Michael Rubenstein, Public Works: Infrastructure, Irish Modernism, and The

Postcolonial. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. ISBN ISBN
13: 978-0-268-04030-7. Pbk. $32.00

The table of contents for Michael Rubensteins excellent book maps an
elegantly simple terrain. The introduction (Chapter One) defines the (Irish)
postcolonial comedy of development, which he sees as an encounter between
the history of public works in the Irish Free State and Irish literary modernism
For the purposes of this volume, Irish literary modernism covers the years
1922-1940. This introduction is followed by two parts, one devoted to Water
and one to Power, each part divided into two chapters. Rubenstein avoids the
usual inquiry into the relative good or ill of technology itself, choosing the far
more useful strategy of exploring how public utilities both create entitlements
and constrain the nature of citizenship. Thus James Joyce and Flann OBrien
testify to plumbing challenges and initiatives in Irish literature at the municipal
and national levels, while Denis Johnston requires us to study up on the Free
States Shannon Scheme, which liquidly propelled Ireland into the era of total
electrification. Implicit in these works is an ideal nation in which the state
provides public utilities as a matter of course and through those public works
alters the citizens ways of thinking, being, and writing. Instead of matching a
second Irish writer to Johnston in literary meditation on Power, Public Works
seeks its conclusion in a comparative postcolonialism that tacitly addresses
infrastructural lapses, engineering accomplishments, and narrative around the
globe. Principal case in point for Chapter Five is Patrick Chamoiseaus novel
Texaco (1992), a fiction about a Caribbean towns efforts to obtain electricity.
Rubenstein somewhat circularly accounts for the introduction of Chamoiseaus
novel into this study of Irish modernism by pointing out that Texaco is
indebted to Joyce and like Ulysses is a work that needs to be categorized as a
postcolonial comedy of development.

To some extent, the table of contents belies the internal complexities and
even unresolved challenges that Rubenstein has tackled in Public Works.
Hence it is instructive to track precisely where the seams show in the
enterprise. Although the book falls into two parts labeled Water and Power,
in the introduction the author also includes gas under his inquiry into public
water utilities. However, he pauses for only six pages or so to look at the
issues surrounding the gasworks in Ireland. At the same time, water issues
(reservoirs, sewage disposal, domestic plumbing, and more) never fully recede;
the Shannon Scheme involved hydroelectricity, after all, and while this overlap
from water to power undoubtedly helps the books argument to flow, it also
points to the difficulty of talking about modernity in its parts while
development was, however unevenly, chugging ahead as a whole. Where a
reader might miss a step or voice an objection, the writer deftly parries these
moments through a variety of rhetorical moves, none perhaps more effective
than the summary of what has gone before in the text. Were a reader to
catalogue all such summaries, she would notice some subtle shifts in the
volumes trajectory, fluctuations that perhaps point to the embedded memory
of the projects own development. For instance, Rubenstein asserts in the
introduction that Joyce is the center of the project, but the project itself wants
to claim something like a comparable structural weight for OBrien, Johnston,
and Chamoiseau. Another example: Irish modernism is flagged in the title,
but Caribbean modernity finds its way into the final chapter and is used to
make the case for a comparative global protocol, what shows up in the title as
the Postcolonial.

Anyone who has tackled the kind of project that Rubenstein has taken
on can easily appreciate both the organizational challenges and rhetorical
strategizing that I describe. That said I almost wish that the seams had been
allowed to fray more fully in this book in order to display the challenges of our
current theoretical moment. Rubensteins stitching-together of disparate
materials creates a copious garment, a coat of many fabrics in which the study
of Joyce unfolds into a consideration of uneven developments in Irish
modernism; an inquiry into Irish engineering projects begins in colonial days
and stretches well into the present; the aesthetic accomplishments of
modernism and the utilitarian protocols of modernity constantly deconstruct
themselves and each other. This ample costume, which makes use of many
kinds of evidence and displaces its own pattern to include a West Indian
design, goes a long way toward documenting the awkwardness and challenge of
the current moment in Irish studies. Indeed, the always intricate imbrication
of life-world and writing is made manifest precisely in the parts of Rubensteins
project that resist the ironing-out inherent in summary and definition.

Rubenstein defines the titular term public works as itself a kind of
synthetic summation of his argument, which is 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 (pp. 1-2). Wanting to shore up its sovereignty, the new
Free State strategically used public utilities and the powerful metaphors
connected with them to bring the social into domestic space and into the
collective psyche. The waterworks at Vartry and the Shannon Hydroelectric
Dam made the states engineering a part of public and literary consciousness
while allowing some distance between aesthetic representations and the
inevitability of personal invasion by capitalist machineries. So it is that Joyce
might be seen as offering literary routes both through and around the prison
house of modernization. Rubenstein submits that we cannot understand
modernist literature without understanding how modern states produced
power and how that power -- what Leopold Bloom would call light to the
gentiles -- was homologous with imagined communities.

For Rubenstein, Irelands electrifictions (he notes that Soviet origin of
this term) not only connect but to a large extent imaginatively align the states
provision of utilities with the nations quest for self-identity. Thus, rather than
becoming mere victims of their own colonial/ postcolonial underdevelopment,
the personae of some Irish modernist literature even took up the option of
becoming developers themselves. Transformation by way of public works was
not always heartily embraced in Ireland (think of OBrien deploring the
invasion of the individual by the state apparatus). However it is the dialogue
between the aesthetic legacy and rationalization that Rubenstein asks us to
keep in focus rather than a simplistic and stereotypically assumed Celtic
opposition to the customs of engineered modernity. Comedy, then, instead of
tragedy prevails, hence Rubensteins positing of the postcolonial comedy of
development as a genre that is at once wary, reflexive, pragmatic, utopian, and
dialectical.

One of Rubensteins sources is the 2007 Infrastructure issue of PMLA,
and in particular the editorial introduction by Patricia Yeager called Dreaming
of Infrastructure. This essay moves swiftly through facts and narratives about
collapsing urban infrastructures in Dresden, Beirut, Detroit, Baghdad,
Mogadishu, Bangalore, and many more cities to underscore the developments
gaps that mark the contemporary world. Yeager illustrates her call for a
poetics of the urban imaginary by reference to narratives such as Hanan al-
Shaykhs Beirut Blues, Ayi Kwei Armahs The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
(1968), Jos Saramagos Blindness, Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man, William
Gibsons Virtual Light, Karen Yamashitas Tropic of Orange, and yes, Patrick
Chamoiseaus Texaco. Yeagers passionate shout out for a metropoetics
recognizes the necessity to take up a provisional starting point in Raymond
Williams The Country and the City (1973), to glide past the usual suspects:
theorists like Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, or even Henri Lefebvre (p. 12),
and to reach toward Mike Davis, Giovanni Arrighi, Achille Mbembe and Dipesh
Chakrabarty, thinkers who have gone well beyond Euro-American contexts. It
seems to me that in terms of its imaginative research, its theoretical risk-
taking, and its startlingly original views of Irish modernity, Michael Rubenstein
deserves to be included on this short list of infrastructural must-reads.







Notes on contributors info:

Cheryl Herr teaches at the University of Iowa. She has published widely on
James Joyce, Irish Studies, British literature, and cinema.