Salut

Canadian Journal of Irish StudiesCanadian Association of Irish Studies

SalutAuthor(s): Jerry WHITESource: The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Spring / Printemps 2009), pp.10-16Published by: Canadian Journal of Irish StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27805194 .

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Jerry WHITE

Salut

This will be my last issue as editor of the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies / Revue canadienne d'?tudes irlandaises. It has been an interesting five years, full

of misplaced submissions, proofreading emergencies, and

knock-down, drag-out, transatlantic disputes over adjectives. I am grateful for the experience, to say the least.

I thus want to take this final chance to assert my editor's

prerogative and offer some thoughts about the broad

contours of Irish Studies. This being the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, I have sought to navigate two intertwined but nevertheless discrete fields during these five years: Irish Studies as it is practiced in Canada, and Canadian Irish Studies. Both face similar issues: an at-times-overwhelming focus on literary and historical studies, the complex push and pull between local and international imperatives, and

the elephant in the room that is language. They do not face these issues in quite the same way, although the two fields can

learn from one another as they collectively move forward.

I'll take them each in their turn.

Irish Studies in Canada (among other places) Irish Studies has, over the course of the last thirty

years, clearly undergone enormous changes. These parallel the enormous changes in Irish culture at large: the rise of

globalisation, the very different (although by no means

resolved) situation in Northern Ireland, the very different

(although, again, by no means resolved) relationship between Church and State, and the utter transformation of the

Irish economy from a semi-underdeveloped one to what

was for a while one of the most dynamic in Europe. Irish Studies since the 1980s has indeed seen a greater interest

in the ways that Irish culture has been exported and has

integrated foreign influences (Luke Gibbons's work has been especially important on that front), a more nuanced

view of nationalism's role in determining the future of the

island (Richard Kearney's Postnationalist Ireland strikes me as

the signature text there), and an overwhelming sense that

Irish culture is defined by a flexible, outward-looking sense

of innovation (manifested quite vividly by the boom in Irish cinema and in critical studies of that cinema). The field has

proven itself to be flexible, able to change with the times. This is surely to the credit of its practitioners, particularly its younger practitioners.

But I am left with the distinct feeling that there is much left to do. Moreover, as I strive to make such a "to do" list

for Irish Studies, I find I have been long since beaten to the

punch. For there are two excellent manifestoes for Irish

Studies, both now decades-old, which offered tremendous

opportunities to revitalise the field in admirably progressive

10 WHITE Salut

ways: one by Desmond Fennell written in 1976 (although not published until 1985, in his book Beyond Nationalism), and one by Declan Kiberd written in 1979 (and recently republished in his 2005 collection The Ins h Writer and the

World, which is the version I'll refer to here). But as I look around contemporary Irish Studies, I find that their

eminently sensible suggestions for the field - having to do with internationalism, with interdisciplinary approaches, and

with language - have by and large been ignored. Perhaps this

is simply the invisible hand of scholarly consensus deeming well-meaning reformers to be impractical, or somehow

missing the true imperatives of Irish Studies. But I am not

convinced. I think now is the time to think again about what Irish Studies really needs to pay attention to.

FennelTs schema for Irish Studies is definitely the lesser known of the two, and this is in no way surprising. Indeed, as I type this I imagine the backs of around 2/3 of my readers simultaneously going up. Fennell is a controversial

figure in Ireland, well-known for his polemical writing on cultural liberalism, nationalism, and what he calls Postwestern

Civilisation (which he sees as beginning following the

bombing of Hiroshima and the widespread justification of that bombing1). He has been unsparingly critical in his

writings, and has been particularly hard on the demographic so lovingly known as Dublin 4. Perhaps it is this specific hostility that accounts for the widespread dislike of his work

(a dislike that is often coupled, in my limited experience, with an unfamiliarity with the variety of his writing), although his 1991 pamphlet criticising Seamus Heaney as a good but massively overrated poet didn't exactly win friends or

influence people.21 believe strongly that Fennell deserves to

be taken seriously, that he offers critiques of Irish, European and global culture from which contemporary intellectuals

can benefit greatly (without, I hope it goes without saying, necessarily agreeing with all of them). I am, in short, in full

agreement with Declan Kiberd's assessment of him, which is

reprinted as a cover blurb on FennelTs 2003 collection Cutting to the Point "He is in the deepest sense a true radical."

Fennell was invited, in 1976, to propose an Irish Studies course for what was then University College Galway. His

document, which he reprints in full in Beyond Nationalism, opens as follows:

Subject-matter of the Irish Studies course:

The island of Ireland in the context of Western Europe and

the Northern hemisphere. The Irish people, their life and works, at home and abroad, especially

since the seventeenth century and with particular reference to:

(a) the achievements of Irish men and women in the arts, physical sciences,3 thought and scholarship, technology, politics, secular and



ecclesiastical administration, industry and commerce, agriculture, education, missionary enterprise, and moral endeavour generally;

(b) the relationships between Irish life, European life, and the world

in general; (c) the relationships between the various elements, native and derived,

which make up Irish cultural identity today;

(d) Connacht

There is a case for describing the course as "Modern Irish Studies."

(236)

This schema has dated a bit, but not tremendously. All that

really bristles here to my eyes is the desire to situate Ireland in the northern hemisphere without mention of connections to

the southern, an exclusion that is also internally inconsistent

given Fennell's also slightly dated desire to pay close attention to missionary enterprise. But as objections go, this is relatively

small beer, especially given that this was, in effect, a working document.

I also think that Fennell's schema remains relevant

because of the way that it anticipates contemporary

obsessions such as globalism, localism, and interdisdplinarity. The global/local tension is very much explicit in "(d) Connacht," which he argues is important as a case-study

because "Most of the elements and relationships of the all

Ireland picture will be found again in Connacht, but in a 'mix'

peculiar to the province" (239). A comparable case could be made for Ulster, Leinster or Munster; the point here is not

that Connacht has some sort of pride of place in Ireland,

but that local details of a specific area are indispensible for a full understanding of any larger state or nation. The

combination of the insistence on the local with attention

to "the relationships between Irish life, European life, and the world in general" clearly anticipates crucial elements of

Irish cultural studies such as regionalism, globalisation, and

the place of Ireland in the EU. Furthermore Fennell makes

the matter of interdisciplinarity explicit in (a), which is a roll

call of subject matter which remains more or less absent

from most of contemporary Irish Studies, both at the level

of course offerings and scholarly publication. I consider my own work at this journal to be an illustrative case; I have

not published a

single article on technology, administration,

commerce, or agriculture. During my time as editor we have

published very little on education (I find only one article on 19th- and 20th-century schools in CJIS/RC?I 30:1, an

issue on the ̂̂ -century guest-edited by Julia Wright), and

very little on governance or policy issues (CJIS/RCEI 30:2, an issue on Dublin guest-edited by Kieran Bonner, was

the exception that proved the rule). Suffice it to say that this was not because we were turning away a lot of article

submissions or proposals for special issues on topics such as

the rise of Ireland as a high-tech capital, the administrative

relationship between the EU and the Republic of Ireland, or

the paradoxes of Irish post-colonialism and its strong history

of missionary work. These topics, all derived from Fennell's

document, are of undeniably contemporary interest, and they

have been basically absent from our pages. No doubt other

venues have done better, but I do not think that CJIS/RCEI has been somehow freakish in our continued emphasis (not

totalising, but undeniably present) on a relatively narrow set

of historical and literary concerns. This is, to say the least,

at odds with the much more generous view of Irish Studies

that Fennell is putting forward here.

Declan Kiberd's manifesto "Writers in Quarantine? The

Case for Irish Studies" is possessed of just as generous a

spirit. Originally written for The Crane Bagin 1979, it came on

the heels of Kiberd's first book Synge and the Irish Language, and it shares a lot of the same concerns. The article's central

argument is basically that critical work which recognises the linguistic duality that defines so much of Irish culture

generally "is not encouraged by a system which ignores the

fact that writers of Irish and English Uve on the same small island and share the same experiences" (54). His argument

is, fundamentally, a Hterary-hnguistic one, and constitutes a

call for greater awareness of the reality of the Irish language as part of Irish literature. Kiberd argued, in essence, that an

ability to deal with this duality was indispensible for what he calls "a fully comprehensive course in Irish Studies,"

lamenting the fact that "Most Irish teachers and critics today are still caught in the pretence that they are the heirs to one

narrow tradition; while their creative writers have shown

them over and over again that their inheritance is wider than

that" (68). This sense of the Irish literary inheritance as wide, as rich, is the defining ethic of the article. Kiberd understands that consideration of Irish Studies as some sort of subsidiary

of English Studies is fundamentally incomplete; the tradition is a lot more interesting than that, and it is up to Irish Studies to take full advantage of the possibilities that this tradition entails. Kiberd's tone is also sharper in places. He writes

towards the end of the essay that:

As far back as 1970 during a symposium at Trinity College Dublin

Sean Lucy remarked with some gusto that he 'would take no student

of Anglo-Irish literature seriously unless that student were bilingual' - but the professors who applauded this comment most loudly have continued to appoint to lectureships those who are not. Those

students who tried in their graduate work to vindicate the logic of Sean Lucy's argument have found the doors of Irish academe

slammed in their face.

(68; he repeats that first sentence nearly verbatim as the first sentence

of Synge and the Irish Language).

This might sound like Kiberd hoped to impose a civil

service-esque set of exams for Irish Studies professors

(who, lacking a sufficient publication record, could perhaps fall back on a career in An Garda S?och?na). This is not

really what he is after. Indeed, these sorts of counter

arguments have been headed off very neatiy by P?draig O

Siadhail, the recendy-elected President of our parent group,

the Canadian Association for Irish Studies/Association

canadienne d'?tudes irlandaises. Addressing Library and

Archive Canada's 2006 Irish Studies Symposium, he sounded

positively Kiberd-esque when he proposed the following:

Let us put an end to the dreadful situation that blights modern

scholarship - for example, so-called "in depth" studies of the modern

Irish novel that deal solely with material in English and blithely ignore

Irish-language novels, or shoddy articles that treat translations of

contemporary Irish-language poetry as if they are originals.... This

is not about "compulsory Irish," that bugbear for so many Irish

people, or language revival. This is not about whether Ireland is a truly bilingual society, or how many people speak more than the

c?pla focal (the obligatory "few words" in Irish) frequently associated

with politicians and public occasions. It is merely acknowledging that

there are historical sources and a contemporary literature in Irish ?

material that won't go away just for our convenience. Rather than

taking the easy route and ignoring this material and writing it out of

CJIS/RC?I 35:1 11



the narrative - as has occurred so often in the past, and continues to occur today

? or relying on the happenstance that is translation, the more challenging and productive response would be to engage with

this material and incorporate it within the ambit of Irish Studies.

(3)

The perspective shared by O Siadhail and Kiberd is, as

you can see here, resolutely pragmatic. The Irish language

exists, simple as that; it may be a hassle to learn, but it

exists nevertheless. It is only intuitive that an Irish Studies

worthy of the name would not collectively ignore that fact.

Indeed, the critic who both Kiberd and O Siadhail echo most strongly in their calls for a revitalised Irish Studies is

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who, in her call for a revitalised

Comparative Literature that was her 2000 Wellek Library Lectures, stated bluntly that "There are a few hegemonic

European languages and innumerable Southern Hemisphere

languages. The only principled answer to that is: 'too bad'"

(10). Kiberd's schema is linked to Fennell's by a shared sense

of internationalism, an internationalism that is (like that of

Hubert Butler, subject of Billy Gray's essay on pp.61-70 of this issue) explicitly European-led. "All over Europe the borders between national literatures are rapidly disappearing, and this is especially true of the fake border between Irish and English," Kiberd writes in a more optimistic idiom, "a

division which was never recognised by our finest writers but

which is still observed and reinforced in every classroom on

the island" (67). Thirty years have passed since he wrote that, and certainly the situation has improved. This division is not

observed and reinforced, for instance, in the Irish Studies

programme at National University of Ireland / Galway, which integrates English- and Irish-language material quite

tightly. Notre Dame's Department of Irish Language and

Literature has a comparably integrated focus. The Irish

Studies programme at Saint Mary's University requires all

of its majors to take two years of the Irish language. But

I think that the majority of contemporary practitioners of Irish Studies (in Canada as elsewhere) looking at Kiberd's manifesto (written thirty years ago) or O Siadhail's critique (written three years ago) would experience

a moment of

recognition. That moment would be just as profound, I suspect, as the moment of non-recognition that the

majority of contemporary practitioners of Irish Studies

would likely experience when they read Fennell's call for an

interdisciplinary approach wide enough to accommodate

Irish participation in "arts, physical sciences, thought and

scholarship, technology, politics, secular and ecclesiastical

administration, industry and commerce, agriculture,

education, missionary enterprise, and moral endeavour

generally." Irish Studies has gone off in different directions.

This is fine. But Fennell and Kiberd's manifestoes posed very basic questions that these different directions have not, as

of yet, fully addressed.

12 WHITE Salut

Canadian Irish Studies (mostly in Canada, but elsewhere too) These manifestoes implicitly pose questions for the

smaller field that is Canadian Irish Studies. This is an

emerging field, and thus it's in no way surprising that its

expectations, its engagements, are still being worked out. At

this relatively early stage of development, then, I think that it would be very useful to try to take some of Fennell and

Kiberd's broad concerns to heart. These are not applicable

in the same way as they are to Irish Studies at large, but some

of the broad-strokes issues remain important for work on

the Canadian-Irish interplay: regionalism, internationalism,

interdisciplinarity, and language. Fennell has had quite a bit to say on regionalism

generally, and he saw such an approach as potentially central

to a revitalised Irish Studies. Again in Beyond Nationalism, we find him recalling his days teaching at UCG:

In the course of that year [1976], I took part in a seminar on the Celtic countries in Rennes, Brittany, and while there visited the headquarters of a body called the Conference of Maritime Peripheral Regions.... This Conference - which is simply a biennial conference of maritime

regions stretching from Sicily and Northern Portugal to northern

Norway ?

gave me the idea of an institute, located in Ireland, for the

interdisciplinary study of European peripheral regions. (183)

This desire to internationalise Irish Studies via smaller and peripheral countries rather than via comparisons with

Britain was part of Fennell's longstanding critique of Irish intellectuals' tendency towards overly deferential views of

British cultural and intellectual trends. As I said earlier,

Fennell's internationalism is decidedly European-led, but it

is a certain kind of Europe that interests him. He goes on

to lament that:

I got the impression that these members of the Irish 'Euro' establishment were somewhat horrified at the notion of Ireland

associating with, and providing a studies-centre for, all that peripheral and subversive riff-raff from Apulia and Corsica to Galicia, Wales, and the Scottish Highlands and Islands. Our Irish 'Europeans' wanted

desperately to feel part of, the central circle of responsible, respectable, decision-making 'Europeans'

- like the English and the French.

(183-4)

This is, in my less charitable moments, close to the way I

feel about the relationship that most Canadian intellectuals

and political elites have with the United States (and I say this both as a Canadian citizen and as a native son of

Philadelphia, birthplace of the nation). I long for a Canadian

Studies, an approach to Canadian culture, which abandons

the obsession (an understandable obsession, but still an

avoidable one) with the culture of the elephant next to which we slumber. Such a renewed Canadian Studies would more

closely integrate not only the relationships that we have

with Mexico or Central America, but also our relationship with other "small countries" or more peripheral states.

These could include the country with whom we signed,

along with France, a joint statement on the role of culture

in international trade agreements in 2003: South Korea. It

could include another society comprised mostly of recent

immigrants with a painful history and an uncertain future

with its indigenous population: Israel. And it could include a fellow constitutionally bi-lingual state whose cultural



and political evolution has strong echoes in both Quebec and Newfoundland and whose population has played an enormous role in Canada's cultural and political development

generally: the Republic of Ireland. One of the possibilities that Canadian Irish Studies offers is to reconnect Canada

not only with the equivalents of Corsica or Galicia (although there is surely good work to be done on that front as well), but to renew its sense of international belonging. Canadian

Irish Studies is a lens through which to see Canada and Ireland that certainly does not exclude British or American

influences, but rather shows how genuinely composite most

contemporary culture really is.

Furthermore, Canada has within its borders a number

of cultures - both geographically discrete and discontiguous - which have important connections to Irish culture. The

geographically discontigous culture to which I refer is of course Aboriginal Canada, whose history of colonial

dispossession and language near-death accompanied by revitalisation attempts should sound very familiar to students

of Irish history. Little sustained work has been done here,

although John Wilson Foster (recently retired from the

English department of the University of British Columbia) hinted at the potential for such a synthesis of concerns. He

was inspired by my fellow-Albertan George Melnyk's seminal 1981 book Radical Regionalism, which, nearly 30 years before

John Ralston Saul's widely-quoted assertion that that "We are

a M?tis civilization" (the opening words of his 2009 book A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada), put forward the thesis that it was Louis Riel's heirs who held the key to a

renewed understanding of Canadian culture. "Their being both newcomers and natives in extraction," Foster wrote of

Riel and his comrades in the 1885 North-West Rebellion, "one is tempted to see a 1798 parallel" (294). He goes on to say, in a 1989 essay he also titled "Radical Regionalism," the following:

"M?tis" is an old French word meaning "mixed." M?tissage - or

race mixture - has gone on in Ulster as long as it has in Canada, but according to [A.T.Q.] Stewart, it was the Reformation that

prevented the assimilation of the Scots in Ireland, forcing mixed

progeny to belong culturally to one side or the other.... Ulster's is a

cultural problem, then, not a racial one. So, too, as Melnyk sees it, is

the problem of the Canadian West, since the M?tis simply function as a metaphor for him. He wishes to see a synthesis of indigenous cultures that would eventually dismantle what he terms "the politics of otherness" which of course is what is practiced in Northern

Ireland.

(295)

Students of Irish history are obliged to point out, as Foster does in this essay, that these are not the same stories, and

that as with all good comparative work, the differences can

be as enlightening as the similarities. Much the same is true

of Canada's other two "distinct societies," Quebec and

Newfoundland, both of which have fascinating connections

with Ireland in strict historical terms (since these two places saw such enormous waves of Irish immigration in the 18th

and 19th centuries) and in comparative terms as well. And

again, the differences are as important as the similarities.

This is the point that Danine Farquharson made so clearly in her introduction to the special issue of CJIS/RCEI (34:2) she edited on Ireland and Newfoundland; she titled that introduction "How Irish is Newfoundland?," and it was by

no means a rhetorical question. That's the case for Quebec, as

well, and Ron Rudin, Michael Kenneally and Rhona Richman

Kenneally made this equally explicit in their introduction to

CJIS/RCEI 33:1, a special issue that dealt with Ireland and

Quebec. There they insisted that "the emphasis... in these

essays, is on intersections; and so comparison is only one of

various means for bringing Ireland and Quebec together"

(12). Working with Ireland's complex connections to these "distinct societies" within Canada is actually what brings Canadian Irish Studies close to Fennell's desire to build an

Irish Studies that is led by an interest in peripheries. Canadian Irish Studies helps

us see that we can find important connections to Irish culture not only in Toronto or Montreal,

but also among all that peripheral and subversive riff-raff from Igloolik and Fishing Lake, to Saint John's and Jonqui?re, Quebec City, and the outport communities of Fogo Island

(whose vernacular architecture was the topic of Robert

Mellin's photo essay in CJIS/RC?I 26:2/27:1, edited by my

predecessor Michael Kenneally). Another crucially important element of a developing

Canadian Irish Studies is a broadening of the disciplinary spectrum. Now, I don't want to sound an anti-literary/anti historical note, and so I rush defensively to say that literary and historical studies are indisputably valuable parts of Irish

Studies, Canadian or otherwise, and should surely continue

to play an important role. But as with Irish Studies generally, Canadian Irish Studies is in need of more perspectives. And

key works of Canadian Irish Studies have come from other

disciplines: Cecil Houston and William J. Smyth's seminal 1980 study The Sash Canada Wore, for instance, is primarily a work of geography. In 1998 D?ith? Mac C?rthaigh edited I dTreo Deilbhch?ip?ise dAcht Teanga Eireannach, an invaluable collection of legal texts pertaining to the quest for some sort

of functional policy framework for the Irish language based on the Canadian model, one that both reprinted essays by the

Qu?b?cois lawyers H?l?ne Thibodeau and R? jean Lemoine and translated them from French into Irish. Furthermore,

the McGill-trained sociologist P?draig Breand?n O Laighin has more recently penned a polemical indictment of Ireland's

2003 Official Languages Act called Acht na Gaeilge ? Acht

ar Strae that drew heavily on the example of Canada. He

marvels in that text how:

Tharla go raibh Rialtas Cheanada s?sta comhartha?ocht mh?nithe

thr?theangach a chur ar f?il nuair a bh? L?thair N?isi?nta Stairi?il

Grosse-Ile i gcuimhne an Ghorta Mh?ir ? cur ar bun. Bh? na tri

theanga cheana ar Chros Cheilteach ar an oile?n. Ghlac an Rialtas i bprionsabal le h?ileamh an phobail ?ireannaigh go mbeadh gach scr?bhinn ar an oile?n i bhFraincis, i nGaeilge, agus i mB?arla. Bh?

go maith agus ni raibh go hole go dt? gur thug toscaireacht oifigi?il ?

Ph?irceanna Cheanada cuairt ar Mh?saem an Ghorta Mh?ir i mB?al an

mBuill? i gContae Ros Com?in, is go bhfaca siad an comhartha?ocht ar

fad lasmuigh, agus na pain?il eolais ar fad sa taispe?ntas f?in - seachas aon cheann amh?in ? i mB?arla amhain.

(35)

But I hesitate to encourage Canadians to start to feeling

cocky about our superior execution of bi-lingual (or in this

case tri-lingual) idealism. Just as I argued, following Declan

Kiberd, that the linguistic duality of Ireland needed to be

recognised throughout Irish Studies, so the linguistic duality of Canada needs to be recognised throughout Canadian

CJIS/RC?I 35:1 13



Irish Studies. There is a real paucity of scholarly material in French on Irish matters generally and, more distressing, on

Canadian-Irish matters. NUI /Galway's P?draig O Gormaile

has published invaluable essays in French on Jacques Ferron's "Irish novel" Le Salut de l'Irlande, and Dublin City

University's Michael Cronin has published, in French, a

number of important studies on Irish and Quebec matters.4

Simon Jolivet and Isabelle Matte have, under the umbrella of L'Association francophone pour le savoir, organised French

language colloquia on Quebec and Ireland in 2008 and 2009.5 This is all to say nothing of non-Canadian examples, such as

France's bi-annual journal Etudes irlandaises, which publishes articles in both English and French, or Buenos Aires' Irish

Migration Studies in Latin America, whose most recent calls for

papers indicated that they would consider articles in English, French, Spanish, or Portuguese. But these examples, however

inspiring, are exceptional. The overwhelming majority of Irish Studies of all descriptions, Canadian included, takes

place in English; a glance through the last five years of

CJIS/RCEI will support this. This clearly has to do with the rise of English as a scholarly lingua franca; there isn't that

much recent scholarly material on Canadian connections to

Ireland in French for the same reason that there isn't very

much comparable material in Spanish, Portuguese or, for

that matter, Irish. Universities all over the world like to see

their researchers publish in English because that seems to

promise an international audience.

What is more of a problem than the language of

scholarly communication is the absence of French from

Canadian Irish Studies generally. For me the key example of this (despite the aforementioned interventions by P?draig O Gormaile) is the nonexistence of the Ferrons in the contemporary discourse around Irish connections to

the northern half of this continent. Jacques Ferron's 1970

novel Le Salut de llrlande is a magical-realist evocation of

the ambiguous place of the Irish in post-Quiet-Revolution Quebec society. It is explicit about the parallel between Ireland and Quebec, although it is pretty melancholy about both places. Towards the novel's end, a Christian Brother

named Thaddeus echoes the funeral oration of Maria

Chapdelaine when he tells the young protagonist Connie

Haffigan that "Le Qu?bec, Connie, plus qu'un pays est un foi

qui ne veut pas mourir. Elle le sauve sans cesse de n'?tre qu'un

pays inachev?." And he goes on to tell him that "Ce sera ? ton

tour de croire et de sauver au jour le jour la deuxi?me Irlande,

de l'emp?cher au moins de p?rir. Tu ne pourras faire mieux.

C'est d?j? beaucoup" (111). That's not exactly a call to arms as much as it is a quasi-Proustian evocation of sentiments or

experiences that forever just barely escape our grasp. Jacques' sister Madeleine Ferron's Sur le chemin Craig is a comparably

poignant (although more formally conventional) 1983 historical novel about 19th-century tensions between Catholic

and Protestant Irish and their canadienne neighbours. Neither

Jacques Fer ron nor Madeleine Fer ron is a minor figure in

Quebec literature. Jacques Ferron really is, with Anne H?bert,

the greatest postwar Quebec novelist; his name was, before

his death in 1985, whispered (however optimistically) as a potential Nobel-Prize-nominee. Madeleine Ferron was

plenty acclaimed in her own right, having won both the Prix

14 WHITE Salut

France-Quebec in 1967 and the Prix litt?raire de la ville de Montr?al in 1972. To offer an English-Canadian analogy, it is as if Alice Munro and Robert Kroetsch had written novels

specifically about the place of the Irish in Canadian society and indeed about the intertwined nature of Ireland and

Canada's fates as societies, but for reasons nobody can quite

explain, these novels just never quite made their way into the

discourse of Canadian Irish Studies. Of course, I am being

coy here; the explanation for the absence of the Ferrons'

"Irish novels" is simple. They are both written in French, and

they have never been translated into English. The situation

in historical studies has been better; key texts on the Irish

Quebec connection such as Marianna O'Gallagher's work

on Grosse-Ile (mostly published simultaneously in French and English editions; see especially her Eyewitness? Grosse-Ile

or its French version Ees T?moins Parlent- Grosse Ile), Robert

Grace's 1997 The Irish in Quebec or Garth Stevenson's 2006 Parallel Paths: The Development of Nationalism in Ireland and

Quebec make extensive use of French-language sources, and

Mary Hasiam has been doing yeowoman's work mining the

19th-century French-language press by way of analysing the

Irish presence in the Patriote rebellions (see especially her contribution to CJIS/RCEI 33:1). I can only hope that this sort of work comes to serve as an example. It is difficult to

imagine how a Canadian Irish Studies worthy of the name can draw upon sources - both primary and secondary

- in

only one language. To echo O Siadhail, this is not about "compulsory

French," that bugbear for so many Canadians; it is about a

simple, pragmatic recognition of the proverbial facts on the

ground. Canada is home to an enormous printed corpus in

French, one that goes back to the first moments of European

presence on this continent. It won't, as O Siadhail said of

the Irish-language corpus, go away just for our convenience.

Indeed, that material must be present at the table of

Canadian Irish Studies. That doesn't mean that I dream

of imposing a civil-service-esque set of French exams for

Canadian Irish Studies professors (who, lacking a sufficient

publication record, could perhaps fall back on a career with

Air Canada). But it does mean that we should put an end

to discussions of the Irish in Canada that deal only with

English-language sources. Those are discussions of the Irish

in English-Canada, which is a perfectly reasonable subject for discussion. The limits of such a discussion, though, need

to be made explicit, and they also need to be integrated into overall analyses. Pretending that Canada is more or less an

Anglophone country while vaguely alluding to people who

speak French is doing nobody any favours.

Something similar is true of the Irish language. Again, I do not wish to imply that everyone who participates in Canadian Irish Studies needs to have fluent Irish, only to insist that there is a relevant corpus of Irish-language

material, found both in Ireland and in Canada, which deals

with the northern third of this continent. That corpus needs to have a place at the table of Canadian Irish Studies as well. For an excellent example of this, look no further

than Gear?id O hAllmhur?in's essay "Soundscapes of the Wintermen" in the last issue of CJIS/RC?I (34:2), devoted

to Irish-Newfoundland connections. This is an essay that

deals with a more-or-less Anglophone community, but one



where the Irish language persisted in a strong enough way to have important influences on the daily life of Newfoundland

society right up to the 20th century. O hAllmhur?in's

reproduction of a bar of a 1928 recording of "The Banks of Newfoundland" from the 1963 book Ceo/ Rince na h?ireann is an excellent example of the usefulness of Irish-language sources that are both Irish and Canadian in origin; this is to say nothing of his reproduction in that article of James Clarence Mangan's translation of "B?nchnoic Eireann O,"

Donnchadh Rua Mac Conamara's 18th century lament about

the loneliness of the outports of Newfoundland, which O hAllmhur?in describes as "one of the earliest anthems

of North American exile composed in Irish" (35). The

imperative here is not as strong as the imperative to better

integrate French-language material, simply because of the

relative size of the respective corpuses; there is indeed less

relevant material in Irish than there is in French. But relevant

material in Irish is out there, and Canadian Irish Studies needs

to make a place for it, and to find a (non-coercive, I hasten to

say!) way to encourage scholars to get up to speed on it.

The matter of Aboriginal languages is trickier. The relevant written corpus is tiny, relative even to Irish; what

written material exists in languages like Cree, Mik'maq or

Inuktitut was, by and large, created by and for missionaries

or language teachers. That's not to say that this isn't

potentially interesting material for scholars of the Irish

presence in the Canadian north (there's Fennell's "missionary

enterprise" thing again!), but ability in Cree or Mik'maq is not indispensible to working one's way through the relevant documents in a way that a

knowledge of English or French is. At the level of sociolinguistics, of course,

the parallels between Aboriginal languages and Irish are

potentially fascinating. Indeed, while the constitutional

status of Irish may be similar to that of French in Canada,

the sociolinguistic reality of Irish is a lot closer to that of Cree in Alberta. So I long for comparative studies of, say,

the developments of neologisms in Irish and Mohawk (did "refrigerator" become "cuisneoir" in the same way that it

became "kawist?htha"?), just as I think those interested in

understanding the operational issues inherent in Ireland's

Official Languages Act / Acht na dTeangacha Oifigi?la would do just as well to study the status of Inuktitut as Nunavut's official language as they would to study Ottawa

based bilingualism. Does this sort of work call for functional

fluency in an Aboriginal language? I would say yes, but largely as an act of good faith. Sociolinguistic work can oftentimes

be done without real capacity in the language under study, but the idea of comparative Irish-Aboriginal sociolinguistic work that is, as a field of inquiry, comprised entirely of material that is either translated into English or originates in English, sends shivers down my spine. That would be, as

Shirley Bassey put it, just a little bit of history repeating.

Towards a toe-tapping disciplinary paradigm Chalk it up to my outsider's romanticism, but the field

that I think has done the most to reconcile these sorts

of complexities -

linguistic, regional, subject-matter - is

contemporary Irish music. In Ireland, the best example of

an accessibly-written, intellectually rigorous, internationally

aware, locally-rooted and genuinely adventurous publication is The Journal of Music (until April 2009 it had been The Journal of Music in Ireland). It has, in its nine years of publication, quite wonderfully broadened the field of Irish musical

discourse; where I have failed to publish considerations of Irish geology, its April 2009 issue included a CD of Irish

Jazz. A regular reader of the magazine will notice that its core

contributors are a bit smitten with the Estonian minimalist

composer Arvo P?rt, but that regular reader will also know

that the last page of the magazine is always given over to

a full-page reproduction of some interesting image from

the Irish Traditional Music Archive, along with a bit of

explanatory text. Ciaran Carson is best-known as a poet, but he has a

monthly column in the magazine on musical

issues; so does Breand?n O hEaghra, who writes in Irish.

On the Canadian side of things, I have playing, as I write

this, the Saskatchewan fiddler Calvin Cairns' 2006 album Celtic Side. He's clearly aware of the Irish song repertoire, and

you might cringe a bit to notice that the album concludes with "Danny Boy." But four of the eleven tracks on the

record are original, so he's no slave to sentimental notions

of tradition. And most importantly, Cairns recognises the

complexity of that Irish song repertoire, its composite

nature, for Celtic Side also includes tunes from Appalachia,

Scotland, and Newfoundland, in addition to two tunes from

Ireland and two from Quebec. In terms of an awareness of

the Irish experience, and the Canadian Irish experience, in its

continental, international, and complexly local dimensions, we should do so well.

CJIS/RC?I 35:1 15



Notes:

1 This thesis has been at the centre of most of his writing of the last ten years or so. He presents it at greatest length in his

books Uncertain Dawn: Hiroshima and the beginning of post-western civilisation (Dublin: Sanas, 1996) and The Postwestern Condition: Between Chaos and Civilisation (London: Minerva, 1999).

2 See his Whatever You Say, Say Nothing: Why Seamus Heaney is No. 1 (Dublin: ELO, 1991).

3 To explain the degree to which this is a lack in contemporary Irish Studies would require a paper unto itself. I can say that I did not, in my five years as editor of this journal, receive a single submission that would fit into anything even approximating physical sciences or life sciences: no

submissions about the future of the Irish fish stocks, or

the geology of The Burren, or the Irish-led innovations in satellite communications technology. But then, I suppose

you could make similar statements about African, Middle

Eastern, or Canadian Studies as well.

4 See, for example, P?draig O Gormaile, "Une Minorit?

Ambigue: Les irlandaises du Qu?bec vus par J. Ferron,"

?tudes canadiennes / Canadian Studies (France) 21 (1986) : 277 282 or his "Jacques Ferron, ou La m?moire retrouv?e," Etudes

litt?raires 23:3 (1990-91): 69-77. Also see Michael Cronin, "Le rachat de l'Irlande: traduction, alt?rit? et origines," in Brigitte Faivre-Duboz and Patrick Poirier, eds, Jacques

Perron: De Palimpseste Infini (Montr?al, Lanct?t, 2002): 251 261 or his "L'?ire du Temps: regards d'?crivains-voyageurs

francophones sur l'Irlande contemporaine," Irish Journal of Trench Studies1 (2001): 1-13.

5 The programme of the 2008 colloquium. "Culture, histoire,

identit? : le Qu?bec et l'Irlande, d'hier ? aujourd'hui," is available at www.acfas.net/programme/c_76_618.html ; the

programme of the 2009 colloquium "Des accommodements

pas toujours raisonnables. L'Irlande, le Qu?bec et le Canada

fran?ais," is availble at www.acfas.net/programme/c_77_634.

html.

Works Cited (except for articles in CJIS/RC?I):

Fennell, Desmond. Beyond Nationalism: The Struggle Against Provinciality in the Modern World. Dublin: Ward River, 1985.

Ferron, Jacques. Te Salut de l'Irlande. P?draig O Gormaile, intro. Outremont: Lanct?t, 1997.

Ferron, Madeleine. Sur le chemin Craig. Montr?al : Stank?, 1983.

Foster, John Wilson. Colonial Consequences: Essays in Irish Titerature and Culture. Dublin: Lilliput, 1991.

Grace, Robert. The Irish in Quebec: An Introduction to the Historiography. Instruments de travail n?12. Sainte-Foy: Institut qu?b?cois de recherche sur la culture, 1997.

Houston, Cecil and William J. Smyth. The Sash Canada Wore: A Historical Geography of the Orange Order in Canada. Toronto: University or Toronto Press, 1980.

Kearney, Richard. Postnationalist Ireland: Politics, Culture,

Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Kiberd, Declan. Synge and the Irish Language. London:

Macmillan, 1979.

?. The Irish Writer and the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Mac C?rthaigh, Dattili, eag. I dTreo Deilbhch?ip?ise dAcht Teanga Eireannach. Baile Atha Cliath: Coisc?im, 1998.

Melnyk, George. Padical Regionalism. Edmonton: NeWest, 1981.

O'Gallagher, Marianna and Rose Masson Dompierre. Eyewitness

- Grosse Ile. Quebec: Editions Carraig Books, 1995.

O Laighin, P?draig Breand?n. Acht na Gaeilge: Acht ar Strae. Baile ?tha Cliath: Coisc?im, 2003.

O Siadhail, P?draig. "Directions and Directionlessness in Irish Studies." Paper presented at Library and Archives Canada Irish Studies Symposium, 23 September 2006. Available at www.coUectionscanada.gc.ca/obi/033001/ f2/033001-1402.10-e.pdf

Ralston Saul, John. A Pair Country: Telling Truths About Canada. Toronto: Penguin, 2008.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Death of a Discipline: The Wellek Library Lectures in Critical Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.

Stevenson, Garth. Parallel Paths: The Development of Nationalism in Ireland and Quebec. Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen's

University Press, 2006.

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