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MULTILINGUAL LIVES

Reverend Lyons

There is more to say about the predicament of the multilingual subject Reverend Lyons. In particular, Lyons’s description of the “Irish language and Irish people’s” proscription reaches across the centuries as a foreign and yet familiar discourse of linguistic imposition. Just as Peros, Jack, Neptune, and Cupid are caught in the mesh of a monolingual politics of language (as well as other forms of institutional violence) and have little agency in defining their own identities—much less linguistic identities—which are always preceded and delimited by the textual discourses in which they appear, Lyons’s life speaks to a different but equally important question: the fusion of linguistic and cultural loss.¹

Unlike Ngũgĩ’s Decolonising the Mind, which has rightly become canonical reading in numerous disciplines because of its vigorous interrogation of colonial ideology as it has outlasted colonialism, Lyons’s speech is recorded in only a few collections of ephemeral pamphlets that are housed at the British Library and the National Library of Ireland. Brief but pithy, the speech is worth reading in detail for the following points: (1) like Ngũgĩ, Lyons argues that the imposition of Standard English has occasioned a cultural disaster for nonanglophones in Ireland; (2) he resigns himself to the impossibility of reversing the force of anglophony in Ireland; and (3) he picks a pragmatic way forward in anglophony while eulogizing his community’s linguistico-cultural past. His lament for the Irish language as a vehicle of cultural continuity is similar to that which I have imputed to Wheatley’s poetry, but Lyons is far more explicit. Not only does he tabulate the destructive effects of the monolingual politics of language I have been describing; he ties this monolingual politics to national, imperial, and religious issues. He also blames it for producing a special kind of literacy problem.

The occasion for Reverend Lyons’s speech is a fund-raising dinner for the Benevolent Society of St. Patrick, a Catholic charitable organization that worked among Liverpool’s poor.² After praising the society’s ecumenical work, Lyons launches a vitriolic attack on Protestant charitable societies operating in Ireland. Specifically, he berates Irish-language Bible publishers like the Hibernian Bible Society (est. 1806), a group that aimed to bring inexpensive Christian scriptures to people in their own languages, thus making it akin to the better-known British and Foreign Bible Society, an organization established by abolitionist William Wilberforce in 1803.³ As Lyons frames it, British-based Bible publishers are associated with “illiberality, [Protestant] proselytism, and persecution” in Ireland even though their primary and seemingly laudable goal is to circulate Irish-language Bibles. Far from celebrating these organizations for making the scriptures accessible to Irish people in their own language, however, Lyons characterizes them as little more than the covert “money-making” vehicles of Protestant evangelism.⁴

Lyons alleges that the fundraising mechanisms of Irish-language Bible producers in England are a “complete hoax upon the English people.”⁵ They should therefore be exposed as fraudulent. “From Erris to Howth, and from Dingle to Donaghadee,” he proclaims, “these societies have left lasting proofs of their bigotry and intolerance.”⁶ Lyons’s sympathies are unambiguous: Irish-language Bible publishers from Britain pursue conversionary ends by manipulating Irish people through appeals to the cultural resonance of the Irish language they are rapidly losing.⁷ That Lyons should go so far as decidedly rejecting the value of Irish-language Bibles is revealing, for this is a man who in the same speech will also furiously denounce Standard English’s intrusiveness in Ireland. Not at all a contradiction, his move has everything to do with a pragmatic sense that Irish linguistic ground has already been swept out from under his feet. By endorsing English-language Bibles that properly hew to Catholic orthodoxy, Lyons drives home the point that British imperialism has already set in motion the Irish language’s death; only religion can be preserved as a cultural testament to the Irish past. In 1755, Samuel Johnson famously ended the preface to his dictionary by claiming that tongues, like governments, have a natural tendency to degeneration. “We have long preserved our constitution, let us make some struggles for our language.”⁸ Several generations later, and from across the Irish Sea, Lyons inverts this idea by insinuating that the struggle for the Irish language is over. Irish people should therefore fight a battle they are capable of winning: the preservation of a traditional religious culture now that traditional linguistic culture is under such threat.

In the present, the politics of self-determination are commonly linked to native language rights. This is also the case in Lyons’s speech, except that he views the Irish language as a natural right that can no longer be reinstituted. Put another way, at the same time that Lyons asserts the value of an indigenous Irish culture rooted in the Irish language, he also claims that the latter is doomed to disappearance—a fait accompli previously settled by the anglophone “Score.”⁹ In order to make the claim that Irish-language Bibles are superfluous in Ireland because anglophony penetrated that country so deeply, Lyons delves into questions surrounding Irish- and English-language literacy.¹⁰ He declares that Irish-language Bibles are incapable of cultivating both biblical and linguistic knowledge.¹¹ Standard English language’ pedagogical primacy in Ireland has produced a literacy problem in which anyone who can read Irish must already be able to read English. Lyons’s point is that Standard English literacy has become the formal precondition for Irish-language literacy. In Lyons’s era, like today, lack of literacy in a language deeply affects its potential for survival.

Relating his recent journey through Ireland, the kind of journey that regularly crops up in eighteenth-century studies of regional languages, Lyons notes, “All the proficients in Iberno-Celtic (and they were few) were proficients in English also; their grammatical knowledge of the former [‘Iberno-Celtic’] was attained through the medium of the latter [English].”¹² Straight to the point: “Every one of them [literate Irish people], without a single exception, could read and write English before they ventured to learn the letters of the Irish alphabet.”¹³ In 1827, only a generation after the full political union of Ireland with the Kingdom of Great Britain, Lyons’s anecdotal experience testifies to the fact that Irish-language literacy was fully contingent on English-language literacy. A reader of Irish was by definition already a multiliterate anglophone. Regarding the question of Irish-language Bibles, Lyons concludes that monolingual speakers of Irish still existed, but certainly no monoliterate Irish readers.

Advice follows Lyons’s grim assessment of Irish-language literacy existing only as the aftereffect of Standard English literacy: no Christian should give money to British organizations claiming to produce and distribute Irish-language scriptures. Such organizations, Lyons argues, fill their coffers by providing “unreadable volumes” of Irish-language scripture to the Irish. Next they attempt to convert the population to Protestantism by virtue of the goodwill their translations have engendered. In Lyons’s eyes, the mendacity of this process is self-evident. “With regard to the translation of the Pentateuch, lately foisted on the public,” he writes, “it is a burlesque upon the language, and replete with the most glaring errors in grammar and in rendering.”¹⁴ The Irish-language reading materials these organizations produce are terrible, in other words, a fact that Lyons claims Irish “readers” can no longer even register. Lyons feels compelled to testify to these dubious translation practices. He even alleges that producers of Irish-language Bibles are actively manipulating spotty Irish-language literacy in order to inject Protestantism into a population that would otherwise resist such injections. In other words, unreadable and doctrinally suspicious Irish-language translations are put before an Irish audience that can read English much more fluidly, if they can read at all. These translations are worthless except as “wrapper for the snuff-seller and the tobacconist,” he claims.¹⁵ This is the lamentable situation linguistic imperialism has produced.¹⁶

Lyons’s emphasis on English-language literacy as a precondition to Irish-language literacy does not mean that he has given up on the Irish language wholesale. In a nostalgic vein, he points out that Irish remains a bearer of cultural patrimony in certain communities, like those of County Mayo, which he references saying, “There is no part of Ireland in which our sweet, expressive, and beautiful language is better known and spoken than in the county of Mayo, of which I am a native.”¹⁷ But even in the linguistic counterpublic of County Mayo “there is not one mere Irish scholar.”¹⁸ Context suggests that “mere” in this sentence means monoliterate, a person trained in reading and writing only Irish. Elsewhere in Lyons the word “mere” means monolingual, as when the speaker, evoking the hierarchies governing Irish linguistic life, recalls, “I remember when a mere Irish servant would not be employed in my father’s house, for fear his children should learn this (to him) vulgar tongue.”¹⁹ The expressions “mere Irish servant” and “mere Irish scholar” produce a powerful tension. The “mere Irish servant” is a figure of monolingual lack or absence, a servant who cannot be hired because he can speak only Irish.²⁰ The “mere Irish scholar,” on the other hand, is an impossible fantasy of monoliterate purity, a reader who reads only the Irish language, and can do so unaffected by English-language mediation.

Given that no “mere Irish scholar” exists, Irish-language literacy must always be undercut by Standard English literacy. As part of his linguistic biography, Lyons reports that he was kept isolated from his native Irish for the first nine years of his life, in “perfect ignorance of the finest medium of communication with which I happen to be acquainted.”²¹ Lyons, like Wheatley, was primarily educated in an anglophone home, one that eschewed languages other than Standard English as a matter of social, cultural, and occupational necessity. With a childhood like the one he describes, an adulthood beyond anglophony is almost unthinkable. Lyons relates his autobiography in a tone that anticipates what Derrida, in a melancholic phrase, refers to as the “strangely bottomless alienation of the soul” that an imposed language produces.²²

These dynamics account for the counterintuitive way in which, for Lyons, Irish-language biblical materials come to represent an encroachment on Irish society, a duplicitous form of lip service that cannot slow the pace of Irish-language erosion that is already underway. Toward the end of his speech, Lyons asks the audience to consider the following hypothetical scenario: imagine that a group of Irish Catholics were to establish schools throughout England for the purpose of “educating the Protestant poor.”²³ Then imagine, he enjoins, that they were to raise money to print Catholic-tinged anglophone Bibles to foist on the people. Imagine further that they were to hold fund-raising meetings in Ireland where they “malign the Protestants of England, caricature their religion,” and in so doing, “enlist the popular feelings of the Irish in favour of their [evangelical] society.”²⁴ As the inverted scenario becomes more elaborate, the anti-imperial subtext of Lyons’s attack on the Bible-producing societies erupts. Imagine, Lyons suggests, that “Irish Papists, who hold meetings in every town in England; insult the people; outrage their religious feelings; assault their persons; and madden round the land.”²⁵ Obviously, English Protestants would be outraged; they would justly feel their language and culture under assault. They might opt for Irish-language Bibles (as Lyons opts for Standard English ones) so that the foreign-language Bible societies would dissolve or be discredited. They might choose the linguistic imposition of a Bible in another tongue, in other words, in order to fight off a larger assault on culture and religion.

Reverend Lyons is one multilingual anglophone who uses pointed rhetorical and narrative strategies for characterizing his identity vis-a-vis language and culture. For him, educational memories are told as tragedy. Adjoined to this, his counterhistory in which Ireland conquers England and spreads its language there becomes a way to argue that the Irish language cannot be saved, and so Irish Catholicism must be. That a person should have to choose religious identity over linguistic identity speaks to the enormous pressures of anglophone imperialism in Ireland in a way that few other choices can. Though Lyons does not push the scenario any further, his counterhistory is worth considering within the context in which it was elaborated: if the vectors of British imperialism in colonial Ireland were reversed and the thoroughgoing anglicization of Ireland undone, would the Irish language experience a meaningful revival? In such circumstances, could a “mere Irish scholar” come into being? Lyons is all too aware that most “mere” English scholars felt no need to learn his language except in the interests of evangelism, which he sees as culturally invasive. His imagined scenario captures one particularly negative view of the future of the Irish language. It also reflects an uneasy awareness of anglophony’s growing textual heft—its grammar texts, style guides, literacy manuals, and translation treatises.

In short, the fantasy of a “mere Irish scholar” is as much about the word “mere” as it is about the meaning of a linguistic “scholar.” The next two chapters examine mid- to late eighteenth-century anglophone linguistic scholarship as it relates to culture and literature. In these chapters I unpack the theories of standardization and translation that make possible the invasion Lyons excoriates. The goal is to reveal the development of the monolingual politics of language I described in the first chapter, but also to reveal points of discontinuity within that politics in which narrow forms of multiplicity were allowed and even encouraged to flourish, albeit in limited ways. Beyond anglophony’s ubiquity, Lyons envisions purity in the form of an unmediated Irish-language reader. However, as we will see in the next chapter, anglophony’s metalinguistic armature in this period meticulously inoculates itself against the idea of monolingual purity by embracing certain forms of mixture. Standard English is by nature mixed and “copious,” the standardizers repeat, an idea that leads toward further justification of English’s ongoing and intrusive impositions into colonial and provincial spaces.