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Lecture
Benjamin Botkin Lecture Series: Texts from the Event Flyers
“The Beautiful Bridge": Crossing The Span Between Oral Tradition
and the Written Creative Word
By Frank Delaney author of the New York Times bestseller
Ireland: A Novel
Book signing with Delaney to follow
Scott Simon, NPR’s Peabody-Award-winning correspondent and host
of Weekend Edition Saturday will introduce the speaker.
Tuesday, October 11, 2005
12:00 noon to 1:00 pm
Mumford Room
6tht Floor, James Madison Building
Library of Congress
10 First Street, SE
Washington, DC
One of the most interesting bridges in cultural life crosses the span
between the oral tradition and the written creative word, linking the spoken
history of peoples to the literature we produced when we began to write.
In this sense, I refer generally to the coming-of-age of cultures and civilizations – and
specifically to the connection in Ireland between what was handed down
in the vernacular, spoken tradition and what became the created literature
for which Ireland became justly famous.
The civilization that became what
we call "Irish" had a purer
strain than most; only a handful of invaders imposed upon or merged with
the long-term Celtic or early European residents. Thus, the literature
by which we know Ireland's soul has few colors not found since early time
on the national palette. The connection between the spoken and the written
in Ireland appears egregiously and recognizably – as witness the
fact that this year celebrates the centenary of the birth of John Millington
Synge. An Irish playwright born into the English-language tradition of
the Anglo-Irish, Synge used the speech of the Irish-speaking-English when
creating his magical plays – Riders to the Sea, The Playboy of
the Western World , The Well of the Saints and others.
In the earliest reckoning of Ireland, little distinction exists between
mythology and factual history. The first settlers of the island, largely
assumed to be western Europeans crossing the long-gone land bridges, yielded
in time to Spanish Celts bearing superior weapons of iron. Once record
began, with the coming literacy of the Christianizing evangelists from
Rome, such as Patrick in 432, nobody intruded on the island until the 8th
century Vikings. They were defeated in time by the native Irish chieftains
and then assimilated. After them, in the 12th century, came the Normans,
Anglo-French noblemen who became famously "more Irish than the Irish
themselves". They were followed in the late 16th century by the last
wave to immigrate – the imposed or "planted" English and
Scots farmers who, to subdue the natives and in reward for military support,
were given the right to take over land in Ireland. In time, they became
the "Protestant" - that is to say non-Roman-Catholic - Anglo-Irish
of Swift, Goldsmith and Yeats, a spicy part of the flavor by which Irish
writing became relished.
But they were not the whole story and in any case
they were colored by the ancestry of their native land. Yeats in particular,
himself Anglo-Irish,
went back to the prehistory of Irish literature, to the legends and mythology
whence the Irish imagination sprang. His founding of the Abbey Theater
showcased the writings of Synge, whom Yeats advised, "give expression
to what has not been expressed."
After the Rebellion of 1916, the population levels of the "Risen People" meant
that the native Irish Catholics were now dominantly inhabiting the three-quarters
that constituted the island republic. A new leveling off began to take
place in which the "native" writers embraced all the gifts and
international reach of the English language, yet reached back into the
ancient vernacular past for inspiration and style. Now the merging was
complete and has taken hold fully and beautifully. Poets who would once
have been privately described as "from the Catholic tradition," such
as Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, have huge international reputations, writing
as they do in exquisite English about Irish themes of prehistoric depth
and tradition. And when the new Republic began to publish its writers,
many of them chose to translate poems and stories from the most ancient
monastic traditions of the fifth and sixth centuries.
My intent in this lecture is to guide people across this bridge from the
oral to the written. Describing first the principles of storytelling in
ancient Irish communities and then making connections between their tradition
of myth, saga and legend, I want to demonstrate how the writers of Ireland
relate to our past. Systems of dialogue, patterns of structure, movements
in poems and drama - they all have currency with, and relationship to,
the force of spoken storytelling whence we came: a good story is a good
human story, written, spoken or acted.
Nor is this confined to the Irish;
the world's tradition of storytelling, common to virtually all ethnic
peoples, lights up the trace elements of every tribe
on earth. And we continue - into television drama; into the more powerful
and successful of Hollywood's output; into the biggest successes in the
history
of book publishing, which could not have happened without a fundamental and
profound observation of the senior rules of oral storytelling.
Frank Delaney
September 2005
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