An Béal Bocht: Mouthing Off at National Identity

Abstract

I am an outlaw. Myles-na-Coppaleen, in Dion Boucicault, The Colleen Bawn A MAJOR development in relation to language and identity in the long twentieth-century (reaching back to the ferment of the 1880s and 1890s) was the countering of received notions of Irishness, particularly those about the language. (1) From the Gaelic League's insistence on the value and relevance of to the Gaeltacht activism of the 1930s, 1960s, and beyond, from the transformative poetry of Sean O Riordain, Maire Mhac an tSaoi, and the Innti poets (2) on down to present writers, scholars, and broadcasters also working in Irish, significant energy has been devoted to challenging a widely held notion that the language is a doomed medieval holdover or, at best, an antiquarian preserve. speakers have also challenged the stereotyped delimitation of the language as a pure repository of national essence safeguarded by the poverty and innocence of its speakers, an image promulgated by many Gaelic League activists (see O'Leary 1994:19-90). A key work that stands out for its radical and deliciously satirical intervention in this complex legacy is An Beal Bocht (1941), a bad story about the hard life, by Brian O Nuallain (Brian O'Nolan), published under his Irish pseudonym, Myles na gCopaleen, and issued in as The Poor Mouth (1964, trans. Patrick C. Power) under his principal English pseudonym, Flann O'Brien. (3) In the new state after 1922, became the first official language as well as a compulsory part of the educational system, even while continuing to be subalternized within an Anglophone majority culture (O Crualaoich 1989:170; Denvir 1997:45). The post-independence state, moreover, like so many former colonies, did not fulfill its radical promise but was dominated by an overwhelming social and cultural conservatism (Brown 1985:17), whose stale traditionalism dictated the symbolic currency of Irish, as of so much else. Against this backdrop, which has been persuasively illuminated by Breandan O Conaire's pioneering study Myles na Gaeilge (1986), An Beal Bocht strikes a very different note. The book responds to these political and ideological conditions through the wretched life-story of its faux-naif ne'er-do-well narrator, Bonaparte O'Coonassa, who inhabits the imaginary Gaeltacht (4) of Corkadoragha, following him through the obligatory events of a life entirely dictated by the (much exaggerated) conventions of the genre of Gaelic autobiography. Yet the book is less a parody of earlier works than of audience expectations of the genre. As a result, An Beal Bocht is also a critique of the calcified discourse of national identity that came to be attached to the Gaelic autobiography and to the language more generally in post-independence Ireland. This analysis of the book's aims is confirmed by its narrative trajectory. Technically An Beal Bocht contributes to the hoary tradition of prison literature, since it is apparently composed retrospectively after its protagonist's short and convention-ridden life is capped off, like his father's before him, with a twenty-nine-year jail term for a murder he didn't commit. O Nuallain thereby suggests that the language and its literary productions have been condemned to perpetual servitude by the state's and the public's regulatory imagination. An Beal Bocht targets the stereotypes of both what we might call the colonial mindset and its strangely similar nationalist obverse, which recycled and perpetuated it. O Nuallain engages with the painful heritage of colonial history and ideology through a parodic revisitation of the degradation and shame of colonialism. At the same time he also skewers the simplistic polarization that characterizes anticolonial discourse described so astutely by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth (1963:221), in which negative extremities in representations of the colonized are inverted in favor of equally exaggerated praise. …