Travel Reference
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There is a sense in which this is an anti-American story. For one thing, it represents a
smack in the face for sentimentalists, of whom there are a good many in the United States.
For another thing, it appeals to populist feelings only to deflate them. It panders to the
champions of the Common Man, then turns on them with its last breath and leaves them
disconcerted. Like a good deal in Irish culture, it builds up lofty expectations only to under-
cut them. It is also typical of that culture in its perversity. It promises to gratify our desire
for a conventional upbeat ending, then pulls the rug out sadistically from under our feet. It
trades on our liberal-minded assumption that appearances are no sure guide to reality, only
to reveal that the fiddler is every bit as inept as he looks. Like a lot of Irish humour, the
story is latently aggressive. It represents the revenge of those with a secret grudge against
self-satisfied, smoothly predictable narratives. In typically Irish vein, it is about failure, not
success, and failure as comic rather than as tragic.
Rather as the Irishman Oscar Wilde's epigrams take a conventional piece of English wis-
dom and rip it inside out or stand it on its head, so this tale takes the traditional fairy story
in which the beggar becomes king and leaves him even more of a loser than he was in the
first place. In all these ways, the fable resembles not the humour of Americans in general
but of American Jews in particular. It is not for nothing that the hero of the finest Irish nov-
el ever written, James Joyce's Ulysses , is called Bloom. The fiddler joke works by bathos,
one of the most typical of Irish literary devices. Hacking the world savagely down to size is
a familiar Irish pastime. Deflation and debunkery are among the nation's favourite pursuits.
In this, Irish culture is very different in sensibility from the United States, which has been
so generous to the country over the centuries. Debunkery is too negative an act for many
Americans to feel easy about.
The Irish can be negative in the sense of satirical, but not in the sense of complaining
too bitterly when things go wrong. This is partly because they live in a country which with-
in living memory hovered somewhere between first and third worlds, and which has re-
cently tipped back towards third-world status again. Life is thus not expected to be highly
streamlined. Transport timetables, for example, are sometimes largely decorative, with only
a loose relationship to observable fact. But the Irish reluctance to complain is also because
it is imprudent to stand out as a trouble-maker in a small country where everyone knows
everyone else. The British complain rather more, and have much to complain about; but
they do so in a muttering, shamefaced sort of way, in case other people might complain in
a muttering, shamefaced sort of way about their complaining.
Both comedy and tragedy are about coming unstuck. The difference lies in the way we
respond to this debacle. Comedy is the art form which understands that coming unstuck is
fairly commonplace. It is part of everyday existence to trip over your own feet from time to
time, to fall apart at the seams, or fail to live up to your own grandiose ideals. If you do not
aspire too high or expect too much, however, you will never have far to tumble, and will
never be too crestfallen. By keeping your head down, refusing the seductions of greatness,
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