Orality and Agency: Reading an Irish Autobiography from the Great Blasket Island

Introduction

The early twentieth century saw the publication of a singular group of texts in Ireland: the Blasket Island autobiographies. These texts were produced by members of the Irish-speaking community living on the Great Blasket Island off the west coast of Co. Kerry, c. 1850-1953. As a group, they have often been viewed as having greater ethnographic, rather than literary, significance.¹ Seán Ó Tuama's assessment regarding what has been the prevalent appraisal of the Blasket texts, reads: "From the Blasket Islands, in particular, has come a handful of autobiographies which by common European standards are sui generis…. The only vaguely comparable series of books known to me is that by Indian chiefs describing their ancestral life before the white man's conquest" (1995:203).² Ó Tuama's rhetoric serves to assert the degree to which the Blasket texts differ from other Irish-language literature. In so doing, he suggests that these texts owe more to the ethnographic or anthropological than the literary, and, in effect, he cuts them loose from a greater Gaelic literary tradition, leaving them as an island, so to speak, between ethnography and literature. As such, the author-subjects of the Blasket texts have been read as passive informants rather than as active authors. Furthermore, this type of reading has been buttressed by a view that sees oral tradition as static rather than dynamic. As a corrective, I offer a reading that pays careful attention to the ways in which both oral tradition and literacy are utilized in a Blasket autobiography to assert the agency of its author.

In the discussion that follows, I advance my case for considering the Blasket autobiographies as collaboratively produced texts, with particular emphasis on examining the manner in which they were produced. This examination raises several critical questions that will be addressed in turn. How can we best understand the various collaborators' roles in producing the text, particularly that of the subject-author, or native, of the text? It is of particular importance not to dismiss the native's agency in one's reading. In a consideration of how a particular type of critical reading has tended to suppress or misread the native's agency, I take into account how this error is buttressed by a misunderstanding of the theoretical construct of orality. When the individual's role in orality is suppressed in favor of a view that sees primary oral cultures as producing texts independent of individual authorship or agency, a further misreading of printed texts is encouraged. In the final segment of my discussion, I address how a reader might distinguish between two fundamentally different readings of the same text: the native as a representative type and the native as author.

Native Autobiography

The category of native autobiography is fraught with complications, as it involves two words that flirt with genre while consistently resisting stable boundaries. Following Arnold Krupat's work on the problem of author in Native American autobiographies (1985), these autobiographies are more accurately typified by their "process of production" rather than by formal characteristics or genre (4-5; 30-31). While the Blasket autobiographies might be read strictly in relation to the conventions of Western literary autobiography, a reading that is based on careful attention to the process of production offers greater insight into these texts. This process of production involves three roles (fulfilled by a variable number of individuals): the native who serves as the subject of the autobiography; the editor who instigates, structures, and collaborates both creatively and destructively with the native; and the translator, who may be interposed between native and editor, or between text and reader. The translator role also serves to transform the text into a global language. The native, editor, and translator are roles assumed during the process of production, and they are fluid by nature, often shifting between cooperation and resistance. The interaction of these roles during the process of producing a collaborative text is what distinguishes native autobiography from other acts of self-representation.

Krupat has suggested that American Indian autobiographies, produced from the type of process outlined above...