In Doyle’s novel The Commitments it is hard to understand the economic state of Ireland and how this impacts the characters in the novel without seeing it. This caused an initial disconnect in my reading, until the history of Ireland and its influence on Doyle’s writing was further explained in class. It is important for readers to understand the constant inflation, high unemployment, and lack of economic growth the Irish were experiencing, which would lead to Jimmy calling the Irish the blacks of Europe.
Contextualizing The Commitments brought entirely new meaning to the connection Jimmy brings to soul music and black identity. Still problematic and lopsided, I can see that it is more about the connection of poverty rather than race. I think this novel is a more extreme example of something written for the people of its time. While the novel is engaging, its full intention cannot be properly understood without the context of time and place. Does Roddy Doyle assume knowledge so that the novel means something different to Irish audiences than other audiences? Can it be a lasting novel, when its context doesn’t make sense within a decade or two later?
I also found the book to be very insular in its presentation of Irish economics in the mid 1980’s. While the novel is still enjoyable if read outside of the class context, the ability to more fully see and discuss the context which the characters live in but rarely explain to the reader granted myself and others a better understanding of life in Barrytown as a whole. Although I had seen the movie years before reading the book, being able to read Doyle’s novel towards the end of the course after reading several texts which set up the themes of identity and place of “The Commitments” greatly improved my reading. I think that even though outsiders can certainly enjoy the novel, his clear lack of proper narrative context implies that this is a novel for Dubliners and more broadly the Irish. I find this particularly fascinating because for a novel with gestures and mentions of the broad transatlantic, its preference to focus more upon the interior life of Barrytown raises a lot of questions about the Irish’s search for identity and search for other groups to better identify themselves.
“I think this novel is a more extreme example of something written for the people of its time.” This is such an interesting phrase considering the music that the band chooses to sing. The Commitments seem to believe that Soul is timeless and transferable between different contexts, people, and time periods. Yet, as you aptly note, context matters in these books and believing that art can apply perfectly to multiple different experiences ignored the valuable context in which the art was produced and the background of the original artist. Intentionally or not, the Commitments do just that.