“Celticism, ballad transmission, and the schizoid voice: Ossianic fragments in Owenson, Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett”

ABSTRACT

This essay surveys responses to Macpherson’s Ossian in Irish literature, alongside analysis of the development of literary Celticism. Despite being a key text behind the development of Celticism in Irish writing, Ossian is consciously rejected in Irish Romanticism and in the Celtic Revival. However, Ossian becomes a symbol of literary recycling and mental fragmentation in Irish Modernism. Texts studied in this essay include Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, and Beckett’s Murphy.

KEYWORDS:

• Celticism
• Romanticism
• Modernism

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Dr Kate Louise Mathis for reading and commenting on an early draft of this essay. I would also like to thank the two reviewers who read this essay for Irish Studies Review.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Moore, “Introduction,” 6. See Porter, “Bring Me the Head of James Macpherson” for a summary of the influence of Ossian on European culture.

2. See O’Halloran’s, “Irish Re-Creations of the Gaelic Past”; and Mac Craith’s, “We know all these poems.”

3. O’Halloran, “Re-Creations,” 70.

4. Ibid., 74.

5. However, Macpherson was a major influence on Scottish Revivalists such as William Sharp/Fiona Macleod). Oisín/Ossian is also a key figure in Irish and Scottish poetry. As Edna Longley has observed: “If Colm Cille/Columba is the patron saint of Irish/Scottish poetry, Oisín/Ossian is the equally ‘ambiguous’ patron pagan” (Longley, 10). NB: In this article, “Ossian” will refer to Macpherson’s Ossianic corpus and “Ossian” will refer to the mythic warrior-bard.

6. Watson, “Aspects,” 129.

7. Macpherson created “the tone at the root of Romanticism” (Crawford, “Post-Cullodenism,”18). Furthermore, the “construction of Celticism and the discourses associated with it effectively begin with [Macpherson’s Ossian]” (Watson, “Aspects,” 130). Macpherson’s work was published well before the generally accepted birth of English Romanticism, the publication of Coleridge and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads in 1798. For a discussion of Macpherson, Gaelic poetry, and Scottish Romanticism, see Clancy, “Gaelic Literature and Scottish Romanticism”; and Stafford, “Romantic Macpherson” in the same volume (27–38).

8. Stafford, “Romantic,” 27.

9. Kristmannsson, “Ossian and the State of Translation,” 39.

10. Pethica, “Yeats, Folklore, and Irish Legend,” 131. See also Stafford’s, The Sublime Savage. According to Moore, “D. S. Thomson’s comprehensive The Gaelic Sources of Macpherson’s Ossian (1952) spelled out … the reality of the relationship to the Gaelic milieu (Moore, “Introduction,” 7). However, according to Curley, “Overestimating Macpherson’s indebtedness to genuine Gaelic literature not only misstates the case seriously but also robs him of the distinction of authorship” (Curley, Samuel Johnson, the Ossian Fraud, 18).

11. Chapman, The Gaelic Vision in Scottish Culture, 39. According to Valentina Bold, “Macpherson was a pioneering fieldworker who … ‘not only helped preserve valuable Gaelic manuscripts but also contributed to the emergence of the proper study of Celtic literature, drawing attention in particular to its ballad heritage.’ His active collecting may have begun when, after a period in Edinburgh in 1756, he was a schoolmaster at the Charity School at Ruthven … He returned to Edinburgh and, by 1758, was a tutor to the Grahams of Balgowan. At this time, he was definitely collecting in earnest.” Bold, “Ossian and James Macpherson,” 194.

12. Ní Mhunghaile, “Ossian and the Gaelic World.”

13. Stafford, “Introduction,” vii.

14. O’Conor, Dissertations on the History of Ireland, 48. Thanks to Paul Fagan for alerting me to this text.

15. Deane, Celtic Revivals and Strange Country, 43.

16. Krielkamp, “The Novel of the Big House,” 63.

17. Ó Gallchoir. “Celtic Ireland and Celtic Scotland,” 117.

18. Ibid., 117.

19. Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination; and “Ossian and the Rise of Literary Historicism,” 60.

20. O’Halloran, “Irish Re-Creations,” 74.

21. Owenson, The Wild Irish Girl, 107. The “Blair” Horatio refers to is Hugh Blair, supporter of Macpherson’s Ossian, and first Regius Professor of Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres at the University of Edinburgh.

22. Ibid., 106.

23. Ibid., 113. Patrick is “airbrushed out” in Macpherson’s versions (Leask, Fingalian Topographies,” 186).

24. Ibid., 113–4.

25. Ibid., 38. “Strongbow or Richard Fitz Gilbert, an Englishman, invaded in 1170 on behalf of Mac Murchada, an exiled Irish king, and after that king died, succeeded him and settled Leinster in Ireland with tenants from his English and Welsh estates” (Kirkpatrick in Owenson, The Wild Irish Girl, 257).

26. Ibid., 88.

27. Owenson, The Wild Irish Girl, 120, 124.

28. Ibid., 123.

29. Owenson, The Wild Irish Girl, 14, 16, 45, 53, 14, 16.

30. Ibid., 45.

31. Deane, 29–30, 99.

32. Owenson, The Wild Irish Girl, 250.

33. Chapman, The Gaelic Vision in Scottish Culture, 82.

34. Ibid., 94.

35. Watson, “Aspects,” 136. According to Howes, “The publication of On the Study of Celtic Literature coincided with an increase in ‘Fenian fever’ in Ireland and the United States” and “an outbreak of Fenian violence in Ireland and England”, 20.

36. Watson, “Aspects,” 136.

37. Crawford, “Post-Cullodenism,”18. For similar observations see Clancy, “Gaelic Literature and Scottish Romanticism.”

38. Castle, Modernism and the Celtic Revival, 174. See also: “Arnold’s interest in the Celt, and his belief in the power of art and criticism to raise the cultural level of a nation, and to stem the tide of vulgarity and of Philistinism, were … important to Yeats” (Watson, “Yeats,” 41).

39. “The Wanderings of Oisin”, l. 201 and 213, Yeats, The Poems, 31. For a discussion of Yeats’ use of the term “Fenians”, see Foster, R, F., Yeats: A Life, I. The Apprentice Mage, 80–2.

40. “The principal source that Yeats drew on for ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ was Brian O’Looney’s translation of Michael Comyn’s ‘The Lay of Oisin in the Land of Youth’ (1750), which Yeats accessed in the fourth volume of the Transactions of the Ossianic Society” (Gomes, “Reviving Oisin,”378).

41. Larrissy, “Introduction,” xiv.

42. O’Flanagan, “Derdri, or the Lamentable Fate of the Sons of Usnach,” 143. See Mathis, “Mourning the maic Uislenn” for a discussion of O’Flanagan’s work on Macpherson.

43. Ibid., xiv. Furthermore, Derick Thomson suggests that Yeats’ celebrated phrase “terrible beauty” may derive from Macpherson’s Temora. See Thomson, “MacPherson’s Ossian,” 264.

44. Joyce, Ulysses, 7.572–3. Subsequent references will be made in the standard fashion, i.e. “U” followed by episode number and line number.

45. Larrissy, “Introduction, “xiv. However, this assessment would contradict Thomson’s suggestion that the phrase “terrible beauty” derives from Macpherson.

46. Gomes, “Reviving Oisin,”378.

47. Foster, Yeats, 53.

48. Brannigan, Archipelagic Modernism, 27. Lady Gregory’s interest in the residents of Kiltartan was also an important inspiration for Yeats in his work on the rural peasant.

49. Yeats, Essays and Introductions; The Poems; and The First Yeats,187.

50. Ibid., 130.

51. See above 47., 131.

52. Joyce, Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, 125. See also his comments in his Exiles notes: “All Celtic philosophers seem to have inclined towards incertitude or scepticism – Hume, Berkeley, Balfour, Bergson” (Joyce, Exiles, 353). As Jean-Michel Rabaté points out, Joyce’s comments on Celtic philosophy point to “a tradition or a line of descent in which Joyce clearly wants to be inscribed” (Rabaté, Joyce upon the Void, 24).

53. Joyce, Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, 124.

54. As was mentioned earlier, Irish and Scottish Romanticisms grew out of the different aftermaths of the 1745/46 Jacobite Rebellion and its defeat at Culloden, the 1798 United Irish Rebellion, and the 1800 Act of Union.

55. Carruthers and Rawes, 1.

56. S. Deane, 99.

57. Foster, Irish Story, 99.

58. Yeats, Poems, 385. For a discussion of archipelagic issues in Irish and Scottish Modernism see Brannigan, John. Archipelagic Modernism.

59. As Brannigan states: “in the 1920s and 1930s … the very notion of the ‘wholeness’ of ‘Britain’, ‘England’, or the ‘United Kingdom’ was undermined politically and culturally by the emergent sovereignty of the Irish Free State (1922) and its constitutional claim to the ‘whole island of Ireland’ (1937), by the Scottish Renaissance of the 1920s, by the formation of Plaid Cymru (1925) and the Scottish National Party (1934), and by the palpable decline of British imperial power across the globe” (Brannigan, Archipelagic Modernism, 147).

60. Joyce and Beckett had differing attitudes to – and levels of interest or involvement in – psychoanalysis, and related subjects such as the schizoid voice. See Thurston, James Joyce and the Problem of Psychoanalysis and Weller, “‘Some Experience of the Schizoid Voice.’” .

61. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 565, lines 29–30. Subsequent references will use the standard citation method i.e. “FW” followed by page number and line number.

62. Mitchell, “Ossian,” 160.

63. S. Deane, Celtic Revivals, 93.

64. See Gibson, Joyce’s Revenge.

65. As were his detractors. In an Observer review Oliver St. John Gogarty declared Finnegans Wake “the most colossal leg pull in literature since Macpherson’s Ossian” (Ellmann, James Joyce, 722).

66. “Ossian, Fingal, trans. into German by Reinhold Jachmann (Leipzig: Philipp Reclam, n.d.) –, The Poems, trans. James Macpherson (Leipzig: G. J. Goeschen, 1840). Stamped “J. J.” –, Poesie, trans. into Italian by Melchior Cesarotti, 2 vols. (Bassano, 1819)”. Ellmann, The Consciousness of Joyce, 122.

67. Fahy, The James Joyce–Paul Léon Papers in the National Library of Ireland, 27.

68. For information on notebook VI.B.45, see https://library.buffalo.edu/jamesjoyce/catalog/vi-finnegans-wake/vib45/.

69. Joyce, U, 12.1125–29.

70. Sturgeon, 115. For a discussion of Joyce’s representations of the inauthentic as authentic, see Castle, Modernism and the Celtic Revival. On the subject of Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, it is worth mentioning that “Oscar” and “Fingal” are both Ossianic names and that Jane Francesca Agnes, Wilde’s mother, was an admirer of Macpherson’s.

71. “Joyce uses the word Celtic in a very loose and atypical fashion … simply to denote the non-English nations and inhabitants of the Atlantic Archipelago, regardless of period, place, or language. For example, the modern, lowland, non-Gaelic speaking Scot David Hume is described as Celtic [in] Joyce’s notes for Exiles” (Barlow, The Celtic Unconscious: Joyce and Scottish Culture, 18).

72. Joyce, Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, 148. Of course, the “Finnegan” of the title also contains “Finn”. According to Ellmann, “[Joyce] conceived of his book as the dream of old Finn, lying in death beside the River Liffey and watching the history of Ireland and the world – past and future – flow through his mind like flotsam on the river of life” (Ellmann, James Joyce, 544).

73. George Gibson has discussed the Celtic nature of the Wake’s obscurity: “The Wake’s obscurity, perhaps its most striking quality, is also one of its most profoundly Celtic characteristics” (G. Gibson, Wake Rites, 226).

74. See note 52 for Joyce’s comments on Celtic philosophy.

75. Joyce, FW, 423.01.

76. Clark, 105. Philip Herring has suggested that “Joyce … accepts as given that the artist is a forger of meaning and of identity” (Herring, 117).

77. Cheng, Shakespeare and Joyce, 96–7.

78. Joyce, Letters of James Joyce. Vol. 1, 297.

79. FW, 123.25.

80. Swinson, “Macpherson in Finnegans Wake”; and Senn, “Ossianic Echoes”.

81. Moore, “Introduction,” 3.

82. Senn, “Ossianic Echoes,” 25.

83. Stafford, “Introduction” to Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian and Related Works, v–xix, xvi. Indeed, words such as “cloud”, “storm”, “dark”, “ocean”, “wave”, “stream”, “roll”, “rolls”, “rolling”, and “rolled” begin to attain a mantra-like quality after extended reading.

84. Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian and Related Works, 66.

85. FW, 4.15–17.

86. Ibid., 25.31.

87. Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian and Related Works, 241.

88. FW, 603.26–27.

89. Swinson, “Macpherson in Finnegans Wake,” 95.

90. See Meek, “Ballads,” 31. Finnegans Wake contains Joyce’s own work in the ballad genre: “The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly.”

91. Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian and Related Works, 127.

92. Ibid., 445.

93. Tindall, A Reader’s Guide to “Finnegans Wake”, 306.

94. FW, 251.24.

95. Meek, “Ballads,” 31. A version of “Bàs Chonlaoich” is included in the Book of the Dean of Lismore. For further information on the “Dean’s Book,” see Gillies, “The Book of the Dean of Lismore: The Literary Perspective.”

96. Ibid., 19.

97. For a range of criticisms levelled at Macpherson, see Mackenzie (ed.), Report of the Committee of the Highland Society of Scotland into the nature and authenticity of the Poems of Ossian.

98. See “The Dream of Ossian” in Barlow, The Celtic Unconscious, 51–182.

99. Crawford, “Post-Cullodenism,” 18.

100. Allen, Modernism, Ireland and Civil War, 22.

101. FW, 264.22–23.

102. Ibid., 123.18–19.

103. Stafford, “Romantic”, 35–6.

104. Weller, “Some Experience of the Schizoid Voice,” 38.

105. Beckett, Murphy, 116.

106. Ibid., 163, 168.

107. Ackerley, “Uncertainty”, 41.

108. Ibid., 41.

109. Jung, The Collected Works, Volume Eighteen, 294.

110. Beckett, Disjecta, 70–1.

111. Mooney, “Kicking against the Thermolaters, “33.

112. Ibid., 34.

113. Power, “Samuel Beckett’s,” 151.

114. Ackerley and Gontarski, 298. “The original of Dr. Killiecrankie … was the senior assistant at the Bethlem Royal, one Murdo MacKenzie, originally from Inverness, the pun on ‘murder’ (‘Killie’) being further identification” (Ackerley and Gontarski, 298). James Knowlson notes that “Both the Senior Physician and the Assistant Physician at the Bethlem Royal, whom Beckett probably met, were Scotsmen, David Robertson and John Hamilton” (Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 210).

115. Beckett, Murphy, 169.

116. Ibid., 171.

117. Ibid., 171.

118. Joyce also had an interest in the Hebrides, Orkney, and Shetland. For example, Finnegans Wake notebook VI.B.32 contains material relating to the Hebrides and notebook VI.B.6 has notes on Orkney and Shetland.

119. Ibid., 67.

120. Hegglund, “Hard Facts and Fluid Spaces,” 71. See “swaran foi” (FW 131.22).

121. Gontarski, Beckett Matters, 20.

122. Ibid., 19.

123. Beckett, qtd in McNaughton, 107. See also: “Jung argued that unity of consciousness was an illusion, because complexes could free themselves from conscious control; they have ‘a certain will-power, a sort of ego … They appear in visions, they speak in voices’ (Tavistock Lecture 3, 72)” (Ackerley, 41).

124. Mooney, “Kicking against the Thermolaters,” 34.Websites consultedossianonline.orgfweet.org.