Irish, ‘Celtic’, and the Future

Abstract

Irish, ‘Celtic’, and the Future Alan Titley (bio) When I was asked to imagine Ireland, and the place that the Irish language, literature, and culture might have in it in 2030, I had to swallow hard. It is difficult enough to examine a past that is always changing, almost impossible to assess a present that is in constant flux: so what chance is there to imagine a future that will never be what we think? I have a long list of books and articles foretelling the future, and they are all wrong. I considered crystal balls and tealeaves and gastromancy or consulting tarot cards, or Nostradamus, or even Colm Cille, but I lack the interpretative gadgets to unlock any of them. The initial proposal asked me to wrestle with the need for a new ‘Celtic Revival’, which casts us back more than a hundred years, but I tried to derail this idea and push it into a siding. Hence my need to stick jabs into Celticism before looking at the place of the Irish language and its literature in the new Ireland that is always beckoning beyond the immediate horizon. I The rusty link of today with a ‘Celtic revival’ rubs badly. As scholars are hardly agreed as to what the word ‘Celtic’ means, we are in a bit of a bind. The beginnings of what we generally call ‘the Celtic revival’ is now one hundred and fifty years old. We could put a stake in the ground somewhere to inform us when it began and another stake in its heart telling us finally when it croaked, but a good beginning might be Matthew Arnold’s On the Study of Celtic Literature in 1867. It at least marks the beginning of when that unfortunate phrase began to be used with any scope. Matthew Arnold didn’t know that much, really, about Celtic literature, and particularly not about Irish literature. His main source seems to have been O’Curry’s Lectures on the Manuscript Materials of Ancient Irish History – not exactly trustworthy when it comes to the range of the subject. His other sources were books of grammar not generally known for manifestations of the creative imagination. Arnold [End Page 29] also made the mistake of attributing certain character traits to Celtic literature: love, beauty, charm, spirituality, lightness, and brightness. It is a common mistake to attach fixed values, forms or natures to a literature or people. Even the great Kuno Meyer, who knew a lot about Irish literature, made the well-known observation that ‘the Celts were always quick to take an artistic hint; they avoid the obvious and the commonplace; the half-said thing to them is dearest.’1 He cannot have been unaware of Eoghan Ruadh Ó Súilleabháin, from whom words poured in spouts and cascades like the Torc waterfall, or indeed the great Táin Bó Cuailnge, where the warp spasms of Cuchulainn surpass anything in the Books of the Apocalypse for horror and grotesquerie. The point, as well shall see, is that Irish literature is not any one thing. It is a coat of many colours in ‘the drunkenness of being various’. It is a blooming buzzing confusion of genres and directions and new beginnings and dead ends and going off on a skite and returning seeking somewhere to land. Just two things before I take off. The first is that this is not a historical review or examination, although precedent will always raise its relevant head. The second is that, for the purposes of this paper, what I understand by Irish literature is literature written in the Irish language. Of course, I would not normally exclude Irish writers in English from that description, but I am using it here in the same sense in which Salman Rushdie or Wole Soyinka or Alice Munro or Lewis Grassic Gibbon are classed under English literature – because they write in English. I’m using it as a linguistic label. I also refuse to use the word ‘Gaelic’ when attached to writers in Irish for two simple reasons. The first is that the language has historically, as far back as the earliest English dictionaries and even in English government...