David Hayden tours the literature of Ireland, from gothic fiction to Joyce, and notices “the persistent tendency of Irish writers to occupy the shadows of the mind, often pushing the English language out of shape in the process”:
Ireland’s history of colonisation, famine and flight, a collapsed revolution, a dominant church and the vitalising deformation of English by the Irish language have created conditions that occasioned writers to follow the twisting inward paths, and for the courageous, to look at the darkest of human behaviour and bring it to some form of light.
One might start in 1820 with Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer. Within the billowing gothic excess of this madly-plotted tale of a fatal bargain with evil powers is a novel of great psychological acuity that explores the terrors of loneliness, failure and madness in ways that make it seem peculiarly contemporary. The denseness, strange colouration and wild febrility of the writing pre-figures much “experimental” writing, encompassing surrealism and modernism alongside work that doesn’t belong to any “-ism” at all. Melmoth haunts novels as different as Oscar Wilde‘s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Patrick McCabe’s brutal, sharp-etched The Butcher Boy and John Banville‘s laconic and unsettlingly funny Birchwood. Turning from the lost mind to a blighted society, William Carleton’s The Black Prophet of 1847, through a powerful melodrama of prophecy and murder, forced the gaze of its largely well-fed readers onto the terrible scenes of famine that were endemic in Ireland even before the Great Hunger. In the decade following the book’s publication the death or desperate flight of millions of people left a legacy of loss and silence that shaped the narrative landscape of Ireland.
(Video: An illustrated scene from The Pillowman, a play by Irish playwright Martin McDonagh)
The Dish 