The land of the undead

It is a land immortalised by a famous princess, a land of castles and church bells and racing cars, of poodles with silver beads in their ringlets. This is where everyone smells of expensive perfume and aftershave and stays up all night gambling in a baroque palace of a casino overlooked by a statue of Lenin.

Fantastical, you might say. The land of the undead, even. But that very quality made Monaco a fitting backdrop forthe recent conference on "That Other World: The Supernatural and the Fantastic in Irish Literature".

The sixth international conference of its kind hosted by the Princess Grace Irish Library was opened by Prince Albert, who paid homage to his mother's love of Irish culture, which led to his father, Prince Rainier, setting up the Library in her honour in 1984.

Fifty delegates spent the weekend exploring the fiction of Bram Stoker, Sheridan Le Fanu and Flann O'Brien, the poetry of Yeats and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Freud's essay on the uncanny, Tzvetan Todorov's definition of the fantastic as a literary genre, post-colonial theory, xenophobia past and present, vampires, fairies, the undead, and much more.

Dr Daithi O hOgain (UCD) opened the proceedings with a lecture on "The Shamanic Image of Irish Poets", which explored the powerful and mystical role of the poet/druid in ancient Irish and European culture, where he was seen as an intermediary between reality and the spirit world. In keeping with the traditional idea of the shaman, the poet was said to take the form of different creatures such as deer, boar and salmon.

It was believed that the poet's words had the power of spells to bring good or bad fortune: to tame a stallion or drive out rats. It was feared that the words of a satirist, "like a dart shot from his mouth" could cause his victim "to sicken and die". Some satirists, such as Tadhg Dall O hUiginn in the sixteenth century, apparently had their tongues cut out "because of their dangerous speech".

In his lecture, "The Time Is Out Of Joint" Dr Chris Morash (Maynooth) examined stories of vampires and the undead which predate Stoker's Dracula, including Ham- let, where the ghost of Hamlet's father represents "the return of the dead, a monstrous imposition on the present, a grotesque disruption of the linearity of time and hence of reason itself".

Dr Morash discussed the time-travelling nature of the supernatural narrative, where "the past and the present are both real at the same time". Far from seeing the supernatural as a marginal feature of Irish literature, Dr Morash noted that its manifestation of "the return of the inescapable past" is a central motif in Irish writing, from Joyce's Ulysses and Yeats's "Purgatory" to Banville's Birchwood.

Dr Peter Kuch (University of South Wales) discussed "Writing Easter 1916", suggesting that not only Yeats, but also AE, Padraig Pearse and James Connolly "needed the supernatural as a discourse of resistance to legitimise their vision of Ireland". Pearse's strategy, for example, was "to inhabit the iconography of blood sacrifice".

Prof Terence Brown (TCD), who is writing a book on Yeats, gave a lecture entitled "W.B. Yeats: Magic and Revolution". Prof Brown emphasised the influence of Maud Gonne on Yeats in apprehending the magical quality of revolution, whereby he saw the 1916 Rising as an imaginative gesture with real consequences.

THE library's literary adviser, Dr Bruce Stewart (Coleraine), disagreed with critics (such as Seamus Deane and Terry Eagleton) who view Dracula as representing the absentee Anglo-Irish landlord. He suggested that Dracula is more like "Land League activists in their ghoulish character as perpetrators of agrarian outrages". Dr Laura O'Connor (Irvine, California) discussed "Thar Mo Chionn", a poem by Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill about Anne Lovett (the 15-year-old from Longford who died in a field in 1984 beside a statue of the Virgin Mary, having given birth to a baby everyone claimed they didn't know she was carrying). Using "the undead Irish language", Ni Dhomhnaill "brings folklore and archetypes to play in a contemporary context," said Dr O'Connor. Selina Guinness (Oxford) examined "To Ireland in the Coming Times" as an illustration of Yeats's distinctive ability to combine "love of country with love of the mystical": "The poem stages a revolt of the soul against the intellect".

Dr Richard Haslam (St Joseph's, Philadelphia), in a study of Sheridan Le Fanu's story, "Green Tea", coined a critical term, "ghost colonial" to express "the relationship between story and history which produces many `shades' of meaning." He quoted Oscar Wilde: "Art is not a mirror, but a crystal. It creates its own shapes and forms."