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A Mostly Irish Farce
Roger
Boylan
8
Farce, declares the Encyclopædia Britannica, is “a
form of the comic in dramatic art, the object of which is to excite
laughter by ridiculous situations and incidents.” I would
go further: farce is life, only more so. Life, with its disregard
for human dignity, may be tragic, comic, majestic, or mundane,
or all at once, but farce is always there: la farce, according
to the French, who gave us the word (from farcir, to stuff,
as a turkey with chestnuts), “est toujours au rendezvous.”
Farce has been acknowledged as a powerful
force at least since the time of ancient Greece, when it ruled the
satire-dramas of Aristophanes and Menander. The Roman satirists
Terence and Plautus had their own stock language of farce that we
still recognize today: the glutton, the lecher, the clown. Medieval
morality plays often threw in a set of donkey ears, or a swift kick
in the britches. The Elizabethan age, with its daily contrasts of
splendor and squalor (such contrasts being the essence of farce),
was ripe for farcical drama, and Shakespeare embraced the form in
The Comedy of Errors, and many other works, including such ostensibly
serious plays as Measure for Measure.
And consider the enduring appeal of
the 20th century’s farceurs: Charlie Chaplin, the Marx
Brothers, Jacques Tati, Peter Sellers, and Monty Python.The language
of things going wrong, identities getting mixed up, pretensions
demolished by a pie in the face, the turd in the punch bowl: a universal
language indeed. Nor is it just the comics and buffoons who live
by farce. Consider Dostoevsky’s towering grandeur that so often
turns ludicrous in a moment; the prolonged and quite ridiculous
birth of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy; Fellini’s alternately
rollicking and sentimental dramas of sad clowns, whores, and gluttons;
Mahler’s sweeping strings that yield to burlesque hurdy-gurdy
tunes: this is farce as great art, but the spirit of farce pervades
everyday life. As one of the novelist’s duties is to capture
the evanescent in everyday life, capturing the spirit of farce is
one way to ensure that posterity will relate, just as today’s
playgoers laugh at the buffoon antics in Plautus and Aristophanes.
So, with an (ever hopeful) eye on the
future, I subtitled my new novel The Great Pint-Pulling Olympiad
“A Mostly Irish Farce,” just as its predecessor Killoyle
was subtitled “An Irish Farce” (the difference is in the
immigrants, mostly Indian, in the dramatis personae). Now, the antecedents
of Irish farce are ancient indeed, as ancient as the habitation
of Ireland. Among modern Irish writers the distinguished firm of
Joyce, Beckett, and O’Brien, in particular, pays dutiful homage
to the forbears of the genre, the myth-makers and shanachies of
the great epic age of heroism (Finn MacCool, Cu Chulainn) and farce
(mad Sweeney, the pooka). I in turn hope to pay homage to all these,
especially to Ireland itself.
Mind you, if Ireland were pure invention—to
quote Oscar Wilde’s very Irish comment on Japan: “There
is no such country, there are no such people”—it would
be a tremendous help to the novelist writing about the place. In
The Great Pint-Pulling Olympiad, as in Killoyle, I
would have had no competition from the “real” world against
which my made-up city and county of Killoyle must be ruthlessly
judged.
If it existed, Killoyle would be a Danish
and Norman settlement built around an ancient Celtic place of worship,
Cuìll gHuaìll (“the church of the flail”).
It would have a population of 42,000 (making it the fifth largest
in the republic). It would rain intermittently, episodically, especially
during the spring and winter, pausing for moments of dazzling blue
and golden shafts of sunlight and bright puddles reflecting the
opulent sky. There would be stained scraps of newspaper chased along
the gutters by the sea gusts, on which would also ride the scent
of beer-yeast from Molloy’s Brewery and the signature smell
of the British Isles: the grease of frying chips, burgers, bangers,
bacon, kidneys, Mars bars in batter, etc. These aromas would waft
through the damp air to the nostrils of the new arrival aboard the
Brest or Holyhead ferry docking in the harbor.
Then there would be the sea—the
sea, a blue sliver at the end of alleyways, a line on the horizon
beyond the garden gate, a shivering skein of blues and greens and
tints of silvery-gray enfolding the harbor’s long stone jetty.
On stormy days the breakers would crash against the Strand’s
low seawall and spew foam over the jetty. On calm, clear days you
might just be able to make out on the horizon a dun-colored slice,
like roast beef in gravy, of Wales.
There’d be a decent walk along
the seafront called the Promenade, boasting a statue of General
Michael Collins, “The Big Fella” (played by Liam Neeson
in the film), who grew up nearby in the real county, West Cork.
The rich end of the Promenade would be called the Shops, after the
upscale boutiques. Then there would be annual events of the kind
that enliven any resort’s placid routine: the pilgrimage to
the Shrine of the Invisible Virgin (attendance slightly off in these
secular times), a yacht regatta or two in the choppy waters off
Killoyle Harbor, and of course the central event of the novel, the
annual world bartending championship known as the Pint-Pulling Olympiad
(first prize: a pub of your very own), a high-profile show likely
to attract the attention of newspaper hounds, drifters, souvenir
hawkers, and publicity-seekers of more sinister intent, some of
them heavily armed.
As for the characters, I’ve met
them all, in some guise, here and there. There’s Mick McCreek,
another Big Fella straight out of the old Ireland of smoky pubs,
nightly pints, wild fiddle music, and a quick fumble with a likely
gal on the car’s back seat, of a rainy Saturday night. Then
there’s Fergus, the Ulster businessman, and his lover, fickle
Cornelius the local church sexton, a real pair of depressive screwballs,
“gay” in the sociopolitical sense but certainly not in
the emotional one. There’s the poet-turned-hotel-manager, Milo
Rogers, quondam hero of Killoyle, now reduced (or elevated,
I’m not sure which) to doing the footnotes in The Great
Pint-Pulling Olympiad—but he gets his own back with one
of the longest bloody non-epic poems in the history of Irish verse.
Then there’s a character you expect
to meet up with sooner or later in any novel calling itself Irish:
your standard, passionate, beautiful Kathleen ni Houlihan / Sweet
Rosaleen figure—only this time she’s from Calcutta and
her name’s Rashmi. The daughter of wealthy Calcutta communists,
Rashmi’s officially in Ireland doing a six-month factory stint
in a union-sponsored work-exchange program, but her secret mission
from the Indian government is to uncover discrimination against
Indian immigrants—and to keep an eye open for much else besides;
as in the case of Kathleen ni Houlihan, she’s not what she
seems at first sight. Her true identity, apart from that of bona-fide
babe, boggles the mind of her poor working-stiff-of-a-cousin, Anil
Swain, the real hero of the book and man of the hour, the poor bastard.
Unlike Rashmi, who can afford to fly home to India whenever she
wants a new sari, Anil’s a humble immigrant, working as a waiter
at Killoyle’s Koh-I-Noor Indian restaurant. As with most immigrants,
he’s got ambitions to better himself: he wants to run the restaurant,
not just serve nan and curries. In the course of trying to fulfill
this ambition, however, Anil comes up against the age-old conventions
of farce; he has to overcome his yen for his sexy cousin Rashmi
while trying to wriggle out of perilous situations involving mistaken
identity, bullets flying about, and even a car chase—but it’s
all in pursuit of his own happiness and that of Rubina, his demanding
Brahmin wife In a sense Anil and Rubina are what the book’s
about. They are, of all things, immigrants to Ireland—new
arrivals in a nation that attracts talent and ambition just as the
Old Ireland drove them off. So on a somewhat solemn, sociological
level, the book’s about the maturity of the Irish nation as
a member of Europe and the wider world, and the death of long-outmoded
stereotypes.
But
never mind all that, most of all, The Great Pint-Pulling Olympiad
is an homage to Ireland, real and imaginary, and to the Irish
writers who have stamped me forever with their biting irreverence
and love for the sound of a tale well told; as Beckett says of
Joyce: “His writing is not about something. It is the thing
itself.” <
Roger
Boylan is author of the novels Killoyle: An Irish
Farce and The Great Pint-Pulling Olympiad: A Mostly Irish
Farce.
Originally published in the December
2003/January 2004 issue of Boston Review
Excerpt from The
Great Pint-Pulling Olympiad
8 Mick whistled in atonal counterpoint
to the overture to G. Rossini’s L’Italiana in Algeri
rollicking away on Breakfast Classics 105.5 FM.1
The traffic was light at that time of day in most parts of town
and almost nonexistent on the MacLiammoir Ring Road, from which
vantage point there was a grand view of the sea. As a red light
lingered, Mick stared at the view, one of the best things about
living in this godforsaken shithole of a town (no Milan, you can
bet yer bags). Whatever his preoccupations of the moment, he always
gave the view from the MacLiammoir Road a glance of admiration,
especially when there was a chance, as there was on extra-clear
days, of spotting Wales on the far horizon of fact and fantasy,
like Avalon, or Hybrassil—in fact, as he watched, a layer
of mist peeled away and presto! Thar she blew, a thin layer
of crust on the distant line of the sea. It was an inspiring sight:
Cymru! The imagination, if so instructed, might even supply
the distant sound of massed baritones lustily rendering “Men
of Harlech” in the melancholy valleys of South Rhondda and
Gwynedd . . . my oh my, ruminated Mick, not for the
first time. So it was across this sea that Tristan sailed to his
Isolde’s Cornwall and did battle with stout King Mark; that
bloody Cromwell came, in the wake of the even bloodier Vikings;
that the Normans came, too, and conquered; that, some day long
since, the original Celts had arrived from God knows where to
rout the small dusky natives from the cosy comfort of their bogs;
and it was over this selfsame sea that the former Mrs. Eileen
McCreek, fed up with her quondam hubby’s obstinacy of habit
and innate lack of ambition, had, in the tradition of the modern
Irish exile, sailed away on the midnight ferry from Dun Laoighaire,
away from her green land, toward a greener love, to Edinburgh,
city of Boswell and Burns and the whiskey distiller or beer salesman
or whatever the blazes he was who had tempted her to sacrifice
so much so soon. . . .
“Ah, ya sod.”
1 A nephew of mine
(wee Colm, Bertie’s boy) worked at that place. Seems they
walk around starkers most of the time, and shagging isn’t
the half of it, why they spend day and night on top of each other,
so they do. That explains the lengthy musical compositions offered
for public consumption, operas and oratorios and what have you:
changing the record manually cuts into shagging time, like.
From The Great Pint-Pulling Olympiad,
© 2003 by Roger Boylan. Published by Grove Press. All rights
reserved.
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