In the old irish tonality: oral echoes and traditional culture in the works of James Joyce and Ciaran Carson

The idea of devoting a study on the influence of the Irish oral tradition on Irish literature was born while I was writing my degree thesis on Patrick McCabe. A short section of my work was dedicated to the influence of the senchaí tradition on McCabe’s style. My attempt to describe the stylistic features of McCabe’s storytelling voice was thwarted by the scarceness of formal studies on the features of the Irish storytelling style. The unavailability of textual studies of Irish oral tales is imputable to the structuralist method that was dominant in the field of folklore studies; scholars were more interested in the folklore system than in the formal features of the individual tale. At any rate, the lack of comprehensive studies on the style of storytelling has prevented an analytical comparison between the style of storytelling and contemporary literature; in fact, lip service is often paid to the influence of the oral tradition, but few authors have bothered to analyse such an influence at the stylistic level. The aim this research is investigating the influence of the Irish oral tradition on the works of James Joyce and Ciaran Carson. Joyce’s works have been praised for the accurate representation of the Dublin vernacular, which has been interpreted as a feature of Joyce’s naturalistic poetics. In my study, I intend to demonstrate that Joyce went well beyond the representation of speech, for orally derived features abound at all levels of Joyce’s text. Themes and tropes of traditional origin abound also in Ciaran Carson’s work, which has been profoundly influenced by the author’s experience as an Officer for Traditional arts. In his poetry and prose Carson analyses the aesthetics and the epistemology of the Irish oral tradition; his works have also served as a theoretical foundation for my analysis of oral culture. The oral models at the basis of my analysis are those belonging to the Irish storytelling tradition and to Irish traditional music. The performative dimension is fundamental in both branches of the Irish tradition, which are based on a paradigm of communication in which language is not just a means for transmitting information, but also a instrument to strengthen the cohesion of the community. Thematic and formal tropes of traditional origin will be described in the chapters dedicated to Irish storytelling and music, and subsequently singled out in Joyce’s and Carson’s work; the influence of the oral tradition will be also investigated at the level of plot construction. Other stylistic tropes are not linked directly to the Irish tradition, but are related to the more general features of orally transmitted culture; to analyse these tropes I will refer to contemporary studies on orality, collectively identified as oralist theory.