Theorising Irish-Language Modernism: Voicing Precarity

Abstract

This chapter challenges the exclusion of literature in Irish from orthodox accounts of Irish modernism. Taking up Robert Flaherty’s fictionalized docudrama Man of Aran, a highly romanticized portrait of the Aran islanders’ manly struggle for survival in a rugged, unforgiving landscape, McKibben shows that these islanders were much less insulated from modernity than the film acknowledges. But the film also suppresses the very hallmark of their supposed archaic authenticity: the Irish language. McKibben compares this ‘devoicing’ to Pádraic Ó Conaire’s 1910 novella in Irish, Deoraíocht (‘Exile’), a ‘gap-ridden’ text recounting the misfortunes of an Irish-speaking immigrant in London. The chapter concludes with a succinct account of the tribulations of the Irish language from the time of the Great Famine, when the language was nearly wiped out as a consequence of mass starvation and emigration, to the late nineteenth century, when Revivalist efforts to forge a new literary tradition out of a language deemed defunct undercut the orthodox identification of ‘progress’ with the English language and the British state.