Presenting: The Poor Mouth - An Béal Bocht
Dia dhaoibh!
Céad míle faílte romhat!
It was translated into English in 1964 or as the Editor called it “The day of Doom”. The reason for its translation was the ever-dwindling number of people who actually speak Irish, even after it was made a compulsory subject at school.
Nolan himself pointed out that his work was concerned with the “tragicomedy of mistaken identity”. In essence this book thematises the problem of Irish identity
Starting with its author.
The Author
An Béal Bocht was written by
Brian O’Nolan, also known as Flann O’Brian or Flannery O’Brian. He was a
novelist, playwright, columnist and satirist who was struggling with his own
literary identity. This struggle manifested itself in the long list of
pseudonyms; he never once wrote anything under is own birth name Brian O’Nolan.
Specifically for this work, he took on another nom de plume - Myles na gCopleen.
He was character in the play “The Colleen Bawn”
form 1860 by DionBoucicault.
He was a liar, convict (like Bonapart O’Coonassa) a horse thief,
pointin-disterller who shot somebody and thus accidentally saved the heroine’s
life. In short, he was the very antithesis of Victorian virtue. Yet, the
English loved him for his brainless loyalty. The blundering buffoon on stage,
whose grip on the English language was mediocre at best, however, the play
had little to do with the reality of the poverty stricken post-famine Ireland.
Myles na gCopleen, whose broken English was the source of mockery on stage, now
takes up a pen and writes down a story, a satire in his own native tongue and
suddenly becomes very articulate in his attack on the treatment and the status
of the Irish and the Irish language, Gaelic.
Irish Gaelic/ Gaelic League/ Gaelic Revivalists
In 1893 the so-called Gaelic League was tasked
with the preservation of old folk tales and myths as well as the revival of the
Irish language at large. Ireland has a very long and rich literary tradition
starting in 6th century when Catholic monks came to Ireland and
wrote them down like the stories of Deirdre and Conchubar, or Frankie’s beloved
story of Cuchulain. With the famine, the decimation of the population the
Gaeltracht areas were soon associated with poverty and a lack of education.
Their language (Irish) was not taught in schools (no standardisation) it only
survived as a community language and became the stigma of the poor rural class.
But with the fight for independence (1922) it became a matter of identity and
the language a symbol for independence (compulsory subject at school).
The Gaelic Revival was a literary movement
active at the turn of the last century that was very much interested in the
tales of the old, reviving those tales and characters to promote an Irish
identity. Important figureheads were William Butler Yeats, John Synge, G.
Russell Lady Gregory, Douglas Hyde (Gaelic League)
The Genre
Satire.
is defined as a mockery of vices and follies in
a society with a didactic purpose. It is a Roman invention. Etymologically the
word Satire derives from the Latin satura, which translates to melange/ medley/
potpourri. Role models from Antiquity include Juvenal and Horace. Their satires
were not characterized by the contend more by the poet’s stance to a certain topic.
As we have seen with Swift’s Modest Proposal it uses irony, sarcasm,
parody sometimes exaggeration, juxtaposition, comparison and double entendre to
criticise established social discourses.
Memoir of a fictional
Character. Bonaparte O’Coonassa is as the Editor assures us, “is still alive
today, safe in jail and free form the miseries of life”. (O’Brian 2008: 7)
Thus, he puts himself in one line with the Gaeltracht biographers such as Tomás Ó
Cromhthain who wrote An t-Oilenach/ The Islandman, an autobiography
that depicts the hardships of the life on The Great Blasket. Peig Sayers’s story Peig is
also an autobiography by a woman who could neither read nor write.
Memoir comes form the French mémoire that means
memory, reminiscence. It is autobiographical writing that usually retells the
life’s story of the protagonist with a focus on his/ her development. Usually,
politicians, military leaders or influential businessmen, people who helped
form and shape the country. Today, putting one’s life to paper has a more
therapeutic aspect. This recollection is not necessarily objective as it can
embellish the truth in order to put oneself in a better light.
The Title
An Béal Bocht does not necessary make sense in
its English translation. However, in Irish there is proverb “an béal bocht a
churt ort” which translates to “to put on the poor mouth” like a disguise, a
mask, a cloak.
It has a pejorative meaning, the exaggeration
of one’s poverty in order to evoke sympathy and gain charity. And indeed the
texts creates this atmosphere of darkness, dire hardship in a place, where its
always raining, where everything is just too much with people who lead
monotonous lives that evolve around spirits, potatoes, drunkenness, poverty,
and hard times.
Thus, the title already sets the tone of the
entire text. It promises the study of the hard life and the consequences of
poverty for an Irish identity, not only of the Gaeltracht peasant, but also of
those who live in the towns. All are bereft, either of material wealth and
spiritual guidance.
Satirizing the Irish
The Gaelic revival
The Satire criticises the Revivalists for exchanging
one stereotype with another. The romanticized version of the Irish peasant was
born as a counter-ideology to Victorian ideas about the colonised neighbour.
For the English colonisers under the reign of Queen Victoria (but especially
with the famine and the violent agrarian upheavals form the 1860s onwards) the
Irish are reduced to a primitive, subhuman standard: “white Negro”. They were
associated with barbarism and savagery. Unlike the noble savage who may be able
to find salvation, the Irish could not even speak proper English. Counteracting
this dehumanized version of the Irish character, the Gaelic Revival created,
based on the folk tales and stories, a romanticised pastoral image of the
“noble peasant” who is/ was suffering under the oppression of the colonial
might England, establishing another essentialist mystique was replacing a
reductive English stereotype.
The Gaeltracht literature
Indirectly by quoting various passages form the
existing so-called Gaeltracht biographies he looks upon his writing colleagues
with scorn, criticising them for their apparent support of the distorted
picture of poverty in the rural areas.
Irish Traditions
The Problem with Names. Names in today’s Ireland
are anglicised versions of a Gaelic original for example Humphrey O’Sullivan
was actually Amhlaoibh Ó Súilleabháin. In its original the name actually means
Amhlaoibh grandson/ descendant of Súilleabháin.
The homodiegetic narrator may be named after the
former French emperor Napoléon Bonaparte but even this borrowed identity will
be taken from him at school when his schoolmaster, like his grandfather’s
schoolmaster before, assigns everyone in the class the same new name: Jams
O’Donnell. He is no longer an individual; he is part of a group.
Where does the Jams O’Donnell come from? The
novel by Máire (Mo Dhá Róisín) depicts a similar scene when a pupil hears the
anglicised version of his name for the first time (James Gallagher) on his
first school day. Jams O’Donnell thus becomes the generic term for those men in
the Gaeltracht. It’s a name forced onto them by the English.
Poverty in the Gaeltracht region is so dire that
it has stripped the people of their identity but not of their sense of
grandeur/ importance. As the residents of the Gaealtracht struggle to find
their own identity, they try to be like the heroes of the old, inadvertently betraying
their own Gaelic tradition by naming their children after influential foreign
personalities: Bonaparte, Michelangelo and not their own heroes (Cuchulain),
which also ties in with the genre, chosen to convey this story. Napoléon
Bonaparte would have been such a person of considerable influence, who did
leave his memoirs.
However, this protagonist leads a marginalised life in the Gaeltracht, writing
in a language that virtually nobody speaks.
Isn't it ironic, that we can only talk about
this text by reading it in translation? Somebody sat down and translated it
into the language of the Coloniser, a language Myles na gCopaleen decidedly
rejected. Does that make us part of the problem or the solution? Is the reader
being mocked for his inability to understand the original?
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