English Studies Forum

The Forum Reviews

Postmodern Irish Fiction

M. ElizNeil Murphy.  Irish Fiction and Postmodern Doubt: An Analysis of the Epistemological Crisis in Modern Fiction.  Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. 2004.  260pp. $109.95

By Mary Burke, University of Connecticut

            Neil Murphy’s Irish Fiction and Postmodern Doubt: An Analysis of the Epistemological Crisis in Modern Fiction, is a consideration of the contemporary Irish writers Aidan Higgins, John Banville, and Neil Jordan in the context of modernist and postmodernist literature, and constitutes volume 12 in the Edwin Mellen Press Studies in Irish Literature series.

            Irish Fiction and Postmodern Doubt is primarily concerned with contemporary Irish fiction, and the opening chapter acknowledges the unavoidable legacy of Samuel Beckett and James Joyce in any consideration of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Irish writer. Despite this overweening heritage, Murphy responds to the specificity of the fictionalized concerns of Banville and Higgins in chapters two and three, and attends to international literary traditions by situating their work alongside that of writers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Vladimir Nabokov, Salman Rushdie, Italo Calvino, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Alain Robbe-Grillet. Chapter four, the final and by far the shortest section of the study, considers the literary output of Neil Jordan, which exists beneath the shadow of his formidable accomplishments as a filmmaker. Murphy admits at the outset of the section that Jordan’s writing has attracted relatively little critical attention in comparison to his cinematic success because it “amounts to a limited achievement” (193), particularly when compared to the works of Banville and Higgins. Murphy justifies the inclusion of Jordan’s work on the basis that Irish Fiction and Postmodern Doubt is an analysis of how the three writers considered confront the legacy of modernism and postmodernism, rather than being simply an attempt to evaluate their artistic worth. Jordan’s writing is summed up as “a fusion of Postmodern reductive analysis and mystical conceptions of the self” (229), a fusion revealed to be entirely illusory in the works of Banville and Higgins. Only one of Jordan’s many films, The Crying Game, is examined alongside his literary output. Murphy’s pointed and welcome attention to Jordan as a writer in contrast to the huge amount of critical interest he has received as a filmmaker nevertheless suggests that Jordan’s fiction might be best considered in relation to his cinematic output.

            Irish Fiction and Postmodern Doubt might have been more carefully edited and tightly organized, and would have benefited from a more balanced treatment of the writers concerned (64 pages are devoted to Higgins in comparison to the mere 36 pages given over to an analysis of Jordan.) Nevertheless, Murphy’s critical approach represents a welcome departure from the lamentable tendency in Irish literary studies to situate Irish writers within exclusively Irish historical, artistic, and political frameworks.