WHEN Sean & Tuama began work in 1950 as a lecturer in Modern Irish, lines of critical approach to the texts being taught were non-existent, and in the foreword to this book he tells us that almost half a century later the "critical analysis of literature in Irish has as yet scarcely begun". In the intervening years the most important critical works have been O Tuama's own writings; Repossessions, a companion volume to Poems of the Dispossessed, allows those without Irish to acquaint themselves with his achievement.
His introduction acknowledges a debt to Russian Formalism and characterises his mentor, Daniel Corkery, as a kind of formalist manque. However, he eschews the vulgarised use of literary theory now prevalent in Irish departments which corsets a text inside a seemingly arbitarily selected theory, which is then used to shower the text in quotations, preferably in French. Neither wide reading nor an understanding of history is required, and the virtue most apparent in the criticism of Sean O. Tuama - an ability to select significant texts - is seen as unnecessary, even reactionary.
O Tuama strongly defends the reputation of Daniel Corkery who, although a cultural dogmatist, was, he says, a sensitive litterateur whose Hidden Ireland sought to "portray a literature" rather than to write social history based on 18th-century Munster poetry. This is a valuable defence, but the book, as is often the case, had an impact beyond the author's intentions, and Louis Cullen is surely right when he states that "his concept of a hidden Ireland was in practice more than a merely cultural one".
This identification with Corkery may account for O Tuama's tendency towards historical generalisation. He claims that "after the fall of the old aristocratic Gaelic order . . . conditions of living for the conquered Irish became quite oppressive. Many descriptions of eighteenth century Ireland speak of it as a land where the native population was submerged and downtrodden a land of peasants living in hovels". This notion of a native Gaelic population minimally differentiated defies not only the complex historical evidence - Poems of the Dispossessed includes a photograph of the big house owned by the poet, Piaras Mac Gearailt - but defies also the literary evidence, particularly Pairlement Chloinne Tomais, the 17th-century satire on the Gaelic lower orders, for whom the plantations of that period may well have offered the prospect of liberation from serfdom.
One important misunderstanding emphasised by O'Tuama is the belief held by Corkery and other Gaelic Leaguers that traditional Gaelic society had been strongly Roman Catholic: ... Synge was right and Corkery wrong... there is a marked ambivalence about Christian religion in traditional Gaelic literature . . . pre-Christian values loom as authoritatively if not more authoritatively than Christian values in the traditional consciousness ... what is understood as `traditional Irish Catholicism' is largely an invention of the nineteenth century."
Synge is one of a number of Anglo-Irish figures linked by O Tuama to Gaelic literature and tradition - in Synge's case, "the mode of Irish storytelling and the native dramatic monologue" Joyce's non serviam is linked to the answer given by Oisin to St Patrick in the late medieval lays of the Fianna, and Juno and the Paycock is connected to the keening tradition.
Noting the openness of many 19th century Irish nationalists to the idea of a king rather than a republic, O Tuama suggests that the 18th-century aisling "prepared a large section of the Irish people for a unique understanding of nineteenth-century nationalism", although he omits to link this suggestion to the suggestion from the Ulster Protestant nationalists Bulmer Hobson and Ernest Blythe that a German prince should rule an independent Ireland. As if to prove the connection, Blythe maintained that the consequent linguistic heterogeneity would lead to the revival of Irish!
The pre-eminent position of O! Tuama in Gaelic literary criticism has meant that subsequent critics have tended to develop their theses by reference to his original readings, and a number of significant challenges have appeared, most notably Angela Bourke's persuasive interpretation of the Lament jar Art O Leary as part of a history of oral poetry by women, and Breandan O Buachalla's reading of the Aogan O'Rathaille poem, Is fada liom oich' fhirfliuch as pastoral elegy rather than autobiographical testament. These mosquito bites have passed unnoticed, and the emphasis placed by O Tuama on the personal poetic voice remains.