A novel is a complex thing. Sometimes I think of it as a building, a house – much of my thinking is in terms of houses – a house of many rooms, a symphony of many voices, and the challenge is to design, construct and decorate it as well as one can. But, however apt the metaphor, when it comes to the crunch the writer knows that even if there is a flaw in the design, even if something goes badly wrong, no one is going to die. Some readers might be bored, or the artist disappointed. But that is it. Writing a novel that fails is not a hanging offence. The world will get over it.
This gives the novel writer a wonderful freedom. Although art is demanding and the artist needs to take pains, ultimately it is a sense of irresponsibility that is the writer’s greatest gift. The childlike gift of creative irresponsibility which the girls in The Dancers Dancing have, and which encourages them to break rules, to explore forbidden territory, is also an asset for the writer, an innate gift which needs to be nurtured rather than abandoned.
Mostly I wrote The Dancers Dancing in my house in Dublin, sitting at my big old computer in my cluttered bedroom. But I began to compose The Dancers Dancing in Kerry, in our little summer house in Dún Chaoin. And it was there that I worked on my descriptions of the burn, examining Abhainn Baile na hAbha, the river that runs through Dún Chaoin. The house is a good place in which to write. It is quiet and there are few distractions. I sleep soundly and long enough to have vivid dreams. Sometimes I dream stories – coloured images, fully-fledged narratives, usually of a bizarre and interesting nature, at least to me – and I sense that I am tapping into whatever source it is that helps me write.
When I get up I go down to the big empty room which constitutes the whole of the house downstairs, and listen to music as I drink my coffee. Outside there is a field full of long grass, weeds, wildflowers in summer. I can stare at that as I breakfast. Sometimes an animal emerges. Most often a hare. Or a swallow. Sometimes a fox. Sheep, the domestic animal which is closest to being wild, occasionally wander past and stare inquisitively at me as I drink my coffee, before moving on, at a sedate and dignified pace. Not in the least bit sheepish.
The grass, like the river, seems to me a metaphor for the imagination. So much comes out of it. Those wild animals – they are there, hiding in it, sometimes emerging, like pinkeens from under rocks in the burn. The flowers, which come in their dozens from spring right through to autumn, starting with the primroses and violets, going on to the early purple orchids, then the profusion of June and July, the buttercups, the dandelions, the eyebright, the selfheal, the scabious, and many more, until the bright orange montbretia come in August and September.
In this place writing is not work – in Dublin, it can begin to be that, to be a chore. In the country, even if there is a deadline, and there often is, it is easy, it is play, it blends into the daily pattern, it is an essential component of that tapestry of walking, listening to music, swimming, cooking dinner. It is a part of life, and fun, as it should be. I often start my novels in this place, in the field of long grass, where ideas flow into my head without any effort on my part.
Declan Kiberd on reading The Dancers Dancing
‘There’s no there there any more’ Gertrude Stein sadly said of Oakland, California; but the same observation might have been made of the Donegal Gaeltacht in 1972. Supposedly a repository of traditional Gaelic culture and values, to which four Dublin girls are sent for a summer sojourn to improve their Irish, it turns out to be a surprisingly modern place. Its teenagers are more sexually precocious than the visitors from the capital; they sport ‘fast’ platform shoes; and they use the same mass-produced furniture in their bedrooms.
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne in The Dancers Dancing has produced one of the most compelling and understated exercises in the female Bildungsroman. Her Dublin girls cannot learn the Donegal dialect from their hosts – a skill which, if mastered, would anyway make them ridiculous in a capital city whose elites speak a ‘civil service’ Irish, stiff with correct grammar and syntax. But they can learn other lessons – about the hidden injuries of social class; about the cultural gap which separates Northerners and Southerners at the height of the Troubles; and about the hybrid nature of a national identity which has already been sufficiently expanded to include English mothers as well as Irish fathers, Protestant fathers as well as Catholic mothers.
Ní Dhuibhne’s book was first published in 1999, a year after the Good Friday Agreement announced that a county such as Derry might be British or Irish or both at the same time; but its narrative shows that such a redefined Irishness had to be learned in youth before it could be proclaimed in middle age. Her chapter headings can make play with this double layering of time: ‘The truce is over (but not to worry it’s 1972)’.
If the form of Irish taught in Dublin has little use-value in the Gaeltacht, this is true of many other aspects of education and upbringing too. Orla, the central character of the four, comes from a family intent on bourgeois proprieties: her bricklayer father must now be styled a building contractor. She herself seems at times less interested in reviving Irish than in stamping out such Hiberno-English expressions as ‘youse’ (second person plural of ‘you’). Yet the crowded house of her bean-an-tí in Donegal reminds her all too pointedly of the fact that, when her father was on strike, her own mother had to take in lodgers so that she might receive a good education at secondary school.
That education, though strong on theory, fell short on practice: and Orla’s mother, for all her carefulness, did not think to alert her daughter to the likely onset of her menstruation. More generally, the Dublin girls know next to nothing about the war being enacted in Derry, not far from their Donegal setting, during the prosecution of Operation Motorman by the British Army. In that summer of 1972, the journalist Mary Holland interviewed an IRA volunteer who insisted that he was dying not for Mother Ireland but simply to protect the neighbours in his street.
The girls from Derry whom Orla meets are thin, fast and derisive of Southern attitudes: and their background in nationalist enclaves of dire unemployment suggests a possible equation with Gaeltacht dwellers, who suffered from the same condition. The Northern girls are undernourished but modern. They are already aware of their bodies, but not so good at Irish. They talk with utter freedom only when together, yet they know how to manipulate adults. When one of them goes on hunger strike, it isn’t hard to feel the force of the implied equation between Gaeltacht and ghetto. In the end, the differences between the Southerners and Northerners come down less to matters of nationalism than to questions of social class. And the Southern girls, like honest young people everywhere, try hard to understand.
Orla, being the complex child of an Irish-English marriage, longs to build a bridge between worlds, between the labouring poor and respectable middle class, between Galltacht and Gaeltacht. But the Gaelic values into which she is inducted often seem hopelessly abstract: Irish dancing, in those pre-Riverdance days, is less a sensuous challenge than a sort of Euclid Theorem performed with nervous legs. Worse still, the headmaster of the Gaeltacht college believes so little in his own mission that he reverts to English whenever he has a crucial message for his charges, ‘so youse will all understand’. The novel is haunted by that very Hiberno- English which the respectable are intent on abandoning: yet whole sentences and paragraphs written in it suggest that, at its best, such a dialect is filled with expressive potentials, and, moreover, that those who still use it are often much more quick-witted than the politer sorts. If respectable people still think in English while using halting Irish words, then others who still think in Irish are capable of using beautiful English phrases. No wonder that poets from W.B. Yeats to Tom Paulin have argued that Hiberno-English posed the ‘real’ language question for modern Irish people, too ashamed to recognise the beauties of a hybrid language which had evolved out of the desperate bargain struck between English and Irish in the nineteenth century. Yeats believed that all prestigious activities, from the writing of editorials to delivery of church sermons
, should be done in Hiberno-English, but that the Irish were too colonised in their minds to do this.
Orla herself is often ashamed of her eccentric Aunt Annie, about whom she feels (as many do about Irish) that ‘something’ should be done (presumably by other people). She avoids Annie, much as Southerners avoid issues raised by the Northern conflict – but, inevitably, a confrontation of sorts with both deferred national questions must occur.
Deeper still, however, is Orla’s confrontation with her own emergent womanhood, against the natural backdrop and secret potentials of that hidden place called the burn. It is here, in the presence of the female divinity of the river, that much is resolved, so that the Euclid Theorems may be cast aside to make way for real dancers really dancing. Near the end, by a subtle shift of voice, Ní Dhuibhne adds further depth to this narrative of growth and demonstrates how a woman can take power by the simple but audacious expedient of writing her self. This second look at experience can transform a person from one imprisoned by it to one freed of it.
The subtlety of this marvellous Bildungsroman lies in its refusal of any sense of a grand narrative. There is no major catastrophe, because everything happens elsewhere, further up the coast, in Derry, or back in the past. This is, after all, an account of a relatively happy childhood, and a happy Irish childhood at that, delivered with tenderness of touch and an utter exactitude of language. Perhaps, in an age of angst-ridden exposés of parental tyranny and youthful trauma, there can be no more subversive or more honest a story than that.
The Dancers Dancing Page 26
