Storytelling on the Northern Irish Border: Characters and Community

1 Goals and Orientations

This book examines how local social life and culture are both represented and enacted through storytelling in one Northern Irish community, Aghyaran . Extending language philosopher J. L. Austin’s memorable formulation that people “do things with words” (1997 [1962]), we can also say that people do things with stories. What they do depends on who is talking to whom, in what contexts, and to what ends. It also depends on the type of story being told, for different genres implicate different subjectivities and ideological orientations toward the world (Seitel 1999, Bauman 2004). Typically, however, people’s stories relay shared beliefs, values, and norms. Stories provide a vehicle through which personal and shared orientations may be passed on, instilled, or indeed critically evaluated and reconsidered. Likewise, stories—especially those that appeal to the authority of tradition—provide powerful rhetorical tools in the construction , maintenance, and revision of individual and group identities. Given that narratives are often commemorative orderings of previous happenings , everywhere people tell stories to depict a meaningful past they can use to assess their present and to bolster themselves as they meet an uncertain future. Ifthesearesomeofthetypical,universalfunctionsofstories,my goals herearetodetermine to whatendsstoriesaretoldinAghyaran,tocontemplate what lasting effects oral traditions have there, and to suggest what the common preoccupations, values, and themes evident in a large body of Aghyaran folklore tell us as outsiders about contemporary culture on the Irish border.1 Part of my task, in pursuit of these goals, is to demonstrate when and in what recurring circumstances people in Aghyaran tell stories, and how these stories and social contexts mutually constitute each other. This requires investigation of primary situational contexts for storytell1 GoalsandOrientations 2 • Storytelling on the Northern Irish Border ing, such as ceilis and wakes, to be discussed in detail in chapters 3 and 4. Anotherpartofmyoverallprojectistoinvestigatewhattypesofstoriesare told and, in effect, what certain types of stories are good for. This takes us into a consideration of genre as, paraphrasing Richard Bauman (2004), an orienting framework for the production and reception of narrative—one theme in chapters 5 and 6. A third part of this undertaking is to demonstrate what social work is accomplished by certain stories told in particular storytelling contexts,andhowthisworkis accomplishedthroughtheways in which people construct stories. Such contextualized narrative exegesis is the focus of chapters 7 through 10. Brought together in the final chapter, these investigations shed light on how people in one Irish community use stories to sustain and critically evaluate themselves as individuals within a groupinthemidstofchange.Throughout,folklorewillbeourwindowinto community and identity as they are imagined, articulated, and enacted on the Irish border today. • Through low tumbling clouds the sun shone reluctantly at best, then retired early behind the sodden black tumulus of Mullyfa mountain. September . With days beginning to grow darker I did as my neighbors did. By conventionTuesdaywasthenightforvisitingPaddyandTommyMongan; there were no scheduled bingo or card games to lure the brothers from home and they had no interest in Tuesday night’s television line-up. This particular Tuesday elder brother Paddy was in the hospital for testing, so calling on Tommy was simply the thing to do. The road from my house to the Mongans’ was relatively short. Still, the pitch black coupled with the press of water—not straightforward rain, mindyou,butanunrelentingomnidirectionalpeltingofsomethingtoorobusttobecalledmist —leftmewiththeimpressionoftunnelingmorethan walking. Surfacing from the murk, I crossed the Mongans’ threshold into the bright turf-toasted warmth of the crowded living room. “Good man yourself, Ray,” Tommy welcomed me as I took my place. “How’s Tommy . . . Mickey, Barney, Francis, Mary, Charlie, Mary, Sadie?” Chat focused first on the bad weather, then on reports of Paddy in hospital—not fully “at himself”but“eatinglikeahorse”—followedbyconcernsovertheaccuracy of diagnoses and the state of Omagh Hospital. Goals and Orientations • 3 Tommy shifted gears to introduce me to another Ballymongan man, Jim Connolly, who after making the connection that I was living in John McHugh’s old house launched into an anecdote about the time Mr. McHugh gave him a savage “tongue-banging” about a defective tire pump. Apparently Mr. McHugh was enraged that the pump Jim sold him, when attachedtoadeflatedinnertube,wasnotasufficienthandholdforstopping his Ford Cortina as it rolled downhill during an ill-fated tire change. The story inspired the company to share several related anecdotes about Mr. McHugh and other irascible characters of the recent past. This sustained conversation for about half an hour before tea was served and chat turned to other topics, mostly an oscillation between childhood reminiscences and the daily...