Just Tell Them the Story
Tradition Bearing
At Blarney Castle in County Cork, tourists queue up to kiss the Blarney Stone; legend has it that doing so will confer the “gift of gab,” a facility for fluent speech. As novelist Maeve Binchy points out, the Irish are generally thought to be, and think of themselves as, loquacious people, and verbal ability is a highly valued trait.1 In Irish fiction and drama, the storytelling episode is a point of connection between speech and writing. A smaller narrative woven into the larger narrative, a story-within-a-story, requires close attention to determine the connections between the two.
Before considering the importance of storytelling in Irish history and culture, it is necessary to look at the storytelling episode from a literary point of view. When the telling of a short tale is included as part of a longer tale, the narrator of the short tale might not be the primary narrator of the long tale. Thus the storytelling episode can involve a shift in narrative viewpoint and a repositioning of the main narrator with respect to the storyteller. When a character other than the main narrator tells a self-contained story that is incorporated into the main narrative, the main narrator steps out of that role to join the listening audience.
This technically complex process adds another dimension to the main narrative. Changing narrators means introducing a different point of view. Once the main narrator becomes a listener, he or she must react to the smaller tale. Listeners play an important role; without them the storytelling situation could not realistically be rendered. Each one of them, including and often especially the narrator, must respond in some way to the story being told. Key questions can be asked about the members of the audience. Why these people? Why do they need to hear this particular story? In what way are they, or should they be, changed by the story? The response of the fictional members of the audience to the story is one of the elements connecting it to the larger narrative.
In addition to adding another layer of meaning, thus rendering the story more complex, storytelling also functions as a highly specialized form of dialogue. Dialogue in drama is all there is. Dialogue in fiction is usually interspersed with narrative and description as both a mode of developing the character of the speaker and an indicator of the nature of the relationship between speaker and listener. As with other kinds of dialogue, what is said or not said depends on who is listening and subtly alters the relationship between speaker and listener. The speaker’s motives are always relevant; characters have reasons for saying what they say to particular listeners or not saying what they do not say.
Then there is the issue of truth and falsity. Stories can be true, not true, or partially true. These categories are not, however, absolute; they blend and blur around the edges. Everything said is filtered through the perceptions of a particular speaker, and the speaker is influenced by who is listening. Where the truth lies is often unclear to the listener, in that he or she was not present at the events being narrated (the presence of the listener at the events narrated in the story would render the story redundant). Such considerations affect the meaning of storytelling in fiction and drama.
Irish storytelling in particular, like much else about contemporary Irish culture, involves complex interrelationships between past and present. According to folklorist Clodagh Brennan Harvey, the custom of storytelling grew in Ireland, especially in the rural areas, in response to long winter nights and bad winter weather. Before radio and television encouraged people to stay home in the evening, nighttime entertainment revolved around “the custom of nightly visiting.”2 This provided an audience for the community’s storytellers. More than an entertainer, the storyteller or, to use the formal title, seanchaí (Anglicized to such forms as seanachie or shanachie) was the preserver and transmitter of folk wisdom. A primary function of the shanachie was as a “tradition-bearer” linking the present to the past.3
The shanachie’s tales were, by definition, old. By story type Harvey classifies them as mythological (stories of Ireland’s legendary heroes); folkloric (tales of the supernatural); macrohistorical (narratives of Irish history); or microhistorical (community or family history, sometimes with connections to the bigger historical picture). The tales can also be classified by length: the stories of the gods and heroes of the Celtic past tended to be long, while folk tales, family sagas, or local history tales tended to be short. Custom dictated that only men could tell the long mythic tales, but either men or women could narrate the short tales.4 When the storyteller is incorporated into a larger work of fiction or drama, only short tales can be used, and so the reader finds fictional storytellers of both genders.
The older the tale, the greater its claim to authenticity. The authority of the shanachie similarly increases with age as it places him in closer connection to the events narrated. This latter qualification—the age of the storyteller—threatens the tradition. A performance art that relies on human memory, traditional Irish storytelling depends for its survival not only on the continued respect for the tradition, which provides an audience, but on the survival of the actual storytellers. In the first few decades of the twentieth century, storytelling seemed to be in danger of dying out. In 1935, in an attempt to capture the tradition while its practitioners were still alive, the Irish Folklore Commission was formed, its task to locate, record, and preserve this piece of traditional culture. Harvey describes how the commission members went about their task and how their efforts shed light on the nature of oral tradition itself.
The first step for the Folklore Commission collectors was to identify storytellers. Collectors were led to storytellers by other members of the community and recorded the tale-telling sessions. Recording and preserving, however, influenced the development of the tradition. As every college professor knows, recording a lecture changes the behavior of both the professor and the students, so that what is recorded is not the class as it would have been had there been no recording or if the recording was done without the knowledge of either speaker or audience. So it must have been for the storytellers and their listeners. Another factor is that the collectors’ involvement privileged not only specific tellers but also specific versions of their tales, that is, the ones recorded. The honor of having been collected by the Folklore Commission conferred official status, further enhancing both the storytellers’ reputations in the community and their own “self-concept of storyteller.”5 The very respect accorded to the collected storytellers may have discouraged the development of new storytellers, ironically accelerating the very process the commission hoped to arrest. In addition the recorded version seemed to be the only official version, whereas in the natural course of events it would be only one of a varying series, versions of the same tale told by the same storyteller but evolving and subtly altering with each retelling.
More significant for the later understanding of the Irish storytelling tradition was the Folklore Commission’s decision that collectors would seek out tellers and tales only in the rural parts of Ireland. It would seem logical that the tradition would survive longest in those parts of the country least affected by the technological developments that were threatening its survival elsewhere, and this would justify the rural bias of the commission’s activities. But seeking out rural storytellers exclusively had other, perhaps unintended effects. According to historian Richard White, the commission’s procedures singled out “rural people [as] the designated keepers of the national memory,” defining them and them only as the “repository of true Irishness.”6 Possibly inadvertently the folklore collection process suggested that Dubliners, for example, were somehow less Irish than their country cousins and Dubliners’ traditions less worthy of preservation. The Folklore Commission’s role was to find and preserve such tales as would be consistent with the then-current belief that the best and truest Ireland could be located in a simple, primitive, peasant culture. The storyteller’s function was to preserve that lost paradise.
In Irish life the storyteller’s position was one of prestige, power, and authority.7 In literature the storyteller character stakes a claim to the authority inherent in the role in some fashion, whether it be as an eyewitness to the events being described or as having heard the story from another, older, equally or more authentic storyteller. The listeners may or may not accept the storyteller’s authority and may or may not even be content to allow the storytelling to proceed. Claiming the role of storyteller is a power move; the storyteller asserts authority via the tale, presenting his or her experience of the past as more important, more valid, especially more authentically Irish than what the listener characters are experiencing in the present. Sometimes the audience may include a skeptic, who may undercut the authority of teller or tale; this adds a further dimension of ambiguity, as the other members of the audience (and the reader) are invited to take sides with one or the other. Sometimes an interrupter will, as interrupters do in life, make a countering power move to steal the attention of the audience and direct it toward him- or herself. Either of these will disrupt the process of tradition-bearing.
The story has an additional function in developing the character of the storyteller. Especially when the story focuses on episodes of the family history in which the storyteller was also a participant, storytelling is fraught with all the traits of human memory and motivation that make personal narrative unreliable. All stories are told by an individual, so that a given story is “X’s story” and no one else’s; what X remembers is unique to X, as is what X adds to or subtracts from the story. The story, then, is more reliable as a guide to the character of its teller than it is to the events it purports to recount.
This is a characteristic not just of fictional storytellers but also of oral narratives in general, according to Richard White. Reflecting on the past of his mother’s Irish family, he notes how unreliable human memory is as a guide to actual events. While a historian “values most what is least altered,” a storyteller “wants to rework not just the story but the very facts themselves.”8 To the professional historian, memories are notoriously fallible. The storytelling medium can itself fail; once a tale is no longer told, memory of the happenings it narrates fades along with it. Forgetting a tale and consciously or unconsciously suppressing it are both principles of selectivity.9 Unlike the stories told by recognized storytellers and collected by professional folklorists, which are frozen in time at the point of collection, personal stories told informally by unofficial storytellers based on their own memories are seldom recorded; these latter tales continue to develop within the oral traditions from which they emerge. Stories are conflated with other stories; they are subtly altered with each retelling (often depending upon who is listening); details are added, subtracted, emphasized, deemphasized; and tales are told so vividly that the teller as well as the listener can be convinced that things happened as described, whether they did or not.
Another angle from which to look at storytelling in fiction is to consider stories that are not told at all but should be or stories that are told in such a way as to suppress something important. “Whatever you say, say nothing”: the paradoxical secretiveness of a loquacious people to which the Ulster proverb refers is often explained by the need of a people long subjected to the rule of others to maintain areas of privacy, while at the same time conciliating the powerful by appearing to be friendly and communicative. In literature “saying nothing” takes the form of telling stories with significant omissions or suppressing stories that cry out to be told. In such cases the motives of the character who is withholding the story or telling the story but withholding something crucial must be examined. Sometimes a story is based on a historical event about which the reader may know, or can discover, more than the listening character does. When the story is about an aspect of the Irish past recoverable in some other way than the oral tale, the reader is invited to learn about it, form his or her own judgment, and analyze the interaction between storyteller and listener on the basis of that judgment. Has the storyteller altered the story in honest error? In an attempt to deceive or manipulate the listener? As a consequence of ignorance or other kinds of limitation? Once the conventions surrounding the storytelling episode in fiction are understood, the episode will be seen to enrich the larger work by providing another layer of meaning.
Saying Nothing: John Millington Synge’s “An Autumn Night in the Hills”
To illustrate how the conventions of Irish storytelling work in a particular story, consider John Millington Synge’s (1871–1909) “An Autumn Night in the Hills.” The setting is an isolated cottage in the Wicklow Mountains, an area not far from Dublin but, in 1903 when the story was published, rural. It is a September afternoon, and the weather is fine after a rainstorm of the previous night. The first-person narrator of the main story is, as is evident by his thought patterns and speech, an educated and sophisticated man, presumably a city-dweller. He is in the Wicklow area to search for a wounded hunting dog; he finds the dog, now recovered, at a cottage. The residents at home at the time are an old woman and a younger one. A “sudden shower” typical of the Irish climate isolates him in the cottage with the two women, where it emerges in casual conversation that no men are around to keep the narrator company because they have all gone to Aughrim, a town in west central Ireland, to bring home the body of a townswoman, Mary Kinsella, for burial.
In response to the narrator’s questioning, the old woman describes the deceased as “a fine young woman with two children” who “a year and a half ago … went wrong in her head, and they had to send her away. And then up there in the Richmond asylum maybe they thought the sooner they were shut of her the better, for she died two days ago this morning, and now they’re bringing her up to have a wake.”10 The reader easily imagines questions that need to be answered. How did it come to pass that so fine a young woman went “wrong in her head”? And what might wrong in the head mean? Who sent her away? What became of the children? Who wanted to be shut of her—the same people who put her in the asylum in the first place or the people in the Richmond asylum? Above all, who or what killed Mary Kinsella? The reader wonders at the narrator’s failure to ask the obvious questions. Is he indifferent? Emotionally detached? Respectful of the villagers’ privacy with regard to the sad fate of one of their own? In any case Mary Kinsella’s story needs to be told.
That, however, does not happen. Having revealed the bare outlines of Mary’s story, the old woman drops the subject, and two other tales are told, one by the old woman and one by the young woman. The presence of two storytellers raises the issue of their relationship to each other: competitive, cooperative, or complementary. The girl begins to tell the story of how the dog came to be wounded and rescued but is interrupted by the old woman, her mother. The old woman’s tale, a bit of local folklore, is of two encounters with a lake-dwelling spirit. In the first encounter, a fisherman is terrified by the spirit and flees. In the second encounter, a man who has swum in every lake in Ireland wants to swim in the lake in which the spirit lives. The old woman’s brother warns him off, but he is determined. Upon the advice of the brother, the swimmer sends his dog into the lake to test the spirit’s power; the lake-dwelling spirit destroys the dog, and nothing of the animal remains but “the inside out of him” floating to the top of the haunted lake.11
Over a cup of tea, the younger woman resumes her tale, a newer and more realistic narrative that seems destined to become a part of local history. Her tale recounts how the hunting dog being sought by the narrator had been wounded, yet recovered. The hunters thought he might well have been killed, and sent out “two lads … with a sack to carry him on if he was alive and a spade to bury him if he was dead” (87). The dog, though injured, jumped on to the sack, as if to opt for survival; he is brought to the cottage and nursed back to health, in the process developing great loyalty to the young woman. Supplementing the young woman’s story, the old woman adds a detail to it: when a letter from a gentleman came about the dog, Mike, one of the men (probably the young woman’s brother), tells her that the letter contains an inscription for the dog’s tombstone. The young girl, apparently illiterate, believes this and has a psychological reaction: she “went down quite simple” until she discovered that she had been “humbugged” about the dog (89).
On the surface, neither of these stories has anything to do with Mary Kinsella. At the end of the story, the narrator sees, through a heavy rain, through a fog that at once distorts his vision and renders the atmosphere grim, “the shadow of a coffin … with the body of Mary Kinsella” (90). But he never hears her story. Why is this?
There are at least three possibilities. When the old woman first begins to talk about Mary, the narrator “had been examining a wound in the dog’s side near the end of his lung” (85). This body language suggests that the narrator is preoccupied with the dog and indifferent to the story about Mary. The old woman, responding to what she perceives as the lack of an interested audience for Mary’s story, stops; then both she and the younger woman respond to the narrator’s apparent exclusive interest in the dog by telling two dog stories. Thus, perhaps without intending to do so, the narrator loses his chance to hear what must surely be a more significant story than the ones he does hear: the story of a young woman lost to madness.
Another possibility is that the old woman realizes that, having said what she has said about Mary Kinsella, she has already said too much in a situation in which she should have said nothing; the townspeople’s privacy, and that of Mary, would be violated by revealing any more of her story. So the old woman seizes the opportunity presented by the narrator’s momentary lapse of attention, which coincides with the younger woman’s return to the room, to end the story. After all, if Mary’s awful fate—sent away (by whom?) to an asylum in Richmond to die alone—had been any responsibility of the townspeople, it would be best to say nothing.
Yet a third possibility is that Mary’s story has indeed been told, but in a symbolic way, via the two dog stories. The two storytellers’ vocabulary with which to describe abnormal psychological states is unsophisticated. The old woman describes Mary as “wrong in her head”; the young woman describes herself as grieving for the dog to the extent that she “went down quite simple.” It is clear that any understanding of Mary’s mental disorder will have to come through interpretation of the stories’ symbolism; at the same time, the tale-tellers can both deny that they are speaking of Mary at all, thus preserving Mary’s privacy and possibly the community’s complicity in her fate. The common element in both stories is a dog. In the first one, the tale of the supernatural related by the old woman, powers stronger than the dog doom him. The old woman’s brother regards the dog as expendable compared to the swimmer and so recommends testing the haunted waters with the dog. This dog’s fate mirrors Mary’s. The dog’s situation is hopeless, as was Mary’s: sent away by people who wanted to be rid of her, she was no match for their overwhelming power.
The young woman’s story, in contrast, is more hopeful; in her tale the dog seems to represent herself, not Mary, and the possibility of life and love. The dog’s symbolic resurrection from the dead expresses the woman’s hope that she can survive, though Mary did not; the dog’s love for her is similarly a sign of hope. But her identification with the dog is so strong—when she thinks it is dead, she is deranged with grief—that it suggests the opposite fear that, without the hope that the dog represents, the young woman herself might meet Mary’s fate.
The two dog stories, taken together and factoring in the untold story of Mary Kinsella, carry a message all the stronger for being impossible to articulate in other than symbolic terms: there is something about rural life that drives young women mad. Without an authoritative version of Mary’s story, the reader of Synge’s tale is invited to re-create it, to consider what might have driven “a fine young woman” with two children to madness and death and to evaluate whether the young woman storyteller runs the same risk. But the narrator clearly misses an opportunity by not responding in such a way as to encourage the telling of Mary’s story and by not understanding the stories that are told in its place.
“A Dark and Stormy Night”: Conor McPherson, The Weir
In Lisa Carey’s 1998 novel The Mermaids Singing, two characters are discussing a funeral, and one, Clíona, an Irish-born character, explains to Gráinne, her American-born granddaughter, that the Irish practice two religions: “We Irish are devout Catholics, but we’re fanatic pagans as well.”12 With the coming of the Christian missionaries in the fourth and fifth centuries, pagan beliefs and practices were gradually absorbed into the new faith.13 But even in the twentieth century, when Catholicism was recognized in the constitution of the Irish Republic, vestiges of the old faith remained, especially in the rural countryside. Old beliefs survived even in the face of modern rationalism. Carey’s Clíona might also have said, “We Irish are devout Catholics, fanatic pagans, and secular rationalists as well.’” The tension between these incompatible belief systems is in the background of the storytelling episodes in Conor McPherson’s play The Weir.
McPherson (b. 1971) “began his theatrical career by scripting monologues,”14 and this play is essentially a set of stories in the form of monologues, connected by the “funny banter” of the five men in the pub.15 McPherson’s childhood visits to the rural Irish countryside included storytelling episodes. In his author’s note prefacing the play, he tells the story of his “visits to Leitrim to see my granddad. He lived on his own on a country road in a small house beside the Shannon. I remember him telling me once that it was very important to have the radio on because it gave him the illusion of company. We’d have a drink and sit by the fire. And he’d tell me stories. When you’re lying in bed in the pitch black silence of the Irish countryside it’s easy for the imagination to run riot.”16 McPherson’s grandfather, living in what many think of as the authentic Irish manner (in a cottage near a body of water down a lonely country road in a sparsely populated area in the rural northwest), is in touch with the ancient storytelling tradition and bears it to his grandson. The pagan beliefs that antedated Christianity never entirely died out in the Irish countryside, and in writing The Weir, McPherson becomes himself a tradition-bearer, a link between the ancient tales and the modern theatergoer.
The ancient beliefs reflected, albeit skeptically, in the play involve not the myths of gods and heroes but those of the fairy faith, a folkloric tradition featuring a “community of spirits or supernatural beings who are living beside human beings but are normally concealed from them.”17 Their territory includes the hills, mounds, and forts, the fairy paths along which they traveled, and other sacred spaces, especially “springs and streams.”18 These beings of the other world (the leprechaun being the most familiar outside of Ireland) are not necessarily friendly to humans—quite the contrary. The fairy otherworld can be a frightening place, and tales of human encounters with it are often tales of terror.
The fairy faith is not a codified religion with a set of rules or a theology or a hierarchy but rather a set of beliefs captured in an oral tradition. Were it not for the activities of folklore collectors, these traditions would have been lost. A key figure in the history of Irish folklore collecting is Lady Augusta Gregory (1852–1932). A member of the Protestant Anglo-Irish aristocracy by birth, Augusta Persse married Sir William Gregory in 1880 and thus became the mistress of Coole Park in County Galway, one of the so-called Big Houses of the Protestant Ascendancy. Unlike many of her social peers and coreligionists, however, Gregory was a Nationalist, and she played many roles in encouraging her fellow Irish to think of themselves as a nation apart from the British Empire. Especially after Sir William’s death in 1892, she became the center of the movement that would come to be known as the Irish Literary Revival.
Gregory’s role with respect to other like-minded writers such as John Millington Synge and especially William Butler Yeats (1865–1929) was multifaceted. She made Coole Park into a writers’ colony; she critiqued, edited, reviewed, and cowrote; and she cofounded, raised money for, and publicized the Irish National Theater and the Abbey Theater. By modern standards she was slow to recognize her own creativity in her commitment to supporting the men in her life, not just her husband and son but most of the greatest writers of her time (again, especially Yeats). The extent of her collaboration has been recognized lately in that in more recent editions of some of Yeats’s works, her name appears as coauthor.
Of Gregory’s activities, the one most relevant to the modern audience’s appreciation of The Weir is her folklore collecting. One of the key issues for the writers of this cultural revival was the search for a set of traditions in the Irish past that were not influenced by England. The storytelling of the Irish peasantry filled this need in many ways. For one thing, in that it was a small-group tradition shared among members of a local community, it did not have to meet any standards but Irish ones, as opposed to written works that would need to be vetted by British publishers. Second, because storytelling was connected with the rural peasantry and with the past, it met the criteria of authenticity. Third, because many of the storytellers were Irish-speaking, they could not be accused of pandering to the literary tastes of the British. Thus the storytellers were in effect able to fly under the literary radar, which was the good news; but the bad news was that, if not collected, the tales would die when the tellers did.
Gregory was the right person at the right time to collect these stories. She was born in and lived her adult life in the west, in County Galway, in close proximity to the Irish-speaking part of the country, the Gaeltacht; she was willing and able to learn Irish; and she had an excellent relationship with the peasantry in the area surrounding Coole Park. One of the results of this folklore project is her collection Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland (1920). Still in print, Visions divides the stories collected by Gregory into a variety of tale types according to the particular belief they record. Four of her twenty-seven chapters are relevant for understanding McPherson’s play: “Seers and Healers,” “In the Way,” “Banshees and Warnings,” and “The Unquiet Dead.” Five tales are told in the play; four are of experiences of the supernatural, and one is not. The four supernatural stories form the point of connection between Gregory’s folklore and McPherson’s play, while the fifth takes a contrasting path. In each of the four supernatural tales, the fairy faith, Christianity, and secular rationalism interact in a way that simultaneously affirms and denies the old-time fairy faith.
The setting of McPherson’s play is ideal for the storytelling situation. The pub is located in an isolated rural area, northwest Leitrim or Sligo; the high summer season, when the tourists, lumped together by the pub-goers under the label “Germans,” have not yet arrived, and the loneliness of the area is stressed as the characters arrive “at staggered intervals, slightly blown and bedraggled.”19 In this pub Brendan has acquired modern communication devices, but “the fact that he has not turned on the television or the radio suggests a continued preference for storytelling”20 over passive consumption of electronic media. All this sets the stage for the storytelling sequences in the play.
McPherson takes the risk of using the “standard Gothic equipment” by setting his play on a literal “dark and stormy night.”21 Similarly conventional is the arrival of “a stranger … someone whose very presence will change the course of the men’s habitual conversation.”22 This is Valerie, who has moved to the town from Dublin. In the process of introducing her to the customs and culture of the area, four of the five characters, all but Brendan the pub owner, tell “half-disbelieved folk-stories” with the newcomer as audience.23
If the west of Ireland functions as metaphor for the past, Dublin, the Republic’s most sophisticated city, home to major centers of learning, government, the arts, and entertainment, represents the modern world. It becomes clear that Valerie has traveled westward not to get in touch with the past, as might be expected, but to come to terms with an experience that cannot be explained rationally. In Dublin her experience was viewed as psychiatric disorder. In the west Valerie finds people who will listen to stories like hers, stories about an opening between the physical and spiritual worlds. This may be no coincidence: “Perhaps she has come precisely because instinct tells her that such communication will not be so readily dismissed in this community.”24
That the setting is charged with supernatural power is suggested in the title of the play. A weir is a structure that dams up water “for generating power for the area,” as Finbar, the local real estate broker, explains.25 In the pagan world view, water is a prime source of spiritual energy, so electricity is not all that is generated. Pent-up spiritual energy is ready to be released, and the storytelling situation releases it. Not everyone will experience the spiritual energy, however, even in that place; Brendan, the pub owner, for example, listens respectfully but has no tale of the supernatural to share with the others. Those who do make contact with the otherworld through direct experience can be termed “seers”; this is the term Gregory uses in her folklore collection. In her chapter “Seers and Healers,” she collects the stories of men and women who are able to connect with the fairy world, for all that such contact is contrary to Catholic doctrine. In the words of one storyteller who was clearly Catholic, “some see these things, and some can’t. It’s against our creed to believe in them.”26
One of those who see, Biddy Early, acts as a combination of folk healer, prophet, and life coach. When presented with a man who was “losing his health,” she advises him to “give over drinking so much whiskey”; he does and begins drinking only gin (46). But above and beyond her medical knowledge and common sense, she is regarded as having psychic superpowers, including preternatural hearing ability; as one storyteller says, “although it’s against our creed to believe it, she could hear any earthly thing that was said in any part, miles off” (35–36). Not surprisingly the priests, her rivals, “were against her,” as were the doctors (37). To facilitate her fortune-telling, she had a bottle in which she could see the future, but in order for her to receive the last rites of the church on her deathbed, some said she had to break it, and others said that she had to turn it over to the priests, who “found black things in it” (41). Many said that she had been away, taken to live with the fairies, and so became expert in what would and would not be acceptable to them. The fairies can apparently be very particular. Biddy Early tells a woman that “if you have a bowl broke or a plate throw it out of the door, and don’t make any attempt to mend it, it vexes them” (40; italics in original). As ambassador to the fairies who were regarded as “her people,” Biddy Early was a conduit to the spirit world (45).
Each of the four tellers of supernatural tales is, at least for the moment in time recounted in the tale, a seer like Biddy Early. Like Biddy they seem also to be Catholics, so they occasionally add a proviso, similar to hers, that the stories are “against our creed” but proceed to tell them anyway. Unlike Biddy they are modern people, and so they also attempt to deal with their experience through the lens of scientific rationalism. In three of the four supernatural tales, a member of the clergy is involved, working his own “magic”; physicians are mentioned as possible resources in three; and medical/psychological explanations such as alcohol- or fever-induced hallucination and mental illness are offered. In each the tale-teller includes some form of denial of the supernatural elements of the narrative or simply resorts to mockery (“old shit,” “old cod”) of the supposedly outmoded beliefs recounted in the tale.27 For once religion and science are allies; both cast doubt upon the validity of these otherworldly experiences.
The first story, Jack’s tale of the fairy road, relates the events that took place eighty or so years earlier—“back in about 1910 or 1911” (31)—in Maura Nealon’s house, which Valerie is currently occupying; the source of the story is Maura herself, an eye- and earwitness. The relatively benign nature of the occurrences—unexplained knocking at a place low on the door, “not where you’d expect a grown man or a woman to be knocking”(32)—allows mild dramatic tension to build up, to culminate in the much greater tension of Valerie’s tale. The powers of Christianity are called in and, in this tale, are effective; once “the priest came and blessed the doors and the windows … there was no more knocking then” (32). Years later Maura found out that “the house had been built on what they call a fairy road…. legend would be that the fairies would come down that way to bathe” (33), and they resented the house in their way. Hence their noisy demands to revert to their usual habits. Maura, the seer character, lives to a ripe age and retains her ability to sense invisible presences: “She was always saying, There’s someone at the back door or there’s someone coming up the path…. And there’d never be, anyone there” (31). An eccentric and a drinker as well as a visionary, Maura is the connection between the old fairy-faith tradition and the pub audience via the tradition bearer, Jack.
The type of tale Jack tells is consonant with the ones collected by Lady Gregory and presented in the chapter of Visions and Beliefs titled “In the Way”: “There’s some places of their own we should never touch such as the forths; and if ever we cross their pathways we’re like to know it soon enough, for some ill turn they’ll do us, and then we must draw back out of their way” (180). Numerous pieces of testimony are collected on the ill fortune experienced by those who do cross the fairies’ pathways, getting “in the way of their coming and going” (180). Most of the narrators recount auditory phenomena: sounds of a “barrel rolling outside the door” (180); “music playing” (181); “feet … clapping, clapping on the floor” (182). Some of those who live in such houses are, like Maura, none the worse for the experience, but others suffer misfortunes ranging from poor crops to dead children. It is clear that the tale-tellers attribute all forms of bad luck to being “in the way”; one afflicted man, who emerged from the ill-placed house “walking crooked, with his face drawn up on one side; and so he is since, and a neighbour taking care of him” (184), seems to the modern reader to have had a stroke rather than an encounter with the fairies. But the consensus of Gregory’s sources is the same as Jack’s: no good can come of living in a house built on a fairy road. Valerie senses immediately that this will have consequences for her. Finbar, who brokered the rental deal, naturally scoffs at this notion: “it’s only an old cod…. You hear all these around, up and down the country” (33).
Having mocked Jack’s tale of the supernatural, however, Finbar proceeds to recount his own “little run in with the fairies” (35). This story is a bit more complex than Jack’s, having a double plot involving a supernatural experience that happened to an acquaintance of Finbar’s and a related one that happened to Finbar himself. A young woman, Niamh Walsh, has been attempting to make contact with the spirit world via the Ouija board and, to her horror, sees “something on the stairs. Like, no one else could see it. But she could, and it was a woman, looking at her” (38). Niamh’s anxiety causes the people around her, including Finbar, to summon help both secular and religious: the local doctor and the parish priest. The former gives her a sedative. The latter, being “more Vatican Two,” that is, relatively modern compared to other priests, is skeptical of “the demons or that kind of carryon” and does a perfunctory exorcism, “sort of blessed the place a little bit” (39). Immediately thereafter the phone rings, announcing the accidental death of a neighbor. Niamh’s woman on the stairs thus appears to be a common figure of folklore, the death messenger.
Niamh’s woman on the stairs is not the banshee, however, as described by Gregory in the Visions and Beliefs chapter “Banshees and Warnings.” The woman on the stairs is silent, while the banshee, notoriously, wails. The banshee in Gregory’s tales and elsewhere in folklore is defined by the sound she makes; she is a “keening woman,” uttering loud, unearthly cries, “the most mournful thing you ever heard” (172)—not lamentations for the dead but a warning that someone is about to die. The woman on the stairs does not resemble the physical description of the banshee or engage in her other characteristic activities, either: the banshee is female, “young … thin and white-skinned and having yellow hair, washing and ever washing, and wringing out clothing that was stained crimson red, and she crying and keening all the time” (170). Niamh’s woman, then, is not the banshee, but death messengers can be various, ranging from bright lights to fire to “a shadow … or a noise of knocking or a dream” (171). In fact in Gregory’s tales anything even mildly strange happening immediately before a death can be elevated to the status of supernatural death messenger in retrospect; and it is through this lens that Niamh sees her vision and those around her, including Finbar, interpret it.
In Finbar’s episode dramatic tension rises but is also deflated, as his experience results in something positive rather than negative: quitting smoking. At home later that night, having his last cigarette of the evening, Finbar, like Niamh Walsh, senses something on the stairs, a presence so powerful that it not only renders him physically unable to turn around but also ends the cigarette habit with which he associates the presence. He discounts the connection between the presence and his instant, and permanent, aversion to smoking—“Obviously there was nothing there and everything” (40)—but he would not have told the tale as a sequel to Jack’s if he thought there was no connection between Jack’s tale and his own. He had called his own tale “not even a real one” and the people involved in it a “crowd of headbangers,” thus undercutting the truth of his own tale via humor: “Yous all think I’m a loolah now…. I’m the header, says you, ha?” (38, 40). A person who is mentally ill—a “loolah,” “header,” or “headbanger”—might have visions too, but they are scarcely to be believed by others. They all laugh as if to reassure him, but Valerie’s response is the most telling: “I’d imagine, though, it can get very quiet” (40). Valerie is testing the waters to judge how her own story will be received.
The dramatic tension increases with the third story, Jim’s, of a dead pedophile and murderer seeking to be buried in his apparent victim’s grave. In Irish funerary practice, the body of the deceased reposes in church before the “removal,” in which the coffin is brought to the cemetery for burial. Jim and a friend have been asked by the priest of a parish other than their own to come to dig the grave. This request strikes Jim as odd in that parishioners would typically do this; when Jim’s friend, Declan, asks the priest about this violation of custom, the priest “[gets] a bit cagey” and answers evasively (45). The atmosphere is dismal; it is again a dark and stormy night. As the playwright noted in his prefatory comments, this environment stimulates the imagination. Adding further ambiguity to the narrative, Jim is sick with the flu and running a high fever, perhaps high enough to cause hallucinations. And then there is the poitin, a potent homemade alcoholic beverage, consumed by both young men. Paradoxically all this evidence that the story is the product of a fevered imagination gives it more, not less, impact. Because the audience is “desperate to disbelieve it, [Jack’s story] carries the more credibility.”28 The dead man’s violent and unnatural desires persisting beyond the grave transform the narrative “from fairy story to horror story.”29
Such beings as the one Jim sees appear in Gregory’s chapter “The Unquiet Dead.” As many of her storytellers note, the restless dead have no place in Catholic concepts of the afterlife. According to the branch of Roman Catholic theology known as eschatology, after death the soul is judged by God and assigned to eternal reward in heaven, punishment in hell, or a term in purgatory, a temporary state of preparation for heaven. Some of Gregory’s folklore sources have visions informed by this Christian view of the afterlife. Others, however, make a distinction between what “those that mind the teaching of the clergy say” and “what the old people say” (191). The “old people,” traditionalists in touch with the pagan past, recount visionary experiences that cannot be reconciled with Catholic orthodoxy.
In their stories the dead are unquiet because of unfinished business. They may mourn the living as much as the living mourn them, and so a tale is told of “a father and mother who had died but … often came to look after the children” (194). The dead are often concerned about unpaid debts and unrepented sins but can also interest themselves in more mundane matters. One sports-minded deceased in Gregory’s tales breached the gap between heaven and earth to offer his father staffing advice for their favorite hurley team (198–99). Gregory sees these visions as a manifestation of the strong faith of the people of Connaught: “Here in Connaught there is no doubt as to the continuance of life after death. The spirit wanders for a while in that intermediate region to which mystics and theologians have given various names, and should it return and become visible those who loved it will not be afraid, but will … put a light in the window to guide the mother home to her child, or go out into the barley gardens in the hope of meeting a son” (190). Gregory espouses this sanguine view despite the fact that some of the stories she collected express great fear. One attributes to a priest the belief that “ghosts … are souls that are in trouble” (192). Another describes an apparition in Cloughballymore that caused children to die of fright (197). Many of these “poor souls traveling” (198) come back from the dead to harm the living. Surely these souls cannot be those of the saved. And surely it is one of those whom Jim sees, “unquiet” even in death because of his desire to be united with his victim post mortem.
While Jim’s story builds dramatic tension, the spirit in the graveyard is not one to win the audience’s sympathy. If he is suffering in the afterlife, he deserves it. But Catholics believe that the spirits of children in the afterlife are welcomed by a loving God. In this context Valerie’s story of the phone call from her dead daughter is almost unbearably painful. McPherson describes how, in previews, the scene caused unexpected reactions in the audience: “every night, people in the audience fainted. For some reason people kept having to be carried out. It was awful.”30 Valerie and her husband, both employees of Dublin City University, are urban professionals, far removed from the banshees and fairies of the west, and so Valerie is an unusual practitioner of the predominantly rural art form of storytelling. When their five-year-old daughter dies in a swimming accident, she and her husband grow apart in their different ways of grieving. While her husband immerses himself ever more deeply in his work, Valerie’s grief borders on obsession, leading to her being regarded, even by herself, as “crazy” and needing treatment (57–58). The child, named Niamh like the young woman in Finbar’s story, had been in life an anxious child, experiencing mysterious presences: “people in the window … people in the attic … coming up the stairs … children knocking, in the wall … a man standing across the road” (54). The child’s visions mark her as a seer, one with a closer connection to the supernatural in life. But in death the child is as troubled and anxious as ever, calling for her mother as she did in life.
This is a horrifying theatrical moment both for the small audience composed of the pubgoers and for the larger one in the theater. Throughout the play the stories have sowed the seed of belief in a pagan supernatural, not only in the listening audience within the play but in the theatrical audience as well. Whatever the audience members’ beliefs, or lack thereof, with regard to the afterlife, the idea of a child suffering for all eternity, fearful and deprived of the mother who wants nothing more than to be with her and to console her, is a glimpse into the heart of darkness.
There is no place in Catholic eschatology for the concept of a dead child in an afterlife of torment. One of Gregory’s storytellers describes an orthodox religious path to accepting the loss of a child: “When my own poor little girl was drowned in the well, I never could sleep but fretting, fretting, fretting. But one day when one of my little boys was taking his turn to serve the Mass he stopped on his knees without getting up. And Father Boyle asked him what did he see and he looking up. And he told him that he could see his little sister in the presence of God, and she shining like the sun. Sure enough that was a vision He had sent to comfort us. So from that day I never cried nor fretted any more” (191). This same theology is echoed, with sincerity and genuine concern, by Jim: “I’m very sorry about what’s happened to you. And I’m sure your girl is quite safe and comfortable wherever she is, and I’m going to say a little prayer for her, but I’m sure she doesn’t need it. She’s a saint. She’s a little innocent” (60–61). In voicing these sentiments, Jim expresses himself both with empathy and with accuracy regarding Catholic beliefs. A child, a “little innocent,” would be incapable of serious sin and would thus be in heaven with God, safe and comfortable. She would not need prayers as she could not be in purgatory; she is a saint, among the saved in heaven, all of whom are saints even though only some of them have been declared so via the formal canonization process of the church. So when Jim prays for her, he would technically be praying to her. She does not need prayer, but the benefit of it would be to Jim himself and to Valerie. He acts as a good Catholic should, as a minister of God’s love and comfort to the afflicted mother.
The empathetic reactions of the four men explain why it is that Valerie sought understanding in the west. Away from the superficial rationality of Dublin, which would trivialize her grief by defining it as a mental health issue to be treated, she finds an empathetic audience for her story of her encounter with the supernatural. In the west, in the lonely countryside, she finds a weir, a source of spiritual energy that builds up and is released in the storytelling experience. She finds an opening between the natural world and the spirit world such that her encounter with her daughter across the boundary between life and death can be better appreciated. Catholicism emerges in Jim’s speech as the kinder view of human destiny than that of the “unquiet dead” of Celtic paganism.
The discussion of the fate of the child in the afterlife is not the end of the play, however. The fourth tale-telling episode is that of Jack, telling Valerie about his lost love, she who wanted to “go up to Dublin” (64) for a better life. At first glance this final story seems unconnected to the other four. But if the play is about “the loss and loneliness that eventually haunt every life,”31 Jack’s story is a tragedy of lost opportunities on the purely human level. For reasons that he himself does not understand, he was unable to leave the west of Ireland for what he perceived as a hostile environment. Thus he has doomed himself to a life of routine and desperate loneliness. Is there a suggestion that he and Valerie, both survivors of human tragedy, can somehow console each other? If so the play ends on a note of hope. But if they cannot, then the natural world holds as much sorrow as that other world depicted by the tellers of tales.
In Synge and in McPherson, the journey of the city dweller to the western regions means approaching the Irish past in a way that is not possible elsewhere. The storyteller transmits tradition to his or her immediate audience and, through them, to the audience of readers or playgoers. This tradition bearing, however, often sends an ambiguous message. Facts are filtered through the subjectivity of the tale-teller. Crucial elements are unknown or withheld or distorted; even when the tale-teller intends to be accurate, the slippery meanings of words make language an imperfect medium to bridge the gap between the past and the present or even between one person and another.
Speaking the same language is a metaphor for understanding. When a country’s original language is suppressed or abandoned or survives only as an antiquarian interest, something crucial to the common heritage is lost. Contemporary writers such as Brian Friel and Roddy Doyle explore the issue not just of the Irish language—so long threatened by the political and military hegemony of the British Empire, now challenged by the cultural dominance of the United States—but also of language itself as a vehicle of self-definition.