North Atlantic Skyline - - Photographs from the west of Ireland (Galway, Mayo, Clare, Limerick, Roscommon and even Leitrim)

Making it up

Sean O’Hagan marks Bloomsday with an article in the Observer complaining about the Disneyfication of Irish culture. Bloomsday always gets commentators into a bit of a lather. No one wants to be seen as a philistine, though you can’t help feeling that, deep down, there is an uneasy suspicion that the rest of the literary world is laughing at us rather than with us. Despite the Nobel Prize and other plaudits, only Ireland could produce two internationally regarded and influential writers (Joyce and Beckett) that have so few readers at home. Me? I can think of worse things than hundreds of people roaming the streets celebrating a novel (as opposed to smashing up the Algarve, for example).

It seems to be a popular belief that, since the country got rich, we’ve been busy bastardizing out culture for easy consumption abroad (exhibit A – Riverdance). Newsflash, we were doing the same when we were poor. Did you ever see a John Hinde postcard depicting rain ?

Ireland has been spinning yarns about itself for centuries. The national narrative of a Celtic race that fought and defeated the Vikings, survived the Normans before enduring the eight hundred year occupation of the British is about as accurate as the Book of Genesis. Think about it, hundreds of Vikings settled across the country, as many Normans before tens of thousand of English and Scots settled. An Irish person today is as likely to have descended from one of the ‘invaders’ as from one of the ‘natives’. And it’s not like the ‘natives’ were great protectors of culture either. The existence of so many round towers and monasteries in Ireland is despite the attentions of the locals rather than because of it. For example, Clonmacnoise suffered far more from the local clans than from the British – in fact, the local yahoos nearly demolished it.

O Hagan quotes from Roy Foster’s “The Irish Story – Telling Tales and Making it up in Ireland”, a book that looks at Irish literary myth-making since 1800. Foster’s book is very interesting, though in my opinion, the weakest chapter by far is about the two best-known living Irish authors. He analyses, together, the literary oeuvre of Gerry Adams and Frank McCourt. He describes the absence of IRA details in Adams’ biographical stories as rather like reading a biography of Field Marshal Montgomery that leaves out the British Army. Which seems to rather the miss the point of why Adams probably wrote them.

As for McCourt, complaining that the yarns in Angela’s Ashes are, ahem, a little polished is a bit like complaining that the Blarney Stone tastes of spit. (And if you knew how the local langers anoint the Stone, not only would you not kiss it, but you wouldn’t kiss anyone who had).

I won’t be eating a big dirty fry-up in honour of James Joyce or anyone else tomorrow. But that’s only because, like much of the rest of the country, I don’t need any excuse for a plate of sausages and rashers.

Posted by Monasette at June 15, 2004 11:38 PM