Island Culture: The Role of the Blasket Autobiographies in the Preservation of a Traditional Way of Life

Eamon Maher

Issue 387, vol.97, Autumn 2008

Twenty Years A-Growing is far more buoyant in its celebration of the joys associated with living in close proximity to nature, the excitement of hunting animals and collecting birds’ eggs, the delights of music and conversation, the solidarity among neighbours. The harsher side of life, the pain of premature death or the doubts felt in relation to an uncertain future, the need to provide for a wife and family – these are all absent in O Suilleabhain’s account. The author is gradually succumbing to the lure of the outside world and the opportunities it affords to those with talent and energy – all the while, however, waxing more lyrical in his description of the earthly paradise from which he will soon be gone.

For O Criomhthain, the inhabitants of the mainland are a weaker race – because deprived of the mutual support and frugal healthy lifestyle of the islanders. John McGahern writes that his own literary evolution was influenced by the style of The Islandman and its resonances of fortitude in the face of life’s tribulations: “Each new day will break on the world with its own claims, demands that care nothing for sorrow. Sorrow, because it blinds and weakens us, is an impairment, and the action required by the new day will require all our faculties and strength”.

The routine of island life was poetic in its simplicity, punctuated by work, prayer, songs and stories recounted around the open fire. Each of these authors evinces “a deep humility before the tradition – accompanied by an invincible pride”. The impending demise of this civilisation added urgency to the need these people felt to chronicle a way of life on the verge of extinction.

 “The island life was part of the creation myth of the Irish state, according to which ‘the western island came to represent Ireland’s mythic unity before the chaos of conquest…at once the vestige and the symbolic entirety of the undivided nation’. They were a past that would also be a future. Their supposed isolation had preserved them from corruption, kept their original Irishness intact through long centuries of foreign rule”. But in reality, economic forces and pragmatism would ensure that the English language became the working language of a nation hungry to rid themselves of a bleak past and to make their way in the world (thus facilitating movement to the mainland, or emigration).