Oral Tales
It is an
undisputed fact of literary history that whereas British writers and readers
have always favored the novel over the short story, just the opposite has been
the case for their Irish neighbors.
Irish short-story writer Frank O'Connor has attributed this distinction
to differences between national attitudes toward society. Whereas in England, O'Connor says, the
intellectual's attitude toward society is, "It must work," in Ireland
it is, "It can't work." The implication
of O'Connor's remark, echoed by many critics since the 1963 publication of his
well-known book on the short story, The Lonely Voice, is that whereas
the novel derives its subject matter from an organized society, the short story
springs from an oral, anecdotal tradition.
According to J. H. Delargy, in a frequently cited study of the Gaelic
story-teller, ancient Ireland fostered an oral literature unrivalled in all of
western Europe, a tradition that has influenced the growth of the modern Irish
short story.
Delargy
describes Irish story-telling as being centered on a gathering of people around
the turf fire of a hospitable house on fall and winter nights. At these meetings, usually called a céilidhe
(pronounced "kaylee"), a Gaelic story-teller, known as a seanchaí
(pronounced "shanachie") if he specialized in short supernatural
tales told in realistic detail, or a sgéalaí (pronounced
"shagaylee") if he told longer fairy-tale stories focusing on a
legendary hero, mesmerized the folk audience.
It is the
shorter, realistic seanchas or eachtra (pronounced
"achthrah") rather than the longer, epical fairy tales that have
given rise to the Irish literary short story.
This type of story, which usually featured supernatural events recounted
with realistic detail suggesting an
eyewitness account, has been described by late eighteenth and early nineteenth
century German writers as the source of the novelle form, which
usually featured a story striking enough
to arouse interest in and of itself, without any connection to society, the
times, or culture. This view of short prose narrative as
a form detached from any cultural background, drawing its interest from the
striking nature of the event itself, has always been a central characteristic
of short fiction.
One of the most
important implications of short fiction's detachment from social context and
history, argued early theorists, was that although the anecdote on which the
story was based might be trivial and its matter slight, its manner or way of
telling had to be appealing, thus giving the narrator a more important role
than in other forms of fiction. The
result was a shift in authority for the tale and thus a gradual displacement
away from strictly formulaic structures of received story toward techniques of
verisimilitude that create credibility.
The displacement is from mythic authority to the authority of a single
perspective that creates a unifying atmosphere or tone of the experience. It is this focus on a single perspective
rather than on an organized social context that has made the Irish short story
largely dependent on anecdote and the galvanizing voice of the story-teller.
William Carleton
Prominent Irish
critic Declan Kiberd has suggested that the short story has always flourished
in countries where a "vibrant oral culture" was challenged by the
"onset of a sophisticated literature tradition"; thus the short
story, says Kiberd, is the natural result of a "fusion" between the
folk-tale and modern literature. William
Carleton is the most important Irish mediator between the folk tale and the
modern realistic story because of his attention to detail and his creation of
the personality of the teller. His Traits
and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (1830, 1833) is an important early
example of the transition from oral tale to modern short story. The purpose of the first-person narrator in
romantic short fiction, as Carleton, and later Poe and Hawthorne knew, is not
only to verify the truth of the event being narrated, but also to transform the
event from an objective description to an individual perspective.
Critics of Irish
fiction generally agree that Carleton's story "Wildgoose Lodge," with
its focus on the horrified emotions of the narrator, its terse style, and its
suggestive detail, is his best, similar to the modern short story later
developed by Poe and Hawthorne in America.
"Wildgoose Lodge" recounts the revenge murder of an entire
family by a Catholic secret society. Although
ostensibly merely an eye-witness report by a former member of the society, the
structure of the story reflects a self-conscious patterning of reality
characteristic of the modern short story.
A completed action, treated as if it were an action in process,
"Wildgoose Lodge" is a classic example of how romantic short-story
writers developed techniques to endow experience with thematic significance
without using allegorical methods of symbolic characterization and stylized
plot.
What makes
"Wildgoose lodge" a modern story is the heightened perception of the
engaged first-person narrator, who is both dramatically involved and
self-consciously aware at once.
Moreover, the story's selection of metaphoric detail with the potential
for making an implied ironic moral judgment--the atmospheric weather, the
ironic church setting, the physically isolated house, and the imagery of the
leader as Satanic and his closest followers as fiendish--shift the emphasis in
this story from a mere eyewitness account to a tight thematic structure. It is just this shift that signals the
beginning of the modern short story most commonly attributed to Poe in the
following decade.
Georege Moore
Many critics of
the short story have suggested that the modern Irish short story begins in l903
with the publication of George Moore's The Untilled Field, thus agreeing
with Moore's own typically immodest assessment that the collection was a
"frontier book, between the new and the old style" of fiction. Moore felt that The Untilled Field was
his best work, boasting that he wrote the stories to be models for young Irish
writers in the future. And indeed, as
critics have suggested, the book had a significant effect on the collection of
short stories that has become one of the most influential short story
collection in the twentieth century--James Joyce's Dubliners.
In combining the
coarse subject matter of the French naturalists with the polished style of the fin
de siecle aesthetes, the stories in The Untilled Field seem unique
for their time. However, they still
maintain an allegiance to the folk tale form and to the importance of story as
a means of understanding reality.
Moore's adherence to the folk tale form and the need to understand
reality by means of story can be clearly seen in one of his best-known and most
anthologized stories from The Untilled Field--"Julia Cahill's
Curse." The story-with-the-story,
told by a cart driver to the first-person narrator, recounts an event that took
place twenty years previous when a priest named Father Madden had Julia put out
of the parish for what he considered unseemly behavior; in retaliation, Julia
put a curse on the parish, prophesying that every year a roof would fall in and
a family would go to America. The basic
conflict in the tale is between Julia, who in her dancing and courting,
represents free pagan values, and the priest, who, in his desire to restrain
her, represents church restrictions.
The conflict
between Julia and the priest is clear enough; however it is the relationship
between the teller and the listener that constitutes the structural interest of
the story, for what the tale focuses on is an actual event of social reality
that has been mythicized by the teller and thus by the village folk both to
explain and to justify the breakdown of Irish parish life in the late
nineteenth century. Whereas the folk may
believe such a tale literally, the modern listener believes it in a symbolic
way. Indeed, what Moore does here is to
present a story that is responded to within the story itself as both a literal
story of magic and as a symbolic story to account for the breakdown of parish
life.
"So
on He Fares" is a more complex treatment of how story is used to
understand a social situation. Moore
himself had a high regard for this story, even going so far as to say in his
boastful way that it was the best short story ever written. The basic situation is that of the loneliness
of the child Ulick Burke who chaffs against the harsh control of his mother and
dreams of his absent father and of running away from home. The story is very much like a fairy tale,
complete with the evil parent, the absent soldier father, and the child's need
to strike out and make his fortune. When
Ulick becomes a man and returns home, he is met by a small boy, the same age as
he when he left, whose name is also Ulrick Burke.
"So on He
Fares" is an interesting experiment with the nature of story as a
projection of desire, in this case the basic desire of the child to escape his
controlled situation. In one sense, it
can be read literally; that is, that when Ulick returns he indeed finds a
younger brother who has the love that he himself never had from his
mother. In another sense, it can be read
as a symbolic projection of the child who throws himself into the river to
escape his loneliness and then is reborn into a child the mother loves. Ultimately, it can be read as a projection of
a child's desire to escape and still remain home at the same time; it is thus a
story about story, about a childhood fantasy presented as if it really
happened.
Frank O. Connor
singles out Moore's "Home Sickness" as representative of the
direction that the Irish short story would take in the twentieth century,
arguing that it has the "absolute purity of the short story as opposed to
the tale." The story seems simple
enough. James Bryden, an Irish immigrant
who works in a bar in the Bowery, goes back to Ireland "in search of
health," and for a short time considers marrying a peasant girl and
remaining there. What unifies the story
beyond its simple narrative structure is the understated but sustained tone of
Bryden's detachment from the reality of Irish life and his preference to live
within a sort of nostalgic reverie, which he is disappointed to find remains
unrealized.
Although Bryden longs for the Bowery as
he contrasts the "weakness and incompetence" of the people around him
with the "modern restlessness and cold energy" of the people in New
York, and although he blames the ignorance and primitive nature of the folk who
cling to religious authority as his reason for returning to America, the
conclusion of the story suggests a more subtle and universal theme by
counterpointing a detached dream-like mood of reverie against Irish village
reality. The story is about the
unbridgeable gap between restless reality and dream-like memory.
James Joyce
The most
influential modern Irish short-story writer is, of course, James Joyce,
although that influence is based on one slim volume, Dubliners
(1914). Joyce's most famous contribution
to the theory and technique of modern short narrative is his notion of the
"epiphany," which he defined in his early novel Steven Hero: "By an epiphany he meant a sudden
spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in
a memorable phrase of the mind itself.
He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies
with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and
evanescent of moments."
In a Joyce
story, an epiphany is a formulation through metaphor or symbol of some
revelatory aspect of human experience, some highly significant aspect of
personal reality, usually communicated by a pattern of what otherwise would be
seen as trivial details and events.
Joyce's technique is to transform the casual into the causal by
repetition of seemingly trivial details until they are recognized as part of a
significant pattern. Two of Joyce's
best-known stories, "Eveline" and "Araby," end with
decisions or revelations that seem unprepared for until the reader reflects
back on the story and perceives the patterned nature of what at first seem only
casual detail.
In
"Eveline," the reader must determine how Eveline's thoughts of
leaving in Part I inevitably to her decision to stay in Part II. Most of the story takes place while Eveline
is sitting at the window watching the evening "invade" the
avenue. Nothing really
"happens" in the present in the first part of the story, for her mind
is on the past and the future, occupied with contrasting images of
familiar/strange, duty/pleasure, earth/sea, entrapment/escape, death/life. It is the counterpoint pattern of these
images that prepares the reader for the last section of the story when Eveline
stands among the crowds and decides not to leave her father and Ireland.
The problem is
how to understand how the first part of the story, which focuses primarily on
the bleakness of Eveline's past life at home and thus seems to suggest that she
will decide to go with Frank, manages at the same time to suggest that she will
decide to stay? The basic tension is
between the known and the unknown.
Although Eveline does not have many happy memories of her childhood and
family life, at least they are familiar and comfortable. Because these events have already happened,
what "used to be" is still present and a part of her. However, life with Frank, because it has not
yet happened, is tinged with fear of the unknown, in spite of the fact that it
holds the promise of romance and respect.
Thus, at the end, when she sets her face to him, passive, like a
helpless animal, with no sign of love or farewell or recognition, we realize
that her decision to stay is ultimately inexpressible.
What Joyce
achieves in one of his most anthologized stories, "Araby," derives
from Chekhov's experiments with creating symbols out of objects by their role
or context, not by their preexisting symbolic meaning. The primary counterpoint throughout the story
consists of those images that suggest ordinary reality and those that suggest
unknown romance. The result is a kind of
realism that is symbolic at the same time for the boy's spiritual romanticism
is embodied in the realistic objects of his world. This is a story about the ultimate romantic
projection, for the boy sees the girl as a religious object, a romantic
embodiment of desire. Her name is like a
"summons" to all his "foolish blood," yet it is such a
sacred name that he cannot utter it. Her
image accompanies him "even in places the most hostile to
romance." Thus, when he visits Araby,
a place he fancies the most sympathetic to romance, what he seeks is a sacred
object capable of objectifying all his unutterable desires.
The conversation
he overhears causes his realization precisely because of its trivial
flirtatious nature, for what the boy discovers is that there is nothing so
sacred that it cannot be made profane.
To see his holy desire for Mangan's sister diminished to mere physical
desire is to see a parody of himself.
The result is the realization not only that he is driven and derided by
vanity, but that all is vanity; there is no way for the sacred desires human
beings store up in their ghostly hearts to be actualized and still retain their
spiritual magic.
"The
Dead" is the most subtle example of Joyce's innovative technique. The first two-thirds of the story reads as if
it were a section from a novel, as numerous characters are introduced and the
details of the party are reproduced in great detail. It is only in the last third, when Gabriel's
life is transformed, first by his romantic and sexual fantasy about his wife
and then by his confrontation with her secret life, that the reader reflects
back on the first two-thirds of the story and perceives that the earlier
concrete details and the trivial remarks are symbolically significant. Thematically, the conflict that reflects the
realistic/lyrical split in the story is the difference revealed to both Gabriel
and the reader between public life and private life, between life as it is in
actual experience and life perceived as desire.
The party
portion of "The Dead" reflects Gabriel's public life; his chief
interest is what kind of figure he is going to cut publicly. However, throughout the party period of the
story, there are moments--particularly those moments that focus on the past, on
music, and on marital union--when reality is not presented as here and now, but
as a mixture of memory and desire.
During their short carriage ride to the hotel, he indulges in his own
self-delusion about his relationship with his wife: "moments of their life
together that no one knew of or would ever know of, broke upon and illuminated
his memory."
When Gabriel
discovers that Gretta has a secret life that has nothing to do with him, he
sees the inadequacy of his public self.
Michael Furey, who has been willing to sacrifice his life for love of
another, challenges Gabriel's smug safety.
In the much-discussed lyrical ending of "The Dead," Gabriel
confronts the irony that the dead Michael is more alive than he is. "Generous tears" fill his eyes
because he knows that he has never lived the life of desire, only the
untransformed life of the everyday. At
the end, awake and alone while his wife sleeps beside him, he loses his
egoistic self and imaginatively merges into a mythic lyrical sense of
oneness. "The Dead" is not a
story that can be understood the way most novels are read--one thing after
another--but the way the modern short story must be read--aesthetically
patterned in such a way that only the end makes the rest of the story
meaningful.
