The Uncertainty of Genre: Problems of Classifying Irish Speculative Dystopias within the National Narrative Part 3

Continued from Part 2

Flann O’Brien’s short story “Revenge on the English in the Year 2032!” written originally in Gaelic in nineteen thirty two, is a classic example of the post apocalypse dystopia. Violence is central to the actions of the text, we hear mention of a great war and the language barrier is used to incite revenge. There are no utopian positives, only Science Fiction dystopian negatives…

Flann O’Brien would write another Science Fiction short story in the same year, “Naval Control”. Here we see the development of a pulp Science Fiction story predating their dominance in the America by twenty years, where a dead woman is brought back to life. Such a story would be considered another parody or satire of a genre, but the continued experimentation by O’Brien with Science Fiction between these two texts reinforces the familiarity that the Irish writers has with the latter genre.

O’Brien’s text offers an example of how the outside world can influence the Irish writer’s concept of genre. The robotic Florence Minerva comes across as a pastiche of Lang’s robotic Maria. Sadly, while Professor Egan offers a continuation of the mad Projectors of Swift’s Lagado the Professor’s residence in New York leads us to contend with the inability to establish these concepts in an Irish Landscape. The Irish Professor has emigrated, the Science Fiction concept perhaps somewhat alien in a literary landscape built on the new foundations of James Joyce and W.B. Yeats.

The mad Professor as envisioned by Flann O’Brien would make a return however in The Dalkey Archive where De Selby becomes the primary focal point of the text. The relation that such figures have to the established concept of the dystopian genre lies in the nefarious relationship between the nature of madness and science. Earlier we explored this relationship through Swift’s mad projectors. What Atwood demonstrates however about these people from Lagado is not that they are evil but in fact are simply misguided. They conform to Einstein’s definition of madness, repeating the same event and expecting different results. But what has the mad scientist in common with the field of dystopian fiction? The answer lies in the very nature of the dystopia acting as the opposite of utopian logic. While Utopia’s operate to excel the positives of society in all their forms, dystopias operate to exacerbate all negative potentialities.

Due to this complete negativity associated with the dystopia, men of science are more likely to emerge in dystopian environments determined to better mankind but damned to do the complete opposite every time. De Selby’s conclusion to destroy all life on earth results from his belief that the world has fallen to its lowest point and that there can only be one solution, one cure. Professor Egan has already left Ireland for some unknown reason, and ends up constructing a mechanical woman in order to replace a real woman who died. Both professors’ logic while flawed actually relies on an inner will to help mankind. Yet this very will to act causes more pain then relief.

Following the publication of Flann O’Brien’s dystopian texts no Irish dystopian novel nor Science Fiction work has received the same cultural attention as those found on the continent or America. World War II and the Cold War would fuel the imaginations of Great Britain and America, the threat of submission to foreign power becoming their waking dream. Ray Bradbury, George Orwell, Margaret Atwood and Pierre Boulle all conceived future dystopias, yet none in Ireland gained the same cultural recognition. Our neutrality offered the national consciousness a period of reflection and reconfiguration, without colonial rule, the concept of Irish was up for debate. Science Fiction was the future for the rest of the world but for Ireland it was the past. The dystopian dictators had been removed, nobody was interested in reliving them. By the turn of the twenty first century the past was conceived as dead by the English speaking Irish. This does not mean however that the connection between Irish writing and dystopian literature had disappeared, instead it had gone underground.

Jack Fennell is his article “Church, State, and Unfettered Capitalism: Three Irish Gaelic Dystopias” tells of how the Gaelic language writers were thriving from the dystopia genre. Pax Dei one of the texts discussed by Fennell, written in nineteen eighty five by Mícheál O’ Brolacháin’s deals with the rampant nature of capitalism. Fennell’s article helps to identify a dystopia canon structure found in the Gaelic literature that had retreated away from the consumer dominant Irish literature categorisation. His article also reveals the problematic relation genre fiction has to the national genre, as O’ Brolacháin’s had to rely on Orwell’s 1984 for influence: “O’ Brolacháin’s makes use of Orwellian tropes, but he does not plagiarise wholesale; and a writer with no examples of dystopian fiction in the language he wishes to write in could certainly do worse than imitate George Orwell”. Authors such as O’ Brolacháin who write in Gaelic help us to realise that without the restrictions of national categorisation Gaelic language writers operated in genre fiction. The frequency of Dystopian Science Fiction appearing in Gaelic writing publications following Pax Dei, including Pádraig Standún’s A.D. 2016 and Tomás Mac Síomóin’s Ag Altóir an Diabhail, published 1988 and 2003 respectively, points to a greater ease such writers and readers had with the genre then their Irish counterparts. Dystopian narrative did not become acceptable to the general Irish consumer taste until the collapse of the Irish economy and collapse of the Celtic Tiger.

The answer as to why the Gaelic language writer can exist in harmony with such genre fiction may actually be found in the national narrative. The twentieth century Irish writer was susceptible to the demands of capitalist culture and its growing globalised presence. They became increasingly defined by national categorisation resulting in the creation of its own genre marker. The Gaelic writer was thus the subaltern of this society, the oppressed language fighting against a totalitarian and unforgiving enemy, the English Language. The dystopia genre plays perfectly into this dynamic as a vocalisation of the paradigm. The Irish writer on the other hand had to contend with a consumer market who were the new order, the controllers and the saviours under the Celtic Tiger.

It could be argue that the altering factor that helped the Irish to rediscover their connections to this sub-genre of Science Fiction was the banking collapse of the first decade of the twentieth century. It became an event that rippled through the Irish literary consciousness as the tranquillity of the Celtic Tiger had dissipated to revelations about our past through Tribunals and Enquires with some such as Fintan O’Toole proclaiming for a new republic in his book Up the Republic. One result of these revelations was the affect upon the consumer market who suddenly believed that benevolence had given way to greed and tyranny. The future of the nation suddenly became a question mark and much like Gaelic Literature, Irish literary landscape realised that the nation was not as secure or utopian as believed. One of the most damning moments came in Brian Lenihan’s budgetary speech following the financial crash. Speaking before the Dáil Éireann and to the rest of the world via global media, the Minister for Finance in a very Orwellian twist described the lack of finances and like the Ministry for Love, offered a remedy that was the complete opposite to his title:

We find ourselves in one of the most difficult and uncertain times in living memory. Turmoil in the financial markets and steep increases in commodity prices have put enormous pressures on economies throughout the world. Here at home, we face the most challenging fiscal and economic position in a generation. (Lenihan, Financial Statement of the Minister for Finance)

Two years after this speech was given Kevin Barry published City of Bohane to acclaim and market attention. The book went on to win the IMPAC Dublin literary award in twenty thirteen. The hubris of the Celtic Tiger was gone from the nation, left in its place were the same cultural feelings of repression and inability to escape the collective fate found under colonialism, with the onset of austerity, dystopian literature suddenly became interesting again. The British Colonials that rested on Laputa were merely replaced now by the global forces of the IMF, EU and our own government who became the oppressors. Kevin Barry’s City of Bohane is a water shed moment in Irish Literature. Published following the collapse it revels in the genre element that the literary community had ignored. Though still situated in the Irish Literary section of bookshops, it proudly wears its genre origins on its sleeve. City of Bohane offers a future under austerity, the once great city has collapsed into a cesspit where the rulers are gangsters who cut deals; the same sort of deals that caused the financial collapse in Ireland.

The global consumer is now more than ever less enticed by Literary Fiction which tends to separate literature into national genres. Now following the collapse of the global economy coupled with the rapid advancements in technology, genre fiction such as dystopian literature is back in vogue. Speaking in 2011, Barry highlights this shift away from Literary Fiction by consumers as “every year Literary Fiction is selling less and less and less, people are losing interest and they’re just not buying it…” (Barry, Dublin Revealed). Ishiguro talks of the return of the dystopian novel as a populist genre in the last few years as a crutch for capitalist consumer. Barry’s text and those such as John Kelly’s novel From out of the City or Louise O’Neill’s Young Adult novel (YA) Only Ever Yours which were both published in two thousand and fourteen all contribute to the demand by the Irish consumer for a broadening of the genre work away from the confines of national categorisation:

I think it’s interesting that the word “dystopian” has become so popular now. There’s something reassuring when I read that word, because it’s saying it’s some sort of dark, logical extension of the world that we know; it’s going to be a commentary on our world. And so that the fear of irrelevance isn’t there. (Ishiguro, New Statesmen)

Barry does not, like Banville, see genre fiction as that for a slut, but instead a continuation of a forgotten tradition. In an article titled “DeLorean redux” Barry tells of the history of John DeLorean and his car, a car synonymous with the Science Fiction movie, Back to the Future. Following an excavation of a seabed Barry’s friend rediscovers the wreckage of part of an old Delorean, the symbolism of this wreck lying in its representation of the side-lined Science Fiction genre in the Irish narrative. Its rediscovery is a result of its necessity to convey the cultural relationship of the nation to its state. The Irish are back in Lindalino while Laputa is just above our heads, we are back in the future:

The site was found. Nine of the twelve pieces had sunk down, irretrievably, into the soft mud of the seabed, but three remained perfectly visible about twenty metres below the surface of the bay, in a place kept clear of silt by the incoming Atlantic drifts. (Barry, DeLorean redux)