Irish Language: Máirín Nic Eoin has written an indispensable book for anyone with an interest in 20th-century Irish writing. Reviewed by Louis de Paor.
In a 1906 review of Pádraig Pearse's Poll an Phíobaire, Myles na Gopaleen's favourite dictionary-maker, Fr Pádraig Ua Duinnín, contrasted Pearse's urban Irish with the Connemara dialect, which he likened to mountain butter:
"It may at times be over-salted and over-dosed with the water of Béarlachas but it is genuine mountain butter all the same and not clever margarine. I am afraid the storyette about the Píobaire smacks more like the margarine of the slums than pure mountain butter. "
In Máirín Nic Eoin's wonderful critique of modern writing in Irish, the preoccupation with linguistic and cultural purity is identified as one of the more disabling reflexes of literary criticism in Irish. She argues that literature in Irish, from the early days of the language revival to the present, is, in fact, defined by its impurity, the inbetweenness of its bicultural location between two languages and traditions, between, as she puts it memorably, "an Modh Coinníollach agus an Modh Foshuiteach", the conditional and the subjunctive moods.
She identifies a close parallel between the central preoccupations of writers and critics in Irish and the practice of post-colonial scholars of Irish studies, castigating both groups for a failure to engage in meaningful dialogue. She proposes a reading method that would recognise the particular perspectives of writing in Irish as those of a minority community that has experienced displacement and marginalisation in its own country and elsewhere. Writing in Irish then can be both a site of resistance and an example of the ways in which minorities deal in creative and partially liberating ways with their own marginalised position.
Nic Eoin argues that criticism in Irish should move from a text-based approach to one which takes due account of the sociolinguistic contexts in which both writers and readers operate. This leads to a highly perceptive discussion of hybridity, and eventually to a consideration of form and genre, "a concept as elusive and fluid as the Mayo coastline", according to Alan Titley. She points out that the suspension of disbelief necessary to the conventions of social realism are especially problematic for writers who would set their fiction in urban centres where, in the words of Seán Ó Ríordáin, the only tint of Irish is on the buses and in the toilets. Writers can choose to insist on their absolute freedom, as does Alan Titley, whose work is so allusive and varied that "it would give Mastermind a migraine" (Seán Ó Tuama), or develop a more reflexive technique that exploits the potential of non-realistic styles. Alternatively, as Nic Eoin quite rightly suggests, one can acknowledge the conventionality of all literary form and technique and judge a work on the excellence of its fictionality rather than its apparent coherence with the actual.
One of the more impressive chapters in the book deals with the representation of physical and psychic displacement in the work of writers in Irish at "home" and abroad. The sense of rejection and abandonment by their country of origin, and the "acculturative stress" which scholars have identified in immigrant communities are evident in the work of Dónall Mac Amhlaigh and Pádraig Ó Conaire, which is informed by their own experience of exile. Similar feelings of betrayal and alienation are evident in the work of writers who remained in Ireland but found their imagined identity as Irish-speakers at odds with the linguistic reality of a new Ireland, stranded "between 1893 and the five to nine bus" as Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh has it in "Freudyssey na Gaeilge". The difficulty is particularly acute for Gaeltacht writers and native speakers of Irish who found English compulsory for economic survival.
There is a pronounced anxiety with regard to audience among writers in Irish, even those such as Pádraig Ó Cíobháin, whose relationship to his own geographical community in Corca Dhuibhne might appear relatively secure. Nic Eoin cites Memmi's "audience of deaf men" to articulate the difficulty of an Irish-language writer whose work is self-consciously experimental and quotes Máire Mhac an tSaoi to the effect that this is a literature "with almost no spoken hinterland" whose criteria "are established from beyond the grave". Biddy Jenkinson, on the other hand, insists that hers is a living language, comparing Irish speakers to travellers, "marginalised by a comfortable settled monoglot community that would prefer we went away rather than hassle about rights".
Finally, for those who might still question the validity of writing in Irish in Ireland of the Celtic Ferret, Nic Eoin reminds us that as far back as 1972, Diarmuid Ó Súilleabháin's Maeldún provided a scathing critique of political favour and chicanery in the area of planning in a satire clearly based on the activities of Taca, the fundraising agency of Fianna Fáil.
In this and throughout her latest work, she has done her readers no little service. This is an indispensable book for anyone with an interest in 20th-century Irish writing and, perhaps, the single most impressive work of modern literary criticism in Irish.
Louis de Paor is director of the Centre for Irish Studies at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and author of Faoin mBlaoisc Bheag Sin, a critical study of the short fiction of Máirtín Ó Cadhain
Trén bhFearann Breac: An Díláithriú Cultúir agus Nualitríocht na Gaeilge. By Máirín Nic Eoin, Cois Life, 580pp. €20.