Celtic Gods as Catalysts in Sean O'Casey's Purple Dust

Notes CELTIC GODS AS CATALYSTS IN SEAN O'CASEY'S PURPLE DUST Purple Dust, a wayward, farcical comedy, traces the foolhardy efforts of two Englishmen, who have made a fortune in dubious business deals - Cyril Poges, a fussy, balding sixty-five-year-old man who believes that what he wants is always correct, and Basil Stoke, a long, thin fellow who wears horn-rimmed glasses and regards himself as the philosophic man - to reclaim and rename a collapsing dungeon-like Tudor mansion near a river that repeatedly overflows its banks in the small Irish village ofClune na Gerra. The dramatic situation has certain similarities to George Bernard Shaw's John Bull's Other Island, where again an English entrepreneur and his companion arrive in rural Ireland, only to be outwitted by the country people they plan to exploit. The parallels have been noted by various critics, and it is often assumed that Shaw's Broadbent served as a basis for O'Casey's self-indulgent Englishmen. It has also been suggested that Stoke and Poges, deliberately named after the English village in Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," represent England in general. However, 0'Casey himselfdismissed both these notions in response to a direct query: Flat 3.40 Trumlands Road, S1. Marychurch, Torquay, Devon. Tel.: Torquay 87766 Aug. 14, [962 Dear Ronald, No. What put that into your head? Neither of the two Englishmen represented in Purple Dust is in any way similar to Broadbent, unless the bond of humanity unites a clever man with two damned fools. These two fellas do not typify the pride and sentimentality of the English; for the English are a courageous and 314 Notes intelligent people, with an odd fool among them here and there, and two of these fools appear in Purple Dust. That is all. With all good wishes As Ever Sean If they are not intended to be typical, O'Casey's pair of would-be colonizers should be seen as little more than conventional satiric figures; then the focus shifts to their Irish opponents and the positive values they embody. In contrast to the illusory aesthetic attitudes of the Englishmen, both are poets and - as builders - engaged in practical creative work. Their approaches are also complementary. O'Killigain, the foreman, has inherited the "touch" ofmaking a song from his mother who won a gold medal at a Feis, and rejects the colonial culture, referring to the house as a "morgue", adding that only fools would discover "loveliness" in rottenness and ruin. His fellow worker O'Dempsey, with a "dreaming look" in his eyes, is the gifted bard-historian of Clune na Gerra (he knows "all" the stories of Ireland "since the world began") and O'Casey's obvious, modem counterpart of the fili (seer) of ancient Ireland. This visionary poet articulates the play's major thesis, the argument that Irish civilization, with its elaborate mythology, is richer and older by more than a thousand years than English civilization. O'Dempsey is enthralled by vivid visions of royal figures and harpers, and bards and saints from Celtic and post-Celtic Ireland parading past him in a long procession. These visions occur only when he is touched by the long hand of Lugh, a blessing from the Celtic equivalent of Mercury in classical mythology that appears to be O'Casey's variation of the apostolic succession in the Christian church; and O'Dempsey's vision includes later glimpses of Wolfe Tone, dressed in the blue-gold coat of the French army, Shane the Proud, strolling through Ireland's four green fields, and Charles Stewart Parnell, as a contemporary revolutionary leader. The "stare" of these figures and others not named, will incite the Irish people to seize what rightfully belongs to them from those lost in a "daze" oftrading, endless buying and selling - justas O'Killigain and O'Dempsey do take what they believe to be rightfully theirs, rescuing the two girls from the destruction ofthe Englishmen's house by the rising waters of the river. RON ALD ROLLINS ...