Modernising the Islands: Irish and Scottish Gaelic Fictions

85 MODERNISING THE ISLANDS: IRISH AND SCOTTISH GAELIC FICTIONS Alan Titley DOI: https://doi.org/10.14712/2571452X.2023.65.6 Abstract: The islands of Ireland and Scotland are geographically peripheral to the mainlands. Yet they occupy a significant part of both literatures. This may well be because they are perceived as being the least Anglicised, the least dominated by the cultural beasts from the east. For most of the last century this was certainly true. The Irish and Gaelic island literature of both countries was for the most part documentary rather than imaginative during that time. This is not to say that it was not sifted through powerful and individual minds, but just that they did not set forth to invent new or alternative worlds. They are often seen, with a wee little bit and often a dollop of justification, as social documents. As these islands have become as much part of what we call the modern world as anywhere else, writers have been forced to do something else rather than just describe. They had to use their imaginations. This essay examines this journey. Keywords: islands, island literature, Scottish Gaelic fiction, Irish-language fiction, Hebrides, Blaskets, Aran Islands, Séamus Mac a’ Bhaird, Iain Fionnlagh MacLeòid (Iain Finlay MacLeod) Let us talk about islands. They loom large and inevitable in any discussion of Irish and Scottish literature. They also loom small in geographical cultural discussions as places apart. They can be apart for many reasons, the most obvious for not being part of the main, being on the edge. This marginality can be seen as romantic and backward on the one hand, or being exciting and primitive on the other, and/or being both authentic and/or barbaric depending on what way someone wants to look at it. Alan Titley 86 As places apart with limited populations they have had a greater impact on Irish and Scottish literatures than their size should warrant. John Millington Synge’s The Aran Islands (1907) made an impact on Anglo-Irish literature at the height of the Irish revival and the islands inspired some of his greatest plays. Liam Ó Flaithearta (Liam O’Flaherty), a native of Aran, wrote both lovingly and savagely of his own place in novels, short stories, and poetry in both Irish and English. Brendan Behan, although a Dubliner through and through, was inspired by both the Blasket Islands and Aran. One could argue that island life was the most important theme in the works of Máirtín Ó Direáin, who was a looming figure in Irish-language poetry for much of the twentieth century. A recent novel by Tadhg Mac Dhonnagáin Madame Lazare (2021) uses island life as a background to a story of exile, terror, mystery, and the Holocaust. Just about every writer of Scottish Gaelic in modern times has an island connection to such an extent that we would struggle to find pure mainlanders in the broad canon. There were 34,219 people living on 24 offshore islands in Ireland according to the census of 1841. The latest census of 2016 records 8,756, only 0.13% percent of the population, and this includes islands with a bridge connecting them to the mainland, like Achill Island, or maybe Cobh Island close to Cork city which could be reached with a hop, a step and a jump before a bridge was constructed in the eighteenth century. Scottish islands, on the other hand, of which there are 93 inhabited ones, have a population of 103,000, which amounts to just over 2% of the population.1 So, we are not comparing like with like, and do not pretend to. On the other hand, the islands of Scotland and of Ireland have often been seen as the repository and well of the purest and most unsullied forms of the Irish and Gaelic languages, and thus, as a kind of ideal source for the best, most perfect, least corrupted and unanglicised version of speech. The bishop of Cork, writing to Eamon de Valera, argued in 1937 that the islands “should be saved for the nation.”2 Most of the prominent islands of Ireland, Aran Galway, Arranmore Donegal, Tory, and Cape Clear are still Irish-speaking, or partly so, just as many of the important Scottish islands on the west coast are still Gaelic-speaking or largely so. And as we know, many of the books seen as classics of Irish or of Gaelic, upheld as examples of uncorrupted prose, untainted by the whiff of a puff of a stink of outside influences, come from the islands. I refer, obviously, to the great autobiographies of the Blasket Islands, or to Saoghal a’ Treobhaiche (The Life of a 1 Diarmuid Ferriter, On the Edge: Ireland’s Off-shore Islands: A Modern History (London: Profile Books, 2020) 3-4. 2 Ferriter, On the Edge 6. Modernising the Islands 87 Ploughman, 1972) by Angus McLellan or more accurately Aonghus Beag mac Aonghuis ’ic Eachainn Mac ’ill ’Ialain, or A’ Suathadh ri Iomadh Rubha (Touching on Many Points, 1973) by Aonghas Caimbeul. The big problem with these books often was that while the language was perfect, poetic, pristine, the life as described was poor, primitive, and pissmiserable. The contrast of what islands might mean to various people can be seen in Dr Johnson’s trip to the inner Hebrides in 1773, where he said that on the one hand the people lived an “antiquated” life, and were often “of peculiar appearance” (although he said this without irony when we think about himself), and on the other hand that the religion of Iona “advances us in the dignity of human beings,” and that “Iona may be sometime again the instructress of the west (western regions).”3 The artistic challenge is, how to turn the admittedly wonderful language, the child of a changing culture, into a vehicle for describing a different kind of life, or to put it another way, how to modernise life in these erstwhile so-called out-ofthe-way places while retaining something of the flavour of their distinctive island ambience? The first generation of these books was not a problem. They were autobiographical. They claimed to describe life just as it was. Tomás Ó Criomhthain boasted that he invented nothing.4 Whether others did or not is a separate question. But they are not novels. They are not in the business of creating fictional worlds. And again, while I do not want to minimise the differences between Scottish and Irish island fiction – and they are many – there are striking similarities between their depictions of premodern life, customs, and mores. I will give short brief examples. In Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s great An tOileánach (The Islander, 1929), he is introduced to his wife on one page, marries her on the next, she gives birth to ten children on the same page, and dies on the opposite leaf.5 While this might seem like cruel male indifference, we find that Catríona NicNèill from Barra in her Mo Bhrògan Ùra (My New Shoes, 1992) discovers that it was time for her to get married, just like that – “Aig deireadh na bliadhna 1940 bha dùil agam pòsadh” [at the end of the year 1940, I felt I should get married], and she mentions a man whom she knew from her island since she was a young 3 Ferriter, On the Edge 11, 12. 4 Tomás Ó Criomhthain, An tOileánach, ed. An Seabhac (Dublin, Clólucht an Talbóidigh, 1929) 263. 5 Tomás Ó Criomhthain, An tOileánach 161-63. The more recent definitive edition edited by Seán Ó Coileáin (2002) is even worse. His wife’s death is only referred to in Appendix 2, and that is just because it appeared in the first edition. Alan Titley 88 girl: “Bha an soitheach air a robh e ’na bhosan ri tighinn ar ais mun am sin.” [The boat on which he was a bosun was coming back around this time.]6 That’s about it. He vanishes from view just as quickly as he appeared. Ealasaid Chaimbeul is even more blunt. In her Air mo Chuairt (My Journey, 1982) she announces: “Sann thainig e nis fainear dhomh pòsadh, oir bha mi suas am bliadhnachan.” [I noticed it was now time for me to get married, as I was getting on in years.]7 No wooing here rough or smooth, no expensive dinners in a fancy restaurant. This ‘traditional’ view of marriage is common to all these autobiographies. They are not riveting love stories. Cupid does not draw back his bow. There is a classic account in Peig Sayers’s autobiography when she is working as a servant girl in Dingle. Her father arrives unexpectedly one day and announces that he has found a man for her to marry: Níor mhór an mhoill an cleamhnas úd a dhéanamh, faraoir. Ní raibh ann ach “Téanam” agus “Táim sásta.” Tháinig m’athair chugam anall. “Tóg suas do cheann,” ar seisean, “an raghaidh tú don Oileán?” [That match didn’t take long to arrange. It amounted to “Let’s go” and “I’m happy.” My father came over to me. “Lift up your head,” he said, “will you go to the Island?”]8 She then said that whatever he wanted she was happy with as well.9 I can imagine the reaction of one of my daughters if I proclaimed that I had found them a man! Whatever we understand as modernity is not like that, as we know. Our question is, how does the writer treat the irruption of this ‘modernity’ into this traditional life... and I am using these words with great looseness. How is island life depicted through more recent lenses than that of direct biographical narrative account? It is an oversimplification, of course, to totally divorce the autobiography and the novel. A very early novel Eachtraí Mara Phaidí Pheadair as Toraigh (The Sea Adventures of Paidí Pheadair from Tory) by Séamus Mac a’ Bhaird, himself a Tory 6 Catríona NicNèill, Mo Bhrògan Ùra: Sgeulachd a Beatha Fhéin, ann am Barraigh, aig an Iasgach, an Glaschu ’s an Sasainn (Glasgow: Gairm Publishing, 1992) 69. All the translations from Irish or Scottish Gaelic in this article are my own. 7 Ealasaid Chaimbeul, Air mo Chuairt (Stornoway: Acair 1982) 38. I have given an account of these autobiographies in Alan Titley “Ravelling Narratives: Irish and Scottish Life Stories Compared,” in Ulster and Scotland 1600-2000: History, Language and Identity, ed. William Kelly and John R. Young (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004) 161-70. 8 Peig Sayers, Peig (Dublin: Comhlacht Oideachais na hÉireann, 1970 [1936]) 124. 9 Sayers, Peig 125. Modernising the Islands 89 islander, is a case in point. We are not certain when it was first written, but it appears that he wrote a version of it at the very end of the nineteenth century, and revised it sometime in the 1920s but it was only published for the first time four years ago, and reads much more like a fictional life story of a sailor who wandered the world.10 It is strikingly similar to the life of John MacLeod, edited by Calum MacFhearghuis, titled Suileabhan (1983) as the protagonist was given a nickname after the great Irish-American boxer, John L. Sullivan. And, of course, Muiris Ó Súilleabháin’s Fiche Blian ag Fás (Twenty Years A-Growing, 1933) could equally be treated as a novel since genres often merge depending on how you want to read them. The first Gaelic novel I ever read from cover to cover was Iain Mac a’ Ghobhainn / Iain Crichton Smith’s An t-Aonaran (The Loner, 1976). I had intended translating it into Irish, but I was told that somebody else was doing it already. Somebody else is still doing it already. It is a beautifully simple account of how a stranger, the loner, the individual, the aonaran, comes to live, or maybe just to visit, an island community and how his presence completely disrupts its way of life, simply by being there. He is, we are told, like a shadow across the village. Different people invest their dreams, or hopes, or failures in this man who resides in a tent on the edge of the community. Even though he never speaks in the novel, and we don’t know anything about him, it is all about him and the way he has punctured the way of life of what Máirtín Ó Cadhain used to call “the local organic community.”11 Pádraig Ua Maoileoin is one of the few Irish writers to successfully use folklore to underpin or to infuse the modern novel. Both Bríde Bhán (Fair Bridget, 1968) and Fonn a Níos Fiach (Where There Is a Will, There’s a Way, 1978) would have been called magic realism if the phrase had become fashionable at the time and taken up by Irish critics who follow the crowd. On the other hand, he could also write a plonker. A case in point is his novel Ó Thuaidh! (1983) which literally means “northward” but is in reality in this context a kind of war cry, like “Up and at ya!” “Wouldn’t doubtcha!” (“I would not doubt you” in standard English) or something. It centres around two typical Ua Maoileoin characters, one by the name of Iarrann [Iron], a local hard man who in later life learns the joys of hooking up with young visiting tourist women, and the other is Bod-Bod, which can only be translated and not loosely as “Penis-Penis” or “Prick-Prick” (which he is). The island comes in, because Bod-Bod wants to buy the Great Blasket and turn it into – wait for it – a nudist colony. He dreams of visitors romping around on the strand stark naked bollocko and frolicking in the foam. While this might be a naturist’s fantasy for 10 Séamus Mac a’ Bhaird, Eachtraí Mara Phaidí Pheadair as Toraigh, ed. Aingeal Nic a’ Bhaird, Caoimhín Mac a’ Bhaird, and Nollaig Mac Congáil (Dublin: Arlen House, 2019). 11 Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Páipéir Bhána agus Pháipéir Bhreaca (Dublin: An Clóchomhar, 1969) 9. Alan Titley 90 the south of France or some Greek island, the weather on the Blasket Islands might be a bit of a downer in all senses of that word. Maybe when global warming hots up even more it might be an upper and a runner, but it is not a great business proposition at the moment. While the run of autobiographies in Ireland and in Scotland do place an emphasis on the ‘traditional’ life, it would be wrong to treat them as places cut off from the world. One big difference is that in the Scottish autobiography, the writer often goes abroad, certainly leaves his/her island, and then returns. The Irish in contrast, when they leave, they usually stay left. Also, because the Scottish islands are bigger and actually have towns or villages, they are more successful at depicting a broader society with a greater variety of people, because that is what they are. But even in the Irish ones, they are very much aware of a world outside themselves, particularly of America on the Blaskets, the Conamara islands and Aran, just as the Donegal islands see Scotland as part of their world. There is a more modern turn. Traditional life is dead. There is no more subsistence economy. But people still live on the islands. So, what is an author to do with his or her own community, their life and loves, in a place which is part of the main, but is still often seen as being on the periphery? The depiction of that old life is done, and even dusted, although dust is not something which blows much through the wet islands of Ireland and Scotland. Seal clobbering, seaweed gathering, and mountain gabbling will no more cut the mustard. The challenge was always going to be how to leave the dying embers of the world that is past glowing slightly in the back of the hearth and bring modern life to the foreground using the human imagination as a weapon of invention and recognising that our islands are as much part of the contemporary world as the fashion hubs of New York or the financial gods of the market. Two authors do this more than most. There are others, but we need to narrow the focus as tempus fugit and space is short. I would like to treat of two authors, both islanders, one Irish, one Scottish for whom island life is central to their works, but who have shaped it and turned it and fashioned it to deal with their own imaginative impulses. In the Irish corner we have Proinsias Mac a’ Bhaird from Arranmore island off the coast of County Donegal; and Iain F. MacLeòid from Lewis in Scotland. Both of them still live and work on their respective islands. Mac a’ Bhaird has written three novels, all of which deal with the influence of the historic past on the immediate present. Rún an Bhonnáin (The Bittern’s Secret, 2010) revolves around the secret left behind by Cathal Buí Mac Giolla Ghunna, an eighteenth-century Irish poet, author of the famous poem “An Bonnán Buí.” More relevant to our purpose is his second novel Tairngreacht (2018) or “Prophecy,” as it links Ireland and Scotland together through the person of St Colmcille and the Modernising the Islands 91 island of Iona. The prophecy referred to is the prophecy, or the prophecies, of Colmcille, which became common in Irish folklore for hundreds of years. There are many such prophecies with revealing insights, such as that the weather will change, there is trouble ahead, and that floods will come and wet the landscape. He also said that in Ireland “a coach without a head” will appear, which is often interpreted to foretell the coming of the car but is more likely to refer to the Irish football team manager. Nostradamus prophesied that Kim Yung-un from North Korea would die this year, but time is running out. Two parallel stories run through Tairngreacht. One is set in the present dealing with a journalist historian researching the connection between Ireland and Rome, which should be fairly obvious. While he is there, he witnesses a grotesque murder in an explosive third chapter. At the same time the Vatican is attacked by a group calling themselves Céile Dé [The Spouse of God] a fanatical right-wing group of Catholic extremists who believe that the Church has strayed far from its ancient roots and proper teachings, which had been exemplified in the person and life of St Colmcille in the glory days. This is where the past and the present intertwine. Some chapters tell the story of the saint, and it is not the accepted one. He is not who he appears to be and wrote a confession before he died telling how his good friend Odhrán committed suicide, as against the official story that he sacrificed himself, and that Colmcille felt guilty because he could not forgive his friend for falling in love with a young man on the island. He also admits that he invented a lot of stories about himself, including his version of banishing the Lough Ness monster, which he only did to keep the locals pacified and knowing that a ‘miracle’ would do his mission a power of good. He doesn’t mention his guilt in promoting tacky tourism with thousands of tiny reproductions of the Lough Ness monster in the highlands of Scotland. This knowledge is deadly, in several senses of that word. The leader of the Céile Dé realises that if this word got out, the saint would be exposed as a quack and a charlatan, and he couldn’t be having this. He feels particularly betrayed because he had often walked on the sacred sod of Iona and felt the presence of Colm Cille there. The past appears to haunt the present even more threateningly in Mac a’ Bhaird’s most recent novel Fatwa (2019), a word which requires no further explication. The central character is a writer who lives on an island which we have to presume is Arranmore in Donegal and who has already written novels. Like many novelists, and particularly in Irish, he is quite peeved, disappointed, crestfallen, and cheesed off that despite his best efforts they have made no noise. They have rarely been reviewed, and if reviewed they were misunderstood. Or showered with clichés. Or smothered with blandness. They have made no splash, no impact, just fallen Alan Titley 92 into the huge pit of forgetfulness, the everlasting limbo of the Irish novel. This time he says it is going to be different. He resolves to write a novel about the prophet Mohammad, especially before his conversion or revelation of God’s word in the Koran. He treats him as a young man, with all the strengths, failures, drives and impulses of young men everywhere, including drugs, sex but no rock and roll. This is dangerous territory, as we know. Chapters of that novel appear in this novel, Fatwa, so we can read it for ourselves.12 It should be said that there are places in the book where the author, Cormac, meets his neighbours and chats about the weather, or fishing, or the neighbours, passages that could be out of any of the traditional island biographies or books of lore. This is true, in particular, at the beginning where I sense that the author is setting us up by depicting the old ways, and the old talk, and the old camaraderie, in order that the shock of the new later in the book will hit us harder. Cormac’s own grandfather was a seanchaí, a traditional storyteller and preserver of local lore, which provides us with another link to the past. Meanwhile there is another strand. A young Irishman, Ben, whose mother is from Libya, and his father an Irish convert to Islam, is doing his Leaving Certificate exam and doesn’t give much of a toss for religion. The story develops, however, and he begins to discover his ‘roots’ and in the easy jargon of the day, he slowly becomes ‘radicalised.’ He meets a friend who is studying Irish in the first year in UCD and has to read a book before the weekend. It happens to be Cormac’s book about Mohammad and the reason he is reading it is because it is short! When asked what it is about, he says, “Ara, prick inteacht as Tír Chonaill ag scríobh fá Mhahamad agus na ragheads.” [Some kind of prick from Donegal writing about Mohammad and the ragheads.]13 This, we might say, pricks Ben’s interest, he searches out a review, gets it translated by Google translate and the story begins to thicken. Having satisfied himself that the book is an insult to the prophet, he gets a small group of likeminded youths together, and they decide to ‘punish’ the author, although they are divided as to whether they should kill him or just beat the bejaysus out of him... although the idea of Muslims beating the bejaysus out of somebody is rife with contradictions. Mac a’ Bhaird has many strengths as a writer, and one of his best is his ability to hold a plot together, to drive it forward and to bring it to an explosive conclusion, 12 See, for example, the interchapters between chapters 3-4, 5-6, 8-9, and 15-16. Proinsias Mac a’ Bhaird, Fatwa (Dublin: Coiscéim 2019). 13 Mac a’ Bhaird, Fatwa 77. Modernising the Islands 93 for all the world just like the climax in an action film. The team of would-be assassins search out Cormac in his island and arrive there while a LGBT+ festival is being held, which both terrifies them and gives them some cover. This again, brings out the idea of “a clash of civilisations” in Samuel Huntington’s unfortunate phrase, or more accurately a clash of values. I am referring to his book with the fuller title of The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of the New World Order (1998) which was more or less out of date as soon as it was published. Without spoiling the conclusion of Mac an Bhaird’s book, it should be enough to hint that, of course, the author does not get killed and the story generates enough tension to keep us gripped to the end. A novel does not just tell a story, of course, but raises all kinds of alternative questions along the way. Mac a’ Bhaird is constantly interrogating the past and its relevance to the present and how that intersection can be either fruitful or dangerous. Iain F. MacLeòid (Iain Finlay MacLeod) has written six novels in Gaelic as well as plays and scripts. Some do not concern us, although they often have an island theme. It might be pushing it a bit to attach an island theme to his reconstruction of the mutiny on the Bounty in his novel, Am Bounty (The Bounty, 2008), but it does concern a young man from Lewis who gets conscripted into the navy and lives through the adventures oft described on screen. When I read it first some years ago, I presumed it was entirely fictional. But I learned since that there was a man from Lewis on the Bounty, and it may have been this which prompted the novel in the first place. And if we are looking for islands, of course, the novel deals explicitly with Tahiti, and as we know, many of the mutineers ended up on Pitcairn Island at the ends of the earth. Ìmpireachd (Empire, 2010) features the island of Manhattan, but this is far beyond our concerns, while Dìoghaltas (Revenge, 2017) is a straightforward detective/murder novel set on Lewis. Indeed, genre fiction is a very handy way to make a story bring other concerns to life which can be smuggled in without any great fanfare. But if we are looking for a genre novel which takes us into the heart of the themes we have been discussing it has to be Iain F. MacLeòid’s Hiort.14 “Hiort” is the Gaelic for the island of St Kilda, the most exotic, outlying, distant and terrifying of all the Irish and Scottish islands. It is 64 kilometres north-north-west of North Uist in the north Atlantic Ocean. It has the highest cliffs in the United Kingdom and had been populated for at least two thousand years, until it was abandoned in 1930. A collection of essays published about ten years ago claims that over 700 books or serious articles have been written about the island, making 14 Iain E. MacLeòid, Hiort (Inverness: Clàr, 2021). Alan Titley 100 Ua Maoileoin, Pádraig. Fonn a Níos Fiach. Dublin: Carbad, 1978. Ua Maoileoin, Pádraig. Ó Thuaidh! Dublin: Sáirséal Ó Marcaigh, 1983.