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7.
AOTW: How would you reconcile the two most frequent emotions in Irish literature --- humor and melancholy?
Emma Donoghue: They seem to me to be a natural pair.
Morgan Llywelyn: They don't need to be reconciled. Laughter and tears, like love and hate, are two sides of the same coin.
Maureen Dezell: What's to reconcile? The two have always coexisted in my mind.
Martin Roper: Are they? I haven't thought about these questions before. I suppose you're right, they are fairly common. Krapp, in Beckett's "Krapp's last tape" is the funniest and most tragic character every to not slip on a banana skin. The best humour comes I think from tragedy. Once it's you and not me slipping on the banana. Perspective plays a role. I wouldn't try to reconcile them. That would involve thought and I don't like to think too much. It's too hard.
Jamie O'Neill: Humour, they say, is the first three sips of the stout: melancholy the remainder. You might think, smaller bottles and we'd have less of melancholy --- but the proportions seem to be set. Humour is a commentary on melancholy, in the way that happiness is not. It is the escaped sufferer who watches from the gallery the degradation of the floor. In that sense it is not an emotion at all, but the communication of some other feeling: detachment, irony, ultimate disbelief. Ireland is sad in its history. I don't mean the wars or the defeats or the long valiant retreats --- I mean the great wastes of sadness: depopulation, emigration, the guilt of those remaining, the fear of any returning, the road on the bog that goes nowhence nowhither, the late and loveless match. Our humour partakes of this sadness. It is rarely jolly: it slants out, twisted, from the side of the mouth.
Eoin Colfer: I think that the humor is often a mask for the depression. I certainly feel both emotions at certain times. We utilise humour to distract us from our problems. But sometimes reality leaks through.
Máire B. de Paor: Our literature is profoundly coloured by our experience as a race under centuries of British oppression. We suffered but humour helped us to cope with melancholy, doom, and gloom. We kept the Faith in spite of dungeon fire and sword and with the strong conviction that it is better to share in the Passion of Christ than to be an oppressor.
Travellers to our country during Penal times, for example, marvelled at the joyful Irish Catholics singing in the fields at their work, and dancing the legs off themselves at the crossroads and outside the church on a Sunday to the tune of the fiddle and bagpies. And then of course a witty, intelligent person in any age can poke fun at the parvenu and the Irish, it would seem, were particularly good at it!
Niall Williams: Why reconcile? the greatest tragedy of my writing life was my first comedy for the Abbey theatre.
Marita Conlon-McKenna: Our emotions are not buried deep, hidden like other nationalities, and come to the surface all too easily. Pain often makes us laugh aloud, crazy people that we are! Roddy Doyle's novel and film The Van an excellent example. Brian Friel did it with Lughnasa and playwrights like Martin McDonagh with his Lonesome West bachelor brothers almost killing each other and Marie Jones's marvellous Stones In His Pockets having two actors play an ensemble of parts on an Irish film set, both having the audience in stitches, before the poignancy of the central characters lives took over.
Randy Lee Eickhoff: All Irish writing has a certain humor about it, even the most blackest. I think this is because of the oppressive history of Ireland --- one must learn to laugh at what is happening to him or become grimly mired in one's own difficulties. The melancholy is due, mainly, to the rich lyricism provided by the imaginative mind. And, we must also take into account the environment and poetic associations, a maudlin association, that comes from the music and songs. When one is in hard difficulties, one can get through with a bit of laughter, but there is always a melancholic air to that laughter. Since the Irish have such a long history of oppression, I think that if suddenly the sense of it was taken away, the people would become socially dysfunctional.
Mary E. Lyons: My father, a first generation Irish American, had a laugh that started in his toenails and emerged many heart-stopping moments later from his mouth. As a small child, I'd wait fearfully for that laugh to reach fruition because I thought he was choking. I've never heard anything like it. It was as if he was laughing himself to death. That's how I think of humor and melancholy in Irish literature --- funny with a desperate quality, as in McCourt's Angela's Ashes.
Liam Clancy: They are the two sides of the same coin --- the coin being the very nature of Celtic --- particularly the Gaelic-soul. Besides, without conflict there is no action and no creative energy.
Malachy McCourt: In Ireland people die as opposed to America where they "pass away" or "pass on" is said though I don't know what it is they pass. Wind, perhaps! Unlike here, death in Ireland is not always fatal as it's assumed the deceased has bettered herself --- still you miss the person and feel guilty at not wanting to join her too soon in the beyond. And of course death is absurd as it seems as if we are subjected to a 100% mortality rate no matter who we are.
Andrew M. Greeley: Why does one have to reconcile them? They're part of being Irish.
Regina McBride: If the melancholy is strong, the humor (the other side of the coin) must be equally as potent. Thank God. Who could live with a strong propensity for sadness without the balm of humor?
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