Inventing Ireland

by Declan Kiberd

  James O'Donnell? These two words were singing in my ears when feeling returned to me. I found that I was lying on my side on the floor, my breeches, hair, and all my person saturated with the streams of blood which flowed from the split caused by the oar in my skull.

  Jams O'Donnell? Bhí an dá bhriathar seo ag gliogaireacht im cheann nuair tháinic mothú arís ann. Fuaireas mé féin sínte ar leataoibh ar an urlár, mo bhríste, mo ghruaig agus mo phearsa uile ar maothas ó slaoda fola a bhí ag stealladh ón scoilt bhí fágtha ag an mhaide ar mo chloigean.8

  Bonaparte remarks acidly to his mother that, if every child in the district is Jams O'Donnell, then "isn't O'Donnell the wonderful man and the number of children he has?" ("feach gur fónta an fear é O'Donnell agus an líon sin clainne aige"). His mother tells him that the Old-Grey-Fellow, his grandfather, was also beaten on his first day at school and called Jams O'Donnell. At this revelation, Bonaparte decides that one day's education is enough and resolves never to return:

  – Woman, said I, what you say is amazing and I don't think I'll ever go back to that school but it's now the end of my learning.

  – You're shrewd, said she, in your early youth.

  "A bhean", arsa mise, "is iontach a n-abair agus ní dói liom go bhfillimse ar an scoil sin go deo acht deire an léinn anois déanta agam".

  "Táir críonna", arsa mo mháthair, "id mhion-óige dhuit".9

  If the fawning peasantry betray a pathetic snobbery in baptizing their children with the names of illustrious foreigners, they also show a great distaste for the names of their own tradition: names such as Seán and Séamas have not been found in the area for generations. Conversely, the affluent Gaelic revivalists from Dublin, who visit the district every summer to learn Irish, are equally anxious to conceal their own inherited names. Here, O'Nolan mocks the subterfuge of the founder of the Gaelic League, Douglas Hyde, who employed the pseudonym An Craoibhín Aoibhinn (The Pleasant Little Branch), in order to hide a surname which pointed clearly back to invading English soldiery. In a somewhat hysterical attempt to deanglicize themselves, city revivalists adopt a strategy which is the reverse of that employed by the peasantry: they discard their foreign surnames and adopt Gaelic tides such as An Nóinín Gaelach, Goll Mac Mórna and An Tuiseal Tabharthach (respectively, the Gaelic Daisy, Goll MacMórna and the Dative Case). They also turn their backs on their actual heritage, in an attempt to acquire a spurious identity. By such subtle satire, O'Nolan emphasizes that affluence is no guarantee of a sure identity and that poverty is the inevitable condition of those who have had their past identity taken away. Affluence, at least, has the merit of leaving a person with a choice in the matter, but it does not ensure that he will have the courage to be himself.

  O'Nolan was all too well aware that many colourless and weak-kneed people had joined the language movement, in the hope that it would give them a social identity, since they lacked the capacity to mould their own. They adopted the kilt as their public costume, in blissful unawareness that it was a foreign importation. The misconception was so prevalent that even Gaeltacht dwellers were taken in. Bonaparte O'Coonassa believes that the kilt signifies competence in Irish and the Gaelic integrity of the wearer:

  There were men present wearing a simple unornamented dress – these, I thought, had little Gaelic; others had such nobility, style and elegance in their feminine attire that it was evident that their Gaelic was fluent. I felt quite ashamed that there was not even one true Gael among us in Corcha Dorcha.

  Bhí fir ann agus gúna simplí nea-ornáideach ortha – iad sin, dar Horn, ar bheagán Gaeilge; fir eile ann le hoiread uaisleachta, shlachtmharachta, agus ghalántachta ina mban-chultacha gur léir go raibh an Ghaeilg go líofa acu. Bhí árd-náire orm nach raibh éinne fior-Ghaelach inar mease i gCorcha Dorcha.10

  An Béal Bocht fulfils the promise of its tide, for it is a study of the effects on Irish identity of generations of dire poverty. This is not simply a matter of the material poverty of the western peasant, but also of the spiritual emptiness of the town-dweller who cannot feel himself a true Irishman until he has donned a kilt. In Ireland the phrase béal bocht or "poor mouth" is used to describe the slavish tactic of the person who makes a great show of poverty. This is done in order to wring sympathy and support from onlookers, a tactic which had become traditional in a region laid waste by deprivation. This theme is developed in the novel's sub-tide droch-scéal ar an droch-shaol, "a bad story about the hard life". That last phrase became the eventual tide of O'Nolan's next book, which was itself sub-tided "An Exegesis of Squalor", a perfect description of what had been already achieved in An Béal Bocht.

  Anti-pastoralists like O'Nolan and Kavanagh were, of course, following a lead which had been given by James Joyce, whose own views on the peasantry became even clearer with the publication in the 1940s of Stephen Hero, in which the main protagonist says: "The glorified peasantry all seem to me as like one another as a peascod is to another peascod. They can spot a false coin, but they represent no very admirable type of culture. They live a life of dull routine, the calculation of coppers, the weekly debauch and the weekly piety".11 This might have been an account of a townland where every man has the interchangeable name of Jams O'Donncll. For An Béal Bocht truly is the Irish version of One Hundred Years of Solitude, a book in which identities are fluid and interchangeable, as characters are trapped in repetitive cycles of time and rains that pelt down without mercy. It takes us beyond the stage-Irish thief who robs the rich for kicks or for revenge to a study of robbers so poor that they filch from one another.

  Behind this desperate hilarity lies a real desolation: as Brendan Kennelly has observed, "this black vision sometimes transcends the satirical purpose it so brilliantly serves, and achieves at certain moments a real tragic intensity".12 The satire and the tragedy are finally one, for in mocking the official clichés of previous Irish writers, O'Nolan is emphasizing the plight of a peasantry which has had foisted on it a falsely romanticized ethos . . . from stage Irish in the nineteenth century to stage Gael in the twentieth, one mask has simply been exchanged for another. For O'Nolan the most distressing aspect of this was the alarming number of Irishmen, in the last century and in the present, who were willing to conform to these stereotypes.

  In the figure of the Old Grey Fellow (An Seanduine Liath) may be found the stage Gael, abjectly conforming to the fatuous clichés laid down in the classic Gaelic novels of "Máire" – to the effect that toddlers should be put to play for hours each day in fireside ashes, that girls in Donegal may be courted only in the middle of the night by two men who come match-making with a five-noggin bottle, and so on. He has no theory of his own to pass on to Bonaparte, other than clichés borrowed from Gaelic texts, and from his literary ancestor, the stage Irishman. Even the credulous Bonaparte soon discerns the lineaments of the time-honoured buffoon:

  . .. bedad, it was an incredible thing the amount of potatoes he consumed, the volume of speech which issued from him and what little work he performed around the house.

  ... by dad, ba dhochreidte an oiread prátaí a d'itheadh sé, an oiread cainte bheireadh sé uaidh, agus a laighead oibre dhéanadh sé fá'n dtigh.13

  His braggadocio is wholly within the tradition, as the maturing grandson notes:

  According to what I had heard, he was the best man in the Rosses during his youth. There was no one in the countryside comparable to him where jumping, ransacking, fishing, love-making, drinking, thieving, fighting, ham-stringing, cattle-running, swearing, gambling, night-walking, hunting, dancing, boasting, and stick-fighting were concerned.

  Do réir mar bhí closta agam uaidh, eisean an fear ab fhearr ins na Rosa le linn a óige. Maidir le léimní, polltóireacht, iascaireacht, suirghe, ól, ga-daíocht, troid, leonadh-eailaí, rith, eascainí, cearúthas, siúl-oiche, seilg, damhsa, maíomh agus tarraingt-a'-bhata, ní raibh éinne sa dúthai ionch-urtha leis.14

  He is, in short, a man whose whole life has been an epic campaign for the rehabilitation of the clich�
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  The tragedy of rural Ireland is enacted in moments of high farce. That poverty which causes humans to cohabit with pigs and cows and hens may be tragic in cause but it is comic in effect – as when the O'Coonassa family are advised to build an outhouse, but mistakenly conclude that nature has ordained that they, rather than the animals, should go to live in it. After two nights of cold and rain, they entreat to be restored to their rightful abode, back with the beasts. For more than two hundred years, the stage Irishman had been associated in the English folk mind with animals, especially with pigs. According to one historian, the popular notion of the swinish mob helps to account for the porcine features assigned by cartoonists to agitators: "Because pigs played such a vital part in the Irish peasant economy, it was all too easy for comic artists to endow United Irishmen with snouts instead of noses".15 Such visual metaphors persisted into the present century, when Bernard Partridge, the chief cartoonist of the magazine Punch, used the pig to denote the Irish people throughout the war of independence.16 In An Béat Bocht, O'Nolan simply took the Englishman's metaphor for the Irishman's literal truth, effectively throwing the cartoons back in English faces with the suggestion that people, if treated for a time as animals in fiction, may begin to behave like animals in fact.

  The comedy is never more bitter than when it is most funny. A whole chapter is devoted to the tribulations of living in the same house with Ambrose, a foul-smelling pig; and the Old Grey Fellow actually turns the family out onto the street rather than evict Ambrose. Later, when the government offers a grant for each child in the household who can speak English, he issues a number of piglets with jackets and trousers for the occasion. He stills the doubts of the lady of the house with the following speech extolling Sarah, the family's sow:

  She has a great crowd of family at present and they have vigorous voices, even though their dialect is unintelligible to us. How do we know but that their conversation isn't in English? Of course, youngsters and piglets have the same habits and take nonce that there's a close likeness between their skins.

  Tá fuirean mhór clainne fá lathair aici agus tá bíogadh breá gutha ionnta má's do-thuigthe féin a gcanúin againn. Cá bhfios dúinn nach i mBéarla a bhíonn a gcóluadar le chéile acu? Dar ndói, cleachtaíonn daoine óga agus muca óga na nósanna céanna agus féach go bhfuil géar-chosúlacht idir a gcroicean.17

  The inspector, when he comes, is given the benign assurance that "All speak English, Sor", including Jams O'Donnell (whoever he might be). The official departs happy with a job well done.

  The Old Grey Fellow's judgement that there is little difference between a piglet and a youngster is vindicated by a curious event in the following chapter. One of the subsidized piglets strays from the farm and is lost, but returns in triumph a month later with not only its jacket and trousers intact, but also its pockets filled with a pipe, tobacco, whiskey and a shilling for good measure. These are the classic props of the Stage Irishman,18 but in this case they constitute the unlikely reward for an evening's work with a professional linguist who tape-recorded the animal's grunts in the belief that they represented a particularly erudite form of Irish. That the collector should later have gained an honorary distinction from a German university for this work adds to the magnificence of the jest. Towards the end of the book, Bonaparte O'Coonassa is himself lost for a time in the mountains, before he manages to stumble back, naked and hungry, to his native parish. The lesson is not lost on the Old Grey Fellow, who lectures his feckless grandson:

  – There's no understanding the world that's there today at all, said he, and especially in Corcha Dorcha. A pig rambled off on us a little while ago and when he returned, he had a worthwhile suit of clothes on him. You went off from us fully-dressed and you're back again as stark-naked as the day you were bom!

  "Níl míniú ar an saol atá iniú ann", ar seisean, "i gCorcha Dorcha go háirithe. Tamall ó shoin d'imigh muc ar scachrán uainn agus nuair d'fhill sé bhí culaith fhiúntach éadaigh uime. D'imigh rusa uainn lán-ghléasta, agus táir tagaithe arais anois, tú có lomnocht is bhí tú an chéad lá".19

  It is in the same chapter that Bonaparte is prompted to put to the Old Grey Fellow the overwhelming question which is implicit in every page of the book:

  – Are you certain that the Gaels are people? said I.

  – They've mat reputation anyway, little noble, said he, but no confirmation of it has ever been received. We're not horses nor hens; scab nor ghosts; and, in spite of all that, it's unbelievable that we're humans – but all that is only an opinion.

  "An bhfuilir cinnte", arsa mise, "gur daoine na Gaeil?"

  "Tá an t-ainm sin amuí ortha, a uaislín", ar seisean, "acht ní frith deimhniú riamh air. Ní capaill ná cearca sinn, ní róintí ná taibhsí, agus, ar a shon san, is inchreidte gur daoine sinn; acht níl sa mhéid sin acht tuairm".20

  On the opening page of the book, Bonaparte had acknowledged that a person's name and his memory are the twin keys to his identity. Having been robbed of his name by the schoolmaster and having lost the memory of his father in early youth, he is well entitled to ask whether he has any human personality or is merely interchangeable with dumb animals. Certainly, he has no understanding of sex and no idea of where he came from:

  I was born in the middle of the night in the end of the house. My father never expected me because he was a quiet fellow and did not understand very accurately the ways of life.

  I lár na hoíche sin sea rugadh mise i dtóin an tighe. Ní raibh aon choinne ag m'athair Horn óir duine cneasta a bhí ann agus ní go róchruinn a thuig seisean cúrsaí an tsaoil.21

  Such ignorance seems widespread in Corcha Dorcha. Later, when the Old Grey Fellow decides to dress the piglets as English-speaking children, he tells Bonaparte's mother with cryptic cynicism that she will have a large household by the next morning. Even this woman seems baffled at such rapid procreativity for she says: "It's a wonderful world, but I'm not expecting anything of that kind and neither did I hear that a house could be filled in one night" ("is íontach an saol atá inniu ann – ach níl aon choinne agamsa lena leithéid agus ní clos riamh go raibh líonadh tí ann in aon oíche"). When Bonaparte attains his majority, he remains woefully ignorant of the facts of life:

  I thought that babies fell out of the skies and that those who desired them needed only to have good luck and a spacious field.

  Cheapas gur as na spéarthaí a thuit na leanaí agus nach raibh de dhíobháil ar éinne a bhí ag duil leo acht an t-á agus páirc bhreá fhairsing.22

  Inevitably, when his own first son is born, he thinks that his household has been blessed with nothing more portentous than the arrival of another piglet – he cannot recognize his son for what he is, just as he has earlier failed to recall the memory of his own father. All continuity of identity from one generation to the next has been shattered by this elementary ignorance, just as the schoolboy's recital of his genealogical tree was rudely interrupted by the master.

  Bonaparte is not the only character in Corcha Dorcha who has difficulty in distinguishing the human from the animal – nor are pigs the only beasts with whom humans are compared. In Victorian physiognomy the Irish were often represented as dogs, just as the English were likened to bulls, the Americans to bears, the Chinese to hogs, and so on. In Comparative Physiognomies (1852), James W. Redfield wrote: "Compare the Irishman and the dog in respect to barking, snarling, howling, begging, fawning, flattering, backbiting, quarreling, blustering, scenting, seizing, hanging on, teasing, rollicking . . . you will be convinced that there is a wonderful resemblance". Redfield went on to make a distinction between the aristocratic Irishman, represented by the noble wolfhound, and the base-born "scavenger-dog".23 It was such lore that O'Nolan satirized in his depiction of Sitric O'Sanasa, the impoverished Stage Irishman in extremis, a man so poor that he has to fight with dogs for a dry bone. In competing with dogs for survival he becomes one in fact, as the Irish had already grown canine in Victorian fiction. Bonaparte reports:

/>   I often saw him on the hillside fighting and competing with a stray dog, both contending for a narrow hard bone and the same snorting and angry barking issuing from them both.

  Is minic a chonnac é sa dubh-luachair amuí ar thaebh an chnuic ag troid agus ag córaíocht le mada fánach, cnámh caol eatartha mar dhuais san iomathóireacht, an sranfach agus an tafan conafach céanna ag teacht uatha araon.24

  Through the character of Sitric, O'Nolan mocks all those writers who would sentimentalize the holy poverty and sacred simplicity of the Gaelic peasant – "it had always been said that accuracy of Gaelic (as well as holiness of spirit) grew in proportion to one's lack of worldly goods" ("bhí sé riamh ráite go mbíonn cruinneas Gaeilge (maraon le naofacht anama) ag daoine do réir mar bhíd gan aon mhaoin shaolta"). One sentimental visitor, who spies Sitric deriving heady pleasure from a bottle of water, dashes the vessel to earth on the grounds that it "spiled the effect". Sitric cannot afford even that most stage-Irish nourishment, the humble spud. One of his neighbours, Máirtín Ó Bánasa, remarks tersely that "Whoever is without a spud for long is unhealthy" ("an té bhíonn gan phráta, ní bhíonn sé folláin") – a bow to Adam Smith who had written of the "nourishing quality" of the Irish potato, as evidenced by the strength of London Irish porters and the beauty of London Irish whores.25 Verging on collapse from hunger, Sitric is saved by Máirtín who offers him the boiled potatoes which he had intended as a feed for his own pigs. In the process Sitric has become the reductio ad absurdum of the stage Irishman – with his fang-like teeth and protruding upper lip, he comes to share bones with howling dogs, spuds with squealing pigs, and is even driven on one occasion to swallow that most hackneyed of props, a piece of turf from the bog. The basic features of Boucicault's character are still retained – like Myles-na-Coppaleen, Sitric lives in a bare den by a rock-pool on a hill. However, through living in such proximity to animals and sharing their food, it is no surprise that Sitric finally opts for animality, preferring an underwater life as a seal to the frugal possibilities for humanity in Corcha Dorcha. The land-dog whom we met at the start of Chapter Eight soon degenerates into a badger, but his future and final status is anticipated when he starts to drink rain for nourishment. By the end of the section Bonaparte reports a sighting of a group of seals with Sitric among their number: