The Poor Mouth: A Parody of (Post)Colonial Irish Manhood

Abstract

W idely known in Ireland but not outside it, Brian O'Nolan's An Beal Bocht is a short comic gem in form of a mock autobiography published in Irish in 1941 and translated into English as The Poor Mouth in 1964.1 It follows its sad-sack narrator in an hyperbolically pathetic journey from typically Gaelic misery of his childhood to a tenuous, still miserable maturation, quickly capped off by a twenty-nine-year prison term for a murder he didn't commit. That Bonaparte O'Coonassa, an ass who is indeed far from good (or Napoleonic), should terminate his narrative in jail literalizes carceral logic of foregoing text, in which characters are trapped by inexorable march of cinniuiint Ghaelach (Gaelic fate; 73, 84) into squalid lives from which they cannot escape. The Poor Mouth uses this deterministic narrative to parody rigid expectations of what can and should be written in Irish. The Irish language (often called Gaelic) became a talisman of lost manly virtues of independence and fidelity, as well as much-needed proof of national distinctiveness in an increasingly anglophone and anglophilic society. Such idealized formulations in turn strongly impacted those who fought for independence, in part to recover that vitiated national manhood. Although Irish was mother tongue of a minority, it became first official language of new state, acquiring a symbolic significance inversely proportional to its linguistic currency.2 Because of importance of Irish to cultural nationalism, and impoverishment of remaining vestigial communities of Irish speakers, what counted as authentic literature in Irish overwhelmingly concerned harsh, traditional life of western, coastal poor, seen as unselfconscious, heroic and doomed. In a postcolonial riposte, The Poor Mouth lays bare servitude of Gael and his language to ideological demands of linguistic majority in new state-something arguably continuing to this day. The text thereby powerfully critiques a repressive and hypocritical nationalist discourse that replicated colonial attitudes and relations well after independence. This gendered, postcolonial reading of The Poor Mouth requires revisiting heritage of Irish nationalism to focus on its preoccupation with masculinity, which in turn strongly marked cultural ideology of new state. According to Nancy Curtin, the ideal of masculine patriotic self-immolation was relentlessly constructed in 1790s by United Irishmen, a radical, interdenominational constitutional-reformist organization that later embraced separatist, physical force nationalism (34). The