Stones of Aran (23 page)
Authors: Tim Robinson
While Synge was at least flirting with the idea of sentimental attachments, the most “statistic” of all investigators of Aran were at work in the big island. A.C. Haddon, Professor of Zoology at the Royal College of Science in Dublin, and C.R. Browne of Trinity College Dublin had recently set up an Anthropometric Laboratory, and the paper on Aran they published in 1893,
inaugurating
a series of systematic studies of the communities of the western seaboard, they describe as “the first fruits of the
Anthropometric
Laboratory in its peripatetic form.” Utterly different from Synge’s descriptions, but perfectly confirming them, are such of their findings as these:
Height
—The men are mostly of a slight but athletic build … Aran average is 1645 mm or about 5 feet 4 ¾ inches, that of 277 Irishmen is 1740 m. or 5 feet 8 ½ inches.
Head
—The head is well shapen, rather long and narrow; but viewed from above the sides are not parallel, there being a slight parietal bulging. The mean Cephalic Index, when reduced to the cranial standard, is 75.1, consequently the average head is to a slight extent, mesaticephalic; although, as a matter of fact, the number measured is nearly evenly divided between mesaticephalic and dolichocephalic. The top of the head is well vaulted, so that the height above the ears is considerable.
Face
—The face is long and oval, with well-marked features … In many men, the length between the nose and the chin has the appearance of being decidedly great.
The battery of instruments with which these results were
obtained
—The Traveller’s Anthropometer, Flowers’ Craniometer, a sliding rule as used in Galton’s Anthropometrical Laboratory, and Chesterman’s steel tape for taking the horizontal
circumference
of the head—must have impressed the islanders, for
measuring
skulls was powerful magic in the hands of their native healers. As to what was going on inside those skulls, Haddon and Browne admit that the question of psychology is very difficult and
delicate
, but nevertheless advance the usual intrusive generalizations Aran has to put up with:
Naturally to the casual visitor the inhabitants show to their best advantage, and to such they appear as a kindly, courteous, and decidedly pleasing
people
. Though begging is becoming more prevalent than formerly, owing to the opening up of the island to tourists, a pleasant independence is often exhibited. We believe them to be “good Catholics.” They have had the
character
of being exceptionally honest, straightforward, and upright. On the other hand, we have been told that the men have no unity or organisation, that they are cunning, untrustworthy, and they certainly are very boastful when in liquor. They rarely fight, but will throw stones at one another.
Occasionally
the old people are badly treated; and when an old man has made
over his farm to his married son, the young people have been known to half starve him, and give him the small potatoes reserved for the pigs. The men do not appear to have strong sexual passions, and any irregularity of
conduct
is excessively rare; only five cases of illegitimacy having been registered within the past ten years. There is no courtship or love-making, marriages being suddenly arranged for, mainly for unsentimental reasons. The
marriages
appear to be as happy as elsewhere; and the women can quite hold their own with the men.
Among innumerable journalistic accounts of the islands from the early years of this century, one curiosity stands out, an article James Joyce placed with
Il
Piccolo
della
Sera,
a newspaper of
Trieste
, where he was living at the time. Its bemusing title is (in translation), “The mirage of the fisherman of Aran—England’s safety valve in case of war,” and it describes a day-trip he made to “Aranmore, the holy island that sleeps like a great shark on the grey waters of the Atlantic Ocean.” The mirage, one obscurely learns, is a project he happened to read about during the voyage, for making Galway into a transatlantic port which would
reinvigorate
Ireland and assure England’s contact with the New World in time of war; Joyce associates this vision with one seen by an Aran fisherman said to have accompanied St. Brendan on his voyages. Everything else in Joyce’s brief evocation is equally adrift.
We stop in one of the steep little streets, uncertain. An islander, who speaks an English all his own, says good morning, adding that it has been a
horrible
summer, praise be to God. The phrase, which at first seems one of the usual Irish blunders, rather comes from the innermost depths of human resignation…. Around the stunted shrubs which grow on the hills of the island his imagination has woven legends and tales which reveal the depth of his psyche. And under his apparent simplicity he retains a slight trace of scepticism, and of humour. He looks away when he has spoken and lets the eager enthusiast jot down in his notebook the astounding fact that yonder hawthorn tree was the little tree from which Joseph of Arimathea cut his walking stick.
Joyce did not share Synge’s empathy with the west; in fact he seems to have feared it as an atavistic and deathly trait in the mentality of his times. The old man of the west is a spectre
Stephen
Dedalus has to face, almost on the eve of his going-forth to encounter life and to forge the conscience of his race:
I fear him. I fear his redrimmed horny eyes. It is with him I must struggle all through this night till day come, till he or I lie dead, gripping him by the sinewy throat till … Till what? Till he yield to me? No. I mean no harm.
And the badinage in
Ulysses
,
when Stephen is told, “The tramper Synge is looking for you. He’s out in pampooties to murder you,” is not to be taken too lightly. To incorporate this peasant world of legends that could be jokes into his own psychic record, Joyce himself would have to invent “an English all of his own,” full of what seem at first to be “the usual Irish blunders.” His throwaway scrap of newspaper column-filling perhaps records the moment of conception of
Finnegans
Wake.
If so, I claim that moment for Aran.
After the First World War, the Easter Rising, the War of
Independence
, the Civil War, after scores of those jolly excursionists to Aran had died in the trenches, and the graduates of the “
University
of Irish” had been shot as rebels or achieved high office in the Free State, after the dislocation and depression of tourism by the “economic war” with Britain, the filming of
Man
of
Aran
in 1932 set the Aran mirage industry on its feet again. Robert
Flaherty
, his family and film-crew and visiting admirers, spent money freely, and laughed away the inhibitions of the islanders about the miraculous new medium that would present them in their ragged nobility on the silver screen of the world. When the film appeared, the “man of Aran” himself was hailed as a star, and Flaherty as a benefactor to the cause of popular entertainment:
Tiger, Tiger burning bright
In the cinema at night
Two and six and one and three
Good old Robert Flaherty.
Thus Aran was launched on a career of mass appeal.
The film itself, despite its innocency, is deep enough to sustain numerous reinterpretations of its own reinterpretation of Aran. It is interesting that in the Venice Film Festival of 1934 it won the Grand Prix or Mussolini Cup, and was well received in Hitler’s Germany, where its theme of man striving against the forces of nature aligned it with the cultish mountaineering films of the time. Even its title is subject to all the inflexions “man” is heir to. As a portrait of a community rooted through the family in the land, or in labour, it needs only the slightest of changes in
emphasis
, a few words added to its subtitles, to swing this epic of struggle to the left or to the right. And if, as he has been pronounced, Man is dead, the nihilistic magnificence of Aran’s storm-beaten cliffs would add grandeur to his drowning.
It may well have been
Man
of
Aran
that brought Aran its strangest visitor. A middle-aged Frenchman who stayed for a few days in August 1937 and left without settling his bill, he is still dimly remembered as “Franncach Sheáinín Bhile,” from the name of the man he lodged with in Eoghanacht village. It is also remembered that the children used to tease him by pretending to steal his walking-stick. The bright, cruel, eyes of children are drawn by signs of psychic trouble, and perhaps they sensed that a wind from hell was blowing this man through Aran, that his stick was a lightning-conductor for the storms of war soon to
overwhelm
the world. He was Antonin Artaud, the dramatist and theoretician of “the theatre of cruelty.” He had recently left the clinic in which he had undergone courses of “detoxification” for his opium addiction, and had been living rough and begging in Montparnasse. As he wrote to a friend just before leaving for
Ireland
:
I do not know what I am but
I
know
that for
22
years I have never ceased
to
burn
, and they have made a pyre of me…. I greatly fear that from
October
and November the fire will be everywhere in Paris. Those whom I love will be sheltered and warned.
For he had lost the power to keep symbols in their own domain, and all the monstrous inventions of his literary genius had
become
for him painful realities about to break out of his mind into the world: “My life fulfils Prophecy,” he wrote to a friend from Galway. A few months earlier he had received certain
illuminations
, and deduced others by “cabbalistic reduction”—
arithmetical
hocus-pocus—of the digits of certain dates, which he expressed in a work called
New
Revelations
of
Being
:
The absolute male of nature has begun to move in the sky…. Because a Cycle of the World is finished which was under the supremacy of the Woman: Left, Republic and Democracy…. That means that the Masses will go under the yoke, and it is just that they should be under the yoke. Because the Masses are by nature Women and it is Man who rules Woman, and not the contrary.
This event was due to take place in five months from June 1937, because:
… on the 3 June 1937 the five serpents appeared which were already in the sword of which the power of decision is represented by a cane!—What does that mean?—That means that I who speak have a Sword and a Cane. A cane with 13 knots and that this cane carries on the ninth knot the magic sign of thunder; that 9 is the numeral of destruction by fire and—
THAT I FORSEE A
DESTRUCTION BY FIRE
…
I see
this
Cane
in
the
middle
of
the
Fire
and
provok
ing
the
destruction
by
Fire.
Some years later he explained the significance of his cane, in a note written on a copy of
The
New
Revelations
of
Being
:
The cane discussed here and which was that of St. Patrick in Ireland is in
reality essentially and before all that of Jesus Christ himself…. From June to September 1937 it was in the hands of the signatory of these lines, and did its work. I have not had it for now for six years and it is now in a safe place. And CHRIST alone will reappear with it or one of the persons of the most holy Trinity.
This copy of his book was dedicated by him (in December 1943, and from the asylum of Rodez) to Adolf Hitler. He had come to Ireland with the idea of returning the cane to its rightful home; but what was it that brought him to Aran in particular, while in the grip of an apocalyptic and Fascistic fantasy, in which it is clear that he himself was to play the role of Führer? In a letter to his family he said that he was looking for the last true
descendents
of the druids, who would understand that humanity must disappear by water and fire. While J.T. O’Flaherty’s Druidical fire-temples and sacrificial altars would have appealed to the
author
of
Heliogabalus,
it is unlikely he would have heard more than the faint echoes of this theme in later writers on Aran. Synge’s vision of Aran as the last stronghold in Europe of the primitive could have been the magnet, or, as I have hinted, the politically ambiguous storms of
Man
of
Aran.
The impending catastrophe did not relieve Artaud of
mundane
troubles while in Aran. As he wrote to André Breton:
Life in Ireland seems to me horribly expensive. I doubt if you could get by in the towns on less than a pound a day. Here where I am it’s a pound a week, there are 9 houses, 3 bushes in the graveyard, and it takes over 2 hours walking to get to the village of Kilronan, where there is a post office, four hotels, 2 bars and about sixty houses. The boat from Ireland calls twice a week. So much for practical details.
But practical details became so pressing after a few days that he left his lodgings, leaving a reassuring note in English for his hosts: “I go to Galway
with the priest
to take money in Post
Office
.” Since the money he had implored his publisher Jean
Paul-han
to send him had not arrived, he fled from Galway too,
leaving
his bill at the Imperial Hotel unpaid. In Dublin he got into street-fights, lost the cane, was arrested and deported as an “
undesirable
.” On arrival at Le Havre, after some trouble with the crew of the ferry, he was taken in a
straight-jacket
to hospital. There followed over eight years of incarceration, and the fifty-one electro-shock treatments, administered without anaesthetic, that failed to torture him back into normality. There also followed the destruction of much of Europe by fire.