Who has the Last Word? The Dead and their Lively Humour in Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Cré na Cille
Who has the Last Word? The Dead and their Lively Humour in Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Cré na Cille

Summary/Abstract: All the characters in Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s novel are dead people, but they continue to speak as if they were still alive, and have not realized they are actually dead. Another paradox may be that although all of them are dead, none is really interested in death or its metaphysics. They go on with their earthly interests and spites, abusing and offending one another, spilling out secrets and shouting out loud. Speaking is the only thing they can still do while dead, and they take advantage of it: it is often quite difficult for the reader to understand whose voice it is in the general uproar. Gradually, voices become identifiable and attributable to characters: the reader learns to recognize them by the bad language they use, by certain quirks or by the expression of individual snobbery, pretence and hatred. By taking dead people as his characters, and faithfully recording their imagined speeches, Ó Cadhain re-imagines and refashions satire as a specific Irish genre. The speaking dead stand for the Gaelic rural communities whose language the political activist Ó Cadhain’s taught and promoted as the real repository of the idea of an Irish independent nation. The particular dialogic form of the novel, though seemingly experimental and difficult to comprehend, represents Ó Cadhain’s effort to establish democracy (lacking in the real post-independence Irish state), through the multiplicity of voice polyphony implies, at least at literary level.

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