Within the field of Irish cultural and literary criticism that has expanded enormouslyâexcessively perhapsâover the past thirty years, the extent of direct references to the idea of excess is paradoxically moderate. The opening of David Lloydâs Ireland and Postcolonial Modernity hints at why this may be so: excess is simply taken for granted in stereotypical ideas of Irishness. Considering the human mouth as a primary locus of activity, Lloyd contends that what goes on in an Irish mouth âdoes so to excess. We drink too much and talk too much, at times even too well: we sing and we blather, bawl as we brawl and wail as we grieveâ.1 On the matter of alcohol consumption, the idea of excess is embedded in the Catholic religious movement that was founded to counteract it: the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association, begun in 1898 by the Jesuit priest, James Cullen. The prayer of the Pioneers refers to âthe conversion of excessive drinkersâ.2 Diarmuid Ferriter points out that however much it might have been a stereotype, the extent of âactually-existing alcoholismâ in late nineteenth/early twentieth-century Ireland was remarkable. Over 13 million pounds were spent annually on alcohol in the last decade of the nineteenth century. In 1891â1892, 100,528 arrests for drunkenness were recorded within a population of less than 3.5 million people. Ferriter draws attention to the fact that, against this backdrop, the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association went on to become the largest lay Catholic organization in twentieth-century Ireland and âas a percentage of its population, one of the largest movements of its kind in the worldâ.3 The result was a society that combined excessive drinking with excessive abstemiousness.
In contrast to such notions as transgression and subversion in Irish criticism, the idea of excess in Irish writing and culture enjoys much less consensus as to its emancipatory value. In her evaluation of the performance of memory in modern Irish culture, Emilie Pine notes the persistence of the figure of the ghost in Irish film and drama. Drawing on the thought of Paul Ricoeur, Pine considers how the ghost in Irish culture manifests an âexcess of memoryâ, the past exerting âan excessive gripâ on identities and attitudes into the present times.4 In her powerful attack on Martin McDonaghâs backfired attempt to Tarantino-ize the Northern Irish Troubles with his 2001 play, The Lieutenant of Inishmore, Mary Luckhurst refutes the notion that McDonaghâs âexcessâ is radical. On the contrary, she argues, McDonagh trades in some of the most jaded English stereotypes of the Irish temperament as violent and stupid.5 Victor Merriman goes further in suggesting that the success of McDonaghâs plays from the later 1990s measures the extent to which Irish society was entering âa hyperactive phase of globalizationâ that was producing an indigenous new generation of millionaires for the first time in the history of the Irish state. By this account, the nativist excess of which Luckhurst writes becomes an inverse image of the corporatist consumer excess of the globalized Ireland that Merriman identifies as the ideal audience for McDonaghâs so-called âwhite-trashâ theatre, within which Irish historical experience is reduced to garbage, surplus to trans-national corporatist capitalist requirements.6
There are moments in which Irish criticism endorses the view of excess as a radical challenge to authoritarian and hegemonic tendencies. In her consideration of Charles Gavan Duffyâs dispute with W. B. Yeats over plans for a New Irish Library during the 1890s, Helen OâConnell sees the pragmatist nationalism of Duffy as a socially conservative âregulating force, fostering a necessary postponement of gratification and a reining in of excess (both literary and political)â.7 She notes that one of the books selected by Duffy for inclusion in the New Irish Library, E. M. Lynchâs 1894 adaptation of a Balzac novel under the title A Parish Providence, the author was adamant in his refusal to idealize the Irish peasant in any way. OâConnell regards Lynchâs representation of practical, materialistic Irish peasants as a deliberate rebuttal of the spiritual otherworldly orientation that Yeats attributed to them in his poetry and folklore writings of the 1880s. In keeping with an ideology of improvement in Irish writing that OâConnell tracks through the course of the nineteenth century, Lynchâs novel represents Duffyâs practical nationalist rejection of the idea of the native rural Irish people as ââhighly strungâ (and therefore given to excess)â, an idea that feeds what OâConnell identifies as the aesthetics of excess in the 1890s writing of Yeats, developed further in the 1900s dramas of Synge.8
Discussing what Synge referred to as âthe Rabelaisian noteâ when defending The Playboy of the Western World in 1907, Bernadette Bourke lauds Rabelais for bringing to the fore an old medieval peasant tradition of ârituals and carnival excessesâ that returns on stage in the 1990s Irish dramas of Marina Carr.9 Likewise, MĂĄria Kurdi praises Marina Carrâs drama for its âGothic excessâ.10 Drawing on the thought of Georges Bataille, Michael Mays offers a plausible argument for the idea of excess as a central component in the hostility towards middle-class commercialism that is a feature of Yeatsâs poetry during the 1910s, particularly the volume, Responsibilities. Mays identifies in this hostility Yeatsâs response to the coercive force of homogenization that bourgeois society in Ireland was imposing upon the human impulse to creative freedom and inventive living during his era. Mays judges the artistic admiration in which Yeats holds the idea of excess to be his counter-reaction to this homogenization, citing his 1897 essay âThe Celtic Element in Literatureâ and his American lectures of 1932â1933 by way of examples.11 Flore Coulouma observes the same counter-homogenizing deployment of excess being undertaken in a very different way and in a very different context: The Irish Times columns of Myles na nGopaleen, pseudonym for Brian OâNolan, more widely known as the novelist Flann OâBrien. The very name of the newspaper column, An Cruiskeen Lawn (the little brimming jug), discloses the function of the satire that OâBrien deploys within it: working âby excessâ in order to expose what Coulouma regards as âthe vacuityâ of its various targets, whether they be state practices of mid-twentieth-century Ireland, or figures of importance in Irish society of the time.12
Both Maysâ reading of Yeatsian excess and Couloumaâs reading of excess in OâBrienâs Myles na gCopaleen correspond in different ways to the value laid upon excess within the distinction that Victor Merriman draws between postcolonial and neo-colonial theatre in modern Ireland. The latter endorses the contemporary moment of globalization as a point of final arrival, the former instead draws upon the Irish past âas a libertarian struggle to exceed the coercive boundaries set by neo-colonial conditionsâ.13 The problem with Merrimanâs proposition, however, is that it deploys excess to attack excess. Exceeding those restrictive boundaries that Mays, drawing on Batailleâs concept of excess, observes as symptomatic of a process of homogenization in capitalist society, the postcolonial Irish drama that Merriman prefers is positioned in opposition to excess as it appears in two inter-related aspects. These profiles are that of historical Irish culture when it is considered dispensable as garbage within the contemporary phase of globalization; that of the exorbitant levels of consumerism and debt within Irish society during the period of the so-called Celtic Tiger economy of 1998â2008 and even in the current post-Celtic Tiger economic phase of economic collapse and badly managed recovery.
Merrimanâs contradictory attitudes to the notion of excess reach back to the thought of Patrick Pearse at the start of the twentieth century. Along with that of Christ, the mythical figure of Cuchulain was Pearseâs greatest inspiration in leading him eventually to direct a rebellion against British rule in Ireland in 1916. Philip OâLeary points out that Pearse worked from the Book of Leinster medieval manuscript version of the TĂĄin BĂł Cuailgne (War of the Bull of Cooley) when reading of Cuchulainâs exploits and his defence of Ulster in the legend...