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577
should be added two more by Shane Leslie from his book
The Irish
Tangle.
First, there is the immemorial Irish cult of chastity which
was, evidently, a pre-Christian phenomenon (although some modern
students of Irish culture claim that the ancient "chastity" is really a
projection imposed upon the past by modern historians). There was
the legend that an Irish girl could travel unmolested throughout the
whole of Ireland, carrying a gold ring as a wand; a legendary Irish
king was supposed to have drowned nine daughters at Doon in Keery
because one had a lover and he could not determine which one it
was. Second, and at the opposite moral pole, there is the constant
turbulence and recourse to drink. These national habits are best un–
derlined by the anecdote concerning the Cromwellian who bequeathed
to an Irish community a supply of dirks and whisky, hoping they
would all get drunk and kill one another.
Four more observations should be made. First, as Robin Flower
points out in
The Irish Tradition,
medieval Irish love poetry was
dominated by two diametrically opposed impulses: delicate senti–
ment and beauty, on the one hand, and the most astringent kind of
irony, on the other. Second-and this scarcely needs documentation
-there is the national concern with betrayal, the "Judas-complex"
that dominates Irish life and literature. For centuries the "informer"
was a constant political fact of the most bitter importance, and in a
literary document like
Ulysses
one can see it as a constant leitmotif
of Dublin life; as Mr. Dea'3y says to Stephen: "Helen, the runaway
wife of Menelaus, ten years the Greeks made war on Troy. A faith–
less wife brought the strangers to our shore here ... a woman too
brought Parnell low." Joyce himself was deeply possessed by the
national Judas-complex and was always talking of those who "be–
trayed" him. (He even used the word "crucified" at times.) Third,
again requiring no documentation, there is the national commitment
to Roman Catholicism, which produced both the most extravagant
devotion and the most deeply felt blasphemy, as in
Ulysses,
for ex–
ample. Fourth and finally, there is the national preoccupation with
rhetoric and the national eloquence.
Excessively familial; noncommunal; sexually chaste; turbulent;
drunken; alternately and simultaneously sentimental and ironical
about love; pathlogically obsessed with betrayal; religious-blasphe–
mous; loquacious: these are some of the historical attributes of the
