Dead and alive
“There is life in death,” says Claire Connolly, O’Brien Visiting Scholar at Concordia’s School of Canadian Irish Studies, when asked to explain the provocative title for her upcoming lecture, Dead and Alive: Irish Gothic Fiction Before the Famine. Connolly refers to the noun “life-in-death” that appears in the Oxford English Dictionary, defined as, “A condition of being or seeming to be neither alive nor dead, a phantom state between life and death.”
It’s certainly a term applicable to many of the Gothic devices being used by Irish writers of the time. “These novels are full of all kinds of remarkable ways of writing about the boundary between life and death, as if that wasn’t a completely certain thing,” she explains.
Connolly says she also chose the title for her lecture because, to understand the literature, it’s important to understand the significance of rituals surrounding death in Irish culture. “There are these very elaborate rituals around wakes, funerals, all of those kinds of things. There’s a way in which dead Irish bodies are alive for longer (Waking Ned Devine, anyone?).
“The wake transits into the Gothic,” Connolly insists, “because it is an everyday cultural practice, but it is about death, a highly charged experience, the passing into a whole other domain, the nature of which we don’t understand.”
Connolly explains that this particular period of Irish Gothic literature, between the Act of Union with Great Britain in 1800 and the Great Famine of the 1840s, has not been studied very much, though it does contain some fascinating texts that were very popular in their own time. The stories draw on Irish folklore and legends, presenting them in print for the English audience of London publishers for the first time. It was a problematic position for Irish writers to be in, Connolly says.
“Especially thinking about it in terms of what it means for Irish writers to offer up the riches of their culture in the English language to a London-based readership,” Connolly says. “That might be the scariest thing of all, that it’s so easy to do that. That it cuts you off so profoundly and you’ve killed the culture you’re writing about. The more you write about it, the more it pulls you away from it.”
Two Catholic brothers, John and Michael Banim, struggled to do justice to the legends that had been passed down to them through oral tradition. In the preface to the story, The Fetches, written by one of two brothers (using the name Abel O’Hara), the author explains how hard it was to create a believably frightening version of the ghosts and superstitions that inhabited his childhood. “The efforts of literary men, even of the highest class, to embody national superstitions, to give them action and scene, have, to me, almost always seemed in a degree abortive … They do not, in spite of myself, chill and awe me like the authentic prepossessions of childhood.”
The author eventually decides to adopt the “Fetch” as his main device. “A ‘Fetch’ is like a double or a doppelganger,” Connolly explains. “If you see it in the morning, it means that you’re going to have a long life. If you see it in the evening, it means you’re on your way out.”
The trials of being an Irish writer working in England led to its own awareness of the horror in the everyday — a horror fed by traumatic personal lives, financial difficulties, and illness.
As Connolly says, Irish writers went to London knowing that literary success would come at a price; as though they were making a deal with the devil. “They were generating Gothic effects from this encounter between London-based print culture and the local legends they were drawing on. Books become scary things, and publishers become scary things.”
Meanwhile, though, the English audience ate it up, relying on the writers to decipher Irish culture for them. “Ireland in the 1820s seemed like a dangerous place. It was brought into the British Empire, but there was still a lot of violence and rebellion. People were turning to the writers to help them make sense of it, and also maybe because the violence gives it a little edge, so people are more interested.”
One aspect of Irish Gothic literature Connolly wants to dispel is the idea that all of its contributors were Protestants, writing from the position of wealthy landowners. “In Ireland, Gothic is normally thought of as a kind of product of ascendency class,” she says. “Actually, all of my writers are doing all of these really interesting things already, but they’re Catholic.”
Nevertheless, one of the more famous texts Connolly will refer to during her lecture is Melmoth the Wanderer, by Charles Robert Maturin, a Protestant who was vehemently anti-Catholic. The book tells the story of a scholar who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for a longer life. He then spends his days trying to find someone to take over the pact. 'I have traversed the world in the search, and no one to gain that world, would lose his own soul!' Monmouth says in desperation near the end of the novel.
“It’s just a novel of such power and reach,” Connolly says. “When you read this novel you’ll encounter some really, really frightening things, but it’s also a recognition of the horror of the everyday, and the horror that can be in some people’s everyday lives. It’s quite modern actually.”
The Irish writers of this era hardly ever let the supernatural elements of their stories stray far from the real world, Connolly insists. “Famines, migration, the realities of life under British Rule: those are the sources of the Gothic; not so much werewolves, vampires and so on.”
When: Thursday, November 10 at 7:30 p.m.
Where: Father McEntee Reading Room (Room H-1001.01, 10th floor), Henry F. Hall Building (1455 De Maisonneuve Blvd. W.), Sir George Williams Campus
Related links:
• School of Canadian Irish Studies
• Tales, containing Crohoore of the Bill-hook and The Fetches (a free Google Book)