Abstract
Robert Welch’s final book, written before his death in 2013, is a marvellous primer on Irish literary history, one that scans the most distant past for themes and draws them into a pattern that links the earliest recorded times to the present day. This book links into a constellation many texts that had hitherto (for the present author at any rate) been disparate points. The mythological figure on whom Welch patterns this constellation is the cailleach, the Hag of Beare (the book’s strange title refers to a folk tale about her). This female principle sometimes appears in Irish writing as a representative of creation; at other times, she appears as the Hag, the goddess of prescience and destiny.
After a considered though necessarily speculative survey of the earliest stories from Irish literature, the third chapter moves on to the Bardic period. Among other things, it shows how Fionn came of age relatively late in this period, in about 1200 (making him a contemporary of the Green Knight and the Arthur of the Romaunt). One of the great strengths of this work is the way its gaze continually sweeps out across Europe. This is a view of Irish literature that is anything but insular.
The fourth chapter follows the tragic course of the seventeenth century, beginning with the pivotal Battle of Kinsale and ending with the laments of Ó Rathaille in the aftermath of the Battle of the Boyne. Carrying on with his theme of the hag as the tutelary presence in Irish literary history, Welch describes her incarnation in the perennially hopeful and disappointed aisling form: ‘Brightness of brightness I saw in the lonely byways/crystallised crystal was the green of her two clear eyes’ (p. 52). Welch links Ó Rathaille’s ineradicable obstinacy amid insurmountable despair to Beckett, Yeats and other later writers. These giant leaps are worthy of the Hag herself (as she appears in her bounding form in At Swim-Two-Birds), but they are convincingly done.
The fifth chapter traces the beginnings of a distinct Anglo-Irish voice in Ireland to the time of the reformation. Welch does not make the sharp distinctions between coloniser and colonised that others have. He compares Swift’s horror at the depredations of unaccountable colonial power in the 1720s with Ó Rathaille’s despairing final verses from around the same time. The chapter also looks at Edmund Burke’s subtle self-positioning, showing how his famously pro-Union and royalist politics were tempered by other tendencies. Irish authors of different backgrounds are shown in this book to be subject to the same territorial dynamics, blown by the same changes in political weather and made apprehensive by the same shadows of future calamity.
The sixth chapter looks at how the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century taste for ‘folklore, indigenous material, the ancient’ (p. 70) in European culture turned to Irish materials. It begins by showing how the late eighteenth-century foundation of the Royal Irish Academy was linked to efforts to reclaim Irish culture from Macpherson’s Scottish highlands. This attempt to privilege Oisín over Ossian is seen alongside ethnographic anthologies like Charlotte Brooke’s Reliques of Irish Poetry (1789). The chapter also brings to light the complexities of Thomas Moore, suggesting that the much-disparaged exoticism of Lallah Rookh (1817) is ‘a kind of antidote to the toxins of hate and memory on which the colonial and the colonised thrive’ (p. 87).
Chapter 7 turns to Brian Merriman and the early years of the nineteenth century. Welch identifies the book’s motif, the Hag, in the aisling form of The Midnight Court. Merriman is considered alongside the antiquarians, translators and manuscript compilers of the first half of the nineteenth century, as the folk tradition made its way into English-language verse, and the verse itself was re-formed under the pressure of this new material. One of most interesting things about this chapter is that, in approaching the start of the Revival through Irish, it connects the desperate anguish of the Irish-language tradition to the extremeness of the young Yeats’s romanticism.
Chapter 8 covers the devastating effects of the famine, the sporadic contemporary responses to it in literature, and the way its legacy is felt in writing up to the present day. Chapter 9 looks at the origins of the post-Famine generation, contrasting the political imagination of Shaw with the more mystical dreams of Yeats. The 10th chapter covers similar Revivalist ground, looking at Pearse’s recreation of the heroic age alongside Synge’s discovery of the Aran Islands. Welch, as ever, adds something original to the story, pointing out how germane The Playboy (1907) was to the changing temper of nationalist politics. In Pegeen Mike’s famous distinction between ‘a gallous story and a dirty’ deed, she was voicing something that troubled nationalism at this critical period.
This is followed, in chapter 11, entitled ‘Hearts of Stone’, with a sustained look at the consequences of the violence of this period in literature. Welch focuses in particular on the work of Joyce, and on the gentle, tolerant ideas espoused by Leopold Bloom. Chapter 13, ‘Matrix of Surds’, uses the surd (a number that stretches on to infinity after its decimal point) as an image to express the off-centre, underrated literature of the mid-twentieth century. Chapter 14, among other things, interprets Heaney’s bog queens as recent incarnations of the hag of destiny. Welch contrasts this with the mandarin, mysterious and often insouciant style of poets just half a generation younger.
This book is an education, not just in literary history but in the psychology of the island. It has three qualities that separate it from much contemporary literary criticism. It is radiant with enthusiasm; it is written with great psychological acuity; and it has the kind of narrative zest that means that it is best read whole. It should certainly be required reading for those who teach Irish literature. It gives a survey broad enough to provide a satisfying map of Irish literary history and detailed enough to provide something new about each text that is examined. It could only have been written after a lifetime’s reading, thinking and feeling.