8 CARNIVALIZING IRISH CATHOLICISM: AUSTIN CLARKE'S THE SUN DANCES AT EASTER
The literary reputation of Austin Clarke (1896–1974) is largely based on his satirical poetry, but he also wrote three narratives which he referred to as “prose romances” and which he set in the Middle Ages. While the first narrative, The Bright Temptation (1932), and the third, The Sun Dances at Easter (1952), are lighthearted in tone and optimistic in outcome, the second book, The Singing-Men at Cashel (1936), is much more dark and brooding in both respects. For all the differences between them, however, the three narratives contain similar ingredients, and many of the images and themes of The Bright Temptation recur in the later volumes, but with a different emphasis. It could be argued that the second book reshapes and rearranges elements similar to those of the first romance in such a way that the emphasis shifts away from romance and towards menippean satire. Much of the resultant complication has to do with structural dislocation and the breaking up of narrative logic and continuity. The Sun Dances at Easter restores narrative continuity to some degree, as it camivalizes rather than satirizes the world it depicts.
The world of Clarke's prose narratives is that of early medieval Ireland before the Norman Conquest of the twelfth century. Clarke's portrayal of the medieval world, however, is “selective and sometimes inaccurate. His use of history tends to be sketchy, but he is intent on describing a world that is similar to his own and yet significantly different” (Harmon 1989, 32). The period appealed to Clarke for two reasons. Firstly, it was more relevant to modern Ireland than the more distant and mythological past that had appealed to the earlier revivalists of the “Celtic Twilight” period (although that mythology is by no means absent from Clarke's work): in the Church of both the Celtic-Romanesque and the modern period, Clarke perceived a strong emphasis on asceticism and mortification of the flesh. Secondly, however, the ancient Church “was in some respects independent of Roman control, had superb achievements in scholarship and art, […] whereas the modern post-Tridentine Irish Church was controlled by the Papacy and neither the clergy nor the people were distinguished for their intellectual independence or their artistic achievements” (Harmon 1989, 32–33). For Clarke, who is concerned strongly with the position of the arts and with freedom of artistic expression in a country dominated by a puritanical morality, the Celtic-Romanesque Church thus forms a dualistic image of praise and blame: an institution simultaneously to be denounced and commended.
Like satire, carnival is aimed at subverting authority and undermining hierarchical structures. Unlike satire, however, it is not purely negative but includes a positive, celebratory aspect; according to Bakhtin, carnival and ritual laughter are linked with destruction and regeneration, and with symbols of the reproductive force: “Combined in the act of carnival laughter are death and rebirth, negation (a smirk) and affirmation (rejoicing laughter)” (PDP, 127). In The Sun Dances at Easter, carnival laughter ridicules the sterile forces of authority and celebrates the fertile powers of nature and the imagination.
Rejoicing laughter and reproduction form the core elements of Clarke's narrative. The plot is as follows: Orla and Flann have been married for over two years, but in spite of their prayers Orla's dearest wish, to have a child, has not been fulfilled. A jolly, fat, wandering cleric (who later turns out to be the Irish god of love, Aongus, in disguise) promises Orla a son if she visits the Well of Saint Naal (or Natalis) and sees the Blessed Trout jump. The pagan god represents the material, bodily principle of renewal and fertility, and his arrival causes a temporary suspension of the power of the official Church. In spite of Flann's objection to the pagan superstition, Orla sets out on the journey. On her way she meets a young scholar called Enda, who closely resembles her husband; he is a student at a monastic school and also in search of a miracle: he wishes to see an angel. He decides to keep her company, and entertains her with two stories, both involving Aongus, which take up much of the book. Orla visits the well and sees the trout jump, at which point Flann, who had been put on the wrong road by Aongus, finally catches up with his wife. In due course Orla gives birth to a baby boy who looks exactly like his father; the identity of the latter is intentionally left open to speculation.
The essence of the book is captured in its title, The Sun Dances at Easter. It refers to a once popular superstition in Ireland that the sun, when it rises on Easter morning, dances with joy at the (re-)birth of Christ, man's hope of salvation. The superstition has pagan origins and is probably connected with the return of the sun and the renewal of life in the spring. As a festival of material rebirth and renewal, therefore, Easter has important carnival connotations, which have largely been lost in modern times, but of which the medieval church was fully aware. In his discussion of the risus paschalis, Bakhtin points out that Easter time in the medieval church was traditionally associated with laughter, physical joy and celebration: “During the Easter season laughter and jokes were permitted even in church. […] The jokes and stories concerned especially material bodily life, and were of a carnival type. Permission to laugh was granted simultaneously with the permission to eat meat and to resume sexual intercourse (forbidden during Lent)” (RW, 78–79). Clarke, however, foregrounds the “intolerant, onesided tone of seriousness” which Bakhtin claims is characteristic of official medieval culture, with its concomitant emphasis on “asceticism, somber providentialism, sin, atonement, suffering, as well as the character of the feudal regime, with its oppression and intimidation” (RW, 73). In The Sun Dances at Easter, the aspect of laughter and material renewal is exclusively represented by the pagan Irish god Aongus.
To understand some of the motivation behind Clarke's depiction of the Church, it is important to know that the Irish Catholic bishops, beginning in the 1920s and throughout the 1930s and 1940s, persistently expressed their grave concern about the decline in sexual morality in the country, which they attributed largely to foreign influences: “New mass media — the cinema, the radio, and above all the English sensational newspapers […] — were bringing unfamiliar values to the attention of their flocks” (Whyte 1980, 24–25). The replacement of traditional Irish dancing by foreign dances which, in the words of Archbishop Gilmartin of Tuam, “lent themselves not so much to rhythm as to low sensuality” (25), seems to have been one of their greatest worries. The Irish bishops voiced their fears in a joint pastoral in 1927: “The evil one is ever setting his snares for unwary feet. At the moment, his traps for the innocent are chiefly the dance hall, the bad book, the indecent paper, the motion picture, the immodest fashion in female dress — all of which tend to destroy the virtues characteristic of our race” (27). By making the “evil one” in The Sun Dances at Easter the indigenous Irish god Aongus, Clarke problematizes such racial arguments involving the inherent sexual purity of the Irish. As an antidote to such monologic thinking, the title of his book introduces an ambivalent juxtaposition of Christian and pagan elements characteristic of carnival: a two-faced, contradictory image that is repeated in the image of Aongus in the garb of a Christian monk.
The dance as an image of physical celebration is a recurring element in The Sun Dances at Easter. On the way to the well, Orla is distracted by twelve merry children who dance with her in a circle, and as she moves around, troubled memories of her own childhood begin to flood her mind until “she was no longer dancing under the fairy thorn, she was being dragged around that other tree in the cold shadowy Garden of Eden where no children ever played. She was unbaptizing herself, searching into the false horrors of the soul”’ (Clarke 1952, 40). The fertile, joyful imagery of the pagan fairy dance is mirrored by the cold and sterile vision of the Christian Eden: in Paradise there is no celebration, and there are no children. Such inverted mirror images are typical of carnivalized literature because, as Bakhtin puts it, “they unite within themselves both poles of change and crisis” (PDP, 126); in other words, in their duality they contain both problem and solution. If Orla's wish to have a child is to be fulfilled, it will have to be with pagan assistance and in defiance of official Church doctrine.
The merry stranger who promises Orla that her wish will be fulfilled if she goes on the pilgrimage is himself the very incarnation of carnival ambivalence. When she sees him approaching from far away, Orla at first thinks of the distant skipping dot as a sign from Heaven, then as a gigantic flea or a goat, and finally as perhaps only a figment of the imagination. The shape-shifting wanderer who finally arrives may be all of the above:
He was cloistered beyond all charity in his own findings: scraps of frieze, loom-droppings, patches of fur, pelts that a ragpicker would have thrown away; and these treasures of his were tied and twisted with sugaun, pinned to their quadragesimal knots with huge thorns, skewered and pothooked from shoulder to muddied hem. He was out at the knees and in at the elbows. He was so enormously fat that the entire collection clung to him or clambered about him in fleshly bulges and bursts of frightened modesty. He was a standing humiliation and a holy show. But as he chuckled and clucked to himself, some of the tattings, the taggles, shook with little jokes of their own, despite their insecurity, and bobbed the hundreds of withered burrs which they had caught in last year's woods. His chesty beard wagged beneath the goatskin hood which almost hid his red face. His paunch rumbled with such mirth beneath an enormous hairy hand-grasp that at one moment his robes were all holes, at the next moment all mendings, and the moment after that the seams had changed places again and the uncountable rips went into little stitches of laughter. (Clarke 1952, 14)
The cleric's patchwork outfit and his merriment associate him with the clown or rogue figure of traditional folklore who plays an important part in carnival: such figures laugh at themselves as they are laughed at by others; they are both ridiculous and subversive at the same time. The cleric's ever-changing, motley costume of found bits and pieces represents this ambivalent lack of unity in his identity. Orla's reaction to the cleric's words — she wants to dance and kneel in prayer at the same time, and laughs and cries simultaneously — is as ambiguous as the “disgraceful sanctity” of the monk himself (15). Bakhtin describes similar characters in medieval Latin literature:
The character of the monk is either complex or intermittent. First, as a devotee of material bodily life he sharply contradicts the ascetic ideal that he serves. Second, his gluttony represents the parasitism of a sluggard. But, third, he also expresses the positive, “shrove” principles of food, drink, procreative force, and merriment. The authors offer these three aspects concurrently, and it is difficult to say where praise ends and where condemnation starts. (RW. 294)
The stranger is indeed a “holy show” in that his person, like the title of the book, unites the sacred with the profane in true carnival fashion.
Both Orla and Enda are in search of fulfilment. When Enda was seven years of age he witnessed the miraculous passing of the last Irish saint escorted by a bright flight of angels, since which time there had been no more miracles. Enda's dearest wish is to see an angel, but his only attempt so far to witness the sacred had resulted in an experience of profanity. He had tied himself to a stone where an angel was supposed to appear at night, but when he awoke to a sensation of falling dew and rustling wings, “an enormous bird rose from the pillarstone into the moonlight with a croak. I tore up handfuls of the blessed grass and raved as I wiped the bird-filth from my head” (Clarke 1952, 52). This grotesque experience is not necessarily merely negative, however, but serves as an example of what Bakhtin calls “positive negation”, that is, a deliberate mixing of hierarchical levels (reversal of top and bottom, the head in contact with excrement) to free the object from all hierarchical norms and values, in order to create a new conception of the world (RW, 403). Such degradation “has not only a destructive, negative aspect, but also a regenerating one”: it is “the world passing through the phase of death on the way to birth” (RW, 21, 412). In other words, it is the first step towards the granting of Enda's wish. As they set out on their journey, Orla assures him that the hermit who promised her a son will make his dream come true as well.
According to Bakhtin, carnivalization, “with its joy at change and its joyful relativity, is opposed to that one-sided and gloomy official seriousness which is dogmatic and hostile to evolution and change, which seeks to absolutize a given condition of existence or a given social order” (PDP, 160). Whereas festive laughter “was linked with the procreating act, with birth, renewal, fertility, abundance”, medieval seriousness “was infused with elements of fear, weakness, humility, submission, falsehood, hypocrisy, or on the other hand with violence, intimidation, threats, prohibitions” (RW, 94, 95). The Church in The Sun Dances at Easter is depicted as an institution corrupted by hypocrisy:
“The pious leave their wealth to religion so that our churches may be fair and ornamented, and they are rewarded in the future life. Virgins who take the veil and become heavenly brides must bring with them to their community an earthly dowry. Riches are dangerous, but the clergy hold them in trust, so that those who live in the world may be spared from further temptation”. (Clarke 1952, 127)
It is in this context of double standards that laughter and mirth confront the high seriousness of Church and State. In that sense, laughter represents a force of renewal that liberates from dogmatism, falsehood and intolerance.
Clarke frequently depicts such moments of liberation in combination with a fall, a physical reversal of top and bottom which deliberately mixes the hierarchical levels and places the character outside all norms and values (RW, 403). When Orla notices how attractive Enda is and how much he resembles her husband, “a ridiculous thought skipped into her mind and she could not help laughing at its impudence. She should have been ashamed of herself, but instead, she shook so mirthfully that she almost sprawled off her mount, and had to grab wildly at flank and mane” (Clarke 1952, 57). Orla's impudent thought, her laughter and her near fall are more genuine, and therefore ultimately more fruitful, than her attempts to please Heaven through severity and abstinence: “During the seven weeks of Lent she had kept to her own half [of the bed], in order that Heaven might be favourable at last to her husband and herself” (19). As Craig Tapping points out, “the assumption that conception is associated with sexual repression motivated by Christian asceticism suggests that Christianity has somehow overturned the natural order” (1981, 143).
The narrative of The Sun Dances at Easter incorporates two stories based on medieval sources but substantially altered by Clarke. They are both related by Enda to Orla and are of direct relevance to the main plot and its outcome. His first story is called by Clarke “The House of the Two Golden Methers”, and is based on the fourteenth-century Altram Tige Dá Medar, translated by Lilian Duncan as “The Fosterage of the Houses of Two Methers” (a mether is a drinking cup). The tale “shows native Irish Christianisation of a pagan Celtic magic-vessel story” (Murphy 1955, 32) and juxtaposes the old gods of Ireland (the Tuatha Dé Danann, or Sídhe) and the new religion introduced by Saint Patrick — not in a genuine dialogue, however, but only in order to justify the coming of Christianity: “‘Is there a god over our gods?’ said Aengus. ‘There is, indeed’, said Manannán, ‘the one God Almighty who is able to condemn our gods, and whom they are not able to despoil’” (Duncan 1932, 210). According to the story, this new God takes all who are obedient to him into his Heaven, and puts all those who are against him in prison for punishment. The entire tale is a parable illustrating the power of the new religion over the old and the sad but inevitable demise of the Tuatha Dé Danann.
In the original story, the old gods and the representatives of Christianity confront each other over the possession of the soul of Ethne, Aengus' foster-child. Mananann explains that Ethne can only drink the milk of a cow she herself milks into a golden mether, and cannot eat the food of the Sídhe because one of their company had insulted her, and at that moment
“her accompanying demon went (from) her heart and an angel came in its stead, and that does not let our food into her body, and she will not revere magic or wizardry henceforth, and it is for that reason she drinks the milk of that cow, for it was brought from a righteous land, i.e. India. […] and it is the […] three-personed Trinity which will be the God of worship for that maiden”, said he. (Duncan 1932, 216)
Soon after the arrival of Saint Patrick in Ireland, the otherworldly Ethne becomes visible to the cleric Ceasan, who instructs her in the Christian faith. One day Aengus and the other members of the Sídhe come to look for her; Ceasan prays for help and Saint Patrick himself arrives to confront Aengus. When Ethne hears Aengus' people lamenting her loss, she falls ill; she asks Patrick to baptize her and to pardon her sins, for, “Though there be many cries and weepings I among the womenfolk of the Brugh, 11 prefer the cry of clerics round my head, I protecting my soul from Hell” (223). Having uttered this lay, she dies piously, whereupon Patrick ordains that her tale will have many benefits and virtues for those who listen to it, among them happiness and fertility in marriage, safety, liberty and prosperity: “every one who has this elegy / he shall win the goal” (225).
The version of the story Austin Clarke puts into the mouth of Enda is a parody of the original in that its intention is directly opposed to that of its source, and yet for Orla the tale appears to carry all the blessings of the original. In Enda's camivalized version, Christianity is the religion of suffering and fear described by Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World, while the Súdhe represent happiness and laughter; the emphasis is not so much on Eithne's (Clarke's spelling) conversion to Christianity as on Ceasan's increasing longing to join the Sídhe. Eithne vaguely remembers coming from a place of happiness and peace, but now she wants only to learn how to be a good Christian, which means banishing all joy, concentrating on suffering and pain, and submitting to the Church's authority:
“I will never look at a book again, 1 will submit my reason, knowing that complete and unquestioning faith is all, that we must be guided by the heart and not by thought. You have said that the training and exercise of the intellect is necessary only in order that the false arguments of the pagan philosophers may be confuted. […] Have you not said that Ireland will be renowned in the future before all other lands, that faith will prosper there and be known by the threefold sign of obedience, simplicity and total ignorance?” (Clarke 1952, 116)
Aongus approaches Eithne, but she refuses to return to the Otherworld; afterwards she remembers “[o]nly that there was some wonderful happiness near me, and yet I knew that I must avoid it. Was it wrong of me to struggle against it, Ceasan, to want sorrow instead?” (106–107). Ceasan does not know the answer: the more Eithne questions him, the more he begins to question the Church's one language of truth.
From the moment he first meets Eithne, Ceasan feels guilty at the pleasure she brings him and the temptation she represents. She tells him to eat the salmon he has caught but “he was uneasy, feeling that he must not yield to the pleasures of appetite” (86); later he watches her sleep and realizes too late that this makes him guilty of shameful curiosity: “His eye had been held by its own immodesty and was taking a wrongful pleasure against his will” (89). While his instructions guide Eithne towards religious obedience, her presence guides him towards material and physical pleasure. He begins to forget to say his prayers, and when he does try to pray, it is as if “the Adversary was deliberately distracting him, snatching away the right words in order to defeat his purpose” (98–99). Instead he longs to sec Aongus, to “tell him I am half mad for that unending happiness, for that knowledge which is its cause” (113). Ceasan feels his mind sinking into pagan superstition, but when he goes in search of help from Patrick he is caught in a storm: he steps in a quagmire, stumbles — another liberating fall — and has to return when he finds that he cannot cross the flooded ford that divides him from the monks on the other side. Eithne, sensing the danger they are in, insists that Ceasan baptize her, but when he begins half-heartedly to pronounce the rite, she disappears: “and, then, from the cliff-wood, came, in echo, his own cry of disbelief” (131).
Whereas in the original version of the story there is no question about the superior power and authority of the Church over the Tuatha Dé Danann (who themselves also concede God's greater strength), Enda's version is much more ambiguous. Ceasan is confused by the juxtaposition of different worlds, by the conflict between body and soul, faith and superstition, happiness and suffering, and asks himself the agonized question, “But why was everything next to nothing?” (128). Ceasan is caught in what Bakhtin calls carnival ambivalence: “everything lives on the very border of its opposite. […] opposites come together, look at one another, are reflected in one another, know and understand one another” (PDP, 176). Instead of the single vision of the original story, Enda's version creates a duality typical of carnivalized literature which evades a “conclusive conclusion” (PDP, 176).
Enda's version of “The House of the Two Golden Methers” sets up a duality between a joyful, pagan religion and a severe. Christian religion of suffering. Although Orla does not comment on the story directly, her encounter with the comical hermit has convinced her of the importance of religious joy, a joy lacking in the official representatives of the Church: “I knew then that all true religion is happy, for he laughed with me, and when he nodded my soul was filled with joy. Indeed when he shook with that holy laughter, even his rags danced so that I thought they were a lovely bird-flock which was trying to fly over his head” (Clarke 1952, 140). She does not yet realize that the birds and the dance represent Aongus, the god of love. When Orla arrives at the women's hostel there are more images of carnival and fertile celebration: six mummers in corn masks and bibs dance a wild reel, and during the dance she sees men and women disappearing into the bushes. She begins to understand the ancient secret of the Well of Saint Naal, but just as she herself is about to give in to the spirit of the occasion, Enda appears beside her to take her further on her journey.
Almost immediately Orla and Enda find themselves wandering around in a circle, caught in a fairy-ring. In Enda's first story, Ceasan had wondered: “Were there many worlds, each with their own order of invisible beings, known in dream or delirium by the different races of mankind?” (111); for Orla and Enda the boundaries between these different worlds begin to dissolve. At first they take shelter from the rain in a small hut and fall asleep; when they wake up they make their way to a hall where two small golden methers appear to them, filled with mead. Orla remembers the story of Eithne and Ceasan, and Enda recalls that “part of the story is lost, and I've never been able to find it in any manuscript” (162): it appears that they themselves are living the missing part, for it is no longer clear whether their experiences are taking place in reality, in the Otherworld, in fiction, or in a dream. If, as Bakhtin contends, carnival celebrates a temporary liberation from the established hierarchical order, and frees human imagination for new potentialities, then this principle also, and perhaps especially, applies to the narrative levels of Clarke's text, whose elements begin to intermingle freely as their hierarchical division is temporarily suspended.
Orla suspects she is falling in love with Enda and he with her, and to distract them both she asks him for another story; this time, inspired by the comical hermit and the lessons of the previous story, she insists on a merry tale. Enda's story, “The Only Jealousy of Congal More”, is loosely based on Eachtra Chléirigh na gCroiceann or “The Adventures of the Skin-Clad Cleric”. Robin Flower summarizes the story as follows:
Aonghus an Bhrogha comes to the court of Congal Cindmagair (king of Ireland 705–710) in hideous guise as a cleric of S. Patrick's company to demonstrate to the king that his boast of his wife's excelling chastity is premature. He transforms the king into a goat, which he sells to the queen, and the king, thus transformed, witnesses his wife's lightness. Afterwards the king is brought back to his natural shape on the hill of Howth and is taken overseas to a fairy island. From the island he brings a magic cup by means of which his wife, her lover, the prior of a monastery, and various other characters are caught in a compromising situation, the hands of the queen and her lover adhering to the cup and the other characters adhering to them. (Flower 1926, 367)
In this version of the story, Congal's disguise enables him to witness his wife's adultery, which the magical cup then allows him to prove. In Austin Clarke's version, the serious ideological intent of the tale is carnivalized as its outcome is reversed and its main character debased. In Enda's story, King Congal More is married for the second time, to his late first wife's sister, a practice normally frowned upon by the medieval Church. In this case, however, the second marriage was blessed, because Congal gave land and stock to the religious orders; Congal himself, meanwhile, is the staunchest supporter of the severely moralistic Abbot-bishop in upholding standards of decency in his kingdom. Congal's disguise as a goat backfires to the extent that he comes to regard his bestial and humiliating experiences as a punishment for spying on his wife. The pious king's grotesque transformation into an animal traditionally associated with lechery and the devil exposes him to ridicule, and symbolizes the hypocrisy of the moralistic attitude he adopts to gain favour with the Abbot-bishop.
In the story about Congal, Clarke uses explicit carnival motifs when he contrasts the official, serious representatives of Church and State with the laughing figure of the roguish monk. The bishop — like that grotesque personification of the Catholic fast, King Lent, in Rabelais — represents “a personification of the bias against natural processes characteristic of medieval ideology” (FTC, 175):
It happened on a sunny day in Spring that the Lord Abbot-bishop of Midhe and his white-clad clergy were approaching the slopes of Tara. Behind every bush, as they passed, the birds went into hiding, reeds shook, tiny pleasure-seekers clambered down from the grass-stalks and took to their heels. Every thicket, every pool was still, for the reverend Macuad was the most renowned moralist in Ireland, and wherever he went he was both feared and respected. (Clarke 1952, 171–172)
As the bishop begins to preach to a large public gathering he denounces all amusement and worldly pleasures: “Traditional stories and poems that incite passion have become widespread and we are threatened with a new era of paganism. In consequence the moral law is openly flouted, and there has been a disgraceful laxity of conduct” (173). As discussed earlier, this is a partial reversal of the position of the Irish bishops of the early twentieth century, who saw the threat of this new paganism in the influence of foreign media rather than in traditional Irish stories and poems.
The Lord Abbot-bishop is not just a stock depiction of a moralistic clergyman; Macuad is a thinly veiled satirical portrait of the Most Reverend John Charles McQuaid, who was appointed Archbishop of Dublin in 1940 (he retired in 1972). Archbishop McQuaid was uncompromising on matters of sexual morality; as late as 1971 he wrote in a letter to be read in all churches of his diocese:
Given the proneness of our human nature to evil, given the enticement of bodily satisfaction, given the widespread modern incitement to unchastity, it must be evident that an access, hitherto unlawful, to contraceptive devices will prove a most certain occasion of sin, especially to immature persons. The public consequences of immorality that must follow for our whole society are only too clearly seen in other countries. (Whyte 1980, 406)
For several decades, Dr. McQuaid was the bane of Irish writers. John McGahern, for example, claims that he lost his teaching job after his novel The Dark was banned because the Archbishop “had an absolute obsession about what he called impure books” (Carlson 1990, 56); Brian Moore, whose novel The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne was banned in 1955, similarly remarks that Archbishop McQuaid “was a heavy-duty banner, and it was his say-so in the fifties which books were put on the Irish index” (113). The climate following the Literary Censorship Act of 1929 was not conducive to literary expression, and all writers automatically came under suspicion (Harmon 1985, 34); Austin Clarke's third prose narrative, like the previous two, was banned shortly after its publication in 1952. The ban on The Bright Temptation was removed in 1954, but an appeal a year later to have The Sun Dances at Easter removed from the index was unsuccessful.
The sacrilegious monk who sends Orla on her journey, and who represents the incarnation of the paganism and pleasure so forcefully denounced by Macuad, appears with a similar mission in Enda's second story. As Macuad begins to preach, guffaws interrupt his diatribe against immorality, and as the crowd sways back he catches a glimpse of their instigator,
a fat monk with a red foolish face, whispering merrily to those around him. His listeners were nudging each other as if he were telling them a dirty story they had never heard before, and they grabbed at their bigger lip to keep in the bursts of laughter. […]
All could see the monk now, for he had wagged his big head out of its hood and was gabbling like a booby. Never indeed has such a ridiculous figure frolicked at Tara from that day to this. The puckers of his goatskin habit were unmatched-and-patehed among themselves. […J Neighbours were elbowing strangers knowingly as his jokes went by them, the young were giggling, the old were wheezing and clawing their leather, for they remembered the good times they had had in the past. Strong men staggered into fits of laughter until their legs could support them no more, and women could not help wetting themselves, so quickly did the tears run down their cheeks. Lookers who were looped outside the crowd were no luckier, for when they lay down in their mirth, they were tickled again by the grass. (Clarke 1952. 174–175)
Bakhtin explains the role of the clown as that of a carnival figure who exposes the underside and the falseness of a situation:
These figures carry with them into literature first a vital connection with the theatrical trappings of the public square, with the mask of the public-spectacle; they arc connected with that highly specific, extremely important area of the square where the common people congregate; second — and this is of course a related phenomenon — the very being of these figures docs not have a direct, but rather a metaphorical, significance. (FTC, 159)
Elsewhere, Bakhtin describes the form of life represented by clowns and fools as “real and ideal at the same time” (RW, 8). The subversive nature of the irreverent monk's infectious laughter becomes evident as the king's soldiers in vain attempt to capture the culprit, but only manage to strike out at themselves and each other, so that the situation deteriorates into slapstick comedy. The laughter drives a wedge between the crowd and the solemn representatives of authority: “Huge was the merriment of the people and their cheers raced neck to neck. Only Congal, the Lord Abbot-bishop and the clergy sat there with dooming faces” (Clarke 1952, 176).
In his rage, Congal pursues the fleeing monk on horseback, but loses control of his horse and is hurled to the ground. His literal — and symbolic — fall brings him face to face with the monk, who now reveals himself as Aongus. The god tells Congal that his wife is betraying him with another man (cuckoldry is a popular-festive form of uncrowning), and helpfully offers to disguise the king so that he can spy on the adulterous lovers. Before Congal realizes what is happening, he has been turned into a goat. The grotesque transformation provides Congal with a split personality, for “events of the grotesque sphere are always developed on the boundary dividing one body from the other and, as it were, at their points of intersection” (RW, 322). The two halves are fused and yet in conflict with each other: inwardly, to himself, Congal is still the same piously moralistic king, but externally he looks and sounds just like an animal. The king's wife calls him a “stinking brute”, an insult Congal humbly takes to heart before realizing that, as far as his wife is concerned, she is not addressing her husband but chasing away a goat. Even when his wife and her lover go after him with a knife, Congal still believes that Aongus has given him this shape “so that my wife might see the image of her own lust in me” (Clarke 1952, 186).
The most poignant confrontation with himself-as-other for Congal, staunch supporter of what Bakhtin calls “the poetics of the medieval church, of ‘the one language of truth” (DN, 271), is the loss of that unitary language. Congal can still think, but cannot translate his thoughts into meaningful words, and all his attempts at communication are misinterpreted as the very opposite of what he is trying to say. Looking for help, he sneaks into the scriptorium and appeals to Father Ruadan, his spiritual confessor. The astonished priest, however, only hears a bleating noise:
He gaped with surprise when he saw a goat looking up at him. Congal tried to smile, but as the lips curled back from his pointed teeth in a bestial leer, the holy father dropped his book, slowly rose and backed away in terror.
Congal moved towards him, but he crouched closer to the wall.
“Do you not recognize me, Father?” he bleated hopefully. (Clarke 1952, 194)
Ruadan, however, is under the impression that the Devil himself is speaking to him in Hebrew. Congal's confrontation with Macuad is equally ambiguous; as the goat-king totters forward on his hind legs, bleating piously at his “protector and soul-friend” (196), the Abbot-bishop sprinkles him with holy water in an attempt to exorcize the Devil. The scorching pain Congal feels when the water touches him suggests that he has indeed, in some way, become what the others see in him.
Congal's goatish disguise has the function of decrowning the hypocritically pious and moralistic king and confronting him with his own natural instincts, which the Church's teachings reject as being more bestial than human. Bakhtin argues — in connection with Rabelais — that it is in fact these hypocritical teachings themselves that debase the natural functions of life:
The healthy “natural” functions of human nature are fulfilled, so to speak, only in ways that are contraband and savage, because the reigning ideology will not sanction them. This introduces falsehood and duplicity into all human life. All ideological forms, that is, institutions, become hypocritical and false, while real life, denied any ideological directives, becomes crude and bestial. (FTC, 162)
Congal is humiliatingly confronted with the ideology he has himself endorsed when he is caught and put into a pen with a frisky nannie-goat, for the king had supported the Abbot-bishop in his campaign “to remove all direct and indirect incitement towards passion”, and Macuad had “made it a reserved sin for anyone to bring a cow to the bull, let a mare be served, or loose a raddled ram within the fold except under cover of darkness” (Clarke 1952, 205). Realizing his “shameful and ridiculous predicament”, Congal tries to get as far away as he can from the “ill-smelling creature” (204). As a human being, the king has every reason to feel humiliated and outraged at being fancied by an animal — and yet one can hardly blame the goat for being deceived by his appearance; Congal's censuring of the goat's natural behaviour by applying the dubious moral standards of human beings is much less defensible.
Congal's victory over a number of rival bucks in a fight over another she-goat completes his transition towards total bestiality. But as he proudly stalks towards his prize, completely lost in his new identity, the day suddenly darkens: “Devil-headed, he stood there, seeing through the mist the pale forms of the clergy and the stern face of the blessed Macuad. A curse came to his bestial lips and, lost in darkness, he heard the voice of his wife calling him gently” (227). The king wakes up in bed, much relieved at being himself again. The function of dreams in carnivalized literature is to “make ordinary life seem strange”, to force one “to understand and evaluate ordinary life in a new way” (PDP, 147). His dream turned the king into another person, a decrowning double of his real self; he realizes that everything exists on the border of its opposite, and that he must never be jealous of his wife again. Apart from this lesson in tolerance, however, the revolutionary extent of the king's reformation is limited, given the temporary nature of carnival decrowning, and given that each decrowning implies an imminent crowning, and vice versa:
Neither carnival, nor the serio-comic genres it informs, can therefore be truly subversive, for to be so they would have to declare free interplay among people as always superior to the current ruling authority. […] Bakhtin's account of the relationship between authority and carnival ultimately reifies authority, and on aesthetic grounds. […J Freedom is aesthetic freedom, a liberty predicated on a monolithic, dominating centripetal force pervading society. (Howes 1986, 237)
This predominantly aesthetic freedom is evident in the plot of Orla and Enda, who are still temporarily trapped in the land of enchantment, where reality and imagination (in the form of storytelling and wishful thinking) are indistinguishable, where every wish is granted, and “where all that can be imagined is true” (Clarke 1952, 238). Using their free will they escape from the Otherworld, only to find themselves in bed together: “They were still under the enchantment of Aongus and their real wish had been granted to them” (242). Soon thereafter, Enda's dearest wish, to witness a miracle, is fulfilled: he sees a flight of angels and follows it. It is clear that Orla's wish is also about to be granted by Aongus, and that its fulfilment, too, will be miraculous and mysterious. When Orla and Enda wake up once more in the hut where they had taken shelter from the rain, they wonder whether the Otherworld had been just a dream — but if so, it is a dream which they both remember. As soon as they embrace each other again, the narrative becomes deliberately ambiguous: is Aongus giving Orla a chance at having a child, or is Saint Natalis testing her worthiness? Must she resist the temptation, or should she give in to it? The story of Orla and Enda, like that of Ceasan and Eithne, is incomplete, and part of it is not found in any written manuscript: its resolution is a task for the creative imagination. The imagination is fertile, for Orla's wish is granted: “in due course she presented her husband with a fine bouncing boy” (255).
The prevalent ideology of the Church in The Sun Dances at Easter does not accept that it can exist side by side with other beliefs, for its authority (“the truth”) is dependent on its position of uniqueness. The Church therefore always depicts the world in terms of either/or (that is to say, true/ false) oppositions, whereby one term in the equation excludes or denies the other. As Ceasan tells Eithne, “After the Great War in Heaven, the material world was created and since then all thoughts and conditions had their opposites” (80). Thus, or so Enda tells Orla, the pious and official view of Saint Brendan's legendary voyage (a tale, incidentally, much liked by Rabelais) is that the Saint was allowed to see the Earthly Paradise, the Islands of the Blessed, not to experience their happiness, but only in order that he might refute the legends of Oisin and other pagans who sailed across the ocean to the Land of Promise (72). Clarke's narrative, on the other hand, blurs such either/or oppositions. It never becomes clear, for example, whether the nightly church-builders Orla sees at the holy house at Glan are angels, or members of the pagan Súdhe, or merely a dream; nor is the mystery of the conception of Flann Jr. ever revealed. Carnivalized literature is inclusive; it embraces the ambiguity of both/and, and the existence of multiple possibilities; it refuses to be pinned down to one single conclusion, or to be identified with one single moral or ideological conviction. Aongus, the Celtic god who appears in various guises, among them that of a Christian monk, and whose presence and influence are felt at all levels of the narrative, personifies this carnival element.
In The Sun Dances at Easter, carnival laughter ridicules the solemn, monologic and inflexible dogma dictated by the Catholic Church and supported by the Irish State; in the year of the book's publication the Irish Prime Minister was Eamon de Valera, who had been largely responsible for the Irish Constitution of 1937, a document which, according to N.S. Mansergh, attempts “to reconcile the notion of inalienable popular sovereignty with the older medieval conception of a theocratic state” (quoted in Lyons 1973, 538). Opposite this single-minded, closed (and, Clarke would argue, barren) doctrine of one answer and one truth, Austin Clarke posits a creative view that offers several equally possible alternatives, without closure and with no single answer, culminating in the fertile image of a birth, a new beginning. As such, the spirit of the book reflects what Bakhtin considers to be carnival's fundamental principle: “It frees human consciousness, thought, and imagination for new potentialities. For this reason great changes […] are always preceded by a certain carnival consciousness that prepares the way” (RW, 49).
If this is so — the change in climate in Ireland did not begin to happen until the late 1950s — The Sun Dances at Easter is a passive reflection of this spirit rather than an active instigator of social change: its truly liberating process takes place entirely on a textual level, within the closed system of the book itself. On that level, the textual carnival of The Sun Dances at Easter can be seen as a subversion of the legitimizing master narratives of Irish religious and political discourse. The book does not fundamentally attack the authority it mocks; rather, it illustrates the view that “carnival is most vital when institutional authority is most powerfully present as well” (Howes 1986, 237). The decades following the creation of the Irish Free State produced many carnivalized and satirical texts, virtually all of which were banned in Ireland by the very authorities they sought to ridicule. Rather than fulfilling a truly subversive social function, self-contained carnivalized texts like The Sun Dances at Easter reflect the paradoxical double bind of the author writing in the vacuum created by official censorship, seeking to engage his audience in the dethroning of the very authorities by whom he is deprived of this audience.
WORKS CITED
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