‘The saga will go on’:⁶⁷²
Story as History in Bailegangaire

Hiroko Mikami

During the Christmas season of 1985, two companion pieces by Tom Murphy premiered in two cities of Ireland: the Druid production of Bailegangaire in Galway, and the Abbey production of A Thief of a Christmas in Dublin. Murphy’s attempt to put two complementary plays on stage at one time by two different theatre companies was a rare and innovative enterprise for a playwright, though there are many cases of playwrights who write a series of plays one after another, of course.⁶⁷³ Bailegangaire, subtitled as ‘the story of Bailegangaire and how it came by its appellation’, is set in 1984 and Mommo, a senile old woman who used to be ‘known as a skilled storyteller’, recollects what happened thirty some years ago⁶⁷⁴ and tells her two granddaughters, Mary and Dolly, how she and her husband fought through the laughing competition in a village called Bochtán. In A Thief of a Christmas, as its subtitle, ‘the Actuality of how Bailegangaire came by its appellation’ shows, the play’s present is set at the time when the laughing competition actually took place in a local pub and the competition is acted out and shown on the stage.

In this essay, I will mainly deal with Bailegangaire and analyse Mommo’s story about the laughing contest and what happened after as a narrative of family trauma. Shaun Richards has examined Bailegangaire in a context of the trauma of Irish society in his article written in 1989, which provides a wider perspective of Modern Irish history to help understand the play.⁶⁷⁵ Here, I would rather concentrate on the limited context of family trauma and underline the mechanism of memory and storytelling. In order to make a close examination of the play, its companion piece, A Thief of a Christmas, is read in tandem and the two texts are to be compared and contrasted: the text of A Thief of a Christmas presents hints to analyse Mommo’s storytelling, especially the mechanism of her unconscious distortion of reality. In Bailegangaire, Mommo’s retelling of the past first appears in fragments, gradually takes a shape as a story, and is finally recognized in the context of what I refer to as family history. This is the process in which this story/history assists in family regeneration and brings about healing.

I would also like to make note of the intensity of emotion that arises from the rich text of Bailegangaire. The play is tightly woven and has its own rhythm gained through repeated phrases as if it is a piece of music. Murphy has a recognition that ‘[a]ll art aspires to the condition of music’.⁶⁷⁶ In an interview with Michael Billington, he expresses his envy and admiration of composers: ‘Words, literature, writing drama is such a linear thing, whereas when I listen to music, I hear emotion, I hear mood; when I listen to the sound that people are making, I hear emotion and character.’⁶⁷⁷ This is what the audience/reader of Bailegangaire is required to do: we have to listen to the sound the three women are making, and we have to hear their emotions. We then witness the process of how the ‘unfinished symphony’ of Mommo’s is transformed into an accomplished symphony of healing. When Mommo wishes for the possibility of reliving her life again, which is almost everyone’s wish, — ‘Isn’t life a strange thing too? ‘Tis. An’ if we could live it again? … Would we? (live it differently?) In harmony?’ (119)—, she unconsciously mentions that whenever relived, it would bring harmony.

How the Story Begins:

Murphy recollects an encounter with a woman at the opening night of A Whistle in the Dark in London in 1962. She pointed out that he knew nothing about women and Bailegangaire was written as a kind of response to this incident. Murphy says: ‘I have generally observed the Aristotelian unities of time, action, place, and I thought I would introduce a fourth, gender.’⁶⁷⁸ Among the three women Murphy created, Mommo, who is over eighty years of age, is regarded as a contemporary variation of ‘Sean Bhean Bhocht’, or Poor Old Woman, in Irish literary tradition.⁶⁷⁹ In addition to this archetypal representation of Ireland, Murphy seems to have introduced two different archetypes of Irish women, Mommo’s two granddaughters: Mary is serious and hard-working, while Dolly is bawdy and easygoing. The two sisters as a pair are analogous to Edna O’Brien’s two heroines, Kate and Baba, in The Country Girls (1960). In 1986, O’Brien wrote an essay, ‘Why Irish Heroines Don’t Have to Be Good Anymore’, in which she explained the characteristics and relationship of her two heroines: Kate, ‘timid, yearning, and elegiac’, a type regarded as ‘what an Irish woman should be’, and Baba, the very opposite type, being frowned upon by social and religious mores. These two heroines are tied firmly by bonds of comradeship and, according to O’Brien, ‘their rather meager lives would be made bearable by the company of each other.’⁶⁸⁰ Mary and Dolly in Bailegangaire are also supporting each other, while opposing each other at the same time. Nicholas Grene sees ‘fraught sibling hostility’ in Mary and Dolly, and thus summarizes their relationship: ‘They have been defined in the crudest polarities, Mary has the brains, Dolly the looks, and they each resent the other one’s attributes.’⁶⁸¹

Mommo used to be Dolly’s responsibility when Mary was working as a nurse in London. Since her return home, Mary has taken over Dolly’s role and been living with and taking care of Mommo in a traditional thatched cottage. Dolly left home and now lives nearby with her children, while her husband, Stephen, works away in London. At the opening of Bailegangaire, we see the three women are at a deadlock: Mommo, like a broken gramophone, repeats a story that happened some thirty years before the play’s present; Mary, having given up her professional career, seems to regard herself as a loser without husband or children; Dolly is pregnant out of wedlock and does not know what to do. Each has her own story of failure and is locked in her predicament. Emotional dysfunction among family members is very clearly apparent.

Mommo’s story, which has never been told to the end, is about ‘the stranger’ and ‘the stranger’s wife’ who are actually Mommo’s husband and herself. They went to a big fair for the preparation of Christmas and after unsuccessful, disappointed trade there they set off for home where three grandchildren, Mary, Dolly and their young brother Tom, awaited them. On their way back, the couple were forced to involve themselves in a laughing competition in a village called Bochtán, which came to be known, since the competition, by its new appellation, Bailegangaire, ‘town without laughter’. Bailegangaire is a play about Mommo’s homecoming at two levels, as Fintan O’Toole points out, one at the level of the archetypal folk tale of Mommo and another at the level of the present existence of Mary and Dolly.⁶⁸² Their homecoming is to be completed when Mommo’s story eventually comes to an end. When Mommo makes her symbolic homecoming, both Mary and Dolly also find their true home with Mommo and thus the family reunion is completed. The journey has taken some thirty years, but at the very beginning of Mommo’s story, when the couple came to the crossroads, she clearly states that ‘the road to Bochtán, though of circularity, was another means home’ (98).

When the play opens, Mary is busy reading or doing housekeeping jobs and tries to attract Mommo’s attention to anything but her storytelling. She knows its already-told sections by heart and has no interest in it. Mommo occasionally strays from the straight plotline of her story and interjects questions to Mary, whom Mommo does not recognize as her granddaughter:

Mommo: And how many children had she bore herself?

Mary: Eight?

Mommo: And what happened to them?

Mary: Nine? Ten?

Mommo: Hah?

Mary: What happened us all?

Mommo: Them (that) weren’t drowned or died they said she drove away.

Mary: Mommo?

Mommo: Let them say what they like.

Mary: I’m very happy here.

Mommo: Hmmph!

Mary: I’m Mary.

Mommo: Oh but she looked after her grandchildren.

Mary: Mommo?

Mommo: And Tom is in Galway. He’s afraid of the gander.

Mary: But I’m so … (She leaves it unfinished, she can’t find the word)

Mommo: To continue.

Mary: Please stop. (She rises slowly.)

Mommo: Now man and horse, though God knows they tried, could see the icy hill was not for yielding.

Mary: Because I’m so lonely (97-8)

Mommo is talking about herself but uses ‘she/herself’, the third person singular. She thus tries to distance herself from the painful, unbearable incidents in her own life.⁶⁸³ Mary, on the other hand, uses ‘us’ in order to make the two of them feel closer, hoping that this use of ‘us’ triggers Mommo’s recognition of Mary as her granddaughter. Mary also implies that she is part of Mommo’s story, by saying ‘what happened us all.’ When Mommo is about to go back to and continue her autistic story, Mary tries to stop her. What Mary really wants is Mommo’s attention to her and a conversation, an exchange of dialogue between family members. It must be painful to listen to a story repeated over again and again, especially a story which never moves further than a certain point. Being ignored by Mommo, the only thing left to Mary is to mumble to herself that she is happy or she is lonely. There is little prospect of a breakthrough in this stifling situation. Mary is too straightforward and serious to bring about effective change as she wishes.

When Dolly makes her occasional visit to Mommo and takes the role of listener, her reaction to her grandmother is more flexible and easygoing: she casually reacts to Mommo’s sexual innuendo and joyously joins her story with refrains such as ‘Good man Josie!’ as if chanting in unison. Contrary to her appearance of enjoying Mommo’s story, however, she is actually fed up with it and wants her to stop it. Dolly says:

And that old story is only upsetting her, Mary. … Harping on misery. And only wearing herself out. And you. Amn’t I right, Mary? And she never finishes it – Why doesn’t she finish it? And have done with it. For God’s sake (102).

Dolly’s remark of this is not a well-thought, constructive suggestion but an utterance that comes out of frustration: she is tired of her life and stuck with an unwanted pregnancy. When she uses the phrases, ‘to finish it’ and ‘to have done with it’, Dolly just wants Mommo to stop the story: what she simply wants is Mommo’s silence. There is a big difference between completing the story (‘finish it’) and stopping telling it in the middle and keeping silence. Dolly’s careless choice of words, however, introduces here the notion of telling the story to the end for the first time in the play. Her casual, somewhat ironical remark acts as a catalyst for change in Mary, or at least gives a hint for change. Even for a moment, Mary is captured by the moving force in Dolly’s remark. The stage direction that follows is suggestive: ‘Mary considers this (‘Finish it? And have done with it’), then forgets it for the moment.’ (102) This implies that Mary will come back soon again to consider what Dolly said, but it requires some time for Mary to be actively involved in the process for completing the story.

After Dolly leaves, Mary still tries to make conversation with Mommo: what she wants is a warm touch of family. If that is not acquired, she just hopes ‘Mommo will stop, will sleep’ (118). When Mommo does fall asleep, Mary mumbles a few words, according to the stage direction, ‘to herself’ (120), but, in her heart, to Mommo:

Give me my freedom, Mommo … What freedom? … No freedom without structure. … Where can I go? … How can I go (looking up and around at the rafters) with all this? (She has tired of her idle game of lighting the candles) … And it didn’t work before me, did it? … I came back (120).

She is unable to go on because Mary as a speaker initially needs a listener: she could only go further if she receives responses from Mommo, who could approve or disapprove of what Mary said. In a situation in which nobody is listening, Mary repeats Mommo’s half-told story which is already so familiar to her ‘[t]o herself, and idly at first’(120):

Now as all do know … Now as all do know … Now as all do know the world over the custom when entering the house of another – be the house public, private with credentials or no – (120).

Every single word is remembered but here she is just parroting Mommo’s words. She has not yet become a true teller of the story, because she lacks the impetus as a storyteller to move on the story. Still she continues and in the meantime acquires a style of storytelling with ‘a touch of mimicry of Mommo’ (121), and ‘a piece of sardonic humour’ (120) is added.

Hamm, in Beckett’s Endgame, explains, in a way, the transformation that happens in Mary. He says: ‘You weep, and weep, for nothing, so as not to laugh, and little by little … you begin to grieve.’⁶⁸⁴ Hamm tells the very truth that if one makes a pretence of grieving, he/she will soon be possessed by the true distress. The process Mary undergoes is a variation on Hamm’s theme: Mary ‘tells’, and ‘tells’, for nothing, so as not to ‘fall silent’, and little by little … she begins to ‘be possessed by a story.’ While she imitates Mommo’s whimpering, ‘I wanta go home, I wanta go home’, Mary’s inner quest for home responds to it. Here, Mary is not just telling Mommo’s story: she comes to realize that her own trauma is emotionally tied up with that of Mommo. It is at this moment when Mary is actively involved in Mommo’s story.

Mommo’s Narrative of Trauma:

Mommo’s story of trauma originates in the incident that happened thirty-four years before. This family tragedy has been tormenting Mommo all through the years. In order to analyse the play in this perspective, recent studies on trauma provide a framework to the interpretation of the play. Cathy Caruth, one of the leading trauma theorists, for example, suggests that literature has a great role to play in helping us work through trauma and argues in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History that a story of trauma is ‘a kind of double telling, the oscillation between a crisis of death and the correlative crisis of life: between the story of the unbearable nature of an event and the story of the unbearable nature of its survival’.⁶⁸⁵ Mommo in Bailegangaire, as the survivor of a traumatic incident, is unable to tell the story, because this oscillation tears her into two. Remembering the incident in Bochtán and the traumatic deaths of family members that follow is unbearable, and at the same time she has been tormented by her own survival of the incident for all the years since.

Dolly unconsciously notices the guilt that has been felt by Mommo, but is unable to pinpoint exactly what the guilt is about (142), when Mary asks for its explanation. Dolly is not the type to analyse what is seen and felt. Instead, she accuses Mommo for not having shed even a single teardrop at the time of Tom’s death, and also of her husband’s that followed: ‘She stood there over that hole in the ground like a rock – like a duck, like a duck, her chest stickin’ out. Not a tear … Not a tear … Tom buried in that same hole in the ground a couple of days before. Not a tear, then or since (143). This is a typical case of ‘latency’, a Freudian term for a period during which effects of traumatic experience are not apparent. Freud gives an example of a victim of a train accident:

It may happen that someone gets away, apparently unharmed, from the spot where he has suffered a shocking accident, for instance a train collision. In the course of the following weeks, however, he develops a series of grave psychical and motor symptoms, which can be ascribed only to his shock or whatever else happened at the time of the accident.⁶⁸⁶

Mommo, who looked ‘apparently unharmed’, as Dolly points out, at the time of the funerals of Tom and her husband, was certainly in a period of latency. Mommo, as the survivor of the family tragedy, has to go through the nightmares, ‘a series of grave psychical and motor symptoms’, again and again.

In order to get Mommo out of her nightmares, involvement of Mary and Dolly, Mommo’s granddaughters, in the process is crucial. As Caruth aptly comments on the intergenerational structure of trauma in her note to the chapter on Freud’s Moses and Monotheism:

That is, described in terms of a possession by the past that is not entirely one’s own, trauma already describes the individual experience as something that exceeds itself, that brings within individual experience as its most intense sense of isolation the very breaking of individual knowledge and mastery of events. This notion of trauma also acknowledges that perhaps it is not possible for the witnessing of the trauma to occur within the individual at all, that it may only be in future generations that ‘cure’ or at least witnessing can take place.⁶⁸⁷

Through generations, memories of both crisis and survival are passed on, and healing can only be possessed within a history larger than any single individual or any single generation. This very process happens to Mommo, Mary, and Dolly, who have their own stories of failure and predicament: each is involved in the family tragedy in one way or another and has her own role in this process of transformation from tragedy to healing: Mommo as a teller, Mary as a listener and co-teller, and Dolly as a catalyst. And the three women cooperate with each other in order to spin a continuing family saga.

Mary, as a patient listener and co-teller, encourages Mommo to reveal the untold part of the story. Telling her story is the only way for Mommo to make sense of the past in the present:

They could have gone home. (Brooding, growls; then) Costello could decree. All others could decree. (Quiet anger.) But what about the things had been vexin’ her for years. No, a woman isn’t stick or stone. The forty years an’ more in the one bed together an’ he to rise in the mornin’ (and) not to give a glance. An’ so long it had been he had called her by first name, she’d near forgot it herself … Brigit … Hah? … An’ so she though he hated her … An’ maybe he did, like everything else … An’ (Her head comes up, eyes fierce.) Yis, yis-yis, he’s challe’gin’ ye, he is!’ She gave it to the Bochtán. And to her husband returning? – maybe he would recant, but she’d renege matters no longer. ‘Och hona ho gus hah-haa’ – she hated him too (140, underlined emphasis mine).

Here, Mommo recalls one of the most memorable moments in which her husband called her by her first name, Brigit. This moment, as we see, is remembered in a context of hatred: Mommo thought that her husband hated her and that she herself hated him.

It is revealing to compare and contrast this scene with the seemingly identical moment in A Thief of a Christmas, which is depicted through all-seeing eyes. When Costello, the opponent of the laughing competition, asks how they would decide its winner, Mommo, the stranger’s wife, replies that ‘he who laughs last’ (226) will win. The stranger, Mommo’s husband, does not like the way a woman steps in the domain of men, and is ‘about to reprimand her – “Stop” or “Whist” – but she is smiling at him very softly and without knowing why, he smiles back at her’ (226). Then the crucial moment arrives:

The Stranger’s Wife is smiling: he goes to her.

Stranger: Ar, whist. Heh-heh- heh- heh! What’s come over us?

She starts to laugh with him, quietly. They stop. Tears brim to her eyes. The misfortunes of a lifetime.

Ar, Bridget⁶⁸⁸…

She titters again. He laughs with her.

Stranger’s Wife: I see the animals in the field look more fondly on each other than we do.

Stranger: It’s rainin’. The thaw is set in. Shouldn’t we be goin’?

Stranger’s Wife: (Shakes her head, no) … How long since we laughed or looked upon each other before?

Stranger: (Nods. Laughs quietly. His laugh, like hers, near tears) … But shouldn’t we go?

Stranger’s Wife: No. … An’ you have him bet.

She embraces him. They start to sway, as in a dance. It is like as if they have forgotten everyone around them in this moment.

Stranger: But ‘twas only the comicalest notion that comes into a person’s head. Heh-heh-heh.

Stranger’s Wife: Whatever it was, you have them bet. We’ve been defeated in all else but this one thing we’ll win.

They separate. The Stranger chuckles, perhaps a little embarrassed.

You’ll get him with misfortunes (227-28).

This is the scene when the couple come to understanding after long, cold, barren years. Remembering the past misfortunes happened among the family members, they are smiling at the same time in tears. This is the context in which Mommo’s name, Brigit, was actually used.

As long as Mommo places this moment of understanding in the context of hatred in her memory, as is told in Bailegangaire, enmity possesses her and controls her retelling. Being asked by Mary what happened next, Mommo, according to the stage direction, ‘growls’ and replies that ‘there-was-none-would-assuage-her’ (141). In the midst of her confusion with anger and hatred, Mommo’s story still moves on a little towards the end and she declares the beginning of the final stage of the competition, ‘the arena was ready’ (141), the phrase repeated from then on several times until the final scene is told. Mommo’s telling, however, comes to a halt at this point and she cannot move on further. The only thing left to her is to go between the fragmented utterance and sleep.

It is again Dolly who acts as a catalyst and brings about change in this stagnant situation. Being unable to handle the situation and having failed to convince Mary to help her, Dolly bursts into anger and shouts out that she hates everybody around her: she hates her husband Stephen, Mommo, and Mary. Mommo’s cottage and the house of her own are added to the list of hatred. Dolly goes on that Mommo also hates Mary (149-50). Dolly is unconscious, but her hatred echoes that of Mommo’s: what lies behind their hatred is cold, barren feelings that come from their own married relationships. Dolly’s refusal of empathy, however, paradoxically has an impact on Mary and evokes the true and certain reception of her address to Mary, who then returns her address not to Dolly but to Mommo.

Mary nurses a notion that the night is the last chance for both Mommo and herself to complete the story: if only they can finish it and relive it through, change will be brought about for them. It is symbolic that the whole action of Bailegangaire takes place within the space of three or four hours starting at around seven o’clock on Mary’s birthday evening, observing the Aristotelian unity of time. Mary decides to celebrate the day also as Mommo’s birthday, which Mary never knew for certain. To ‘share the same birthday together in future’ (93) could mean, for Mary, to share a new start in life between them and they could symbolically be reborn again together on the day. That is the reason she is so determined to complete Mommo’s story within their birthday. Mary declares: ‘I don’t want to wait till midnight, or one or two or three o’clock in the morning, for more of your – unfinished symphony’ (122). Near the end of the play, Mary summarizes her own life and makes her last plea to Mommo:

No, you don’t know me. But I was here once, and I ran away to try and blot out here, I didn’t have it easy. Then I tried bad things, for a time, with someone. So I came back, thinking I’d find – something – here, or, if I didn’t, I’d put everything right, Mommo? And tonight I thought I’d make a last try. Live out the – story – finish it, move on to a place where, perhaps, we could make some kind of new start. I want to help you (153).

Mommo, however, does not reply to this and asks for a cup of milk for the night, instead. Mary agrees to get it, something which she has been refusing during the evening, half-admitting that the evening might end without completing the story. Mommo’s drinking the milk symbolizes for both Mommo and Mary the end of night. Mary then addresses herself ‘gently to Dolly’ (153), replying to her remark on hatred:

She may hate me, you may hate me. But I don’t hate her. I love her for what she’s been through, and she’s all that I have. So she has to be my only consideration. She doesn’t understand. Do you understand, Dolly? (153)

Mary confesses that her love is not affected even though Mommo hates or ignores her. No matter how provoked she is, Mary is gentle and calm to Dolly. It is symbolic that Mommo begins to tell her story again, saying that ‘the full style was returning’ (154, original emphasis), just after Mary’s remark about love, as if admission of unconditional love is necessary for Mommo to escape from the memory of hatred.

Mommo reproduces the laughing contest, enacting the exchanges between Costello and the stranger. Since Mommo is a skilled storyteller, both Mary and Dolly cannot help ‘laughing at Mommo’s dramatisation’ (155) of the newly told section: it induces them to laugh a hearty laugh, to which Mommo herself joins. Telling/listening to the story of laughing competition, the three women are laughing together. After such joyous laughter being shared between Mommo and her two granddaughters, Mommo is almost close to recognising Mary, but she goes back to sleep again. When asked about her intention by Dolly, Mary admits that it is over:

Dolly: What were you trying to do with her?

Mary: ‘Twas only a notion … She’s asleep.

Dolly: … Maybe she’d wake up again?

Mary: (Slight shake of her head, ‘No’). Sit down (159, underlined emphasis mine).

Mary’s use of the past tense well explains her acceptance of failure. This failure, however, is not a bitter, hopeless one for Mary, because she knows that she did her best; at least the three of them laughed together; and Mommo was even on the verge of recognition of Mary. In this condition, Mary states her resolution to take Dolly’s newborn baby away from home.

At the very moment when Mary accepts everything, Dolly, looking at her belly as if in self-mockery, utters the word, ‘misfortunes’⁶⁸⁹(161), to which Mommo unexpectedly reacts. ‘Misfortunes’ is the topic that kept ‘them laughing near forever’ (162) in the laughing competition in Bochtán. Mary’s admission of love and Dolly’s utterance of the keyword act as a trigger for the resetting of the volatile memory of Mommo. She begins to retell that crucial moment and replaces it in a more favourable context:

An’ didn’t he ferret out her eyes to see how she was farin’ an’ wasn’t she titherin’ with the best of them an’ weltin’ her thighs. No heed on her now to be gettin’ on home. No. But offerin’ to herself her own congratulations at hearin’ herself laughin’. An’ then, like a girl, smiled at her husband, an’ his smile back so shy, like the boy he was in youth. An’ the moment was for them alone. Unawares of all cares, unawares of all the others. An’ how long before since their eyes had met, mar gheal dhá gréine, glistenin’ for each other, Not since long and long ago.

And now Costello’s big hand was up for to call a recession. ‘But how,’ says he, ‘is it to be indisputably decided who is the winner?’ And a great silence followed. None was forgettin’ this was a contest. An’ the eyes that wor dancin’, now pending the answer, glazed an’ grave in dilation: ‘Twas a difficult question. (Quietly.) Och-caw. Tired of waiting male intelligence. ‘He who laughs last’ says she.

An’ ‘cause ‘twas a woman that spoke it, I think Costello was frikened, darts class of a glance at her an’ – (She gulps.) ‘That’s what I thought,’ says he (161-62).

Like a young courting couple, Mommo and her husband are smiling each other. Here, the mystery of memory is at work. Mommo unintentionally distorts what happened at Bochtán and says that it was Costello who was annoyed with Mommo’s intervention as to make a crucial comment on the laughing competition, that is, the man’s field. In A Thief of a Christmas, the scene is depicted as follows:

Costello: … Now, the question is, how, is it to be indisputably decided who is the winner?

John: Oh, sh-sh-sh-sure – Hah?

Costello: Indisputably the winner. (And he nods solemnly.)

Silence.

Stephen: (To the fire) ‘Tis a difficult question.’

Stranger’s Wife: … He who laughs last.

Stranger: Ar …

About to reprimand her – ‘Stop’ or ‘Whist’ – but she is smiling at him very softly and without knowing why, he smiles back at her.

Costello: That’s – that’s what I thought (225-26, original emphasis).

It was the stranger, Mommo’s husband, who was about to cast a reprimanding glance at her. In Mommo’s retelling, however, Costello is falsely accused of his darting hostile glance at the stranger’s wife. In order to put her husband in a context of understanding between the couple, Mommo has to distort the fact that actually happened. Cathy Caruth regards this kind of distortion as a mechanism of history: ‘historical memory … is always a matter of distortion, a filtering of the original event through the fictions of traumatic repression, which makes the event available at best indirectly.’⁶⁹⁰ Mommo goes through this process and is thus able to continue her story.

In the laughing competition at Bochtán, the crucial topic was unhappiness. The list of Mommo’s misfortunes ranges from a bad crop to premature deaths among the family members. The relation between laughter and misfortune is one of the favourite themes of Beckett’s. Nell in Endgame says: ‘Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. But— … Yes, yes, it’s the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with a will.’⁶⁹¹ Mommo is reproducing what happened in Bochtán: she begins to talk about her sons, who died premature deaths, and takes a roll call of them. Mommo makes an all-out effort not to sob, as the stage direction states: ‘the “hih-hih-hih” which punctuate her story sounds more like tears trying to get out rather than a giggle.’ (164) Mommo’s heart is aching behind the notion that nothing is funnier than her own personal misfortunes. This act of telling has the power to appease the souls of the deceased and at the same time Mommo’s soul. And the sons in the photograph on the wall have always been watching over Mommo and her granddaughters.

When Mommo has revealed the episodes about her dead sons, she can at last tell that the stranger and his wife set out for home: ‘home without hinder’ (168). Ironically enough, the villagers of Bochtán would not let them go ‘home without hinder’. When the stranger and his wife were about to leave, Josie, one of the villagers, became hysterical and attacked the stranger, and soon after, all whole villagers followed suit: ‘They pulled him down off the cart an’ gave him the kickin’.’ (168) Mommo’s story then comes to a halt at the point when the stranger and his wife got home, telling that ‘the three small childre, like ye, their care, wor safe an’ sound fast asleep on the settle’ (168). Here again Mommo has to distort the reality: the three small children were not safe at all. It seems to still be painful for Mommo to admit the tragic death of Tom, one of the grandchildren, and the death of her husband that followed.

Here Mary receives the baton from Mommo and takes over the role as storyteller, starting with the opening phrase of Mommo’s story, ‘It was a bad year for the crops, a good one for mushrooms’ (168). Mary knows the part she is going to tell, because she was there and witnessed what happened: Mary was part of the tragedy. Contrary to her insistence on using the first person plurals, ‘we/us’, in Act One, she uses the third person pronoun when she tells her story. As Grene writes, ‘when its tragic consequences in the early childhood lives of Mary and Dolly are brought to light, connections are made allowing the lost generations of the dead and the trauma of their loss to be acknowledged’.⁶⁹²

Mary and Mommo are finally able to relive the tragedy they experienced some thirty years before: telling it is reliving it. Mommo is then able to address her dead husband by his first name, Séamus (169). It is her belated response to her husband’s use of her first name Brigid in Bochtán. And she can finally recognize Mary as her granddaughter, saying: ‘And sure a tear isn’t a bad thing, Mary, and haven’t we everything we need here, the two of us.’ (169) The phrase, ‘the two of us’ is a repetition of what Mary said to Mommo at the very start of the play: ‘We’ll have a party, the two of us.’ (93) As in the case of ‘misfortunes’, repeated several times in the play, the repetition of the phrase has an effect similar to that of a theme and variation in a piece of music. When the phrase, ‘the two of us’ is repeated here in the play’s final scene by Mommo, it evokes a synergistic effect, like ‘basso continuo’, which leads the (ideal) audience/readers to an enhanced feeling of denouement. Mary thus concludes both the story and the play:

To conclude. It is a strange old place alright, in whatever wisdom He has to have made it this way. But in whatever wisdom there is, in the year 1984, it was decided to give that – fambly … of strangers another chance, and a brand new baby to gladden their home (170).

Mary regards her family as ‘fambly of strangers’, implying that herself, Dolly, and her newborn baby are the direct descendants of the stranger and the stranger’s wife in Mommo’s story, which is also Mary’s. The baby is to be called Tom after its uncle. As Richards aptly points out, ‘the monosyllabic simplicity of the name … encapsulates the alliance which projects a unified past and present into a potential future’.⁶⁹³ The intergenerational structure of trauma is clear and insightful here: certainly the sense of survival is handed down through generations, and healing can only be possessed within a history larger than any single individual or any single generation.

Mary, Dolly and Stephen; the Eternal Triangle:

Mary had an affair with Stephen, Dolly’s husband, while she was working in London. According to Mary, Stephen called her ‘dearest’ and ‘wined and dined and bedded’ her and wanted to have a girl by her who’d look like her (113). Their affair ended when Mary ‘told him to keep away from (her), to stop following (her)’ (115). When Mary mentions there were ‘other offers of marriage’ (115, emphasis added), she implies there was one from Stephen, which she turned down. Stephen, according to Dolly, appeared in front of her all of a sudden and courted her. Dolly accepted his proposal of marriage, because she believed that he was her ‘hero, (her) rescuer’ (149). But she also says she ‘never once felt any – real – warmth from him’ (149). Dolly wonders to herself: ‘why the fuck did he marry me’ (154). In order to annoy Mary who had rejected himself, Stephen might have married her younger sister, Dolly, whom he did not really love.⁶⁹⁴

In Act One, when Dolly left, Mary shouts at the door and says: ‘you’ll never know a thing about it.’ (113) Dolly, however, seems to notice the affair between her husband and her own sister:

Dolly: An’ you owe me a debt.⁶⁹⁵

Mary: What do I owe you?

Dolly: And she had to get married (143, original emphasis).

Mary replies to this just by one word, ‘impossible’, pretending that Dolly is talking nonsense. She still knows what Dolly means. The main concern of Bailegangaire is how Mommo’s story is completed with the aid of Mary, but there is always some sort of undercurrent of strain and tension between Mary and Dolly. The sisters have an ongoing, bitter rivalry: Mary envies Dolly’s easy way of life, even her liberty that leads to her promiscuity, admitting her silliness at the same time; Dolly envies Mary’s intellectual and social success, saying that she had it easy. From the moment when they cry together at the end of Act One, however, their relation begins to change gradually: Dolly puts her arms around Mary and ‘the two of them (are) crying through to the end’ (131) of Act One. As Mommo says, ‘a tear is not such a bad thing’ (169). Their tears, along with the laughter they share with Mommo later on, has power to cleanse, to bring about catharsis. In the address Mary makes to Mommo, she implies an indirect message to Dolly: ‘Then I tried bad things, for a time, with someone. So I came back.’ (153) The identity of this ‘someone’ is obvious to Dolly and Mary adds her apology to her sister:

Mary: … And I’m sorry.

Dolly: (Drunkenly) For What?

Mary: (Turn away tearfully) I’m not the saint you think I am.

Dolly: The what? Saint? That’d be an awful thing to be. ‘Wo ho ho, ho ho ho!’

Mary puts the milk by the bed (153-54).

Dolly, like Mary, also pretends not to understand what her sister means. Instead, she mimics Mommo’s laughter at the competition: the very theatricality of this laughter serves to disguise the tension between the sisters. Dolly, in this way, accepts Mary’s apology. She knows that it is sometimes better to keep things unsaid, because their fragile ‘home’ will fall apart, if they bring what they know into the open. The story of the triangle of Mary, Dolly, and Stephen has not yet become part of the family history: it is too early to be told. Later generations may spin it into a story and tell it, if they feel it necessary. This sense of imperfection paradoxically suggest a strong continuation and possibility: their lives go on, as their family saga will go on.

Extract From: ‘Alive in Time’: The Enduring Drama of Tom Murphy: New Essays, edited by Christopher Murray (2010)

Cross Reference: Kilroy, Friel, Carr, McGuinness.

See Also: Talking About Tom Murphy, edited by Nicholas Grene