Writing While Irish: Universality and Parochialism

I'm fairly certain it isn't a criminal offense, at least in most countries. . .

from Excursions in the Real World
William Trevor

Being Irish is complicated, in my case, by the fact that I am a writer of fiction. One circumstance influences the other; nationality seems irrelevant in the loose, uncharted world of art, then suddenly raises its voice; fiction insists on universality, then equally insists that a degree of parochialism can often best achieve this. A muddle of contradiction prevails, but since the practice of any art has to do with establishing order, muddles should be grist to the artistic mill. Or so at least you can pretend.

Writing is a professional activity, yet when fiction is the end product it must necessarily also be a personal one. As you engage in it you cannot escape the person you are.

I think the critical point here is how universality is achieved.  It seems to me that it is almost always achieved in the particular.  Hamlet is not the prince of anywhere at anytime--he is not Everyman.  He is Hamlet--that he shares in the human condition makes some of what he says and does particular and some of it universal.  So, too with any work that attains universality.  It is universal because it speaks in particulars that are meaningful.  Thus Shakespeare is universal in a way that John Bunyan, writing allegorically and vaguely, cannot be.

But these are hasty thoughts on the matter--not deepthink.  And so they are subject to equally hasty revisions as conversation is engaged--or not.