“To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now,” declared Samuel Beckett in a 1961 interview. The Irish playwright was talking about the “buzzing confusion” of the day, suggesting that the job of the writer is to find a shape into which the chaos can fit.
Perhaps we have always lived in ages of dubiety, but Beckett’s quote is particularly apt in describing the last 60 years. We have stepped into the eye of a technological and moral storm that has been moving at exponential rates. News is in doubt. Truth is in doubt. Memory is in doubt. Journalism, criticism and fiction also.
One of the many triumphs of Fintan O’Toole’s “We Don’t Know Ourselves” is that he manages to find a form that accommodates the spectacular changes that have occurred in Ireland over the past six decades, which happens to be his life span. “My life is too boring for a memoir,” he writes in the afterword, “and there is no shortage of modern Irish history.” The subtitle of the book is “A Personal History of Modern Ireland.” Indeed, it is not a memoir, nor is it an absolute history, nor is it entirely a personal reflection or a crepuscular credo. It is, in fact, all of these things helixed together: his life, his country, his thoughts, his misgivings, his anger, his pride, his doubt, all of them belonging, eventually, to us.
