Vivian Mercier's Irish Comic Tradition : The Man and the Book

Usually, a discussion of a work of literary criticism is academic in the strict sense, confining itself to the contents of the book and evaluating its materials from a scholarly standpoint. My looking back at Vivian Mercier's The Irish Comic Tradition, while it will seek to engage with those elements of the book that have had most influence and effect upon my study of Irish literature in English, will necessarily have a strong (auto)biographical vein, as my encounter with the book is so tied up with my memory of the man himself, both as mentor and friend.

It was as an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1972 that I first came into contact with and developed an interest in Anglo-Irish Literature, as it was then referred to. All of my teachers in the subject were Irish—but when I went to the library stacks to look up secondary works of literary criticism on Irish writers, the authors were inevitably American. In the booklist for the Third Year course, we had been given a dauntingly long, and hence rather unhelpful, bibliography of more general works on Anglo-Irish literature, among which I had noted The Irish Comic Tradition by Vivian Mercier—a French woman, I surmised. But it was to the more detailed studies of individual authors I had gone when the tutorial or term essay came due.

Later in that same undergraduate year, I chaired a session of the English Literature Society apocalyptically titled, "The Irish Theatre: Has It A Future?" (Plus ça change.) After the panel discussion, a silver-haired gent in green tweed jacket and orange tweed tie at the back of the lecture hall rose to his feet and, in a soft American accent, asked the then artistic director of the Abbey Theatre why the Peacock had been let go dark. Obviously a knowledgeable type. Who was he, I wondered, since (such being the nature of local literary gatherings) I recognized everybody else in the hall? Afterward, this visiting American scholar introduced himself as Vivian Mercier; and he further corrected my false impressions by telling me that, though long resident in the United States, he was from Clara, County Offaly, and had studied for both his undergraduate and graduate degrees at Trinity. As he spoke, the lineaments of an Irish accent were discernible within the American. He was in Dublin for a year on a fellowship, researching his book on Beckett. He also indicated that he would be willing to give a talk on Joyce's Finnegans Wake to the society. We were so impressed at meeting anybody who had read all of the Wake, let alone was prepared to talk about it, that we immediately said "yes." In the Dublin academic world, the earliest Joyce works were always preferred over the later. Vivian gave a witty and engrossing talk on Finnegans Wake which, as with the sections about it in The Irish Comic Tradition, not only insisted on seeing Joyce's lifelong project whole, but also made the case for the Wake as the most connected of Joyce's works to the Gaelic tradition.

I had looked for a copy of Vivian's book in the Dublin bookshops, but without success. Instead, I dipped into the library copy. It was only several years later, when I studied for both my M.A. and Ph.D. with Vivian as my professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, that I bought The IrishComic Tradition and read it through in tandem with relevant texts from the Gaelic and Anglo-Irish literary traditions. I distinctly recall that the title of The Táin so baffled UCSB's English Department that it was typed up in the course booklet as "The Train."

I found the scope of Vivian's book dazzling and impressive, covering as it did the two literatures of Ireland from the earliest...