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Conor Carville, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2011, 256 pp, no price, ISBN 978-0-7190-8383-9 I reviewed David Lloyd's Anomalous States for this journal in 1994. I recall the excitement o...

For twenty‐five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible...

Since the 1960s, Ireland has specialised in the production of a kind of popular music that hovers along the borders between a number of different genres and traditions. Encompassing a range of diff...

This essay introduces some of the themes and methodologies which might characterise a spatial analysis of modern Irish popular music by considering a range of issues which emerge in relation to one genre (punk rock) and one band (The Saw Doctors). The principal intention of this brief account is to highlight some of the ways in which such an analysis might proceed ; a secondary motivation is to test some of the standard assumptions of Irish Studies against material traditionally seen as less tractable, and thereby perhaps to mitigate the disciplinary hegemony which has traditionally ordered the study of Irish cultural history. The author engages with theoretical developments in a variety of disciplines, including Geography, Irish Studies and Popular Music Studies., Cet article présente quelques-uns des thèmes et des méthodologies propres à caractériser une analyse spatiale de la musique populaire irlandaise, en examinant une série de questions relatives à un genre (rock punk) et un groupe (The Saw Doctors). Le but principal de cette brève étude est de mettre en lumière certains procédés d'analyse ; il s'agit aussi de mettre les hypothèses admises dans les études irlandaises à l'épreuve d'un matériau traditionnellement perçu comme moins docile, et par conséquent de réduire l'hégémonie qui a traditionnellement ordonné l'étude de l'histoire culturelle irlandaise. L'auteur aborde des développements théoriques dans plusieurs disciplines, comme la géographie, les études irlandaises et la musique populaire irlandaise., Smyth Gerry. Place, Noise, Nation : Towards a Spatial Analysis of Irish Popular Music. In: Études irlandaises, n°29 n°2, 2004. Espaces irlandais : zones et marges, sous la direction de Sylvie Mikowski et Claude Fierobe. pp. 75-89.

INTRODUCTION THE last decade of the twentieth century witnessed a proliferation of novels dealing with the subject of music. I shall leave it to some enthusiastic young scholar to undertake a full inventory, but even a cursory browse of the bookshelves and catalogues is enough to confirm the trend. The scene was set in 1992 by Toni Morrison with Jazz, a difficult novel that attempted to reproduce the elaborate systems of early-twentieth-century African-American music in literary form. More recently, high-profile examples have been provided by Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Vikram Seth's An Equal Music, and Jackie Kay's Trumpet. (1) As these texts demonstrate, moreover, "music" was very liberally understood by their authors, encompassing the traditions of classical, jazz, and rock/pop. Although neither Rushdie's nor Seth's novels was particularly well received (critical orthodoxy maintaining that the authors will never repeat the achievement of Midnight's Children and A Suitable Boy, respectively), together with Kay's striking debut all three reveal a widespread tendency toward the invocation of musical matter through the medium of extended prose fiction. Another such novel is Bernard Mac Laverty's Grace Notes, a work not only about music on a number of related levels, but one that also attempts to invoke musical effects and to incorporate musical form into its own structure. (2) In this, it makes intertextual reference to a long (though infrequently considered) tradition of what in this essay I shall refer to as "the musical novel." At the same time, as a story about contemporary Northern Ireland, it engages with a (critically orthodox) tradition of colonial and postcolonial fiction foregrounding questions of representation, resistance, identity, and voice. These traditions--the well-known one concerning the novelistic representation of (sub-)national identity, and the lesser remarked one concerning the novelistic representation of music--have productively cross-fertilized at a number of points in Irish cultural history. In this article, I describe the type and provenance of those moments of productive cross-fertilization before considering how Grace Notes adopts and/or modifies a range of issues attending upon the musical novel. MUSIC AND FICTION What could account for the rise of the "musical novel" during recent times? One might speculate that the contemporary novelist's concern with music represents a response to the fin de siecle growth of interdisciplinarity in the critical languages that service the creative arts. Cultural Studies offers one such obvious language, less concerned with traditional disciplines (whether creative or critical), it seems, than with the organization and dissemination of power across a range of discursive practices and institutional sites. Cultural Studies--indeed, modern criticism in general--is by and large theory-driven rather than text-driven; it tends to read the text in terms of a range of a priori precepts rather than granting it the courtesy of an immanent response. The provenance and effect of such a practice is the subject of ongoing debate; but, in the meantime, the currently dominant critical mood might be described as holistic rather than discrete, and this may have created, or at least contributed to, a general intellectual/academic zeitgeist in which the musical novel can flourish. Rather than representing some entirely new departure, however, the admixture of artistic concerns in the musical novel in fact partakes of a well-established tradition. The novel, it turns out, has always been fascinated with music, and at some points in its history this fascination has become an obsession. (3) Perhaps this development should not come as too much of a surprise: the modern form of the novel and the tradition of classical art music developed alongside each other from the early eighteenth century, although for much of their shared history, the latter has represented a far more respectable (understood in the bourgeois terms that set the standards for artistic decorum) than the former. …

(1999). Irish studies, postcolonial theory and the ‘new’ essentialism. Irish Studies Review: Vol. 7, Irish Studies and Postcolonial Theory, pp. 211-220.

(1996). ‘The natural course of things’: Matthew Arnold, Celticism and the English poetic tradition. Journal of Victorian Culture: Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 35-53.

(1995). The past, the post, and the utterly changed: Intellectual responsibility and Irish cultural criticism. Irish Studies Review: Vol. 3, No. 10, pp. 25-29.

The critical systems through which a spatial analysis of the modern novel might be attempted are many and various. For convenience, however, they may be organised into three main groups: those that focus on the built environment, those emphasising apparently ‘natural’ outdoor environments, and those engaging with issues of aesthetic spatiality. This latter, most fully expounded by Joseph Frank in his book The Widening Gyre (1963), concerns what he termed ‘spatial form in modern literature’.1 While not denying the potential for an analysis of Seamus Deane’s celebrated debut Reading in the Dark in terms of ‘spatial form’, in this chapter I intend to focus upon this text in terms of the first two groups — that is, theories which have addressed themselves to the novelistic representation of built and natural environments.

This chapter offers an analysis of Irish rock supergroup U2 in terms of certain spatial practices and motifs that recur throughout their music. Before going on to look in some detail at these issues, I want to consider the theoretical and methodological contexts in which such an analysis might be undertaken.

The material in this chapter arises from a concern with two related theoretical-methodological issues: 1) an emphasis on local and personal history in much late twentieth-century Irish culture; and 2) the possibility of developing new critical discourses.

The coalescing of a number of critical discourses in the closing decades of the twentieth century made the study of Irish cultural history amenable to spatial analysis. This included the rediscovery of the spatial imagination within the work of a number of established philosophical systems, a reinvigorated Marxist geography, the growth of environmentalism and the emergence of postmodern (often called ‘new’) geography. Together, these provided the methodological and theoretical bases for the high profile that ‘space’ came to enjoy as an analytical category in such fashionable modern fields as cultural studies and postcolonial theory. This cluster of critical discourses has fed into this book at a number of levels, providing a rich array of techniques and languages with which to undertake an overview of Irish culture’s spatial imagination.

Dublin, claimed Augustine Martin in 1984, is ‘the most famous city in literary history, with the possible exception of Troy’.3 But which Dublin? It seems clear that Martin had not just a specific place but also a specific time in mind when he made his claim — the early twentieth-century town made famous in the work of James Joyce. It is true that the great writer ’s work has certainly come to represent one dominant image of the city, both within Ireland and abroad. Joyce’s Dublin was a composite of the various layers which had contributed to the emergence of the modern city up to the late nineteenth century — Viking trading town, colonial buttress, Georgian capital, industrial slum and, in the words of Declan Kiberd, ‘a classic example of a periphery­dominated-centre’.4 The literary city represented by Joyce, however, is but one moment in the cultural history of a complex, living entity moving in time as well as in space. Even as Martin was writing, new ‘Dublins’ were emerging — post-industrial sprawl, misplanned conurbation, heroin capital of Europe — a spatial organization incorporating a wide range of diverse and amorphous micro-communities: self-conscious bourgeoisie, increasingly internationalized working class, criminal cadre schooled on Hollywood. In 1984 the city was in the process of becoming, in the words of Fintan O’Toole, ‘a frontier town, on the edge of Europe, on the edge of the Irish nation, on the edge of itself’.5

Of all the violent exchanges which characterize the encounter between colonizer and colonized, perhaps the most significant is that colonialism, in the words of Ashis Nandy, creates a culture in which the ruled are constantly tempted to fight their rulers within the psychological limits set by the latter. It is not an accident that the specific variants of the concepts with which many anti-colonial movements in our times have worked have often been the products of the imperial culture itself and, even in opposition, these movements have paid homage to their respective cultural origins.1

Across the margins - An introduction, Glenda Norquay and Gerry Smyth. Part Theorising identities across the Atlantic Archipelago: Ireland, verses, Scotland - Crossing the (English) language barrier, Willy Maley "A warmer memory" - Speaking of Ireland, Colin Graham "Where do you belong?" - De-scribing imperial identity from alien to migrant, Peter Childs Gender and nation - Debatable lands and passable boundaries, Aileen Christianson The union and Jack - British masculinities, pomophobia, and the post-nation, Berthold Schoene Paper margins - The "outside" in poetry in the 1980s and 1990s, Linden Peach Sounding out the margins - Ethnicity and popular music in British cultural studies, Sean Campbell Cool enough for Lou Reed? The plays of Ed Thomas and the cultural politics of South Wales, Shaun Richards Waking up in a different place - Contemporary Irish and Scottish fiction, Glenda Norquay and Gerry Smyth Finding Scottish art, Murdo Macdonald.