o '
N
ElL L '5 I R I 5 H CAT H 0 Lie 15M
589
It should be said too that the family swarm produced a vio–
lently negative reaction as well (not dealt with by O'Neill in
Long
Day's
J
ourne
y ) ,
just as the religious intensity generated the blas–
phemy.
As
in the case of the blasphemous reaction, it was the male
who rebelled against the dominion of petticoats and the responsi–
bilities of fatherhood that home and offspring imposed. Some of the
violence of this reaction can be gauged from a fact of history, rather
than poetry, namely, Stanislaus Joyce's account in
My Brother's
Keeper
of his own father's successful flight to freedom and ultimate
irresponsibility. When Mrs. Joyce lay dying of cancer, John Joyce
blurted at her: "I'm finished . I can't do any more.
If
you can't get
well, die. Die and be damned to you! " And within two years after
the mother's death, the family was scattered. "I'll get rid of you
all," he would say, "and go back to Cork. But I wiII break your
hearts before I go. Oh yes, by God! See if I don't. I'll break your
hearts, but I'll break your stomachs first." He succeeded in divesting
himself of his "fleas," as he called them in more jocular moments,
.and had for himself twenty-six or twenty-seven years of freedom be–
fore he died and during which time he frequently complained about
his being deserted by his unnatural family. For the pressures of the
Irish family seem to lead either to total intimacy or to total estrange–
ment.
The peculiarly intimate relationships of the Irish family were
given, I think, by two conditions. First of all, it is a democracy in
a wild sort of way. These are not parents and children, each with
their appropriate range of personality and behavior. They are all
equal,
and can condemn one another openly, irrespective of age or
rank. The children are not children but little adults. The adults are
not adults but big children. The second factor is that they have no
prohibitory conventions:
that is, there are no agreed-upon prohibi–
tions, either in the realm of action or the realm of subject matter.
There are no certain things that everybody mutually agrees to keep
silent about; there is no norm of conduct beyond which one does
not venture. Above all, there is no reticence. Everybody says just
what he or she thinks; so that one enormity after another is uttered.
Yet so deeply are they involved with and committed to one another
that these enormities in reality mean nothing. They pass like the
air that gave them voice. For while the Irish may know that life is
