Mapping the Symbiosis Between Two Great Signifiers of Irishness, the Writer and the Pub
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Dublin Gastronomy Symposium 2018 – Food and Power Powerful Puzzles: Mapping the Symbiosis Between Two Great Signifiers of Irishness, The Writer and The Pub Aoife Carrigy Abstract: This paper explores the symbiotic relationship admits, ‘he knows his own business best’ (O’Brien, p. 69). between the Irish pub and Irish writer. It traces how a Meanwhile in a letter to his brother Stanislaus written in contemporary drinks industry, cultural industry and 1912, two years before embarking on Ulysses, Joyce ‘drinks culture’ industry has capitalised on that historic suggests that most publicans would welcome some free symbiosis and helped to secure the status of both pub and advertising. The letter relays an argument with Maunsel & writer as powerful signifiers of Irishness. Representations Co. who were considering publishing Joyce’s collection of of the pub provide the writer with a sense of place and a short stories, Dubliners, but were nervous of being sued for neutral setting in which diverse characters might interact, libel by publicans whose businesses had been mentioned by in the sense of Oldenburg’s characterisation of the Third name (Ellmann 1983, p. 331). Place. Referencing Bourdieu’s ideas of capital and Dietler’s They may have had valid concerns, as explored in Declan ideas of commensal politics, the paper examines dynamics Dunne’s book on Mulligan’s of Poolbeg Street — a famous of power common to the Irish pub, notably within the Dublin public house (Dunne 2015, pp. 39–65). Dunne rounds system as a ritual of reciprocity and pub talk as a highlights parallels between an infamous 1868 manslaughter ritualised forum for negotiating social status, illustrating case and the Dubliners story ‘Counterparts’, in which a these with a selection of 20th-century texts from Irish clerical officer called Farrington returns from a Bacchanalian masters of the stage and page, including Synge, Joyce, drinking spree to viciously beat his young son. A key Keane, Murphy and McGahern. parallel is the setting of Mulligan’s pub as the site of the excessive drinking that fuelled the domestic attacks. These parallels provide nuance to Joyce’s defence to his publishers that: ‘Nothing happens in the public houses. Good puzzle would be cross Dublin without People drink’ (Joyce 1912, cited in Ellmann 1983, p. 331). passing a pub (Joyce 1992, p. 69). While it is true that the violent denouement of ‘Counterparts’ does not take place in the pub itself, the So ponders Leopold Bloom as he passes Larry O’Rourke’s story is carefully crafted to establish clear connections pub on his early morning wanders to buy a mutton kidney. between the brutal violence and the pub-based activities We have only just met the protagonist of James Joyce’s and incidents that precede it. Farrington beats his son to Ulysses and he has not yet had his breakfast, but his redress the slippages of power that he experiences in the bourgeois advertising agent’s brain is already unpicking pub, and the publican is the only winner. another puzzle: where do self-made publicans get the Nonetheless, Joyce remained confident that publicans money to build such lucrative businesses? His theory is not would enjoy their premises being mentioned in Dubliners. altogether flattering. He wrote to Stanislaus: ‘I offered to take a car and go with Save it they can’t. Off the drunks perhaps. Put Roberts [the publisher’s managing director], proofs in down three and carry five. What is that? A bob here hand, to the 3 or 4 publicans really named. I said the and there, dribs and drabs. On the wholesale orders publicans would be glad of the advertisement’ (Joyce, perhaps. Doing a double shuffle with the town pp. 331–332). Furthermore he warned that, while he was travellers. Square it with the boss and we’ll split the willing to appease the publishers by switching the real job, see? (Joyce, pp. 69–70) names for fictitious ones, ‘by so doing the selling value in Dublin of the book would go down’ (Ellmann 1983, During the course of Bloom’s travels in and around p. 332). These canny and prophetic comments illustrate Dublin city more than 50 pubs are name-checked (O’Brien that, in spite of the implicitly critical nature of much of his 2014, p. 213). Several of these feature as settings for depictions of public houses, Joyce was explicitly aware of prominent scenes involving Bloom and a host of local the mutual benefits to both writer and publican of what characters, most of whom drink considerably more than has since proved to be a peculiarly symbiotic relationship. our anti-hero. Part of the enduring intrigue of Ulysses, and perhaps Unlike Joyce himself, Bloom boasts a relatively modest one of the best-known elements in a book that ‘may be appetite for alcohol. But both however seem to share a more talked about than read’ (Mullin 2016), is an certain respect for the business nous of Dublin’s many extraordinary sense of place, achieved through its publicans. Bloom knows that there is no use canvassing painstakingly accurate depiction of Dublin’s early 20th- that ‘cute old codger’ Larry O’Rourke for an ad. ‘Still,’ he century streetscape. And, arguably, the spin-off literary pub 2 Powerful Puzzles: Mapping the Symbiosis Between Two Great Signifiers of Irishness, The Writer and The Pub culture that has since evolved in Joyce’s home town has frequented by newcomers or returnees is a key storytelling remained mutually beneficial to publicans and publishers device in Tom Murphy’s Conversations on a Homecoming, alike and has helped to secure the status of both the Irish a one-act play written for and first performed by Galway’s pub and the Irish writer as great signifiers of Irishness. Druid Theatre in 1983. The conversations in question take place in their old haunt, The White House pub, between returned emigrant Michael who is fleeing his life as a failed Methodology and selected texts actor in New York and his childhood friends who have This paper will explore the theme of power within the stayed in their west of Ireland hometown. Much of their context of that long-established, still-evolving and talk centres around an impassioned critique of JJ, the ever-ambiguous symbiotic relationship between the Irish absentee publican who had himself returned from a failed pub and the Irish writer. It will trace the evolution of that life in England and had fired the imagination of locals with relationship with reference to a selection of 20th-century his similarities — in physique, charisma and promised texts from Irish masters of the stage and page, and outline ideals — to a young JFK (Murphy 2012). how the broader contemporary drinks industry, cultural John McGahern, described by literary critic Declan industry, and an emerging ‘drinks culture’ industry are Kiberd as ‘the foremost prose writer in English now in capitalising on the power of that historic symbiosis. Ireland’ (Maher and Kiberd 2002, p. 86), also used the Referencing ideas of capital and commensal politics setting of the pub for many short stories, notably ‘The developed by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and anthropologist Country Funeral’. In this later story, three brothers travel Michael Dietler respectively, it will examine the power play from Dublin city to a Leitrim village for the funeral of evident within key elements common to the Irish pub, their bachelor uncle, for which they organise provisions for notably the rounds system of buying drinks as a ritual of the wake in the village’s local pub. The return journey sees reciprocity and pub talk as a ritualised forum for negotiating them stop in on various country pubs and the story is social status and illustrate these with references from the bookended by visits to their local pub in Dublin, Mulligan’s selected literary texts. of Poolbeg Street (McGahern 1992, pp. 374–408). Joyce was not the first writer to recognise the potency of the pub as both a resource to draw from and a setting to The literary pub project onto, and nor was he the first to present a complex picture of these ubiquitous public institutions and the The above overview is by no means exhaustive but serves as people who both run them and frequent them. a useful collection of texts for this paper’s examination of John Millington Synge, who wrote that ‘what is highest power in relation to the Irish pub in Irish writing. There in poetry is always reached where the dreamer is leaning out are several more writers whose lives were and legacies to reality, or where the man of real life is lifted out of it’ (cited remain intertwined with Irish pub culture: poet Patrick in Smith 1996, p. xvi), chose the pub as the prosaic setting Kavanagh, playwright Brendan Behan and writer Brian for his poetic masterpiece Playboy of the Western World, a O’Nolan who wrote under the pseudonyms of Flann play so powerful in its unflinching portrayal of ‘countrymen O’Brien and Myles na gCopaleen. While famed for and women as capable not just of murder, but of idealising it’ frequenting pubs, these writers wrote little about them, (Smith 1996, p. xix) that it caused nightly riots throughout although evocative accounts are provided by their friend its original 1907 run in the Abbey Theatre. Irish and literary associate Anthony Cronin in his memoir of the nationalistic audiences were outraged by its darkly comic 1950s bohemian pub culture they inhabited, Dead as narrative of Christy Mahon, a stranger whose hyperbolic tale Doornails (Cronin 1999). of killing his father brings ‘excitement and heroism to a small If the ‘literary pub scene’ reached its heyday in the Irish community desperately in need of it’ (Smith).