An Beal Bocht: mouthing off at national identity

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

Myles na gCopaleen's "preface" echoes all the supposed scrupulous care with which earlier editors had represented their labors as precise recording, complete with notes on dialectal variations, indexed tale types, and stern comments about degenerate versions. Folklorists often justified their work (and thereby increased its value and their own prestige) as a desperate race against time to collect material in advance of "the death of storytellers and informants who were living repositories of tradition" (O Duilearga 1932:517). In a nod to such eleventh-hour ethnography (Abrahams 1993:11), the additional note prefixed to the 1964 reprint of An Beal Bocht remarks that the people of Corkadoragha, "ni dul i lionmhaireacht doibh, agus ni forbairt ach meath meirge ata ag teacht ar an gcanuint bhinn Ghaeilge is minice ina mbeal na an greim bidh" ("are not increasing in numbers and the sweet Gaelic dialect, which is oftener in their mouths than a scrap of food, is not developing but rather declining like rust"; 1941:8, 1993:9). What serves to inflate the "editor's" self-importance conversely diminishes his objects, since they remain trapped in a mellifluent poverty. The deadening hand of convention appears again within O Nuallain's text proper, as in Bonaparte's opening lines, where he says that he writes "de bhri go bhfuil an saol eile ag druidim liom go sciobtha" ("because the next life is approaching me swiftly"; 1941:9; 1993:11). This opening exaggerates and extends the mode of lamentation to the subject himself, though its elaborate performativity reminds us that such grief, too often misread as literally true, is fundamentally rhetorical in nature.

Other "editorial" interventions evoke the painstaking pedantry of scholarship--but in seemingly infinite regress, as when Hiberno-English terms are spelled in Irish phonetics and then glossed back into Irish. Other moments unerringly duplicate folklorists' careful representation of oral delivery on the page, as in chapter 1 where Bonaparte describes the Old-Grey-Fellow's prodigious appetite for potatoes, saying "by dad ba dhochreidte an oiread pratai a d'itheadh se" ("bedad, it was an incredible thing the amount of potatoes he consumed"; 1941:2; 1993:14). Even as An Beal Bocht mimics the scholarly insistence on verisimilitude, it suggests that languages and cultures are no longer and indeed never were pure or unadulterated. Moreover, the novel's gleeful hodge-podge of dialectical forms, bent grammar and syntax, and bilingual punning further defy the constraints on what Irish and its literature should be. Such hybridity defiles the purity of "caint na ndaoine" ('the language of the people'), supposed to be the only "authentic" speech (O Conaire 1986:237-38; O'Leary 1994:9-12, 45-49). At the same time, impersonation makes scholarly pomposity a laughingstock. Instead, we have a purely literary exorbitance of received forms whose perversity declares that neither Irish nor its literature are the property of any one ideological or cultural constituency.