Sir, - Fr Pat Moore writes critically (April 6th) about my discussion of Peig Sayers at Comoradh an Bhlascaoid. For the record, I did not say that Peig Sayers was a feminist. I did indeed point to an element in Peig's thought which anyone who reads the three books in question (not just Peig, but also Machtnamh SheanaMhna and Beatha Pheig Sayers) can see for themselves, though it was not generally emphasised in the received version of Peig's life as enshrined in our national ideology for so many decades. This is that Peig in her youth sharply resented the economic circumstances of her life, and still felt strongly enough about this in her old age to communicate the feeling to her son Micheal O Gaoithin when together they put together the volumes of her autobiography. Do we not owe both these people, and all those others whom these books so vividly represent, the honesty to acknowledge such feelings? Or are we to pretend that Blasket life was an idyll?
If Fr Moore had been present he would have heard how warmly I share his admiration and respect for Peig and for the skill, intelligence and beauty of her writing as narrative art. Indeed, a central part of my argument was that this specifically literary achievement has been somewhat undervalued, having been understandably eclipsed by her other identity as oral storyteller.
I have also come to revere her as a representative figure in Irish history; one of a whole class of unregarded people who toiled lifelong, she yet kept her dignity and that gift of intense consciousness of life which marks an artist and a bearer of verbal art. Her life story gives luminous witness to the ordinary fate of the poor, and in particular to the lives of women - many births, multiple infant deaths, early widowhood, loss of her grown family to emigration or death - in an age of bare subsistence and a place of physical exposure, danger and isolation. Are we to deny her inalienable protest against the circumstances of that life? All her life, to judge from these texts, she continued to question and struggle to accept what she saw as the divine arrangements which permitted such grief and heartbreak.
So I must emphatically disagree with Fr Moore's argument that to do justice to the writing of the past we must suspend our own judgements, our moral and ideological perspectives. In my view literature is kept alive by being encountered, thought about and felt by real people now. Certainly we must strive towards a sympathetic understanding of the lifeworld of authors from different places and times; but in the end the only true tribute we can pay them comes from within our own experience and our own minds and hearts.
Fr Moore thinks there is a "cardinal principle" which makes art somehow impregnable by history; I disagree. We are all - writers and readers - inescapably within history, and indeed ideology. The axiom I would invoke is rather the awareness that all aesthetic judgements and appreciations of art are also judgements based in moral and political values.
In the preceding paragraph I have done my best to show why, both aesthetically and historically, I value the life stories of Peig, and that this is for reasons simultaneously aesthetic and historical.
Finally, why "must" we "assume" that Peig "had the courage to openly confront" patriarchal power if she had wanted to? Women's resistance to such power in many places and times has been shown by scholars of folklore and anthropology, as well as cultural historians, to have been customarily and perhaps necessarily "coded". In literature such coding entails the use of motifs and story material in such a way as to query the respective roles of male and female in the given culture. The investigation of such coding in the writings of Peig would be of great interest; I see absolutely no contradiction between such an investigation and the honouring of her memory. - Yours, etc.,
Patricia Coughlan
Department of English, University College Cork.