The first in a series of occasional pieces exploring certain genres by reviewers who know them well.
We read imaginative literature because it clears our minds of platitudes, because it permits us to know others more deeply than we could otherwise. Literature also gives us access to our authentic selves, strengthening our idea of who we are and shattering it, too. Enduring books are our most profound teachers, leading us across cultural and geographic boundaries. In the past two centuries Ireland has given the world such an inventive breadth and depth of stories that a reader might once again believe in the semi-mystical powers of the Gaelic file, the ancient poet of the island. The cauterizing power of literature may not be unique to Irish literature but it surely is particular to it.
Gaelic bards played a central role in the investiture of chieftains and kings. People believed that a poet’s curse could destroy an enemy; they feared the poet’s tongue and pen. The file was honored for being able to tell fluent, imaginative tales — and to record laws. Poets, like the laws themselves, could alter reality. When in the 4th and 5th centuries St. Patrick and the Christian missionaries came ashore, with them came the monasteries and a love of the book and a cherishing of the word. Ireland is still a land in love with books. How many other countries give over an entire day (Bloomsday, June 16) to the celebration of one book?
The first Viking invasion came in 795, and the raids lasted about 200 years. In the late 12th century Henry II invaded and 1,000 years of English colonization and Irish resistance began its rollercoaster ride, through Oliver Cromwell, the Great Hunger and more, and — after the island’s independence — into “The Troubles” between Protestant and Catholic.
As Frank O’Connor once said, Irish literature amounted to a tale of two cities: Dublin and London. Embattled and starved and colonized over the centuries, a people who had their language marginalized, their myths and religion and culture stolen, their sovereignty stripped away — for them literature became a way of regaining a stolen past and envisioning a free future.
Throughout the past two centuries, Irish literature has been a strange concoction of comedy and tragedy, a portrait of heroes and gawms. It has been a literature of profound invention — in 1922 James Joyce’s “Ulysses” opened the modernist floodgate and changed how a story could be told.
One great lesson of Irish literature in the 20th and 21st centuries is how to survive in a bifurcated land, how to find a balance of humor and strength in poverty and disenfranchisement. Today’s Irish writers position sinister humor and violence alongside memory of myth and magic. Celtic tigers and angst-filled millennials share the streets with drug-addled youth and confused country men and women, all characters desperately trying to find a way to stay in their homeland even as it changes into a place they can no longer grasp. In much of the literature, the past converges with the present, or collides with it. This is the story that we get in Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown Trilogy. In Paul Lynch’s searing account of the Great Hunger in “Grace.” In Rob Doyle’s apocalyptic “Here are the Young Men.” Or Kevin Barry’s grimly funny tales in “Dark Lies the Island” or Paul Murray’s existential comedy in “Skippy Dies.” In Tana French’s mesmerizing mysteries, a world splintered, shattered, hidden. The Irish world. Our world. Irish literature — from plays including Synge’s “Playboy of the Western World” and McDonogh’s “The Lonesome West” to Edna O’Brien’s trilogy “The Country Girls” and Sally Rooney’s and Anna Burns’ novels giving voice to contemporary women — offers a portrait of a country in conflict with itself, seeking a language that allows it to face its past, make sense of the present, and envision its future.
In the 21st century this story of a bifurcated land is not Ireland’s alone: It’s Europe’s and it’s America’s. Irish literature speaks to all of us in its portrayal of the incestuous relationship between church and state — a cautionary tale. The narrative of misogyny embedded in Irish history serves as a timely object lesson, as well. The demonizing and marginalizing of the “other” in the Irish Troubles highlights the growing dangers we face on the demagogic American scene.
So we read Irish literature, not because it offers a map to the mysteries of Ireland but because it offers a glimpse into the mysteries of what it means to be human in our fractured world. The compulsion to tell and hear stories, the healing power of narrative, is what makes us all — whatever our DNA — Irish to the core.
Coming in September
A review by Michael Pearson of “Night Boat to Tangier,” a novel of two aging criminals at the end of their careers, by Irish writer Kevin Barry.
Michael Pearson teaches a course in Irish literature every spring semester at ODU.
