Ciaran Carson’s constellations of ideas: theories on traditional culture from within

Ever since the dawn of folklore studies, Ireland has been identified as one of the richest stores of traditional lore and music in the world. In the twentieth century, the focus shifted from folklore studies to anthropology, which provided scholars with new tools, and inaugurated a new approach to Irish traditional culture. Both the folkloric and the anthropological approaches have their shortcomings: if the study of the Irish traditional society as a tribe could lead us to forget its positioning in the history of the West, the emphasis on folklore often dilutes itself into a quest for “local colour”. Moreover, the task of describing a different culture is complicated by the invasiveness of our epistemological approach; confronting traditional culture with the filters of literacy might lead us to perceive it as banal and simple. Ciaran Carson is a poet, a traditional musician, and the son of an accomplished storyteller. Carson approaches traditional culture as an insider: his description of traditional music and cooking are not travelogues, nor they resemble the detached structuralist approach of anthropologists. Carson does not treat Irish traditional culture as a sample, nor as a fragile item to be kept isolated: his poetic discourse is in constant dialogue with world literature, from Japanese Haiku to the philosophy of Walter Benjamin; like James Joyce, Carson makes Ireland the centre of the world by turning to the outside. Ciaran Carson’s perspective on Irish traditional culture is very articulated and could indeed be described as a theory, as long as we accept a theory that is not formulated in the language of criticism. Carson often describes traditional culture as a web of motifs, a constellation of narratives; the descriptive paradigm he adopts could also be described as a constellation, a web of ideas that, as in McLuhan’s mosaic technique, are juxtaposed and accumulated, in order to avoid the snares of literacy.


Introduction
The antagonism between an official cultural pattern, often informed by the ideas of progress and internationalism, and a subordinate set of traditional oral beliefs is a constant in the history of the West. Such a contrast has taken place at different levels of society, and its actors have often changed: Roman Christianity has been opposing barbarian paganism, modern medicine has been fighting against traditional methods of healing, and so on.
Since the end of the 17 th century, the picture has been gradually mutating; an unprecedented interest in folk tales and in the lore of the past propelled the birth of folklore studies. The link between folklore studies and nationalism dates back to this period: folk culture was contrasted with humanistic learning, and the Roman roots of the latter were opposed to the German origin of the former. Folklore studies were imported in Ireland by the so-called antiquarian movement: this, being chiefly constituted by Anglo-Irish gentry, looked back at the Irish antiquities for identification, in order to legitimise its power on Ireland and to mark its difference from the English nobility. When the balance of power shifted, the Catholics saw in folklore a means of rediscovery of their Gaelic roots.
The study of Irish folklore has thus been largely instrumental to ethnical politics, but it has nonetheless shed a benevolent light on traditional Irish culture, and its contribution to the preservation of traditional material has been essential. In the twentieth century folklore studies were enriched by the contribution of structuralist anthropology; a new scientific approach to traditional material was introduced, and the use of recordings and cameras allowed a more efficient preservation of the collected material.
The relation between science and traditional culture is however a very delicate matter; officially sanctioned written culture encounters traditional oral culture on very uneven terms. Jack Goody argues that "when the written mode achieves a dominant cultural position, the result is a systematic devaluation of forms of knowledge that are not acquired through books" (Goody 1982, 201). Traditional culture is in a subordinate position even when its value is being recognised: in order to gain acceptance, it has to be legitimised by the official establishment. The process of legitimisation is not a neutral one; "oral" culture needs to be reshaped in scientific "written" terms; the risk of sacrificing the gist of traditional culture is very high. The discourse of official culture constructs our views of traditional culture: theory might silence traditional culture by speaking over it.
Eric A. Havelock ironically asks himself "Can a text speak?" (Havelock, 1986, 44), and maintains that "there always exist an insurmountable barrier to the understanding of orality" (45). The barrier Havelock is referring to is textuality itself: any work of scholarship on orality must necessarily, at least at some stages of the analysis, recur to the use of writing. Recent scholarship (see Ong 1982, Havelock 1986, McLuhan 1967, Goody 1982 has demonstrated that writing is not a neutral medium, and that "writing develops codes in a language different from oral codes in the same language" (Ong 106). The codes of literacy and its mechanisms are deeply inscribed in the patterns of our culture. The gulf spreading between an oral and a literate code can be bridged only with the transposition of the oral code into its written counterpart, through a process that might be equated to Jakobson's "intersemiotic translation" (Jakobson 114). The similarities between translation and the process of rendition of traditional culture into writing are striking. Like translation, the written representation of oral culture is an inescapable process on the path of mutual understanding; at the same time, any rendering of traditional culture operated by the academy suffers the limits of translation, and is likely to be affected by a number of mistakes and imprecisions.
A will to reproduce traditional Irish culture without altering its nature is at the core of Ciaran Carson's artistic production, which is rich in theoretical implications. Carson is not a critic, nor an anthropologist, and it might seem inappropriate to introduce him as a theorist of traditional culture. Yet, he has produced a substantial body of poetry and prose characterised by an extraordinary theoretical self-consciousness; he is a poet of exactitude, and he is fond of driving his poetic discourse into purely intellectual questions. We are witnessing a progressive blurring of the boundaries between artistic and scientific genres, stem from a post-structuralist consciousness of the presence of fiction and stylisation behind any kind of text; it is with this framework in my mind that I approach what I see as a delicate, but hopefully rewarding operation: analysing Ciaran Carson's writings on traditional Irish culture as works of theory tout-court. This operation looks less hazardous if we keep in mind that the post-structuralist category of 'discourse' encompasses all genres, disregarding their formal conventions.
Carson's systematic exploration of the world of traditional culture is conducted with a methodology of its own, which David Wheatley indicates as Carson's "semiotic method" (Wheatley 14). This original approach to traditional culture was developed by Ciaran Carson as a means of overcoming the expressive limits of the scientific discourse, and has gradually developed into a theory "from within": this paper will be focused on Carson's epistemology of traditional culture.

From practice to theory to poetry
Ciaran Carson's first collection of poetry, The New Estate, was published in 1976, and was followed by a long period of poetic silence: a second collection, The Irish For No, was published only in 1987. As a matter of fact, in 1975 Carson started working as Literature and Traditional Arts Officer at the Arts Council of Northern Ireland; the years of silence have been mostly devoted to the professional exploration of Irish traditional culture. Carson's job "was concerned with traditional music, song and dance" (Brandes 1990, 81); Carson was already a musician, but this full immersion in traditional culture allowed him to greatly improve his skills. He started playing the Irish flute, and devoted himself to traditional music, "to get hold of it and learn it", in what he amusingly described as a "long and thirsty pilgrimage around Ireland" (Brandes 81).
Of course, his profession required also a more detached approach to the oral material of the tradition, (loc. cit.); Carson's investigation was aided by the tools of musicology, ethnography and folk studies.
The most immediate fruit of this research was a compact book called Traditional Irish Music (also known as The Pocket Guide to Traditional Music), which resulted from a number of essays that Carson had been writing for The Belfast Review. According to Carson, The Pocket Guide "seemed… to fill a gap in the literature -that is, to give an account of the music as it is, from the perspective of someone who is actively engaged in it" (Ormsby 7). For all its practical purpose and its commitment to actual music-making, there is a great deal of theory in this book: Carson sets traditional music in an historical framework, comparing it to baroque and ancient music; the analysis is conducted with a precise awareness of the principles of musicology and of the harmonic theory.
Even though Traditional Irish Music is Carson's only volume of well-formed essays, the theoretical strain survived in Carson's writing, and was eventually incorporated into his poetry; Carson himself admitted that "The Pocket Guide was a kind of blueprint for the shape and structure of The Irish For No" (Ormsby 1991, 7), which is maybe his most influential and praised volume of poetry. Given this premises, we may safely assume that Carson's experience as a researcher has contributed to the shaping of his mature artistic voice: after The Irish For No poetry and theory are inextricably linked in Carson's writing.
In 1996 Ciaran Carson published Last Night's Fun, which reviewer Patricia Monaghan has described as a "an unusual and unusually effective set of short essays" (Monaghan 1997) 1 . Last Night's Fun is made up of chapters that are indeed strongly reminiscent of the essay form; nonetheless, their essayistic nature is pushed to the extreme, and the weight of narrative and fictional elements is very high.
It is no chance that, after Traditional Irish Music, Ciaran Carson dispensed with the essay as it is traditionally intended: theory still lied at the core of Carson's writing but it needed to be expressed in a new jargon. Carson's new descriptive style would treasure the experience of traditional narrating modes accumulated during the years of ethnographic research: I was, at the time, toying with the possibility of writing in a mode which would owe something to traditional oral narrative, as exemplified by innumerable characters in pubs throughout the length and breadth of Ireland... (Carson 1989, 115) The scene of Last Night's Fun is set by a memorable opening, which illustrates Carson's debt towards the seanchaí tradition: We are in Ballyweird on the outskirts of Portrush, County Antrim, and it's the morning after the night before. Or rather, it is sometime after noon, and we've just staggered back from the local Spar, laden with the makings of a fry: bacon, sausages, black pudding, white pudding, potato bread (or, as we call it, fadge) and the yellow cornmeal soda farls peculiar to the north-west region. (1) The rhythm of traditional storytelling, characterised by alliteration, internal rhyme, and syncopated stresses, is mixed with digressions associated to a more conventional form of learning; the resulting style, in perpetual balance between personal experience and erudite analysis, has a Proustian flavour which can be regarded as the trademark of Carson's prose.
Last Night's Fun could actually be considered a poetic reformulation of the principles expressed in Traditional Irish Music. Carson feels the necessity to voice the views of those actually involved in music-making, and to free the music from the museums of folklorists and the antiseptic laboratories of musicologists; Last Night's Fun is a picture of the music as seen in its natural environment, that is pubs, kitchens and céilí.
Carson's meandering exploration of everyday rites, folk etymologies and melodic structures is anything but devoid of methodology; Last Night's Fun can in fact be regarded as a systematic analysis, since its classifications are almost taxonomic in their coherence, and exhaustive in their scope. Besides, Carson's prose is lavishly stuffed with explicit quotations, and the book features a rich bibliography, as well as a suggested discography.
A delicate balance of theory and narrative is achieved through a collage technique, whose aim is depicting reality by a number of different perspectives. After a first reading Last Night's Fun might look like a messy heap of memories: scraps of everyday dialogue alternate with quotations from the classics, lines from songs and serendipitous musings on a variety of subjects. Variety is a keyword here, since Carson's works could aptly be described as a variety of varieties, the result of an accumulation of heterogeneous layers of discourse; Carson's reader is faced with a mise en abîme of multiplicity.
A passage from "Last Night's Fun", the opening chapter of the homonymous book, will illustrates the quality of Carson's discursive style: I have ordered a nip just to taste, when a tune drifts out from the back: they're playing 'Last Night's Fun' again. Or maybe it is we who are playing it, the night before the morning after, before we left to spend the early hours and see the dawn in Ballyweird. I think it's 1979. The first I heard 'Last night's Fun' (no, rather, the first time I knew it was 'Last Night's Fun' that I was listening to, for I must have heard it many times before without knowing its name, or knowing the tune itself, for that matter), was from a record of the accordion-player, the late Joe Cooley. Entitled simply, Cooley, the album was produced in 1975 by the accordion player Tony MacMahon, who adopted and adapted the Cooley's style to make his own music. (1-2) The thread of Carson's thought moves irregularly back and forth in space and time, and memories are a vehicle for the introduction of new topics: Carson's description of Joe Cooley's album will be an occasion for digressing on the contrast between analogical and digital recording.
This perplexing route is balanced by a number of limpid statements on art, culture and the language; the clear and self-explaining nature of these passages often adds surprise to the bewilderment of the reader. In this passage Carson focuses on the relationship between a tune and its name: 'Last Night's Fun', to take an example, is a name or a label for a tune: it does not describe its musical activity nor impute experience to it. It is not about frolics revelled in on some particular night, although the name might put you in mind of them. In other words, the tune, by any other name, would sound as sweet; or as rough, for that matter, depending on who plays it, or what shape they're in. (7) This passage has a didactic flavour that is found in many other sections of the book, where the usual impressionistic tone gives way to a plain denotative prose style. The texture of the Last Night's Fun is only apparently chaotic: Last Night's Fun is carefully built on a number of hypothesis on the nature of traditional music. Carson's theory of traditional music will be useful as a way of intercepting Carson's thought on traditional culture as a whole.
The key element of traditional music is its fluid nature. Every musical experience is subjective, and dependant of a number of local and temporal variables: In any session of music, no one will hear the same thing: it will depend on context, on placement, on experience -whether or not you've heard the tune before, whether or not the person next to you knows the tune that you might only half-know. (2) No tune is ever complete: But do we ever fully know a tune, or only versions of it, temporary delineations of the possible? (2) Carson's idea of music can be productively compared to Ferdinand De Saussure's structuralist description of the human language: every musician gives his utterance (la parole), but the tunes in its totality (la langue) is only an abstract entity; the tune is a platonic ideal, it exists only in the collective mind of the musicians' community. Every time a musician starts playing he enriches the store of traditional music with his utterance, modifying the equilibrium of the whole system.
The fluid element of the musical tradition is counterbalanced by a set of rules, a framework which constitutes the structuring principle of Irish music. Rhythm, for example, is a fixed convention, and no jig could be called such without a jig rhythm. Quoting The New Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments 2 , Carson observes: Nearly all ancient oral traditions are surprising for this double feature of endless variety within a fixed framework. (Carson 1997a. 28) Oral transmission is an essential feature of Irish music, as Carson stresses repeatedly both in Traditional Irish Music and Last Night's Fun. The fluid element of traditional music is related to its oral character: variations and melodic turns can be seen as instruments of mnemonics.

Mnemonics and theories on orally transmitted knowledge
In Carson's work, associative memory often substitutes linear consequentiality as the structuring principle of the narration. Peter McDonald stresses the unconventional quality of Carson's narrating patterns: The conventional rules of cause and effect which underlie narrative patterns are re-interpreted, from The Irish For No onwards, as contingent factors, dependent on association, chance, and the prismatic, linguistically conditioned memory of the individual; and the nature of poetic language, in which the narrative happens, is itself bounded by relations which are apparently arbitrary. One thing leads to another thing, just as one word can lead to another word, and a coincidence of event can mirror (say) the coincidence of a rhyme: but that mirroring can as easily be perceived as a distortion. (128) In her review of The Irish For No, Nuala Ní Domhnaill welcomed the use of "additive rather than subordinate clauses, the repetition of the just said, the transition due to memory and association rather than to any formal linear logic" (Ní Dhomhnaill 117), recognising in it a successful imitation of oral storytelling, "the authentic voice of the good seanchaí" (116). Ní Dhomhnaill interpretation is consonant with Ong's reflections on orality: In a primary oral culture, to solve effectively the problem of retaining and retrieving carefully articulated thought, you have to do your thinking in mnemonic patterns, shaped for oral recurrence. Your thought must come into heavily rhythmic, balanced patterns, in repetition and antitheses, in alliteration and assonances… (Ong 34) The arbitrary mirroring of sound and meaning, far from being a deliberate exercise in obscurity, is fully functional to Carson's representation of an orally preserved culture; the pairing of rhyme and meaning, which was at least problematic for McDonald, actualises the articulation of oral knowledge in mnemonic loci.
The theory of oral mnemonics and formulaic composition was made popular by a classical scholar, Milman Parry. According to Parry, the Iliad and the Odyssey are the result of a process of oral composition, where a number of fragments are juxtaposed and cumulated. It was to his son, Adam Parry, together with Albert B. Lord, to demonstrate the plausibility of Milman's theory: Adam Parry and Lord investigated the poetics of Serbian oral epic singers, discovering that some poets could produce epic narratives of considerable length without the aid of writing. The most astonishing feature of these epics is the ever-changing nature of their texture; every telling is actually a new composition, since the singer builds up a tale anew every time he tells his story, drawing on the stock of topoi and fragments of the tradition: For the oral poet the moment of composition is the performance.… An oral poem is not composed for but in performance … Our oral poet is composer. Our singer of tales is a composer of tales. (Lord 13) An active interest for the dynamics of oral communication and oral knowledge is perceivable in Carson's meta-linguistic poems. First Language (1994) is a collection of poems dedicated to the interaction between Irish and English, and to the process of linguistic acquisition; in this poetic exploration Carson dissects the strata of his linguistic experience, never failing to stress the primacy of the oral code.
"Opus Operandi" is the poem where the dichotomy between written and oral codes is tackled more directly. "Opus Operandi" is characterised by an extremely convoluted narrating structure: every stanza is formed by two long verses, and tend to constitute a narrative monad; it is only through the juxtaposition of these monads that we can grasp the meaning of the poem as a whole.
In this passage Carson describes a classroom, where children are perplexed by their encounter with strange words: Today's lesson was the concept 'Orange'. They parsed it into segments: some were kith, And some were kin. They spat out the pips and learned to peel the pith. (60) These two verses are an illustration of the process of assimilation of language: the children connect the unknown words to the feelings associated with the orange. Their dissection of the orange is metaphorical and abstract, and it is through the use of new words that the children gain access to the realm of abstract thought.
Contemporary anthropological theory traces a direct link between abstract thought and the use of the alphabet (Ong 87-88 and Goody 1987, 105); Carson seems to illustrate this point when he connects the lexicon of the "concept 'Orange'" to the alliteration of the "p" sound in the sequence "pips, peel, pith", announced by the verb "spat".
The poem is very explicit about the effect of the printing press: A school of clocks swarmed out from the Underwood's overturned undercarriage, Abei 08.pmd 23/9/2011, 10:23 124 Full of alphabetical intentions, led astray by braggadocio and verbiage.
Typecast letters seethed on the carpet, trying to adopt its Turkish Convolutions. They were baffled by the script's auctoritas. (61) Braggadocio and verbiage oppose to the alphabetical intentions: Carson's dramatises the contrast between written language, which carries the weight of officialdom, and the playfulness that derives from the freedom of oral expression. "Typecast letters" cannot cope with the complex pattern of the Turkish pattern: the a-verbal and abstract representation of the world is far more sophisticated than a bunch of "typecast letters".
According to McLuhan, the invention of the printing press, and the consequent spreading of writing, empowered the sight at the expense of other senses; the sensorial balance, which granted a pervasive synaesthetic experience of reality, was lost (McLuhan 1967, 24). The most direct consequence of this process has been the detachment of man from his environment, epitomised by Descartes's representation of the world as divided into res cogitans and res extensa (246-247). The primacy of writing in the West would thus be the cause of the desacralisation of the world and even the ultimate cause of schizophrenia (22).
McLuhan employs all his poetic and stylistic resources to reproduce the plurisensorial kind of perception that is experienced by illiterate subjects. He endeavours to express his thoughts in a cumulative way, in order to make them immune to the constrictive linearity of writing; he himself declares that his Gutenberg Galaxy is written in a "mosaic pattern of perception and observation" (265).

Constellations of meaning
The tesserae of McLuhan mosaic are projected on a third spatial dimension, since their assembling builds up a "galaxy"; it is quite significant that Carson's prose, also structured in a mosaic pattern, often conjures stars and constellations.
The metaphor of "constellation as a cognitive model" was introduced into the cultural debate by Walter Benjamin, in his "Theses on the philosophy of History". For Benjamin, constellations are an effective model for representing the connections between events that are very remote in history: stars that are light-years away from each other are united in the same constellation (Benjamin 255). Carson applies the constellation metaphor to a different context, and with a distinct emphasis; nonetheless, constellation are still seen as a model for knowledge, and stand as a symbol of inter-connectivity. Carson's use of the constellation metaphor might indeed be directly related to Benjamin's; the German philosopher is often quoted in Carson's prose (Carson 1997b. 26, 30).
Stars are a favourite subject of Carson's poetry. First Language features many allusions to stars and constellations; "counting the stars" is a metaphor for the process of interpretation in respectively: "Opus 14" Surely the children had anticipate all of this, these frosty nights; They counted out the gabbled alphabet of stars. (1994,28) Newly-appointed innumerate Chancellor of the Exchequer What-Do-You-Call-Him-Clarke Was counting his stars in twos like the innumerable animals in Noah's Ark. (1994,31) Here and elsewhere 3 in First Language, stars stand for the nodes of a semiotic system; in The Star Factory, Carson's second work of prose, the metaphor will be further developed, and stars will be juxtaposed to form a multitude of constellations.
The Star Factory is dedicated to Belfast; its prose rephrases and rearticulates a number of statements previously made by Carson on his native town; Belfast is seen as a city caught between the grandeur of its industrial past and the incertitude of its violent present.
The Belfast poems form a substantial portion of Carson's production, and are often read as a contemporary version of dinnseanchas, which can be translated approximately as "place-name lore". According to Ní Dhomhnaill, dinnseanchas springs from a religious impulse that is typical of the Irish psyche: It is patently obvious that different tribes worship different gods and it would seem that in Ireland we tend to give value to places, rather than things […] Dinnseanchas is not just mere naval-gazing but a human necessity and a fundamental part of our human underpinning. (Ní Dhomhnaill 118) Dinnseanchas was one of the main genres of Irish storytelling; Carson's obsession with topography and mapping is thus re-interpreted as a modern adaptation of a fundamental feature of Irish traditional culture.
Carson's relationship with the Irish tradition is mediated by the figure of his father William, son of a Protestant who turned to Catholicism when he married. William Carson, in the effort of obliterating his Protestant origin, became "more Gael than the Gaels", championing the Irish cultural cause. The Carsons learned Irish at classes, but their sons were brought up with Irish as their first language; William Carson had a rich store of folk tales, "incessant stories and yarns and songs" (Brandes 77). This passage is dedicated to the storytelling of William Carson; here Ciaran Carson is commenting on the serial mode which his father employed to link his tales: The serial mode allowed ample scope for such scenarios, whose iconic details might be mirrored over many episodes, in different shifts of emphasis or context. At such points, my father's voice would elevate and quicken, since remembering the narrative depended on these rhythmic clusters or motifs. Compressed mnemonic musical devices, each contained within itself the implications of its past and future, like a Baroque phrase which undergoes conversion and inversion as the tune proceeds in constant renegotiation. They were aides-memoire for both audience and teller. It has been suggested that the mind of the storyteller is inhabited by constellations of such crucial points, whose stars are transformed or regurgitated into patterns of the everyday. (1997b, 66) The fragments of narrative which are assembled into storytelling are like stars; they shine vividly on the landscape of memory. Each storyteller stares at his inner sky, looking for connections and links, in order to trace new constellations and to recognize the old ones.
The Star Factory is a collection of such fragments, bits and pieces of life from Belfast, its building and its lore. "The Star Factory" is described as a mysterious building, a mill which was demolished; it stands as a symbol of the long gone era of Belfast industrial prosperity. The star is embedded into Belfast topography, for a stellar pattern is drawn by the roads converging to the centre of the city. "The Star Factory" might be Belfast itself; for it is Belfast the ultimate source of the stars we have been referring to, the narrative scraps inscribed in Carson's memory.
Every constellation is made up of single stars, and each star is a story in itself; Fishing for Amber, Carson's third prose work, tells us the story of Io, Ganymede and of other heroes who have been transmuted into stars by the capricious gods of the Greek pantheon. Fishing for Amber deals with the golden era of Dutch painting, with the ambiguous fortunes of Esperanto and, again, with the storytelling of William Carson. Fishing for Amber is an embroidery of stories: Irish tales, Dutch anecdotes and classical legends are woven together into a complex pattern. Every narrative fragment is thus, fragmented in itself: every story contains in itself the seeds other stories, just like amber beads, which contain in their yellowish wax insects, leaves and other relics of the past.
A narrative is a tale, a story, but it is also a recit, a representation, a plot; Carson's constellation of stories is in itself a trope, a device he uses to represent the complex nature of oral culture. The scientific paradigm might be inadequate to understand the multi-dimensional nature of oral knowledge: Carson's stylistic turn might be regarded as a cognitive approach, a epistemological device envisaged to overcome the limits of conventional linear textuality. Carson's theory of traditional culture is not constituted by a hierarchy of ordered ideas: Carson's constellation of stories is the stylistic projection of his constellation of ideas on traditional culture.

Notes
1 It is worthwhile noting that the first chapter of this book, "Last Night's Fun", was previously published in the essay section of The Southern Review -A Special Issue: Contemporary Irish