Full Irish

The Pill is back from two busy and pleasurable weeks in Ireland and glad to see that you’ve all entertained yourselves and each other in the comments. Truly glad, because it is, I think, a GOOD THING when people vigorously air their disagreements and debate issues of aesthetics, ethics, politics, etc. I especially value some of the substantial comments that take issue with my arguments and analyses; these will send me back to the poems to see whether, in the different light cast by the critiques, the poems themselves look different. For those comments, thank you. This is how the language game of critique is supposed to work, isn’t it? I report on the nature of my experience of the work. Your experience is like or not like mine and you say so and describe your own. Might mine be misguided somehow? Maybe. So I test my experience against your account of yours. And so on. To forcefully articulate a position but to hold the position aware that it is not unassailable is, it seems to me, one of the prerequisites of evaluative criticism. I don’t assume that my judgment (that’s all criticism is) is infallible. This is not, of course, to guarantee that a strong counter-argument will persuade me, any more than I assume that my arguments will change anybody else’s mind. I’ve got some ideas of my own about irony and immanent evidence for tone and the renovation (as opposed to the mere repetition) of cliche, after all. I’m just glad we’re talking about this stuff, and at a pretty high volume (in both senses).


I’ve titled this post “Full Irish” in honor of the breakfast that bears this name, which, for the uninitiated, typically includes egg, bacon, sausage, mushrooms, beans, black and white puddings, whiskey, choice of Hansel or Gretel, grilled tomato, toast, tea, and Pepto Bismol. Herewith, some similarly smorgasbordish thoughts inspired by the trip.

In Dublin’s fair city, I took in some Joyce-related sights and was prompted to recall that moment in “The Dead” when Gabriel Conroy is accosted by Miss Ivors. “You’re G.C.,” she says, “outing” him as the author of a book review he published over his initials. This was a gratifying reminder that to publish a review over one’s initials is neither anonymous nor trollish, but is, in fact, simply adherence to a long-standing convention in reviewing, one dating back to the invention of the review in the new periodicals of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. And then, feeling peckish, your faithful correspondent lunched upon a Gorgonzola sandwich and retired to Davy Byrne’s for a one-eyed pint.

As I was driving westward a few days later, two texts kept repeating in my head. Each, in its way, recalls the Famine that devastated the island, and especially the less fertile western areas, in the 1840s. In “That the Science of Cartography Is Limited,” Eavan Boland frames an image of the Famine’s traumatic presence in Irish history with autobiographical intimacy:

When you and I were first in love we drove
to the borders of Connacht
and entered a wood there.

Look down you said: this was once a famine road.

I looked down at the ivy and the scutch grass
rough-cast stone had
disappeared into as you told me
in the second winter of their ordeal, in

1847, when the crop had failed twice,
Relief Committees gave
the starving Irish such roads to build.

The juxtaposition of young lovers and the wound in the land works here, I think, because it’s in the service of exploring the ineffable. Our representational schemes simply don’t enable us to capture or render certain realities. While it’s not the poem’s primary focus, an important reality it registers is the way love is constructed in part by the shared witness of historical suffering (it’s a weird, but apt, kind of courting that the poem recounts but also subtly suggests tends to be missing from our accounts). In Lucky’s amazing speech in Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett literalizes and inverts Hegel’s master and slave relationship as if to ask what love’s got to do with it and to emphasize a starkly chilling and historically resonant memento mori:

. . . I resume the skull fading fading fading and concurrently simultaneously what is more for reasons unknown in spite of the tennis on on the beard the flames the tears the stones so blue so calm alas alas on on the skull the skull the skull the skull in Connemara in spite of the tennis the labors abandoned left unfinished graver still abode of stones in a word I resume alas alas abandoned unfinished the skull the skull in Connemara . . .

Wildly different, not least in their original languages, these passages share not only the Famine as a reference point but also evidence of rigorous thought about the ways that event’s significance figures in the presents of Ireland in the 1990s and Paris in the first postwar decade.

I’ve had good times in Galway in the past, standing in a crowded pub, sipping a pint, listening to a half-dozen musicians playing trad in the corner. What’s most impressive about some of those performances is that the musicians don’t seem to care whether anyone’s listening (and not everyone is). Their attention is on the music, and they seem to be moved by a sense of responsibility to it rather than to the pub full of people. They’ll test each other’s knowledge and, sometimes, the punters’ patience, with esoteric choices and unexpected juxtapositions. This time, though, the center of the city seemed like a sort of Disneyland Ireland, and it was packed with tourists whose guidebooks had clearly told them they should seek out music pubs for some good, old-fashioned craic, and the pubs had drawn musicians happy to turn their backs to the tradition and mug for the crowd. The tourists ate this stuff up, of course. Maybe the musicians went home and congratulated themselves on the way they ironically riffed on the tourists’ desires for accessibly happy or sappy songs performed in broad stage-Paddy stylings. I’d like to think so. But whether they did or not, the experience of watching and hearing them seem simply to perform accessibly happy and sappy songs in broad stage-Paddy stylings left this listener, who loves and values the carefully crafted, expertly innovated, real thing, disappointed.