Coire Sois, The Cauldron of Knowledge: A Companion to Early Irish Saga

Foreword

Foreword Declan Kiberd Tomás Ó Cathasaigh is one of a generation of scholars whose intellectual formation owes as much to French poststructuralism as to native interpretative traditions. His early essays appeared not only in Éigse but also in The Crane Bag, a journal of ideas whose very title encapsulated that moment when old Irish legend was invoked under the sign of continental literary theory. Repeatedly in the following pages, he cites the work of Georges Dumézil on the three functions of warrior and hero mythology in IndoEuropean narrative: sacred sovereignty; physical force; fertility and food production. Yet, unlike many scholars who found a guru and a method when Paris dictated fashions in cultural analysis, Ó Cathasaigh cheerfully admits at an early stage of his application that Dumézil’s approach may well be superseded; for the present, he concludes, it is the theory that accounts most fully for the workings of the texts under scrutiny. There is an equally delicious moment in another essay when Ó Cathasaigh offers two quotations from that maître à penser, Claude Lévi-Strauss, on the structure of ancient myth: the sentences quoted are rather at odds with one another, but Ó Cathasaigh is content to note the discrepancy as an element in the range of possible interpretations, leaving resolution for some other time. This is typical of his method with his own predecessors in the study of early Irish texts.In often-packed paragraphs,he offers reviews of the various ix mythological,historical,and linguistic approaches to Cú Chulainn or Fionn. These reviews sometimes hint at the conflicts between famous scholars without ever accusing them of fanaticism and without remarking that such monomania was of just that warlike kind warned against by many monkish redactors of the old tales. As a gifted teacher, Ó Cathasaigh has the gift of explanation rather than simplification. He feels the need to acquaint his students with the range of past approaches, even as he develops his own method. There is a mellow, amused, sometimes vaguely regretful note in his surveys of the scholarly battlefield, but also an insistence on saying his piece, even though in saying it he will usually concede that there will be many more analyses to trump his own. That note of tentative, enquiring reverence for the text under discussion and of respect for all scholars past and future is still unusual enough in the field to be worthy of celebration. Why did early Irish literature become, rather like Shakespeare’s texts in the nineteenth century, a happy hunting ground for zealotry and fanaticism among commentators? Some of this could be put down to the vanity of gifted pioneers in a developing discipline; more again might be attributed to the strident patriotism of certain nationalist interpreters of “the matter of Ireland”; but the main reason for such repressive analyses may have been a puritanical fear of art, the sort of panic that often overwhelms a mind confronted by the uncontrollable nature of literary texts. Many scholars were rather like patients in the early years of psychoanalysis who aborted the analysis not long after it had begun. Fearing the potent force of stories rich in emotional and symbolic power, they retreated into a merely linguistic or historical analysis, treating those texts as a means of establishing the rules of grammar or syntax or of understanding the surrounding world picture . The idea that each text might be the passionate utterance of a literary artist was the last thing most wanted to think about. Ó Cathasaigh is quite trenchant and steadfast about this: “In general we can say that an appreciation of the conceptual framework which underlies early Irish narrative is an essential element in the criticism of individual works. But whereas, in this respect as in others, the historian can cast light on the early texts by virtue of his knowledge and interpretation of other (non-literary) sources, there are strict limits to the amount of historical information which may be extracted from what are, after all, literary texts.” That is a modest and timely warning to Celtic scholars of the autonomy of the creative imagination. Even the criticism of modern Irish texts, restricted x Foreword to a largely linguistic analysis in the first half of the twentieth century, ran in the second half of that century the equal risks of reducing literature to fodder for historians. While it was certainly a good thing that some historians...