Roy Foster: evaluation

Transcript context

…Well, this is something that has preoccupied me more and more. I started life as a straightforward historian and wrote a book about Charles Stewart Parnell, which was a contextual biography. I then wrote another biography of a British politician, Lord Randolph Churchill, the father of Winston. I then wrote my book Modern Ireland, which I think you mentioned earlier. But, especially writing Modern Ireland, I was fascinated to see how often a radical and questioning discourse emerged through creative and fictional and poetic writings in Ireland. Then, almost I would say serendipitously (but it was a tragic case, really), the person — a great mentor of mine, F. S. L. Lyons — who was to write the authorized biography of W. B. Yeats died before he could write it, and the task passed to me. In writing about Yeats, I also had to write about the heft and the power and the originality of Irish writing in the English language, which is so notable in the period when Yeats comes to prominence — where you also have Joyce, you have Shaw, you have (slightly later) Beckett. You have a great number of less well-known writers, like George Moore, who I think is a very underrated and experimental novelist of this time. They’re using the English language in a completely new way. Now, part of this — and structuralist critics following the great Russian critic [Mikhail] Bakhtin would say it’s because they’re writing in a language that is at the corners of change. There are traditions of a different language, the actual Gaelic Irish language, which you mentioned earlier. There are also uses and changes and moldings of English that happen in the island of Ireland which you don’t get outside. You still will get this. I had an aged Volvo once (this is not irrelevant), and I was on holiday in Ireland in the summer, as I usually am, and the boot — which you call the trunk — jammed. I went in to the local garage man in my Kerry village and said, “I suppose I should take it to a Volvo dealer.” He lifted up a monkey wrench and hit the back of the car where the boot was jammed with a great belt. As he hit it (and it did spring open), he said, “In matters like this, Volvo dealers wield no special magic.” I thought at the time that could be something that Yeats could have heard, or Lady Gregory collecting sayings of the people traveling in the West of Ireland. There is an original twist to the English language in Ireland which is unique. something that Yeats could have heard, or Lady Gregory collecting sayings of the people traveling in the West of Ireland. There is an original twist to the English language in Ireland which is unique. As I wrote about this more (and I wrote another book called Words Alone: Yeats and His Inheritances), I felt that, looking back through the 19th century and into the late 18th century, the time when the Irish language begins to spectacularly decline and English takes over, the novelists of the early 19th century — Lady Morgan (that’s Sydney Owenson), William Carleton, Sheridan Le Fanu, many others — who used to be seen as rather crude and farouche and slightly-rough-around-the-edges writers, now look to us, looking back through Beckett and Flann O’Brien and other experimentalists, as far more subtle, sophisticated, intentionally destabilizing writers of the English language than they used to be accepted for. I think critical opinion would agree with me in this. Why this is, is something to do with the decline of Irish and the way it seeps and filters into the way English is used. Part of it is to do with the way that the English language is often a way in which — a medium which Irish people in the 19th century use to conceal the truth or evade uncomfortable conclusions when they’re dealing with land agents or police or bailiffs. Or the army, when it comes to that. Part of it is the oral tradition of storytelling and using slightly idiosyncratic but vivid turns of phrase — like car dealers “wielding no special magic.” Why did Frederick Douglass visit Ireland and then spend six months there?…

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