From ‘Dracula’ to ‘Ulysses,’ Ireland’s Literary Genius Enchants at New York’s Oldest Museum

“Irish Literature: History & Myth Since 1798,” a new show at the New York Historical, makes the case that Irish writers have prospered at what Lionel Trilling called the “bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet.” The exhibition at New York’s oldest museum comes via a loan from the Leonard Milberg Collection, a gathering of some 6,000 pieces housed at Princeton University. The selection offers a glimpse of a gigantic legacy.The show begins at a moment of bitter political failure. The Irish Rebellion of 1798 saw Catholics and Presbyterians unite against Anglican rule from London. The uprising, though, was crushed — to the tune of some 30,000 deaths — before it got off the ground. In punishment, Britain dissolved the Irish Parliament and in 1800 passed the Act of Union, which absorbed Ireland into the century-old United Kingdom. The exhibition insists that “Irish literature demonstrates why art matters in times of crisis and how art functions as an agent of political transformation,” but the same could be said of nearly all literature. The literature of Ireland endures because of its particular blend of evocative power and relentless experimentation — a strange tangle of the primitive and postmodern, with modern literature molting from the mythologies of hill and glade. The generation after 1798 was ravaged by what the Irish call an Gorta Mór, or the Great Hunger of the 1840s. One million people died, and some 2 million fled — many to these shores. On display here is a rare first edition of “The Black Prophet: A Tale of Irish Famine.” Published in 1847 — the famine’s deadliest year — the book here sits beside Liam O’Flaherty’s “Famine,” published nearly a century later. Hunger is revisited in John Montague’s “Hunger striker,” from 1981. The poem was written after the death of Provisional Irish Republican Army member Bobby Sands, a landmark event in the three decades-long-stretch of violence known as the “Troubles.” The poem declares “This is a song of silence / This is the sound of the bone / Breaking through the skin / Of a slowly dying man / This is the song of his death / This is the sound of his living on.”‘Portrait of William Butler Yeats,’ by John Butler Yeats. National Gallery of Ireland via Wikimedia CommonsSands died alongside nine fellow hungerstrikers, becoming a martyr to Irish republicans in the process. A hero of an earlier age was Cuchulain, from the Ulster Cycle of Irish mythology. In “Táin Bó Cúailnge,” the central story of that cycle, he holds off an entire invading army on his own. Set in the pagan first century of the common era with roots that reach deep into pre-literate Ireland, the epic is sometimes reckoned as the “Irish Iliad.”Cuchulain reemerged during the Irish Literary Revival of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when writers urged a turning away from the British tradition and toward Ireland’s Gaelic inheritance. A leading light and patron of that movement, Lady Augusta Gregory, herself a member of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, rewrote the tale of Cuchulain in a patois so distinctive that it was referred to as “Kiltartanese,” after Gregory’s estate at County Galway.The Nobel Prize-winning poet William Butler Yeats reckoned that Gregory’s retelling was the “best book that has ever come out of Ireland,” and the two were among the founders of the Abbey Theatre. Yeats aspired to set “upon the stage for the first time the real Irish life as opposed to the traditional.” The Dubliner Bram Stoker — the author of “Dracula” — was some two decades older than Yeats and knew the wit and writer Oscar Wilde.Yeats’s project of reaching into the Irish past to forge an independent Ireland in the 20th century had few more vociferous critics than the novelist James Joyce. During their first meeting, the 20-year-old Joyce asked the 37-year-old Yeats his age. Once told, the younger writer exclaimed “I have met you too late. You are too old for me to help you.” Joyce, whose “Ulysses” is on display here, accused Yeats of pining for an ancient Ireland that is dead.”Joyce’s path led away from Dublin toward Paris, the City of Light that the writer Walter Benjamin called the “capital of the 19th century.” His epic “Ulysses,” though written from abroad, recreates in every detail the city from which Joyce exiled himself. He said that if Dublin “one day suddenly disappeared from the Earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.” The same could be said about this show, an itinerary of the Irish imagination.

From ‘Dracula’ to ‘Ulysses,’ Ireland’s Literary Genius Enchants at New York’s Oldest Museum

From ‘Dracula’ to ‘Ulysses,’ Ireland’s Literary Genius Enchants at New York’s Oldest Museum

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