The Language
When it was established that folk or popular idiom, “caint na ndaoine,” would be the medium of modern literary Irish, emerging authors and critics became keenly aware of the importance of mastery of the registers of Irish as spoken in the Gaeltacht, the regions where primarily Irish is used. The extent of dialectal variation in Irish, the slow development of Irish language literacy in post-independent Ireland, the absence of a standardised orthography, and the inadequacy of available dictionaries meant that for many readers texts from authors such as Máirtín Ó Cadhain and Séamas Ó Grianna were cherished as lexical treasure troves, to be revered as regionalised glossaries as much as literary masterpieces. The Irish-English Dictionary of the Reverend Patrick S. Dinneen (1927) was regarded as a superb work of scholarship, and, while it is probably more representative of Munster Irish than other dialects, Ó Cadhain praised it profusely, advising all writers of Irish that there is no better bedfellow than Dinneen’s dictionary.29
The appearance of Cré na Cille, whose narrative consists entirely of dialogue, was bound to present challenges for ordinary readers and literary critics with only a scant familiarity with Connacht, much less Conamara, Irish. It is also worth noting that the seminal monograph series on Irish phonetics and accidence published by the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies began appearing during the 1940s. All these factors served to emphasise a lexical, as opposed to a literary, analysis of the text in the first instance.
Reception and Interpretation
In the early reviews by Tomás Ó Floinn, Daniel Corkery, and David Greene in 1950 we are told that the author has excelled in the crafting of his medium, that this medium is heavily indebted to the speech of his native Conamara Gaeltacht, and that, while this is a criterion of excellence in itself, the text is difficult.30 This has been challenged by Róisín Ní Ghairbhí, who states that syntactical structures are relatively straightforward, and while individual words or phrases may be rare or unusual, their significance and meaning are not beyond the resources of a reasonably alert reader.31 Other critics have pointed out that Cré na Cille “is not simply a tour de force of conversational Irish,”32 and that “Ó Cadhain has been criticised unjustly by critics who didn’t understand what he was saying.”33 An Aran Islander and native Irish speaker himself, Breandán Ó hEithir went on to say: “Cré na Cille is a great comic work and by far and away the funniest in modern Irish, as Ciarán Ó Nualláin [brother of Myles na gCopaleen] pointed out when it was published. Apart from Evelyn Waugh and Jaroslav Hašek no author makes me laugh as heartily and as regularly as Máirtín Ó Cadhain in Cré na Cille.”34
The initial reaction to Cré na Cille must be measured carefully, however, against the constraints of literary and periodical journalism of the day. Several analyses exist, in English and in Irish, of critical responses to the publication in book format of the text.35 As the publication was only made generally available in March 1950, the considered reviews of critics such as Tomás Ó Floinn (April 1950), Daniel Corkery (May 1950), and David Greene (May 1950) must be regarded as relatively rapid responses to editorial demands. In that light, the quality of insight demonstrated by all three of these critics stands the test of time, by and large, although it is fair to say that all three reviews tell us as much about the critical culture of the time as they do about the actual text. Gearóid Denvir, of a younger generation of critics, suggests that the text is “an acerbic, satiric and darkly comic depiction of some of the rather less pleasant side of human nature, told with earthy, Rabelaisian humour.”36
The temptation to read Cré na Cille as a faithful record and authentic representation of contemporary Gaeltacht life still features in criticism now, as it did then. Breandán Ó Doibhlin, however, in his reappraisal of the novel in 1974, makes a particular study of the comedic aspects of the text. He downplays the role of satire and any sense that the purpose of the novel is a realistic depiction of Gaeltacht communities, and sees Cré na Cille as a general statement about the human condition, enabled by laughter and filtered through humour (translated from the Irish): “To tell the truth, this novel is a prime example of the comedic genre. Máirtín Ó Cadhain chose his subject so meticulously that he has been accused of sordidness (suarachas); his characters can only talk about parish gossip, futile disputes about the GAA [Gaelic Athletic Association] and the Treaty, backbiting and petty jealousy of the meanest kind…. The author avoids any kind of subject — pity, affection, idealism — that would interfere with laughter, because the reader must not have any empathy with the character.”37
The Graveyard
The geographic location of Cré na Cille is fixed very much in the author’s own Cois Fharraige in south Conamara during the Second World War, a generation after partition and independence, during the Emergency, as World War II was called in Ireland. The characters are a motley collection of locals, including some who were in real life killed by a German mine that drifted ashore in Cois Fharraige in June 1917, and some victims of a typhus epidemic in the Spiddal area in the winter of 1942. There are also a couple of stray corpses like Dotie, the woman from East Galway who moans longingly for the lush green plains where she wished to be buried, and the French pilot whose plane came down in Galway Bay and who is now learning Irish from the local corpses.
The French airman may be regarded as a rather exotic species in the graveyard, but it has been argued that he “is a reminder that Ireland has made itself marginal to the fight against continental European fascism.”38 An attempt has also been made to identify a real-life source for the character: Pilot Officer Maurice Motte alias Remy of the Free French forces, who was interned in the Allied Officers’ section of the Curragh Military Camp, having landed in County Waterford in June 1941 after running low on fuel.39 Whether the character had a basis in reality is an interesting question in itself, but he is a representative of an external dimension and wider world beyond the graveyard, Conamara, and Ireland itself.
The graveyard is divided into three sections—Áit an Phuint (the Pound Place), Áit na Cúig Déag (the Fifteen-Shilling Place), and Áit na Leathghine (the Half-Guinea Place), and commentary on the social status of each section is supplied on the hustings before the graveyard election. Locating the graveyard in that context offers multiple possibilities for informed historical, political, and sociocultural criticism. The discourse in general reflects the passions, anxieties, and preoccupations of an intimate rural community, warts and all. Land, social status, love, lust, greed, and visceral hatred all feature strongly in the exchanges, extending the significance of the text beyond temporal and regional contexts.
The Story
The action, which is nearly all verbal, is helped along by the regular arrival of fresh corpses, bringing fresh news from the world above. Many of the characters can be identified only by their recurring peculiarities of speech, thus focusing attention on the characters themselves. In a lecture Ó Cadhain delivered to Cumann Merriman the year before he died, he said (in translation): “The most important thing now in literature is to reveal the mind, that part of a person on which the camera cannot be directed. Speech is much more capable of this than observations about his clothes, his complexion…. It is not what covers a person’s skin that is important, or even the skin, but that which he is walking about with inside his head. We know more about the stars in the firmament than about what’s going on under that small skull beside you.”40