Someone once remarked that Synge wrote in Irish and English simultaneously. The English of this novel is inhabited from the inside by the tones and rhythms of Irish, so that from the viewpoint of Standard English its idiom is as persistently off-key as its realism. Synge almost never uses an Irishism that you might not hear in real life, but nobody in Ireland talks like that all the time, or ever did. His characters speak in poetry, not prose. Joejoe, Mister Psyche, the Blackbird and their colleagues are far from poetical personages, yet their everyday talk is flavoured with the speech habits of a foreign idiom. ‘It would make a dog think,’ ‘you long black bastard’, ‘It’s a grand class of a day,’ ‘He was like a shook fox,’ ‘trying to keep the chat from going dark’, ‘a lock of food’: such phrases are as foreign to English ears as Healy’s writing is remote from the English novel of suburban adultery. ‘She was like the hare, enchanted,’ Joejoe says of a former girlfriend in an unwonted outbreak of emotion. ‘The hare has a lot to answer for. Filling you with the gra then going down to wash her clothes and hair at low tide and leaving you here be yourself. That’s all I can say, it skips through your mind, all men’s mind, so I’ll leave it.’ The sentences are curious partly because the speaker, like most characters in the book, is obeying the laws of private fantasy rather than public logic, but also because of the spectral presence within them of a language other than English.
Being stranded between two tongues in this way is one reason Ireland proved so hospitable to modernism. In fact, it was the only part of what were then the British Isles in which a flourishing native modernism, as opposed to one imported from abroad, actually took root. Modernism tends to thrive in conditions of political turbulence, which was more in evidence in the Ireland of the time than it was in Britain. Ireland achieved partial independence at the point of a gun at just the time Ulysses was published. Modernist art also tends to spring from the collision between tradition and modernity, which was evident enough in the nation of Yeats and Lady Gregory. It is typically the work of literal or internal émigrés, men and women caught on the hop between different cultures and languages. If literary modernism is the point at which language comes to be about language, taking itself as the object of its own inquiry, this vein of verbal self-consciousness was already obvious in a country for which language had long been a political minefield. The members of the Gaelic League did not just speak Irish; they spoke it combatively, self-consciously, which is not quite how E.M. Forster spoke English.
A piquant remark later on in the review: “It is said of some of the Celtic Revivalists that they translated their work so often from Irish to English and back that they sometimes forgot which language they had written in to begin with.”