The Salon Interview Gabriel Byrne
The joys of being Irish
The new Dublin
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BY ANDREW O'HEHIR | If we have to live in a golden age of Celtic kitsch -- and there appears to be no choice these days -- then my preference is clear. It's St. Patrick's Day, and you can keep your blessings and divinations and your myth-informed Driveldance spectaculars and your gauzy, keening New Age goddesses. I'm going to stay home, pop a green-label Bud and pursue the authentic expressions of the Celtic soul, like, say, "Darby O'Gill and the Little People." Now, what did I do with me Lucky Charms? I'm being facetious, I guess. The unrelenting torrent of Irish/Celtic-related books, music, film, theater and what have you over the last decade or so has brought unexpectedly large audiences to the work of some genuinely talented artists (filmmakers Neil Jordan and Jim Sheridan, novelists Roddy Doyle and Patrick McCabe, playwright Martin McDonagh) and has made Frank McCourt, who seems like a genuinely nice man, rich beyond his wildest dreams. But the bullcrap factor in this second Celtic Revival is really, really high (it was the first time too, back in Yeats' and Lady Gregory's day, but that's another story). Aesthetic issues aside -- and it's tough to make those allowances when the aesthetics involved are so consistently heinous -- the entire Celtic New Age genre seems to be an attempt to dress up good old Irish sentimentality in the guise of middlebrow respectability and "authenticity." Give me a chorus of drunken cops singing "Danny Boy" any day of the week. For Irish traditional music, which has long been poised uneasily between the folk music and world music markets, the arrival of Celtomania has been a mixed blessing. It's undoubtedly easier for musicians to make and sell recordings these days, and longtime loyalists like the Chieftains or the Green Linnet label have surely benefited. But more often than not the commodity being sold in the Celtic section of your neighborhood Tower is some sort of nonspecific windswept spirituality -- Windham Hill-style tranquillity with a sexy accent. Once upon a time the musicians on Irish traditional albums were hairy guys in cable-knit jumpers with fiddles. Now Enya and the members of Clannad dress like extras in a college production of "Riders to the Sea," walk moodily along cliffs and make cryptic allusions to Molly Bloom, the Children of Lir, the Tuatha Dé Danann. I'm not even going to talk about the dance realm; at least in terms of popular perception, "Riverdance" and its spinoffs have poisoned the well far into the next millennium. Michael Flatley and his late-Aerobics Age costumes do deserve full credit, however, for uniting the old and new styles of Irish kitsch in a single work. Scholars of the future will look back in awe, and perhaps terror -- what "The Ring of the Nibelungen" was to 19th century Germany, "Riverdance" is to the wistful masses of the Irish diaspora. Making fun of the New Age publishing industry is too easy to be truly entertaining, but I suppose I can try. The thing is, the explosion of interest in all matters Celtic has led to any number of valuable books on history, folklore and religion, some scholarly but many written for general readers. Some of these, like Declan Kiberd's literary study "Inventing Ireland" or R.F. Foster's social history "Modern Ireland 1600-1972," are the kinds of magisterial tomes that will get their just desserts regardless of prevailing fashion. But an unclassifiable little book like John Minahane's "The Christian Druids," an ingenious, even inspiring study of the philosopher-poets of medieval Ireland, stands no chance in the contemporary marketplace; it invites its readers to draw their own inferences and offers no homiletic formulas to help them deal with modern life. Instead, we get such massively hyped products as John O'Donohue's "Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom" (HarperCollins), a collection of anodyne philosophical ramblings on such topics as "The Salmon of Knowledge," "The Infinity of Your Interiority" and "Self-Compassion and the Art of Inner Harvesting." To be fair, O'Donohue doesn't exactly claim that his book is based on anything real, either in historical or folkloric terms. He describes it as "an inner conversation with the Celtic imagination," and adds that "it takes its inspiration from the implied and lyrical metaphysics of Celtic spirituality." (I believe that translates into "I made this stuff up.") A similar caveat can be found in Rosemarie Anderson's "Celtic Oracles" (Harmony Books), a divination guide that instructs you to flip a coin six times to determine which of 64 mythic symbols you are "drawn to." (Faery Lover or Cauldron of the Otherworld? Banishing of Snakes or Hag, the Initiator?) Anderson actually -- even proudly -- admits that she created her basic "system" in 20 minutes, when her "scholarly sensibilities crossed into the realms of the otherworldly and oracular." N E X T+P A G E: From Celtic warriors to Bono and Daniel Day-Lewis
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