An Beal Bocht: mouthing off at national identity

   "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" Irish twentieth-century (reaching back to the ferment of the 1880s and 1890s) was the countering of received notions of Irishness, particularly those about the Irish language. (1) From the Gaelic League's insistence on the value and relevance of Irish 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 Irish language is a doomed medieval holdover or, at best, an antiquarian preserve. Irish 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 English as The Poor Mouth (1964, trans. Patrick C. Power) under his principal "English" pseudonym, Flann O'Brien. (3)

In the new Irish state after 1922, Irish 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 Irish 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 Irish 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 Irish 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.

Such interrogation of national identity and culture often follows independence, once insurgent ideology threatens to become hegemonic. Thus we find O Nuallain and many of his contemporaries, such as Sean O Faolain, emphasizing the contrast between the ideals of independence and their often sordid aftermath, moving from a discourse of loyalty to one of dissent. In generic terms, the mode of parody marks this crucial shift from legitimation to delegitimation since it is "a meta-literary genre" that is "parasitic of its objects" and therefore constitutes "a form of literary criticism" (Dane 1988:5). Hence parody comes to serve as a postcolonial genre (or meta-genre) par excellence. In An Beal Bocht we do hot encounter the usual schema in which the novel functions as the agent of subjectivization within a normalizing aesthetic regime (Lloyd 1993:88-124). Instead, this work deliberately ruptures identities and self-congratulatory trajectories with its proliferating critique. In this light An Beal Bocht emerges as a postcolonial text in all the richness and ambiguity that this locution has come to signify, at once anticolonial and antinationalist (Appiah 1996:65-66), but, unlike some postcolonial theorizing, not Anglophonocentric. (5) We might say the work takes in (while refusing to be taken in by) the varied and complex ideologies of Ireland twenty years after independence.