'An Irishman's home is his coffin', wrote James Joyce in Ulysses. Nobody does death in quite the high style of the Irish - it's just life that we sometimes find hard to manage.
Joyce sets his hero, Leopold Bloom, ruminating among the gravestones in Glasnevin Cemetery. Bloom would prefer it, instead of the usual maudlin sentences ("departed this life"), that the stones gave more personal vignettes of the dead: "I travelled for Cork lino" or "I cooked good Irish stew".
Bloom also wonders "whether the news goes about whenever a fresh one is let down". This witty speculation may have provided the central idea for Cré na Cille, the greatest novel in the modern Irish language. Its author, Máirtín
Ó Cadhain, was born in 1906 and an RTÉ documentary Rí na bhFocal tonight marks the centenary on Arts Lives at 10.15pm.
Cré na Cille (which means Graveyard Clay) is set in Connemara cemetery. There the buried bodies refuse to be quiet, but gossip non-stop about one another. In each of its 10 chapters, a newly-deceased person is interred, bringing news of the latest outrages above ground, causing all tongues to wag even faster.
The work is a rich example of caint na ndaoine, the people's speech. It offers not the idealised peasantry of Patrick Pearse, but a deglamourised version of Gaeltacht life, filled with sexual infidelities, jealousy and recrimination. It is an antipastoral in the realist mode of Patrick Kavanagh's The Great Hunger and an answer to the prayer of a west of Ireland blacksmith who wished for a "literary work in which the people would be shown up in all their naked hideousness".
It is astonishing to think that it was not only published to great acclaim in 1949, but also serialised successfully in the Irish Press. It would be hard to imagine, say, Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett being run in the Irish Independent in the same period.
Had Cré na Cille appeared in English, it would very likely have been banned, but the wily
Ó Cadhain understood that you could get away with many things in Irish which could never have been published in English.
He used to joke that if all the English language novels then censored in Ireland were translated into Irish and printed, this would provide the greatest possible incentive to our people to learn their own language.
The corrosive cynicism of Cré na Cille is offset by a poignant insight into ordinary people's dreams of a better world. Even in death, the class system prevails.
The central character, Caitríona Pháidín, is interred in a 15-shilling plot but longs for a guinea grave. The babblers boast of the number of priests who officiated at their funerals, or of the number of motorcars that followed their coffins. They are (quite literally) "killed with respectability".
Tormented by the slow passing of time, these dead souls seek comfort in chatter. A French pilot who crash-lands his aircraft and dies adds to the gossip, as does an old love interest of Caitríona. The result is a masterpiece to set beside Waiting for Godot. Indeed, its central theme is summed up in the most famous lines of Beckett's play: "All the dead voices . . . They make noise like wings . . . To have lived is not enough for them . . . They have to talk about it."
Ó Cadhain spent much of the second World War interned in the Curragh camp for IRA activities. While there, he learned many languages. Years later, as professor of modern Irish at TCD, he often told us students that the hardest day of his life was that of his release from captivity, for then, like so many other post-war intellectuals, he had to confront the bleakness of freedom.
Some readers think that Cré na Cille draws on that experience of internment - a sort of internment which leaves inmates dead to the outside world. But it's more likely that the talking corpses were Ó Cadhain's version of the Irish language itself, considered dead by detractors but still astoundingly articulate. After all, he knew that in a funerary culture like ours, death is the ultimate career move.
After the Flight of Earls in 1607, Gaelic bards, who had once been paid to lament the death of chieftains, now proclaimed the death of Gaelic tradition itself. But they did so in lines of such power as to throw the very idea into question.
Ever since, the Irish language and its literature have been pronounced extinct, only to return from a near-death experience in every generation. Ó Cadhain must have sensed that his own great book was but the latest proof of that vitality.
Detractors of the language will say that debates concerning compulsory or voluntary Irish are not really about how to save the language, but about who precisely owns the corpse. However, Ó Cadhain's corpses, like that of Joyce's Finnegan, keep on rising to make another point. In Ireland, the dead seem to never know that they are dead.