The Gaelic People

So it makes sense that as a writer, one would have a healthy respect for language. (At least, you would hope so.) But in his 1980 play Translations, Brian Friel suggests that in for the Irish, language is not only important—it’s the core of their very identity. Translations is set in 1833 in the fictional town of Ballybeg in Donegal, Northern Ireland. A group of English soldiers have come to the town as part of an initiative to map all of Ireland, and part of this mapping includes “standardizing” (ie, Anglicizing) Irish place-names. The English characters speak only English, and several of the Irish characters speak only Gaelic, but this is shortly to be remedied by the foundation of a new, free public school system in Ireland, in which only English will be spoken. According to my director, the generation of young people represented in the play is the last to speak only Irish; our hypothetical children will go to the National School and speak English at school and Irish at home, and their children will speak almost exclusively English. Thus in one generation the Irish national language is almost swept away, relegated to something studied in school or spoken in a few remote hamlets.

The unease that one of the English soldiers, Yolland, feels about the erosion of the Irish language is dismissed by Owen, a native of Ballybeg who has lived in Dublin for six years and is now working with the English army.  (Sorry for that abominable use of the passive voice there, dear readers.) Owen’s older brother Manus, who has never left Ballybeg, finds it extremely disquieting that the mapmaking is being carried out by soldiers—“It’s a bloody military operation, Owen,” he says. The play is skillfully constructed so that this relatively gentle, apparently innocuous act of English imperialism—changing place-names into English—foreshadows the physical brutality at the end of the play as the English, seeking information on the now-missing Yolland, plan to kill all the livestock in Ballybeg (this is in a society, remember, where agriculture and livestock are so critical to survival that stealing someone’s horse or sheep is a capital offense). If they still have not found their missing officer, they will begin evicting and leveling every house in the parish, rendering all the inhabitants homeless. This violent plan of action comes as a shock to most of the characters onstage when it is announced, but one has the sense that if Yolland or Manus were present, they would consider it no more than a physical extension of the linguistic and cultural attack the British were already carrying out.

Friel’s argument, articulated most eloquently by Hugh, the bombastic but astute Irish schoolmaster, is that language defines identity. This is a question that could be taken back to the most abstract philosophical grounds—does language define existence and thought? Is to think of something to name it?—and a conversation between Owen and Yolland compares their place-naming to God in the garden of Eden, naming things and bringing them into existence. But Hugh also argues that language, and the oral and written cultural heritage that accompanies it, is particularly important in Ireland. He tells Yolland, “Certain cultures expend on their vocabularies and syntax acquisitive energies and ostentations entirely lacking in their material lives…It is our response to mud cabins and a diet of potatoes, our only method of replying to…inevitabilities.” He says dismissively of English that it’s a language “particularly suited” to commerce, as opposed to Gaelic’s suitability to romance, mythology, fantasy and hope. In a land of extremely impoverished, poorly educated and politically oppressed people, the spiritual and intellectual treasures of their accumulated literature and history is all the Irish have in the way of pride in themselves and gifts to hand down to their children. And in this way, we see, the leveling of homes and killing of livestock is only a temporary, limited, if devastating attack on a few individuals; the leveling of the Irish language is an attack on an entire people.

McDonagh, You Clown, You

Well, ladies and gentlemen, today we are starting our Irish unit, which will probably go on for the next several months. Joyously, just as I was beginning to fall into the depths of despair, I have finally been cast in something, and that something is Brian Friel’s Translations. Whee! In gratitude, and out of my own natural nerdiness and curiosity about my heritage, I have decided to do some investigation of the literature and history of the Emerald Isle. And this began with the reading of three plays by a playwright I ought to have already known (post B.F.A.) but had never read or seen anything by, the unmatchable Martin McDonagh.

I knew he had a reputation for being both brutal and dark, and as I tend to favor the Sarah Ruhl school of lyrical, optimistic drama, I approached the Galway trilogy (The Beauty Queen of Leenane, A Skull in Connemara, and The Lonesome West) with some trepidation. The back cover of the book describes the town of Leenane, where all three plays are set, as “so blighted by rancor, ignorance and spite that, as the local priest complains, God himself seems to have no jurisdiction there.” The three plays each feature four characters, none of whom appear in more than one play but several of whom are mentioned in plays in which they do not appear, which not only links the three together but contributes to the sense of a tiny town where everyone knows everything about everyone, and most of them hold grudges for decades. To my surprise, I found all three plays compelling, funny, and sometimes heartbreaking, and although they each stand alone, the experience of reading all three one after the other contributed greatly to my enjoyment and my understanding of Leenane.

 McDonagh’s characters do terrible things to their family members, but somehow (especially in Lonesome West, which I think was my favorite) he makes their quarrels blackly funny; I never feel with him, as I do with some authors, that he’s indifferent to the loss of his characters’ lives or even to the gloom of lives warped by selfishness and loneliness. Have you ever felt that? That a writer (or movie director) is killing someone off or making someone miserable for effect or for a moral, without really weighing the cost of a human life, and you think, hey! You can’t do that! I’m not buying that! It needs to mean more! McDonagh, on the other hand, without taking his characters’ pain lightly, allows them to express it in hilariously human, petty ways (until they give in and murder each other); the complacency and indifference with which most of the town regards their crimes is absurd, almost farcical, and McDonagh allows himself some great self-referential moments to the insanity of it all.  It was fun, in The Lonesome West, to finally meet the ineffective local priest, Father Welsh, whose name no one can quite remember and whose attempt to maintain some optimism about the souls of his parish is gradually worn down by alcohol and the unnatural deaths of several parishioners. Father Welsh is a wonderful character because he, almost alone of anyone, is aware of the awfulness of life in this town, the horrors of people murdering their mothers and fathers and wives, and his flabbergasted protestations that this is altogether unacceptable are both comical and the voice of reason in a mad world.

Maybe McDonagh is simply following the old secret of comedy (and tragedy)—he takes an ordinary human condition (being unable to stand your neighbors and relatives) and pushes it to the furthest possible extreme. Because you recognize and believe the scenes of the mother nagging her daughter about buying the wrong cookies and the brothers fighting about toys they stole from one another as children, it’s an easier leap than one might expect to believing they might blackmail one another for their inheritance money or bash one another’s head in with a fire poker. Without judging his characters or condescending to them, McDonagh never descends to heir level of their ignorance and cynicism. It takes a deft hand for a playwright to express more with his work than what his characters say, without making them unlikable martinets, and McDonagh does it skillfully and entertainingly.

As with the Shakespeare plays I’ve already written about, there are so many moments and lines I’d like to copy out for you, things that made me laugh or stuck in my head or haunted me a little. But one thing I am slowly learning (after years of compulsive quote-copying into my notebook) is that at a certain point, what you’re really trying to do is copy the whole book, and you can’t do that. At that point, just go back and read it again. So, dear readers, I would like to urge you to go out and read these plays yourself, if you haven’t already. I can promise you’ll be entertained—I have a weak stomach for violence and darkness, so if I found McDonagh not only palatable but hilarious, chances are so will you. 

P.S. More on Translations soon!

Girl in Hyacinth Blue

Susan Vreeland’s occasionally exquisite novel Girl in Hyacinth Blue traces the heritage of a painting believed to be by Vermeer in eight discrete, reverse-chronological chapters. Beginning with Cornelius, a late-twentieth-century professor at an American boys’ school, and moving backwards to the painting’s subject in seventeenth-century Holland, the book uses the painting to investigate the role of art and beauty in a variety of societies; the ability of a physical object to outlive its creator by centuries; and the question of whether the inherent aesthetic and emotional value of a painting can be separated from its material and historical value as the work (or not) of a master.

The first chapter is narrated by Richard, Cornelius’s art teacher colleague. Cornelius invites Richard to his apartment to show him the painting, insisting it is a Vermeer but refusing to have it appraised or show it to anyone else. It emerges that Cornelius’s Nazi father looted it from a Dutch Jewish family he deported to a concentration camp during WWII.  The guilt of keeping his father’s secret has warped Cornelius’s adult life, preventing him from sharing the painting with anyone (until now) and even from making any close friends. Cornelius even considers burning the painting, as an act either of atonement or erasure of the past. On the one hand, the thought of destroying an undiscovered, unrecorded Vermeer is legitimately spine-chilling. On the other, it seems almost too easy and contrived to pit the epitome of evil, the Nazis, against the incarnation of beauty, Vermeer.

The narrative then moves backwards in time to the Jewish family in Amsterdam who owned the painting before Cornelius’s father, and continues to trace its heritage as it moves around the Netherlands. There are some unexpectedly lovely descriptions of the Dutch countryside, but some of the little girls and young wives aching for beauty in a bleak existence failed to assert themselves as distinct characters. I liked a cynical, materialistic French diplomat’s wife who committed adultery under the eyes of the painting and then sold it to buy passage back to Paris, giving the seller the wrong artist’s name to raise its price; her regret over rendering the painting “illegitimate” by distancing it from its true parent is an interesting and telling contrast to her blithe indifference to her and her husband’s mutual infidelities. She reflects, “How love builds itself unconsciously out of the momentous ordinary,” a phrase that echoes a recurring theme of the importance of contemplation and the appreciation of the small details before you. This entreaty, along with the necessity of beauty and art even in a life struggling for survival, supports a value system I agree with and enjoy reading about, and initially I loved the way the Vermeer was a stand-in for all art. For some reason, perhaps unfairly, my appreciation was slightly diminished by learning that the author is planning several other books about artists (she teaches art history as well as writing). I’m not sure if it led me to question her true love for Vermeer (I was similarly discomfited to know she’d never seen a Vermeer face to face, though she’d read numerous books and gallery catalogues on his work), or to wonder if rather than seeing the painting as a metaphor for all art, I should have taken a narrower view on Vermeer’s specific talents and contributions. Fundamentally, of course, this speculation is irrelevant to the novel’s merits, but somehow it dampened my enthusiasm just the same.

Several of the chapters were initially written as stand-alone stories and published separately, and it wasn’t until Vreeland filled in the gaps in the narrative that she found herself with a novel on her hands. Although later chapters explicitly answer plot questions raised in earlier chapters, I felt the book failed to build on itself in a more fundamental way, and that each chapter existed separately. I also felt that several of the characters had similar voices and experiences with the painting, and wish she had explored a broader range of reactions and characters. The French woman was merrily amoral, but still able to, at the last, appreciate the innocence and purity of the painting; several of the other stories could have benefited from that level of complexity and ambiguity.