Public Works

Michael Rubenstein

Description

In Public Works: Infrastructure, Irish Modernism, and the Postcolonial, Michael Rubenstein documents the relationship between Irish modernism and a restricted segment of the material culture of the modern state known colloquially as “public utilities” or “water, gas, and electricity.” The water tap, the toilet, the gas jet, and the electrical light switch: these are all sites, in Irish modernism, of unexpected literary and linguistic intensities that burst through the routines of everyday life, defamiliarizing and reconceptualizing that which we might not normally consider worthy of literary attention. Such public utilities—material networks of power and provision, submission and entitlement—are taken up in Irish modernism not only as a nexus of anxieties about modern life, but also as a focal point for the hopes held out for the postcolonial Irish Free State. Public utilities figure a normative and utopian standard of modernity and modernization; they embody in Irish modernism and in other postcolonial literatures an ideal for the postcolonial state; and they figure a continuity between the material networks of the modern state and the abstract ideals of revolutionary republicanism (liberty, equality, and brotherhood). They define a new territory of contestation within the discourses of civil and human rights. Moreover, public utilities influence the formal qualities of both Irish modernist and postcolonial literature.

In analyses of literary works by James Joyce, Flann O’Brien, Elizabeth Bowen, Denis Johnston, Samuel Beckett, and Patrick Chamoiseau, Rubenstein asks us to think about the industrial networks of the twentieth century alongside self-consciously “national” literary works and to understand them as different but inherently related forms of public works. In doing so his book maps thematic and formal relationships between national infrastructure and national literature, revealing an intimate dialogue between the nation’s literary arts and the state’s engineering cultures.

Sujets

• Historical Events
• Comparative Literature
• Literary Criticism
• HISTORY
• Celtic studies
• Denis Johnston
• General officer
• Ulysses
• Anthropology
• William Denis Johnston
• Elizabeth Bowen
• General
• Ulysse (homonymie)
• Patrick Chamoiseau
• James Joyce
• Samuel Beckett

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 15 octobre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268091767
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

Rubenstein-00FM_Layout 1 6/30/10 5:30 PM Page i
P U B L I C
W O R K SRubenstein-00FM_Layout 1 6/30/10 5:30 PM Page ii
Image of Ardnacrusha Control Room.
Reproduced by kind permission of ESB Archives
(Electricity Supply Board, Ireland).Rubenstein-00FM_Layout 1 6/30/10 5:30 PM Page iii
P U B L I C
INFRASTRUCTURE, IRISH MODERNISM, AND THE POSTCOLONIAL
W O R K S
M I C H A E L R U B E N S T E I N
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, IndianaRubenstein-00FM_Layout 1 6/30/10 5:30 PM Page iv
Copyright © 2010 by the University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
www.undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rubenstein, Michael, 1971–
Public works : infrastructure, Irish modernism, and the postcolonial /
Michael Rubenstein.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-268-04030-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-268-04030-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. English literature—Irish authors—History and criticism.
2. English literature—20th century—History and criticism.
3. Public utilities in literature. 4. Infrastructure (Economics) in literature.
5. Modernism (Literature)—Ireland. 6. Postcolonialism in literature.
I. Title.
PR8755.R83 2010
820.9'3556—dc22
2010024336
This book is printed on recycled paper.Rubenstein-00FM_Layout 1 6/30/10 5:30 PM Page v
C o n t e n t s
Acknowledgments vii
o n e
The Postcolonial Comedy of Development:
Public Works and Irish Modernism 1
Pa rt I . Wat e r
t w o
Aquacity: Plumbing Consciousness in Joyce’s Dublin 43
t h r e e
A Fountain of Nationality: Haunted Infrastructure
in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman 93
Pa rt I I . P o w e r
f o u r
Electrifiction, or Dramatizing Power: The Shannon Scheme, the Free State,
and Denis Johnston’s The Moon in the Yellow River 129
f i v e
Other Rough Beasts: Comparative Postcolonialism
and the Dream of Infrastructure 167
Notes 205
Bibliography 233
Index 246Rubenstein-00FM_Layout 1 6/30/10 5:30 PM Page viRubenstein-00FM_Layout 1 6/30/10 5:30 PM Page vii
ac k n o w l e d g m e n t s
This project was supported in part by funding from a President’s Research
Fellowship in the Humanities and from a University of California Hu -
mani ties Research Fellowship. A series of Junior Faculty Research Grants
enabled travel to archives and experts in Ireland.
Earlier versions of this work were first published elsewhere, and I am
grateful to Novel: A Forum on Fiction and Social Text for permission to
reprint them here.
Pat Yeates and Brendan Delany at Ireland’s Electricity Supply Board
Archive provided timely information, supplemental literature, and the
permissions to reprint the images in the book and on its cover.
My book owes its strengths to the many colleagues and friends who
read, commented on, and discussed it with me over the years. For six years
the English department at Berkeley has continuously nurtured,
sharpened, and challenged me and my work, particularly in the persons of
Elizabeth Abel, John Bishop, Mitch Breitweiser, Ian Duncan, Cathy
Gallagher, Steve Goldsmith, Celeste Langan, and Colleen Lye. These are just
the ones that I know read all my work, even early drafts that must have
been torturous, and provided thoughtful criticisms and guidance. That
they applied their impressive intellect and energy to my project was a
gift—occasionally terrifying, ultimately invaluable—of insight,
motivation, and collegiality.
Others at Berkeley who read and commented on portions of my work
and to whom this project owes, and I myself owe, much: Kea Anderson,
Ann Banfield, Dorri Beam, Stephen Best, Eric Falci, Anne-Lise François,
Kevis Goodman, Bob Haas, Abdul JanMohamed, Steven Justice, Chris
Nealon, Geoffrey G. O’Brien, Genaro Padilla, Joanna Picciotto, Scott Saul,
Sue Schweik, Namwali Serpell, Janet Sorensen, and Bryan Wagner.
Dan Blanton and Maura Nolan introduced me to Barbara Hanrahan
and thus to the University of Notre Dame Press. Thanks to all three for
their help and encouragement.
viiRubenstein-00FM_Layout 1 6/30/10 5:30 PM Page viii
viii 
I thank friends and colleagues from around the profession whose work
and conversation have amply sustained my intellectual life over the years
and who, therefore, have had incalculable impact on the merits of the
present work: Nancy Armstrong, Sophia Beal, Joe Cleary, Joshua Clover,
Mike Cronin, Richard Dienst, Greg Dobbins, Enda Duffy, Brent Edwards,
Luke Gibbons, Geoffrey Gilbert, Liz Ho, Marjorie Howes, Karen
Leibowitz, Saikat Majumdar, Francine Masiello, Patrick Mullen, Lionel Pil-
kington, Michael Sayeau, Joey Slaughter, Moynagh Sullivan, Nirvana
Tanoukhi, Joe Valente, Kevin Whelan, Alex Woloch, Edlie Wong, and
Patricia Yaeger.
The students in the introductory graduate course I facilitated in Fall
2008 made for one of my most memorable and cherished teaching
experiences to date: Adam Ahmed, Shannon Chamberlain, Alek Jeziorek,
Ella Mershon, Jonathan Shelley, Luke Terlaak Poot, Rachel Trocchio, and
David Vandeloo. Their intelligence, generosity, and friendliness were a
revelation.
I thank my research assistants, Bahareh Brittany Alaei-Johnson, Annie
McLanahan, and Sarah Townsend. Sarah’s timely editorial work, and her
critical engagement with my project and her own, have made mine an
immeasurably better book.
Bruce Robbins has been an inspirational and formative presence in
my professional life generally and in the production of this book particu -
larly. I thank him for believing in and encouraging my work from the
beginning.
John Bishop daily demonstrated for me the meanings of passionate
engagement, scholarly expertise, intellectual integrity, and good citizenship.
Very special thanks go to my closest friends whom at one point or
another I was compelled to call upon for weekly, daily, and occasionally
hourly counseling, back when this book, as I was often convinced, was
trying to kill me: Natalia Brizuela, Jeremy Glick, Seán Kennedy, Johnny
Lorenz, and Kent Puckett. Their understanding and support were crucial
to my survival, their company and humor to my flourishing. In the final
stages of the manuscript Doctor Puckett made a few emergency house
calls, as a result of which the patient’s condition improved dramatically.
And Clara O’Brien stuck with me through the hardest parts.
I dedicate this book to my parents, David and Shirley Rubenstein.Rubenstein-01_Layout 1 6/30/10 5:33 PM Page 1
c h a p t e r
THE POSTCOLONIAL COMEDY
OF DEVELOPMENT: PUBLIC WORKS
AND IRISH MODERNISM
o n e
Public Works is centrally about a brief span of time—1922 to 1940—in
the literary, cultural, political, and technological history of Ireland. This
was roughly the eighteen-year period of the Irish Free State, a political
body that emerged in 1922 from colonial union with Great Britain and
transformed itself, with the ratification of Éamon de Valera’s constitution
in 1937, into Ireland or Éire. In that time, James Joyce published Ulys -
ses and the Free State planned, funded, and built the world’s first
state1controlled national electrical grid. Joyce’s monumental achievement in
Ulysses is widely acknowledged; Ireland’s technological and political
achievement with their electrical grid is far less well known, even in
spe2cialized histories of science and technology. Public Works seeks to
describe the counterintuitive but profound connections between these two
seemingly unrelated historical facts, one a milestone of literary modern -
ism and the other a milestone of technological modernization. The term
public works I use as a kind of synthetic summation of my argument:
1Rubenstein-01_Layout 1 6/30/10 5:33 PM Page 2
2  
that works of art and public works — here limited to water, gas, and
electricity—are imaginatively linked in Irish literature of the period for
reasons having to do with the birth of the postcolonial Irish state.
Chapters 2, 3, and 4 of Public Works make the case for the connection
between literary acts and public utilities in the cultural milieu of the Irish
Free State. Each of these chapters focuses on a literary text: Joyce’s Ulys -
ses in chapter 2, Flann O’Brien’s posthumously published novel The Third
Policeman in chapter 3, and Denis Johnston’s play The Moon in the Yellow
River in chapter 4. Joyce published Ulysses at the dawn of the Free State
era; O’Brien wrote The Third Policeman looking immediately back on it;
and Johnston staged The Moon in the Yellow River right in the middle of
it, one year after the state’s Shannon Hydroelectric Scheme began
producing electricity for the first time. Taken together as a selection of Irish
authors—Joyce the famous high modernist and Catholic exile, Johnston
the representative “West Briton,” and O’Brien the state functionary, native
Irish speaker, and struggling author—they represent a diachronic slice
of Irish cultural production in the new period of state sovereignty
immediately following the partially successful Irish revolt against British
colonialism. My chapters are organized thematically, however, not chro-
nologically. Chapters 2 and 3 form Part I, “Water,” and deal with Joyce
and O’Brien: because they both thematized the waterworks and because
O’Brien’s novel is in my reading a direct response to Joyce’s Ulysses.
Chapters 4 and 5 form Part II, “Power,” and deal with literary thematizations of
electrification; chapter 4 treats Johnston’s play depicting the construction,
and destruction, of a hydroelectric power plant in Dublin. My last chapter
departs from Ireland and follows the public utility to Marti nique and to
the end of the twentieth century. My central text there, Patrick
Chamoiseau’s 1992 novel Texaco, depicts the struggle of an officially unrecognized
shantytown to obtain electrical supply from the municipal authorities of
Fort-de-France. By thus moving, via a shared thematic concern for
electricity, from early twentieth-century Ireland to the late twentieth-century
Caribbean, my book makes two further arguments: