아일랜드 탈민족주의 담론과 문학의 포스트-수정주의적 개입

Abstract

Four years before the 2010 Irish economic collapse from the ‘Celtic Tiger,' Sean Dorgan, as an Irish economic authority, addressed that the Irish owed its economic success to the policy of economic globalization and he defined critically the Irish past as nationalist, poor, hopeless, underdeveloped, and depressed. It is undeniable that his refusal of economic nationalism and praise of globalization had been activated through the historical revisionist intervention in the Irish society since the 1960's. When the Republic of Ireland wanted to enter into EEC, its inevitable reaction was to revise its nationalist ideology and history, not to be involved into the sectarian conflicts in Northern Ireland. Roughly, they adopted three different stances to Irish nationalism within Irish scholarship. The first step is anti-nationalist, revising and de-mythologizing the traditional nationalist interpretation of Irish history. The second is the traditional nationalist retort against the revisionist interpretation of Irish history for the reason of its denial of the existence of British imperialism and its attempt to rehabilitate the unionist role of Britain in Irish politics. The third is the post-revisionist who want to find a third way between traditional nationalism and anti-nationalist revisionism, critical both of old nationalist for its dogmatism and rigidity and of anti-nationalist for its blindness toward British imperialist existence and the danger of unionist political culture. While the third strand seems to be more realistic, empirical, and flexible, we can argue that such a trend has been found in Irish literature, especially the ‘trouble' literature which records Irish conflicts form Easter Rising, through civil war to the Northern violences. In this sense, Ulysses by James Joyce is a post-revisionist intervention into Irish history, for the novel keeps the self-critical balance between the past and the future of Ireland. Especially the Trouble literature such as Frank O'Connor's "Guests of the Nation" and Brendan Behan's The Hostage can be read as a post-revisionist intervention into the Irish reality, finding a third way between nationalism and anti-nationalist revisionism. They are critical of both ideologies and imagining the liberating and egalitarian territory beyond the national and ethnic boundaries. All these works try to remember people's distress, rejoice, and self-criticism, which is similar to the kind of vision proposed by the post-revisionist scholars.