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| Wednesday, 14 July 2004 |
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Ireland's literary heritage by Rohan Jayetillake Irish writers with a long tradition of literary skills have contributed enormously to the enrichment of literature written in English. The rich and sparkling dramas, poetry and fiction, percolated with wit and humour, fantasy and elegant satire executed in those particular rhythms, derived from millennia-old Galeic speech patterns and nuances are unique in the Irish literature. Ulster-born poet Seamus Heaney's Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 was the fourth to be awarded to an Irish writer. His other three predecessors who were awarded the very same prestigious award for literary excellence were W. B. Yeats (1923), George Bernard Shaw (1925) and Samuel Beckett (1969).
In the slightly less exalted writers from both north and south of Ireland have figured very prominently in the list of winners and short listed writers for the United Kingdom based Booker Prize for Fiction. Among them are Iris Murdoch (Dublin-born Anglo-Irish parentage), Roddy Doyle, Molly Keane and Brian Moore. In this genre is Indian novelist Arundhati Roy who donated the millions she was awarded to the anti-Narmada Dam, an organization to carry on the fight to emasculate the irrigation and power project in India, that would devastate villages and rob them of their agricultural pursuits for living and reduce them to stark penuary. Molly Keane, the Irish playwright treading the very same track laid down by Sheridan, Oliver Goldsmith, Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw gathered early success in Britain writing under the pseudonym M. J. Farrell, to conceal her identity, the reason being that well-brought up Anglo Irish girls of the higher echelons of society, did not attempt to write plays.
Additionally another constraint faced by her was any play written by a girl of this aristocracy was not even performed on the West Stage of Britain, though plays are to be read and staged for the amusement of the society at large, to give them a peep into the various unseen unpleasant conditions of life and the fantastic wasteful lives of the rich. With the passage of many summers and winters, like the proverbial 'if winter comes can spring be far behind', witty novels of the like Anglo-British Big House the path was traced earlier in the century by Elizabeth Bowen. The attitudes and perspectives in the literary world had a turn around as Molly Keane was able to write under her own name at ease. It was in the 17th century that various Irish writers dipped their pens in the ink pot to write in English language rather than in the indigenous Galeic, the Irish language of the old aristocracy, which had been weaned of its power and prestige and also wide acceptance as a medium of literature. Prestige The Protestant Anglo-Irish had a craving to read poetry and stories and view new plays at the theatres and insisted them to be in English.
The icon of satire Johanthan Swift, born of English parents in Dublin was gunning at the bloated politicians with penfuls of satire. He knew well and truly that his audience too would be from the same stables. Swift went on to become the Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, where he was finally laid to rest and where many memorabilia connected with him are on display, enticing many a writer and others. A fellow student of Swift's Trinity College, Dublin, was William Congreve, a few years his junior. George Farquhar also studied at Trinity, and emerging as the leading playwright of their day - in England. Interestingly well into the 20th century Irish writers in order to gain fame and finances and also to pursue their god-given craft - as writers are not made but bequeathed to a nation at a certain stage to be witnesses in writing to the life and times of his period. After Congreve and Farquhar the next Irish writers to embellish the London stage, were Sheridan and Oliver Goldsmith. Late in the 19th century names did change and great names such as George Moore and playwrights Don Boucicault, Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw became the flag-bearers of English literature in Britain. By then the Irish Revial influenced by the Galeic Revival at the penultimate period of the 19th century gathered more moss on the rolling stones. The Abbey Theatre, supported by W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory produced its first play in 1904. These and others of great writers like J. M. Synge and Sean O'Casey had as the background plot, Irish life, and Irish history. These were repulsed by the Irish audiences and Synge's masterpiece 'The Playboy of the Western world' erupted into a riot, resenting the langauge used as 'immoral'. Attitudes Meanwhile the situation prospered and the Irish Revival brought about a complete reversal of attitudes and novelists, poets, playwrights and short story writers had a marketability for their products both at home and abroad. Notably James Joyce and Samuel Beckett had to face the narrowness of Irish society and seek sympathetic publishers overseas. Bitterness In James Joyce great works of fiction, Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man and Ulysses, mirrored his bitterness in self-imposed exile from his dear home Dublin, where his fictions were crafted upon. In Ireland, there was a long and extending list of banned works under the title 'pornographic' including Ulysses, and this was taken off the list subsequently. Today Bloomsday, named after Leopold Bloom, a main character in Ulysses is celebrated on June 16. The celebration centres on dramatizing the events in the play and is a much looked forward event of the summer season in and around Dublin. The writer of Irish parentage William Butler Yeats born in Dublin was educated there and London. He was a lover of Irish culture. Yeats died in the south of France in 1939 and it was not until 1948 that his body was brought back to Ireland to be laid to rest in the Protestant churchyard in Drumcliff. The gravestone carries the epitaph written by Yeats himself: "Cast a cold eye, On life, on death, Horseman, pass by" Patrick Kavanagh was a great Irish poet. One of his poems was called 'Lines written on a seat on the Grand Canal in Dublin'. He died in 1967 and his statue is by the Grand Canal, where he sat and versified the scenery. **** Back **** |
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