Never underestimate the power of the Irish mammy

CULTURE SHOCK:The sad early death of Christopher Nolan reminds us of the crucial role mothers have played in the contribution Irish culture has made to the world

THE IRISH mammy gets a bad time in literature. She tends to be either hauntingly absent ( Ulysses) or a control freak of tyrannical proportions ( Big Maggie). Yet the sadly early death of Christopher Nolan reminds us that Irish mothers have been crucial to one of the most important contributions that Irish culture has made to the world. There is, so far as I know, no parallel anywhere to the breakthrough for writers with cerebral palsy made by Christy Brown, Christopher Nolan and Davoren Hanna. That breakthrough matters globally, but also historically. It broke a silence that had lasted for millennia. And though it was made by the writers themselves, it was crucially facilitated by their mothers.

Perhaps because we are wedded to the idea of genius as an entirely individual attribute, or perhaps because liberal intellectuals are uncomfortable with the religiously-motivated self-sacrifice of women, Bridget Brown, Bernadette Nolan and Brighid Hanna seldom figure as cultural heroes. Yet they are the midwives of one of the truly great achievements of Irish culture, the smashing of the barriers that separated those who could neither speak clearly nor control a pen from the expression of their thoughts, feelings and imaginings.

It is hard to overstate the force of that breakthrough. Nolan, in the title of his first book, called it a Dam-Burst of Dreams. Davoren Hanna, when he was just 14, wrote a remarkable poem about the fall of the Berlin Wall – an event that clearly resonated with his own liberation into language: "Light kindles the naked callous stones/ and luminous dreams mutate the skies." Those images of dams bursting and walls falling were entirely justified – in its own way, the work of Brown, Nolan and Hanna really is as historic as the fall of the Berlin Wall.

It is easy to sentimentalise the role of the writers’ mothers in this achievement, to see it merely as one of unquestioning support. In fact, it demanded bitter physical labour to hold and guide a writhing body through the Herculean task of manipulating a keyboard. It demanded the ferocity to face the continual battles with prejudice, with officialdom, with the world itself. And it demanded the making of demands, an almost cruel insistence that the wall of silence be kicked again and again.

There is a very moving moment in Nolan's brilliant autobiography Under the Eye of the Clockthat encapsulates the complex nature of the relationship. His mother is baking bread while listening to Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata.

The music enraptures him and he begins to vocalise his pleasure. His mother orders him to stop shouting so she can enjoy the music. He rebukes her: “I wasn’t shouting, I was singing.” She apologises and is close to tears. But then she comes back and says: “I’ll continue to say shut up but you can respond as you see fit.” It is a lovely encapsulation of the crucial moment in a writer’s growth, the one in which he both stands up for his right to communicate his own noises, to sing in the only way he can, and at the same time understands that communication is also a process of negotiation. It is an insight he gains, not from his mother’s simple devotion, but from her complex insistence on her own independent needs.

That process of understanding both communication and its limits is at the heart of the struggle of the writer with cerebral palsy. The very purity and energy of the dam-burst – the words tumbling out from a historic silence – creates the great artistic challenge. Davoren Hanna’s father, Jack, wrote incisively of the “propensity of writers with a major communication disability to indulge in language of abnormal density and luxuriance, resulting in a strain and contortion almost mirroring the body image.”

Nolan's great achievement as writer – and it is rooted in that complex relationship with his mother – lies, not just in bursting the dam but in subsequently channelling the rushing waters. The Joycean exuberance of the neologisms and wordplay in Dam-Burst of Dreamsnever left his work, but it was tamed and focused in Under the Eye of the Clockand his novel The Banyan Tree, whose opening line – "That churn came out once a week, usually on a Friday" – has a directness and simplicity that would have been unimaginable in his earlier work.

Nolan’s struggle as a writer was to objectify himself, to escape the necessarily self-centred perspective of the boy locked into his own world.

This meant, in a sense, growing through the primary communication with his mother and into a much larger sense of the unknown audience out there, beyond his immediate experience. It is a huge tribute to his mother that he was able to do this so quickly. She let him out without locking him in.

Even in the obviously autobiographical Under the Eye of the Clock, he adopted the name Joseph Meehan and wrote in the third person. More tellingly, he calls his mother, not Bernadette, but Nora. He is already making her both herself and someone else. And she is allowing him to be both himself and someone else, both her beloved son and an artist.

Ultimately what made Nolan an artist of real standing, was this ability not just to recount his experience, but to transform it. He used the most painful part of that experience – the horrified gaze of others as they looked at his twisted body – as a way in to the artistic mission of seeing things through other eyes. He saw himself as others saw him: “zoo-caged”, his face “locked tight in an expression of stupid-looking languor”, his limbs moving wildly, “just as a clockwork doll would move on being released to unwind”. But he did what writers do, putting himself in the minds of his own beholders. “How must I have looked to those sane men?

. . . Were they really shattered in the face of my mad bodily antics?” Knowing that he had at least one beholder who would never be repelled by the antics of his body gave him the courage to look at himself from the outside and, in the process, to become a writer.

fotoole@irishtimes.com