Abstract: | In the 1990 collection of essays The Sub-Prefect Should Have Held His Tongue, Hubert Butler's ideas about the last 80 years or so of (Irish) history oscillate between autobiography and political testimony, taking the little community as the minimal unit for explaining culture in its dynamics as struggle, at the level of facts and mentalities, and as debate at the level of the commentary about the facts and mentalities. Moving to and fro in an ideal space between politics and literature, Butler's texts surprisingly touch, without naming them so, on nearly all our fashionable cultural analysis topics:power in society and the official ideology and propaganda of the religious, political or ethnic groups, plus the means of their subversion through intellectual, economic, spiritual initiatives of the community. |
