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221 16 The Great Forgetting A L A N T I T L E Y Some time in the early 1930s, the great Irish folklorist Séamus Ó Duilearga , or James Delargy, was investigating the spoken Irish of northwest Clare. He was interested in old sayings, or prayers, or words, or whatever he could find. Although Irish was still the language of the older generation, it had not been passed on, and it was effectively dead as a community language. During the course of his enquiries, he was told that there was a man living on his own out the road, and that he was a good Irish speaker. He hoped to collect some items from him, to add to the scraps he had already gleaned in the area. Instead of that, he tells us that he met the best Irish-speaker he had ever encountered and collected from him hundreds of stories that were later published as Leabhar Stiofáin Uí hEalaoire. What is revealing about this anecdote is that in one corner of the county of Clare there lived a man who carried around in his head a whole library of medieval tales. It is even more revealing that nobody knew that he possessed this knowledge. It was as if the angel of silence had moved across the countryside , rubbing out the past without flourish or fanfare. Ó Duilearga had had a similar experience some years before in Uíbh Ráthach in West Kerry. Although it was well known that his informant Seán Ó Conaill was a great storyteller, when Ó Duilearga came to him looking for tales and wonders, Ó Conaill would take himself away up to the mountain headland in order to practice his craft in silence. In fact, almost more poignantly, he used to tell his stories to his cows as he drove them home, in order that he would not forget them. Ó Conaill’s book is as long as Ó hEalaoire’s, a man who had never been to school, who spoke no English, 222 Afterword: Language, History, and Memory and who had only left his native area for a short visit to a nearby town once in his life. He was another walking library. Nowadays we “look things up,” we go to the library, we trawl the Internet. These men carried it all in their heads and in their hearts. There is no need to romanticize these people, and the many others like them. Obviously, storytelling and the remembering of long narratives that took nights to relate were going to pass anyway. School and radio saw to that initially, and television and electricity finished it off later. But there is also something quite scary about this passing away. In one generation the wisdom (and superstition), the repository of what was common knowledge for generations, the thinking that shaped the ordinary person in the field or on the road, and the points of cultural contact that were normal and given, or to use a more current term, the accepted discourse within which people lived, were swept away. It is not that this kind of sweepage did not happen elsewhere with the onset of what we like to call modernity. Carl Gustav Jung tells a tale of a young girl who was completely traumatized being brought to him in Geneva. He could not find anything wrong with her until he realized that she had come from a very traditional family in the mountains that was steeped in folktales and song and music. Quite suddenly, this culture that was her life and mental world had disappeared. Not only did it disappear, it fell into communal disfavor and was looked down upon with disdain and with disrespect. Jung spent time with her, allowed her to sing and tell stories, validated her experience, brought it back from oblivion, and, if he is to be believed, she was shortly cured of her trauma. No doubt there were many people throughout Western Europe who suffered inside as their old worlds fell away before the modern tide, no more than it is also certain that people adapt with amazing rapidity to a new situation. But what happened in Ireland was different. The destruction of traditional culture was accompanied by the widespread abandonment of the language. So not only did life change and society alter, but the possibility of retrieving that other world became more difficult. In most societies, modernity was change; in Ireland, it was rupture. Throughout Europe the normal citizen, or even “subject” in...

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