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  • "Níl an Focal Sin Againn":Orality, Literacy, and Accounts of the 1798 Rebellion
  • Radvan Markus

The rebellion of 1798, together with the decade immediately preceding it, is commonly regarded as a crucial period in Irish history, vitally important for the forming of Irish national identity. Despite its tragic outcome, this period of political turmoil brought into close contact, and conflict, various groups of the Irish population that, owing to a rigid political system, lived in separate worlds and had relatively little understanding of each other.1 This dramatically changed in the 1790s. The political project of the United Irishmen—famously expressed by Wolfe Tone's words "to substitute the common name of Irishman, in the place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic, and Dissenter"—and the necessities of conspiracy and military organization required intensive communication between all levels of Irish society. The involvement of French soldiers, although of limited military impact, in the Connacht episode of the rebellion can also be seen as significant in the context of this cultural interchange.

The groups involved have been commonly described in terms of religion (Catholics versus Protestants), economic status (landowners versus tenants), language (Irish versus English ), nationality, and historical background. Yet, another dimension—the dichotomy of orality and literacy—may also prove useful in the description of cultural differences in the period of the rebellion, and in the analysis of its reflections in historiography and literature. [End Page 112]

Since the publication of Milman Parry's analysis of Homeric epics in 1928, and with increasing intensity since the 1960s, the attention of many scholars has been drawn to the ways that different kinds of "technologizing of the word" through writing, print, and electronic communication deeply affect the users of these systems to the extent that they "restructure their consciousness."2 This scholarship has established a crucial contrast between oral and literate cultures and distinguished various stages in the development of the latter, marked by the interiorization of print and electronic communication. A great degree of attention has been devoted to "primary oral cultures," which never came under the influence of writing.3 The analysis of such cultures provides an opportunity to illuminate the changes that writing had imposed on contemporary Western culture. That analysis has been carried on various texts seen to bear traces of oral composition—the Homeric epics, Beowulf, parts of the Bible—as well as on cultures that have until recently retained a significant degree of orality, such as those of Native Americans, certain African cultures, and some Central Asian nations. On the basis of these findings, notable differences have been postulated between primary oral and highly literate cultures. An exhaustive summary of these differences can be found in Walter J. Ong's influential Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982).

The dichotomy of orality and literacy may also prove a relevant tool in the interpretation of the rebellion of 1798, a process that started with the historical actors themselves and has continued in historiography, politics, and literature to this day.4 The concepts of orality and literacy can play an analytical role, especially when considering the opinions and motivations of Irish-speaking participants in the rising. Issues of orality and literacy also arise prominently in two historical novels from the twentieth century, both concentrating on the Connacht episode of the 1798 rebellion.

Traditionally regarded as derived from and secondary to historiography, historical fiction may seem an unusual source; yet, it can be argued that the points of view adopted by the two authors in question throw an interesting light on the problem. This view of historical fiction and drama is supported by contemporary theories of historiography, most notably by Hayden White in Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973) [End Page 113] and Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (1978).5 In these seminal theoretical works, White draws attention to the process of selection and construction inevitably present in any rendition of history, and brings to light important structural similarities between historiography and fiction. White's critics are right in maintaining that there still exists a relatively well-defined border between these two discourses.6 Nonetheless, his theory has opened a way...

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