the chapters that comprise Machine Fever suggest that writers are not neatly situated on one or another side of a strict divide—here, between the technophilic and technophobic. What Greer, Yeats, Joyce, and Bowen share is a sense of the significance of the relationship between the human and the technological as they explore how the machine shapes the modern world. The technologies examined in Machine Fever, like the archive of Jacques Derrida’s archive fever, are not merely additive artifacts, but, as these chapters suggest, are profoundly constitutive—of the human, of the social, and of Irish modernism itself. Machine fever captures the notion that we are simultaneously and paradoxically in need of, sick with, and burning with a passion for the technologies that shape our ways of being and knowing in the world.¹⁶

The particular exigencies of empire at the end of the nineteenth century informed not only scientific exploration, but also the various technologies that sustained and advanced the imperial project. As Kathryn Conrad’s exploration of Tom Greer’s novel A Modern Daedalus (1885) reveals, even when individual technologies were developed and used in opposition to that project—for instance, the submarine, invented by Irish American scientist John Holland for American Fenians—they became part of a larger networked assemblage, a war machine, that crossed national boundaries and shaped the humans caught within it. This war machine, as Greer’s work reveals, extends beyond the more obvious technologies of warfare and includes media technologies and their networks—larger assemblages, comprised of weapons and words, that implicate the work of the artist in the work of empire. Joyce’s response, Conrad argues, is to acknowledge these networked assemblages while seeking actively to use them rather than be manipulated by them.

Joyce’s recognition of the need for the artist to make deliberate and creative use of technologically mediated assemblages is echoed in Gregory Castle’s exploration of Yeats’s Cuchulain plays. Castle’s essay reveals a writer conscious of the material constraints of theater and actively using those limits to shape a new modernist form. While he acknowledges that Yeats resists the materialism and mechanism of his time, Castle offers a more nuanced view of Yeats’s creative approach, arguing that he embraces artifice as a means toward a new modernist aesthetic. Yeats, Castle suggests, rejects a slavish devotion to a backward-looking cultural authenticity, instead reimagining the authentic as the result of a creative, active, and machinic process, in the sense meant by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. In doing so, Yeats forges a new pathway through technological modernity.

Elizabeth Bowen’s work both takes us beyond national boundaries and reinforces the notion of an Irish modernism forged in the crucible of the imperial project and in the conflicts that emerged from it. Focusing his attention on To the North (1932), Simon During insists that Bowen’s novel does not fall into the critique of technology genre, as Maud Ellmann has argued. Indeed, according to During, Bowen’s work emerged at the particular moment when literary criticism was inventing modernism, and her brand of modernism, typified by Emmeline’s (ultimately fatal) embrace of new transportation technologies, did not fit comfortably into those new categories and narratives. During’s rendering of Bowen’s engagement with technology contrasts with that of Greer, whose novel sounds a warning even as it acknowledges the ways in which humans are inevitably embedded in, and shaped by, the networks of their time. But both of these writers, ultimately, leave us with a sense of an Irish modernism that is aware of and entangled in a networked, transnational, technologized modernity, and that puts that awareness to creative use.

Machine Fever then echoes Christopher Morash’s claim, in his influential examination of Irish media, that the defining feature of Irish culture in the early 21st century is . . . a deeply engrained mediated connectedness between Ireland and the rest of the world.¹⁷ That mediated connectedness is not limited to traditional media or communication technologies, however; it is facilitated by machines more broadly. Nor does the phenomenon Morash is describing emerge from nowhere at the beginning of the twenty-first century: media technologies played an important role in shaping the landscape of Irish modernism, as exciting recent work by Emily Bloom, Damien Keane, and others has shown.¹⁸ Following their lead, the Sounds Modern section of this book attends to technologies of sound recording and transmission and the cultural phenomena they help to enact, speaking to a lively ongoing conversation about media in the broader field of modernist studies.¹⁹

The gramophone is one such technology with a notable presence in Irish modernism, appearing in several texts in the 1920s, including Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock (1924), and Bowen’s The Last September (1929). While gramophone recordings, as Keane notes in his chapter, were on their way to being superseded in popularity by the superior aural presence of radio broadcasting and its attendant technologies when Joyce recorded a selection from Aeolus in 1924, the gramophone itself was by this point ubiquitous in Irish homes. As Susanne Cammack writes in her chapter, the gramophone, whose inner mechanisms comprised finely calibrated springs and tensions, could serve as a timely metaphor for a country that had most recently emerged from the Civil War and almost a decade of armed conflict. Lennox Robinson’s play Portrait (1925), she argues, not only offers a dramatization of the stresses and trauma of a postwar generation but also enacts the modernist fascination with the intertwined relationship between mind, culture, and machine.

By drawing attention to the gramophone itself, Cammack’s analysis of Portrait endorses Marshall McLuhan’s claim that the medium is the message, and, indeed, the authors and actors examined in this section each focus on the nature of their chosen media in order to explore the implications of their use.²⁰ Keane’s detailed and archivally rich chapter examines the history of Joyce’s 1924 gramophone recording of a section of Aeolus, showcasing what Keane describes as a drama about authority, mediation, and access. The commercial success of vinyl LPs brought with it a rise in the popularity of authorial recordings, with different record companies seeking to produce different effects through audio equipment. Joyce’s recording, made before such equipment was available, was situated oddly in this new environment; fresh attempts to frame the value of this recording reveal shifting ways of thinking about meaning, not only of the recording itself but of Joyce’s written work and its relationship to audience(s).

This recording history reveals the extent to which modernist writers were engaged in conversations about shifting understandings of the place and value of communication technologies beyond the printed page. Jeremy Lakoff argues that Denis Johnston’s radio plays also offer a drama of mediation, to echo Keane’s phrase, by foregrounding broadcasting technology as a thematic of the plays. In doing so, Lakoff argues, Johnston’s radio dramas resist the ethos of immediacy associated with wartime journalism. And just as Keane argues that the history of the Aeolus recording shows us a tension between the elite and the middlebrow in modernist culture, so too does Lakoff reveal that the modernist experimental process, as Johnston’s work makes clear, resides as much in the broadcasting house as it does in the writer’s study. Ultimately, these chapters highlight the importance of individual media and show, to borrow Lakoff’s words, how the material means of dissemination condition artistic expression and reveal a broader vision of the modernist creative process itself.

In the fourth section of the book, Body Trouble, our contributors situate medical, eugenic, and evolutionary discourses of the body within the Irish modernist landscape, as scholars such as Maren Tova Linett and Marius Turda have done with regard to transatlantic and European modernism more broadly.²¹ Modernism is inescapably concerned with the body, Tim Armstrong has argued, in the way that it grapples with the tension between the notion of the body as a complex of biomechanical systems and the body as a site of crisis, perpetually unstable and at risk of regression.²² This tension informs Irish modernism’s troubled relationship with the body as a locus of control as well as creativity. Certainly, the abject Irish body—the diseased body of the Famine and the corrupted body of the allegedly mad or alcoholic Irish peasant of nineteenth-century discourse—was one of the central concerns of nineteenth-century science and governmentality. In his chapter, Enda Duffy argues that Joyce’s refiguring of the heart from sentimental metaphor to clinical reality in his fiction emerges directly and deliberately from the nineteenth-century Irish medical tradition. The turn to observation of the processes of the body initiates a radical turn in the literary representation of subjectivity that may have been an Irish innovation, he suggests, emerging out of the post-Famine burst of medical research and the public health apparatus the Famine engendered.

Duffy’s essay, like many in this volume, gestures toward the larger material and discursive inheritance of colonialism, which is also the foundation of Alan Graham’s argument in his chapter: that eugenic thought, so long reduced to an association with the Yeats of the 1930s, underwrote much of the Irish literary and cultural rhetoric at the turn of the century. Writing of Douglas Hyde’s message of cultural self-sufficiency in the 1890s, which resonates to various effects in the writings of Synge, AE, and Joyce, Graham concludes that it came to bear as well on public policies of the Irish Free State. Latent within that rhetoric were potent narratives of Irish identity that implicated the effort to deanglicize Ireland with the desire to locate within the Irish body a kind of superiority that could only be recognized if this body was part of a biologically esteemed race. The perception of a decay of culture and language coincided with the urge to reimagine the Irish body as vigorous—for it was felt that the alternative choice, submitting to the decay of language, would signal the impending extinction of Irish ethnicity itself.

Decay and extinction are more frequently Beckettian than revivalist concerns, and it is to Samuel Beckett that Body Trouble turns next. Beckett’s own attention to the body has become a fixture of scholarship about the writer, with studies ranging from Yoshiki Tajiri’s Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Body (2006) to Ulrika Maude’s Beckett, Technology, and the Body (2011). These works have emphasized Beckett’s attention to, if not obsession with, the decaying, afflicted, and technologically enhanced body. Chris Ackerley’s argument, then, comes as a surprise. He reveals in his chapter that for all Beckett’s attention to the body, he disregarded popular trends in the biological sciences. Why, this essay asks, does a writer as scientifically literate as Beckett ignore the apex of the modern biological canon—Darwin’s theory of evolution, Mendel’s laws of inheritance, and Watson’s and Crick’s identification of the double-helix configuration of DNA? Ackerley proposes an answer with strikingly modernist implications, suggesting that Beckett hearkens back to older scientific models to allow for a longer, more comprehensive view of natural development. Beckett’s interest in other scientific approaches arguably displaces the contemporary ethnonationalist focus on the racialized body.

Beckett’s willingness to borrow the structure of an outdated theory like Ernst Haeckel’s, or to look for inspiration in Aristotelian models rather than contemporary physics, marks a larger Irish modernist challenge to the temporalities of modernism and modernity.²³ The final section of this book, Strange Experiments, gathers together three essays that also trouble the temporal boundaries of Irish modernism, bringing into view a field that stretches beyond World War II, the long-held, arbitrary (though not entirely unwarranted) historical moment of modernism’s decline. If Ireland did not participate in the war, declaring a suspended state of emergency instead, the narrative of a cataclysmic coincidence of total war and the end of a particular vein of experimental literary production finds its limit.²⁴ Strange Experiments explores what modernism looks like in the wake of this emergency, in a world in which literature and theater are haunted by what had come before. With essays on the shadows that Yeats’s drama shed on Beckett’s work; Flann O’Brien and the search for uncertainty; and John Banville’s long spaces of time, this section of the book wagers that modernism experienced not just an afterlife in the latter half of the twentieth century, but lives on, in strange experiments that expand and strain the moment of modernism.²⁵ What Joe Cleary has called a remarkable but still scarcely conceptualized late Irish modernism comes into focus in these three chapters through the prism of science.²⁶

The argument for a peculiarly Irish late modernism—explicitly marked in Andrew Kalaidjian’s and Cóilín Parsons’s chapters but also present in Katherine Ebury’s contribution—rests in large part on the principal conviction of this book: that reading Irish modernism’s interest in science and technology yields profound new insights. All three chapters in this section prove that the question of the time of modernism needs to be posed not just historically but also formally and philosophically. The question is not simply When was modernism? but How did and do Irish modernists think about the very idea of time and historical location? The expanding time of Irish modernism is not an anomaly or a hangover; it is, rather, a defining feature of any cultural project that takes an active interest in the new science that parses the atom and finds that the universe is expanding.²⁷

Ebury, drawing on a deep reading of advances in the science of light in the early twentieth century, proves that Yeats was very much interested in these discoveries. This science, she argues, finds its way onto the stage in the form of Yeats’s experiments with lighting to signal the ghostly, an innovation that lives on in Beckett’s occult imaginings. While Yeats’s and Beckett’s haunted stages disrupt the physical presence of the stage and dislodge any easy idea of a unity of time in the theater, other experiments were taking shape in Ireland that would further unsettle the parameters of the here and now. For Kalaidjian, modernism is defined by an interest in revolution itself, a restless and continual remaking of art and culture; it is marked by both stasis and dynamism, with an unchanging commitment to change. Late modernists—and, in this case, Erwin Schrödinger and Flann O’Brien—are wary of the certainties of an earlier revolutionary age, constructing images of a world that is known rather by its uncertainties. Reaching back to before the new sciences of relativity and quantum theory that Ebury and Kalaidjian address, Parsons’s essay approaches the latest of our modernist writers, John Banville, following him back to the Copernican revolution. Banville’s science tetralogy, Parsons argues, is a long-form experiment, played out over a decade of writing and hundreds of years of historical setting, that seeks to reset the clocks of modernity and modernism, recognizing their jagged and overlapping temporalities. Modernism is not dead for Banville, nor it is especially revitalized; it is recontextualized within a longer and deeper planetary history that eliminates the times and spaces through which we have previously thought it. Late modernism’s strange experiments are both lingering effects and new horizons.

This book is being published at a time of growing interest in the question of the complex entanglement of science, technology, and modernist artistic production, an interest that is driven not only by external pressures to marry the humanities to STEM fields, but also internally, by the insights of new materialism and by an ever-widening sense of the interdisciplinary reach of the phenomenon known as modernism.²⁸ The field has moved substantially beyond early questions of how scientific knowledge and technological advances influence literature by providing metaphors and content, toward thinking about the coemergence of scientific ideas and literary forms, as well as investigating the artistic elements of scientific thought and writing itself.²⁹ After the initial blush of influence studies in the field of science and literature, critical attention began to turn to the idea that there was not, in fact, a one-way flow of information and ideas from science to art, with science providing raw material for artistic work. This approach is perhaps best explained by Gillian Beer, in her magisterial work on Darwin’s profoundly humanistic writing: "The traffic [between science and literature] was two-way. Because of the shared discourse not only ideas but metaphors, myths, and narrative patterns could move rapidly and freely to and fro between scientists and non-scientists, though not without frequent creative misprision."³⁰ Literature provides no mere embellishment for the hard knowledge of science and technology: writers offer a wealth of words, images, and ideas with which to imagine and describe the world. Though highly visible in Darwin’s amateur-scientific literary peregrinations, this two-way street has become occluded as scientific metaphors have hardened into structures, and the figurative origins of explanatory structures like the evolutionary tree (to take just one example) get lost.

Mark Morrison has recently offered a formulation of the relationship between modernism and science that avoids the trap of this debate over one-way or two-way influence. Modernism, he writes, is not the domain of writers, dancers, filmmakers, visual artists, or architects alone. Many in the world of science and technology self-consciously understood themselves to be participating in a present intensely marked by its modernity and modernization . . . so much so that we might speak of a ‘scientific and technological modernism.’³¹ The implication is that scholars need to learn to recognize the changing but related shape of ideas as they slip into and through various discursive fields. The sharp delineation of fields that even the title of this present volume suggests has served to misdirect our attention from the mutually constitutive emergence of science/technology/literature as a variegated but interdependent field of knowledge. While all who engage in this self-conscious refashioning of the world understand science and technology as a feature of the modern world, and in many ways key to its newness . . . the terms in which they understood their own technological and scientific modernity varied greatly.³² Recognizing and doing justice to the myriad terms in which scientists and writers understand their own modernity calls for historically and geographically situated scholarship that grasps the particulars of a given place and time. Extending Morrison’s argument, we might say that the salient distinctions to be made are not between disciplines of knowledge, but between the historical and geographical locations of those disciplines.

Delineating these locations is precisely the work of Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism. The authors of the chapters in this book take as a given the fact that science, technology, and modernist literature are intimate strangers. What the chapters explore in detail is how this intimacy is played out against the background of a particular set of historical processes that took place in Ireland in the course of the twentieth century. Yeats’s proclamation about the man of science is demonstrably different from C. P. Snow’s famous lamentation about the two cultures, the sciences and the humanities, for it emerges from an entirely different set of concerns. It is also disingenuous, coming from a poet who read widely and at times deeply in scientific writing. The man of science may not be Irish and is as likely not to be a man, but Yeats’s declaration is decidedly Irish, carrying with it all the complications associated with that identity at the turn of the last century. Many of the writers discussed here lived and wrote outside of Ireland, some famously choosing exile over remaining at home. Theirs are locations that straddled Ireland, Britain, and continental Europe—they lived in and wrote about an in-between world in which boundaries of both disciplines and identities were not meaningless, but were constantly being fractured and re-formed. It is the ambition of the chapters in this volume to lay bare precisely those fractures and formations.

PART ONE Revival Dynamics

1

Natural History and the Irish Revival

Seán Hewitt

By the end of the nineteenth century, the craze for amateur naturalist study had taken a firm foothold in Dublin, Belfast, Cork and a number of smaller Irish towns and cities.¹ Throughout Britain and Ireland, up to one hundred thousand people were engaged in entomology, botany, marine biology, ornithology, and lepidopterology through organized scientific societies.² The main field clubs in Ireland were formed later than their counterparts in Britain, with the Dublin Naturalists’ Field Club (DNFC) being established in 1886.³ Hence, the popularity of amateur naturalism coincided roughly with the more general Cultural and Literary Revivals in Ireland. As Juliana Adelman has noted, the memberships of scientific and literary societies in Ireland during the latter half of the nineteenth century often overlapped.⁴ By the time of the Literary Revival, which sought in various ways to counter the Enlightenment’s apparent disenchantment of the world, and to assert the Irish as a race equipped to oppose the spread of Anglicized modernity, there were a number of writers engaged in naturalist study who attempted to harness the discourses of natural science into narratives of spiritual resurgence.⁵ In doing so, these writers created a form of positivist spiritualism that moved beyond the Romantic search for the sublime (and beyond the dominant Symbolist-inspired aesthetic of the early Revival, which emphasized physical nature as a symbol) and into a number of more modern formulations, which foregrounded the materiality of the natural world, and the spiritual potential of close, detailed scientific attention.

Natural history was fundamental to many revivalist works, and an engagement with the burgeoning culture of natural science in late nineteenth-century Ireland pre-dated many writers’ conversions to literature. Emily Lawless (1845–1914), Charlotte Grace O’Brien (1845–1909), W. B. Yeats (1865–1939), Alice Milligan (1865–1953), J. M. Synge (1871–1909), Seumas O’Sullivan (born James Starkey) (1879–1958), and, later, Sean O’Casey (1880–1964), to name but a few, were (to different degrees) naturalists before they were writers. George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) also attended the Woolhope Naturalists’ Field Club in the early years of the twentieth century. Others who chose natural science and natural theology as their careers also moonlighted as poets: J. J. Murphy (1827–94) and Thomas Corry (1860–1883) are examples. Both as a social and an intellectual pursuit, natural history intersected with nationalism, class politics, and religious contention. As Enda Leaney has argued, in nineteenth-century Ireland the Anglo-Irish minority looked to their hegemony in science for an intellectual defence of their increasingly precarious political status.⁶ Far from providing neutral ground, the field clubs of turn-of-the-century Ireland were fraught with political implication. In the literary works of revivalist naturalists, natural history is intertwined with, and reinterpreted to serve, both aesthetic and political ends.

This chapter will focus on three principal writers: Emily