Memory Ireland by Frawley Oona;

Author:Frawley, Oona;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Published: 2017-12-09T00:00:00+00:00

It is a deliberately intended allegory to see the “cracked lookingglass of a servant” (U 1.146) as representing the condition of Ireland in 1904. That condition has in turn often been seen as one of cultural discontinuity—the demise of Gaelic during and following the Famine constituting as crack in the mirror, as it were (Leerssen 1988; Cronin 1998; Tymoczko and Ireland 2003). Thus Thomas Kinsella in his essay “The Irish Writer” encounters a “great cultural blur” when he looks for “the past in [him]self”: “I must exchange one language for another, my native English for eighteenth-century Irish” (1970, 58). Kinsella sees this bifurcation in his cultural memory as if he comes, “so to speak, from a broken and uprooted family, [in] being drawn to those who share my origins and finding that we cannot share our lives” (59). John Montague’s lines in “A Severed Head” (part of the celebrated cycle The Rough Field) have, for all their clumsy ineptness, become an aureum dictum: “To grow / a second tongue, as / harsh a humiliation / as twice to be born” (1972, ll. 33–36); and Brian Friel’s Translations remains, despite its willfully counterfactual distortion of cultural change in nineteenth-century Ireland, accepted as a valid “poetic” representation and interpretation of real-world events.6

That, then, is the wider allegorical meaning of the cracked mirror: language change as a traumatic, self-alienating disruption, a fracture in the historical, transgenerational course of cultural transmission. The process set in with Tudor wars and the Flight of the Earls and reached its nadir in the Famine of the mid–nineteenth century and the subsequent pattern of emigration—that is to say: in the immediate historical run-up to Bloomsday. The nineteenth century out of which Ulysses emerges has been described by Robert Welch as “that most intriguing and haunting of all phases of Irish culture . . . in which the great mass of Irish people moved from one language to another, from Gaelic to English” (1988, x).

To be sure, the sense of a traumatic language shift in the previous generations is stronger in Dubliners than in Ulysses. Dubliners has the mantra of a no-longer-understood Gaelic phrase, derevaun seraun, spoken as the dying words of the mother of Eveline (in the story of that title)—almost like an abracadabra that will conjure up the ghost of Michael Furey in “The Dead,” where the unquiet grave of Irish is also troubled by the feisty but vaguely disconcerting revivalism of Miss Ivors.

Such references are far less prominent in Ulysses, where the only interest in Irish is shown by the English tourist Haines, in the “Telemachus” episode; even the old woman who delivers milk to the Martello Tower is, in a deflation of Haines’s fondly exoticist expectations, off-handed and ignorant of the language. Ironically, the only one in the book who would gratify Haines’s English Gaelophilia would be the grotesquely nativist Citizen, he of the “Cyclops” episode. There is more Greek than Gaelic in Ulysses, which after all sets out to “Hellenize” Ireland. The main presiding spirit is that of Odysseus, not St.

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