Short Story Month: 2015--William Carleton, "Wildgoose Lodge"

The short story has always been a more successful narrative genre for Irish writers than the novel.  The most common conjecture offered to account for this success is based on the critical assumption that the novel, primarily a realistic form, demands an established society, whereas the short story does not. And as the contemporary Irish short-story writer William Trevor points out, when the novel began in 18th-century bookish England, Ireland, largely a peasant society, was not really ready for it. As a result, Irish fiction remained aligned with its oral folklore--the oldest, most extensive folk tradition in Europe--throughout the 18th century and was not prepared for the novel's modern mode of realism until the 19th century. 

William Carleton's careful attention to specific detail and his ability to create a sense of the personality of the teller makes him the most important Irish intermediary between the old folk style and modern realism. Although Carleton's work is little known outside of Ireland, Benedict Kiely has called him "possibly the greatest writer of fiction that Ireland has given to the English language," and Yeats has said that "modern Irish literature" began with Carleton's 1830 Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry. 

Carleton did not perceive himself to be a creator of stories, so much as a re-creator of fact. Harold Orel notes that Carleton believed fiction and fact were inextricably mixed; thus, like many other romantic writers, such as Hawthorne, Irving, and Poe, he made no real generic distinction between the terms "sketch," "story," "essay."  In many of his narratives, Carleton frequently reminds his readers that his story is based on fact, using such language as "exactly as it happened" and "strictest truth."  Orel says that this emphasis on truth was obsessive with Carleton, that he emphasized fact even when his story was written to illustrate a theory or a moral.

            This combination of fact and thematic significance signals an important shift in the development of the 19th-century short story, for a crucial problem for fiction writers of the period was how to write a story based on "real" events that illustrated a thematic idea but did not depend on the symbolic conventions of the old allegorical romance form.  One of the most important conventions to develop from this need by such romantic writers as Carleton was the creation of a personal teller whose emotionally-charged account of the event took precedence over both mimetic and didactic considerations.

Although Margaret Chesnuitt claims that Carleton goes no further than to reproduce what is ostensibly an eye-witness account in one of his best-known stories, "Wildgoose Lodge," other critics of Irish fiction generally agree that the piece, with its focus on the horrified emotions of the narrator, its terse style, and its suggestive detail, is typical in technique of the modern short story developed by Poe and Hawthorne.  Barbara Hayley argues convincingly that the accuracy of Carleton's account is less important than his "skill at picking out from the real event the facts that would act most powerfully in a story." Because this "tale of terror," as Carleton tells us in a final note, "is unfortunately too true," the question it raises for students of the history of the short story is:  By what means does Carleton, without previous models, transform an event based on fact into a modern symbolic narrative with thematic significance?

Narrated by an eye-witness, the story recounts the revenge murder of an entire family by a group of Ribbonmen, a Catholic secret society.  Since Carleton was not actually present at the murder, his choice of the first person point of view is a romantic literary device--typical of Irving, Poe, and Hawthorne--to emphasize the reactions of the teller.  A completed action, treated as if it were an action in process, "Wildgoose Lodge" is a classic example of how the modern romantic short-story writer developed techniques to endow experience with thematic significance without resorting to allegorical methods of symbolic characterization and stylized plot construction.

The story begins with the narrator receiving a summons to a secret meeting of the society to which he belongs.  Although the summons has nothing extraordinary or startling about it, he has a premonition of approaching evil; an "undefinable feeling of anxiety pervades [his] whole spirit," very much like the undefined sense of anxiety that pervades the spirit of many of Poe's narrators, such as the unnamed narrator of "The Fall of the House of Usher" when he first rides into view of the ominous house.  Moreover, like many Poe narrators, Carleton's narrator says he cannot define the presentiment or sense of dread he feels, for it seems to be a mysterious faculty, like Poe's "perverse," beyond human analysis.  Although Carleton never wrote about his theory of the construction of fictional narrative, it is clear that "Wildgoose Lodge's presentation of the past as presage makes possible the kind of tight unity popularized by Poe in which even the first sentence seems self-consciously aimed toward the climax and denouement.

Another self-conscious literary device Carleton uses is the creation of a thematically-appropriate atmosphere surrounding the events by describing the day as gloomy and tempestuous beyond anything he remembers.  Moreover, the fact that the meeting in which the murders are planned takes place in a church and involves ceremonies of brotherhood is perceived by the narrator to be bitterly ironic.  This ironic contrast is further emphasized when the narrator describes the devilish malignancy of the Ribbonman captain as "demon-like," "Satanic," "supernatural," and "savage."

When the captain slams his fist down on the altar bible to swear an oath of the horrifying revenge he plans, the candle goes out, a sound of rushing wings fills the church, and a mocking echo of his words in "supernatural tones" seems to resound throughout the building.  In what would be comic in any other framework, the captain explains that the candle was snuffed out by a pigeon that sat directly above it, and the narrator apologizes for not pointing out that pigeons had built nests among the rafters--a mundane explanation for the seemingly supernatural rustling of wings.  That Carleton's narrator conveniently neglects to mention the pigeons until he has used them to create a quasi-supernatural and symbolically meaningful effect is simply another indication of his self-conscious use of unifying fictional techniques to transform a factual event into a literary occasion.

The actual scene of the revenge murders is also described symbolically, for the torrential rains have created a lake in the meadow where the house lies, isolating it on a small island in the middle so that the Ribbonmen have to create a human bridge over which they can travel to reach it.  The description of the murders is graphic and horrifying.  When a woman leans out the window and cries for mercy, her hair aflame, she is "transfixed with a bayonet and a pike" so that the word "mercy" is divided in her mouth.  When the captain pushes the final victim back into the flames, the narrator's transformation of the events into a mythic, symbolic story is complete.  As the fire throws its light on the faces of the murderers, "the scene seemed to be changed to hell, the murderers to spirits of the damned, rejoicing over the arrival and the torture of some guilty soul."  The story ends with the narrator affirming that although the language of the story is partly fictitious, the facts are close to those revealed at the trial of the murderers, which resulted in over two dozen men being hanged in different parts of County Louth.

What makes "Wildgoose Lodge" a modern short story is the heightened perception of the engaged first-person narrator, who is both dramatically involved and ironically distant at once, and the story's selection of metaphoric detail to make 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 the story from mere eyewitness account to a tight thematic structure.

The Beginnings of the Modern Irish Short Story: William Carleton

Happy St. Patrick’s Day to my readers. As I have mentioned before, Ireland has always been a special place for me. My wife is Irish, and she and my daughter and I spent a year in Dublin once when I was on a Fulbright Senior Fellowship, lecturing on the American short story at University College and Trinity College. I have been back in Dublin since then, studying Joyce with students from California State University, Long Beach. Before I retired, I taught the history of the Irish Short Story at Long Beach. To commemorate St Patrick’s Day 2010 and to call attention to Ireland’s contribution to the short story form, I post the following brief essay on what I think is the first modern Irish short story.

The short story has always been a more successful narrative genre for Irish writers than the novel. The most common conjecture offered to account for this is based on the critical assumption that the novel, primarily a realistic form, demands an established society. And as the contemporary Irish short-story writer William Trevor points out, when the novel began in 18th-century bookish England, Ireland, largely a peasant society, was not really ready for it. As a result, Irish fiction remained aligned with its oral folklore, the oldest, most extensive folk tradition in Europe, throughout the 18th century and was not ready for the novel's modern mode of realism until the 19th century. 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 often credited for being the most important Irish intermediary between the old folk style and the modern realistic one as a result of his careful attention to specific detail and his ability to create a sense 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 post-romantic short fiction is not only to verify the truth of the event being narrated, but also to transform the event from everyday reality to an individual perspective. Carleton embodies several important elements that came together in the 19th century to create the modern short story: the involved first-person point of view, the symbolic transformation of the materials of the oral folk tale, and realism as a function of verification of the actuality of the event narrated.

Carleton's "Wildgoose Lodge," with its focus on the horrified emotions of the narrator, its terse style, and its suggestive detail, is typical in technique of the modern short story later developed by Poe and Hawthorne. Critics agree that Carleton probably achieved this pre-Poe success by instinct rather than by knowledge of short story models. Indeed, the tight structure, economical detail, and symbolic language of the story is not typical of Carleton's more familiar discursive, detailed, and often polemical style. Because this "tale of terror" is, as Carleton tells us in a final note, "unfortunately too true," the question it raises for students of the history of the short story is: By what means does Carleton, without previous models, transform an event based on fact into a modern symbolic narrative with thematic significance?

The story recounts the revenge murder of an entire family by a group of Ribbonman, a Catholic secret society. Not a story of Irish sectarian conflict, for both the murderers and the murdered family are Catholic, the event is recounted in the horrified accents of a former Ribbonman who witnessed the murders. Originally appearing in 1830 in The Dublin Literary Gazette as "Confessions of a Reformed Ribbonman," the story was retitled "Wildgoose Lodge" in the second series of Carleton's Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (1833). Carleton was not present at the action he describes, although he does say he once saw the body of Patrick Devann, the Captain of the Ribbonmen responsible for the murders, hanging from a gibbet in Country Louth. Thus, his choice of the first person point of view is a romantic literary device, typical of such writers as Irving, Poe, and Hawthorne, to emphasize the reactions of the teller. Although ostensibly merely a report of an eye-witnessed event, the structure of the story reflects the kind of 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 the modern romantic short-story writer developed techniques to endow experience with thematic significance without resorting to allegorical methods of symbolic characterization and stylized plot construction.

The story begins with the narrator receiving a summons to a secret meeting of the society to which he belongs. Although the summons has nothing extraordinary or startling about it, he has a premonition of approaching evil; an "undefinable feeling of anxiety pervades [his] whole spirit," very much like the undefined sense of anxiety that pervades the spirit of many of Poe's narrators, such as the unnamed narrator of "The Fall of the House of Usher" as he first rides into view of the ominous house. Moreover, like Poe's narrator in "The Imp of the Perverse" and "The Black Cat," the narrator says he can not define the presentiment or sense of dread he feels, for it seems to be a mysterious faculty, like Poe's perverse, beyond human analysis.

Another self-conscious literary device Carleton uses is to create an atmosphere of artifice surrounding the events by describing the day as gloomy and tempestuous almost beyond anything he remember. Moreover, the fact that the meeting in which the murders are planned takes place in a church and involves ceremonies of brotherhood is perceived to be bitterly ironic to the narrator. This ironic contrast between the church and the men is further emphasized when the narrator describes the devilish malignancy of the Ribbonman captain as "demon-like," "Satanic," "supernatural," and "savage." When the captain slams his fist down on the altar bible to make the oath of the horrifying revenge murders he plans, a sound of rushing wings fills the church and a mocking echo of his words seem to resound throughout the building. Although the sound of rushing wings and the echo of the man's oath have natural explanations--doves in the rafters frightened by the leader's striking the bible so hard and natural echoes reverberating through the building--they communicate a sense of mockery of Christian values.

The actual scene of the revenge murders is also described symbolically, for the torrential rains have created a lake in the meadow where the house lies, isolating it on a small island in the middle so that the Ribbonmen have to create a human bridge over which they can travel to reach it. The narrator frequently cries out that the very memory of the horrible night fills him with revulsion, sickening him. The actual description of the murders is graphic and horrifying. When a woman leans out the window and cries for mercy, her hair aflame, she is "transfixed with a bayonet and a pike" so that the word "mercy" is divided in her mouth. When another woman tries to put her baby out the window to safety, the Ribbonman captain uses his bayonet to thrust it into the flames. The story ends with the narrator affirming that although the language of the story is partly fictitious, the facts are close to those revealed at the trial of the murderers, which resulted in between 25 and 28 men being hanged in different parts of County Louth.

What makes "Wildgoose Lodge" a modern story is the heightened perception of the engaged first-person narrator, who is both dramatically involved and ironically 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 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.

The Irish Short Story Tradition

In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, how could I not offer a post on the Irish short story? I have a personal connection and love for Ireland. My wife’s mother was born in Belfast and married a G.I. who brought her to California. My wife is thus an Irish citizen, although she was born in southern California. A couple of years ago, we applied for Irish citizenship for our daughter, who now has dual citizenship also.

After a visit to Ireland some thirteen years ago, I loved the country and the people so much that I applied for and received a Fulbright Senior Fellowship to teach the American short story at University College, Dublin and Trinity College. My wife, daughter, mother-in-law (whose husband died at that time), and I lived in the suburb of Blackrock, south of Dublin, for a year. Our daughter, who was 11, went to an international school. It was a great experience for all of us. I got to know Dublin quite well.

So well, in fact, that for the past two years I have taken a group of 20 American students from California State University, Long Beach to Dublin for three weeks in June to study Joyce’s Dubliners and Ulysses. We lived in a youth hostel near Stephen’s Green, and I held classes on the Trinity campus each morning. In the afternoons, we visited museums, including the Martello Tower at Sandycove where the first chapter of Ulysses takes place, and walked the walks described in those two great books; reading them in Dublin made for a marvelously integrated experience for the students and me. Being in Dublin on Bloomsday and having a bit of Gorgonzola cheese and a class of burgundy at Davy Byrne’s Pub, as did Leopold Bloom, was a corny, but pleasurable, treat. Although I do not plan to take a group this year, I hope to do it again in the future.

Now after that little personal introduction, here are a few comments about the Irish short story.

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 storyteller, 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. The German novelle then gave rise to the short story.

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 storyteller.

Prominent Irish critic Declan Kiberd, in his book Inventing Ireland, 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 eyewitness 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.

The main development of the Irish short, from its roots in the rich folklore of the Irish people to its post-Joycean modernism, has been one in which the old local color conventions and stereotypes of Ireland and its people have been replaced with an image of Ireland as a modern European country. Although many tourists may bemoan the loss of the old rural images, lamenting that Ireland and its literature is losing its distinctiveness, the fact is, most of those stereotypes were due to the biting poverty of many of the people, the harshness of British rule, and the despair and hopelessness that lead to the stereotypes of Irish immigration and Irish drinking. The people of the New Ireland, until recently the shining star of economic development in the European Union, are not sorry to see those myths laid to rest. The short story will probably always be a powerful literary form for Irish writers, but it will probably never again be a form that perpetuates the old local color legends of the Emerald Isle.

The question I pose to you is: Why do you think some countries give rise to great short story writers, while other countries favor the novel? For example, it has been suggested that the French have always been much better at the short story than the Germans. Why did the short story take such strong root in America, I mean other than the publishing issue (British novels were widely available in America because of the lack of copyright protection; thus, periodical publication of short fiction became the favored outlet for American writers.)? Why do you think that the Irish have always been better at the short story than the British?

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! I lift high a pint of Guinness to all of you!