The History of The Irish...Worldwide
Are the Irish Natural Storytellers?
When someone says to me that the Irish are natural storytellers, I’m usually really pleased. I’m an Irish writer, and isn’t it the ultimate aim of all writers to tell a cracking story? The writing life is full of rejection and self-doubt. You draw hope and confidence from whatever source you can. So I’m usually delighted to think that, by some accident of birth, I might have a tiny advantage when it comes to storytelling.
But then, watching the CUNY TV series Irish Writers in America, I heard something that called into question this whole theory that the Irish have an innate ability to tell a good tale.
It was in episode five, which features Jennifer Egan and Colm Tóibín.
When asked what being an Irish writer meant to her, Egan replied that she believed Ireland was a country of storytelling and growing up in an Irish American community had influenced her in her writing life.
Nothing particularly surprising in that.
Tóibín, however, had an altogether different opinion. He said:
“I hate being called a storyteller – it’s the sort of thing that English people in particular use about Irish people – oh you are all such marvellous storytellers, all you Irish people, as if you come from an oral culture, a sort of primitive culture and that you are not really part of the great tradition that is the novel.”
I’d never thought of it that way.
Thinking more about it though, I can see his point. Dismissing an Irish writer as simply yet another naturally gifted storyteller, of which there are many, is to undermine the effort it takes to write a novel.
It takes months, if not years, to write a book. You need to show up day after day, learn the craft and be disciplined. And I am sure to write something as brilliant as Tóibín’s The South or Brooklyn, you need to work very hard indeed. So I can imagine how annoying it must be to have all that effort dismissed, and for people to assume it must have been easier for you, or that your work has less value, just because your country has a reputation for producing storytellers.
Go to any Irish pub and you will usually find someone with the gift of the gab telling entertaining anecdotes. The oral tradition is alive and well. But Tóibín is right; we should also celebrate Ireland’s contribution to literature, and recognize that it takes more to write a novel than simply the ability to tell a good yarn. And the works of the Irish writer Amanda McKittrick Ros proves the point.
According to the Oxford Companion to English Literature, McKittrick Ros is “the greatest ban writer who ever lived.” In the 1890’s, she self-published her own series of novels and instantly won a devoted following, but the critics savaged her. McKittrick Ros, however, never lost faith, calling her critics: “bastard donkey-headed mites and clay-crabs of corruption,” amongst other things. She certainly had a way with words.
With the publication in 2013 of my first novel, "Dancing with Statues," I became an Irish novelist. But I don’t yet feel worthy of that title. Perhaps, if I put in enough hours at my writing desk and write with grit and determination, one day I will feel worthy. In the meantime, I’ll happily welcome anyone who says the Irish are natural storytellers. As a new writer you have to face criticism and rejection from all sides, especially from within, so I’ll take any compliments I can get.
Image: www.discoverireland.ie
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Comment by Cindy Thomson on January 21, 2015 at 8:23am
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I am an American with Irish roots and a novelist who wrote a novel about the power of a story. I do believe the Irish are natural born storytellers, but in a good way, a way that has the rest of the world envious. Keep telling your stories, Caroline. Who cares what the critics or English or anyone else thinks. There are plenty of readers out there waiting.
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Heritage Partner Comment by That's Just How It Was on January 21, 2015 at 10:18am -
I too have been referred to as a story teller by a critic of my book - That's Just How It Was . Since this discussion was first aired ; I have now taken heart from the many people who have called 'story -telling' an art
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Comment by John W. Hurley on January 21, 2015 at 12:16pm
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Caroline (and anyone else) I hope I didn't sound preachy or anything it's just something that I feel like I have to remind *myself* about (even though I'm obviously aware of it) because it does make a difference in how we communicate with others. But it's deceptive because you think you're speaking the same language with other people and then you realize you aren't actually. I attended a Catholic high school where most of the students were African-American or Hispanic and at the time, the theories about Ebonics were out there and I felt you could easily apply that kind of theory to Hiberno-English as well.
My wife is from Belfast but moved to the US at the age 11 and she and her siblings were tortured at school because of their accent which they have since lost. But to this day she will ask me how to phrase things in American English because she's not sure if she's saying something "right". Which is sad of course, but she wants our kids speaking "proper" English because if you don't, you're not taken as seriously.
You probably know this already but a great resource on Hiberno-English is PW Joyce's "English As We Speak It In Ireland". I was able to use it for my own books, and there was an Irish episode on an old documentary I think it was called "The Story Of English", where they felt that a lot of Hiberno-English was the use of Elizabethan terms and pronunciations with Irish (gaelic) sentence structures. I agree it's a really fascinating subject.
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Comment by Ron Redmond on January 21, 2015 at 12:21pm
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That's a resource I did not know about. I thank you very much for sharing it though!
PS: You're not preachy. :)
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Comment by Katarzyna Gmerek on January 24, 2015 at 10:52am
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Late Brian Earls wrote this and that about the ties between orality and literature, see for example: http://www.drb.ie/essays/oral-culture-and-popular-autonomy Elsewhere he said, I remember, that one must be exposed for orality from childhood to become a good storyteller. (This fully agrees with the analysis of Neil F. Cosgrave here..)
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Heritage Partner Comment by That's Just How It Was on January 24, 2015 at 12:15pm -
I have read the article - it appears that this man 'Carleton' of whom I know nothing other than what I have read in the above blog by Katarzyna Gmerek - that his allegiance and conversion to evangelical Protestantism had much to do with what was happening in Ireland in this era. To gain access to food and other support from the Protestant body's [of which there were many ] there was a of a campaign of proselytism aimed at the Catholic poor for them to renounce their Faith in exchange for food - particular during the Famine years . {thirty pieces of silver spring to mind].
The fact that he did gain a pension of £200 would suggest that his support for a campaign of proselytism aimed at the Catholic poor was just another way for him to disassociate himself from the poverty and deprivation of his Catholic roots; which would have left him and his family at the mercy of British Establishment.
He was not the only Roman Catholic to abandon their Religious beliefs ; many were swayed with the offers of jobs ; living accommodation /food and cloths .
For Corcoran, a prominent if scarcely representative Catholic intellectual, the most salient fact about Carleton was his conversion in the 1820s from the Catholicism into which he had been born to evangelical Protestantism. The Bulletin’s editor was not given to moderation of expression, and the fact that Carleton’s early stories and tales had been written in support of a campaign of proselytism aimed at the Catholic poor amounted in his eyes to an intolerable affront. Carleton, he asserted, although of “excellent Catholic and democratic stock”, had “elected the path of the pervert. Miserable indeed, in all its petty malignity and abuse, is the record, set down by himse - See more at: http://www.drb.ie/essays/oral-culture-and-popular-autonomy#sthash.A...
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Carleton was mentioned by Seamus Heaney in his poem Station Island - as a repenting soul in the Purgatory (of course..)
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Heritage Partner Comment by That's Just How It Was on January 25, 2015 at 6:09am -
Thanks for that
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Mary I did a lot of research on William Carleton and this was (in part) the result: "Irish Gangs And Stick-Fighting: In The Works Of William Carleton" He was a fascinating guy and really the grandfather of the Irish literary movement. He was raised as an Irish speaker but he and his parents spoke English as well. His father was a Seanachie and his mother a Sean Nos singer which, at the time, were semi-professional but unpaid pursuits. So he was steeped in polished storytelling. He eventually moved to Dublin and really was very, very poor when he agreed to start writing stories about how terrible his Catholic upbringing had been for a Protestant evangelist, Ceasar Otway. (The original exaggerated "Angela's Ashes") Here's the thing: Carleton has some very legitimate critical things to say about the Church and Gaelic Irish culture itself. But at the same time, a lot of it was being done for the money and some of it was also criticizing Protestantism. Once he became successful enough he left Otway and his agenda and eventually all religion, at least publicly. Not that he was an atheist but just walked away from it all. He was the kind of guy who, if you were a Catholic who attacked Protestantism would defend it but then if you were a Protestant who attacked Catholics, he'd defend them with equal passion. He seems to have just liked to argue! The pension he applied for he got because of his status of what we today would call a "national treasure". He was so famous and had sold so many books that people thought it was wrong that he would live in such poverty. Although obviously if he had been anti-government he would not have gotten that.
But he is the perfect example of making that segue between Gaelic oral storytelling and modern English language novel writing, he is the Irish archetype of it. All the past Irish literary greats from Shaw, to Yeats, to Joyce etc., all knew his stories and acknowledged him as the first international "superstar" of modern, native Irish writing. Because of the Hiberno-English in his work and the sectarianism in "Traits And Stories" he has been largely forgotten today. In my book I tried to analyze his stories and sort of translate the slang and Irish language phrases to help understand the stories which, in this case, all had to do with descriptions of Irish faction fights and martial arts. His stories can be a bit like reading "The Canterbury Tales" in the original.
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Heritage Partner Comment by That's Just How It Was on January 25, 2015 at 10:07am -
Thanks John for that ; I may actually read the book that you have commented on above. It appears to me that 'Carleton' was a man who very controversial in life and promoted arguments just to be controversial . Perhaps this was his way of protecting himself and his family from any controversy over how he was able to align himself with Protestant evangelicalism .
This was remember; a ere of great poverty /deprivation and to try and exist people done a lot of ugly things that they were ashamed of in later life.
If the 'greats of our Literary past i.e.Shaw ; Yeats et.al. found him to be inspirational, then who am I to argue against their learning by one of their 'greats' .
The fact that he is was 'steeping in polished storytelling ' appeals to me enormously - as you may have read above in my blogs ; I have been described by a critic as being a 'storyteller ' not a polished writer .
That I will have to remain !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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