Tragedy and Irish Literature: Synge, O’Casey, Beckett by Ronan McDonald (review)

MLR, 99.2, 2004 477 popular culture, between dominant and subordinate, and between agency and re? presentation. The deconstruction of spaces, times, and theoretical categories is, for Brooker, not simply a matter of describing a contemporary urban aesthetic or ex? perience. So, for example, Langston Hughes's Montage of a Dream Deferred offers 'strategies forsurvival and sociality' (p. 69). Writing about the Londons in the written and cinematic works of Sayed Manzarul Islam, Patrick Keiller, Rachel Lichtenstein, and Janet Cardiff, Brooker argues that 'an interventionist art, commonly thought to have ended with the modernist project, remains possible' (p. 115). A new architectural and political order is shown to give rise to an art which 'can be open to the unvoiced and unrepresented' (p. 115) without succumbing to the exile and failure to belong that he diagnoses in many of the works discussed in that chapter. His final words, in a coda discussing work by a Latife Tekin and John Berger, are: 'My hope is that the estrangement practised by these fables from the edge and from a possible future city might jolt us into a productive re-imagining of thistime and place' (p. 198). The use of this terminology of 'estrangement' and 'possible future' hints that what Brooker is doing throughout this book is drawing attention to fictions as science fictions, in the best sense of the term. For just as science fiction can be characterized by its interest in cognitive estrangement and possibility, so Brooker wishes to argue that visions ofthe city and modernity are agents in a speculative and critical revision of the here and now. This book is a wide-ranging, convincing, and often seductive study. The relation? ships between literature, film,architecture, music and subcultural practices are deftly unpacked and analysed with attention to their specificity as well as their contributions to Brooker's ongoing argument. The dialogues between theories of modernity and postmodernity, and between theoretical discourse and cultural practices, are sustained even-handedly and reflectively.However, Brooker's reflexivityabout his selection of material and his language of analysis could be pushed somewhat further.In reviewing this book, metaphors and tropes relating to vision and point of view have recurred frequently, because this discourse inhabits and underlies Booker's own project. The language of perspective, view, survey, illumination, and focus is not simply instrumental , but the book rarely thematizes this explicitly and the reader is sometimes left to wonder about the status of its critical vocabulary. University of Reading Jonathan Bignell Tragedy and Irish Literature: Synge, O'Casey, Beckett. By Ronan McDonald. Bas? ingstoke and New York: Palgrave. 2002. xi + 201 pp. ?42.50. ISBN 0-33392393 -6. Not only have concepts of the tragic forcenturies been central to Western culture, but from Sophocles through Shakespeare to Racine and beyond, the high points of the genre have been seen as the pinnacles of literature. Theories of tragedy, furthermore, have attracted the most distinguished figures in the history of ideas from Aristotle onward. McDonald's study interests itself in the ways in which this endlessly fecund term and its theories have developed an intimate association with the structures of thought and the contexts of meaning through which a society mediates or represents profound sufferingand loss. Ireland and tragedy have often been seen as synonymous, as epitomized in Yeats's 'terrible beauty', and itis here that McDonald's trenchant and intelligent study begins, with an analysis of the compellingly easy fitbetween Ireland, its legacy of failed rebellion, emigration, and colonial persecution, the Irish literary imagination and its tropes of loss and guilt, and ideas of tragedy and 'tragic value'. When Michael Collins complained of the 1916 Rising that it 'had an air of Greek tragedy', he was identifyinga fetish often deemed characteristic of Irish history?for 478 Reviews ceremonial failure, the self-conscious attempt to find redemption through gestural sacrifice, rather than through pragmatic military strategy. McDonald's opening chapter moves from an intelligently wary analysis of the apparently endless series of qualifications and hair-splitting discriminations surrounding definitions of tragedy, and the restlessness of twentieth-century tragedy in its inherited forms and traditions, to a specific discussion of tragedy and Irish cultural history. He is at...