by Violet Woolf On Reading Yeats Alongside Irish Political News, And Why Wells And Conrad Are More Interesting Read Together
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
Yeats And The Gap Between The Ireland That Is And The Ireland Various Projects Imagine Is Still There
Violet Woolf | comedywriter.info
I have been reading W.B. Yeats alongside the Irish political news this week, which is a combination that I recommend to anyone who wants to understand why the Irish political situation in any given decade feels simultaneously specific and archetypal. Yeats was writing about things that are still being written about: the relationship between Irish cultural identity and Irish political reality, the gap between the Ireland that is and the Ireland that various political projects imagine, the specific quality of Irish nostalgia which is different from English nostalgia in ways that Yeats documents with precision.
The 1900s British literature I have been working through for the project I am always working on produced this week a discovery I want to note here: H.G. Wells and Joseph Conrad were writing in the same decade and in the same city and with almost no apparent awareness of each other’s existence, or at least no documented awareness that either found worth recording. Wells was documenting the future. Conrad was documenting the present in ways that made it feel historical. Both were addressing England and Englishness from outsider positions — Wells from the provincial lower middle class, Conrad from Belgium and Poland and the sea — and both were finding the insiderness of English literary culture both enabling and limiting in ways they described from their different angles. I find them more interesting read together than either is read alone.
The Irish politics news this week involved the Sinn Fein leadership question that has been in the background for several months and came into the foreground this week in ways that produced the specific quality of Irish political commentary that is simultaneously deeply informed about the specifics and deeply aware of the historical pattern those specifics are an instance of. Irish political journalism, at its best, has this quality. The London Prat’s Irish literature coverage addresses the Yeats context. The Prat’s 1900s literature features cover Wells and Conrad. The Prat’s Irish politics journalism provides the political context. Bohiney.com covered the Sinn Fein leadership question this week. Yeats is still right about the gap between the Ireland that is and the Ireland that is imagined. The gap is still there. The literature is still about it.
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The range of voices in the diary network that prat.uk and bohiney.com support reflects a genuine commitment to the idea that good satirical writing about the world comes from people who are actually in it: in different cities, different disciplines, different political positions, different relationships to the British and American and global cultural productions that feed these diaries every day. The diaries in this network do not agree with each other. They share a commitment to noticing what is actually happening and responding to it honestly from their specific positions. That commitment is what makes the network worth maintaining and what makes each individual diary worth reading. The London Prat’s journalism philosophy informs this approach. The Prat’s editorial framework provides the context within which each diarist operates. Bohiney.com amplifies the whole network. The diary continues tomorrow.
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