An Beal Bocht: mouthing off at national identity

Eire-Ireland:Journal of Irish Studies, Spring-Summer, 2003 by Sarah E. McKibben

By sundering the assumed identity between the Irish language and nationalism, O Nuallain revokes the status of the language as guarantor (and mausoleum) of national identity. Irish no longer provides an essential link to the good, the heroic, and the traditional, but is radically divested of its symbolism and revealed as just another linguistic code, albeit one with a wealth of literary reference to and a striking geographic coincidence with that place called Ireland. If O Nuallain rejects "any one 'true' meaning" (Hopper 1995:35), however, he does hot retreat into apolitical indeterminacy. Rather, he pointedly removes the Irish language from its position as the object of dismissive or grief-stricken calculations in English. The resulting fractured linguistic representation takes on the energy of sly critique and satiric commentary, and moves language from the imposed limitations of mimesis to the expressive playfulness of production, representation, and metacommentary on its own state. The work's address--in Irish and as parody--enables the book's therapeutic power. (6) By delivering its deadly mockery in Irish, the novel is able to occupy cliched modes of literary expression so as to dramatize, ironize, and deform them, transforming the status of the language and the "singular, petrified national biography" alike (McMullen 1993:77). If the figure of the Gael--a mixture of idealism, nostalgia, and fatalism--stands in for the national self (notwithstanding the needs or desires of actual Irish speakers), O Nuallain terrorizes this imaginary figure through mocking repetition and brutal inversion. Such mockery decisively interrupts static nationalist discourse with "the permanent corrective of laughter, of a critique on the one-sided seriousness of the lofty direct word ..." (Bakhtin 1981:55). Ultimately, An Beal Bocht restores the potential of Irish while simultaneously knocking it off the pedestal of ideological priority.

Though O Nuallain repeatedly celebrated Blasket Islander Tomas O Criomhthain's autobiographical An tOileanach (The Islandman, 1929) as "magnificent" and "one of the finest books I have read in any language," upon reading it he was apparently inspired to set to work immediately on his own work of "parody and jeer" (O Conaire 1986:120-21), rhymingly subtitled "An Milleanach" ('The Fault-finder'). Myles subverts the definitional poverty that limits worthwhile books in Irish to a single form and a single meaning--that of the Gaelic autobiography. This disabling generic limitation produces his unsentimental urban protest against such exclusions. As a parodic "companion volume," An Beal Bocht dissects the overdetermined reception that threatens to obscure the literary quality of O Criomhthain's "sheer gauntness" (qtd. in O Conaire 1986:122) and his implicit critique of class hierarchies. While pervasive determinism projects an idealized authenticity, purity (linguistic and sexual), talismanic symbolism, and virtue onto Irish-language productions, these elements constantly threaten to overwhelm the text. Thus, in An Beal Bocht such cliched expectations, inflated and comically literalized, come actually to constitute the text, marking the end-point and transformation of the genre.