Patrick Healy’s novel Beyond the Pale explores memory, time, childhood, and how language shapes our world. Set in rural Ireland, starting in the 1950s, the book follows a young boy’s early memories through a series of expressionistic soundscapes. The expression from which the book takes its name has come to mean beyond what is considered acceptable behavior, but the origins of the phrase referred to land within Ireland that was “beyond the control of the English government.” Healy’s book examines social class, stigma, village, family life, identity, and the nature of consciousness. Rooted in the oral tradition, the book is a celebration of place, the Irish idiom, music, and memory.
Patrick Healy was born in Dublin in 1955. He studied philosophy and Semitic languages at St. Columbans Dalgan Park, Pontifical University Maynooth, and University College Dublin. He has published over 20 books on topics around artists, aesthetic theory, philosophy of science, architecture, art criticism and innumerable essays. He has been a Professor of Interdisciplinary Research at Free International University Amsterdam, 1997-present, and was a Senior Research Fellow at the Faculty of Architecture from 2020-2022. He is currently completing a new work of fiction entitled Fatal Fragments, a loose follow-up to his novel Beyond the Pale.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Where did your fascination with the beauty, the music of language begin? Can you trace it back?
PATRICK HEALY
Well, I think that something in the book has to do with memory. But it isn't just memory relating to place; it's also memory relating to sounds. I was very fascinated as a child as to why, when you were learning the alphabet, you were shown a picture of a donkey. D is for donkey or G is for goose. It fascinated me that you could recognize from a drawing an animal you had seen, but also an animal you hadn't seen. If you showed a child of three or four a book of dinosaurs, they still knew there were animals, even though they'd never seen these animals because the association of an actual alphabet letter with a picture, and later then with a sound, became very fascinating. At the same time, you were learning to write. As you may remember, one of the biggest achievements when you're about three or four in writing is that you write your own name. There’s a certain secret moment when you can write out your name as whatever it is. I think these were the memories of where you begin to feel that you've started to live. This is you. This is not other people calling you "you"; it is you writing yourself in a movement of the hand with a pen. Usually, it had a nib. You often talked about the nib getting sprained and you had to dip it into a small enamel ink well, which was inserted into the top of the desk that had a slanting cover on it.
You dip the pen in, and you wrote in a lined jotter book your name, and you would write it out maybe 20 times. At that stage, a teacher—this was in what was called baby infants at the age of four, not high infants Miss O'Carroll was the teacher. If you wrote very well, you were given a gold star. This set you on a kind of path where you were meant to achieve things, where you were supposed to be doing something. You got rewarded; you wrote your name. The repetition of this was like saying to yourself, "I am what I write."
It opens with what, I suppose, for an Irish book, is a rather unusual situation. It is about somebody called Count Taffe, who is an Irish aristocrat living in the local area. He’s teaching this young boy Japanese while he's making a consommé. The point about the mix of the ingredients is that he's making a consommé; he's not making a stew. The word "satura" or "satire" actually comes from a stew where you put a lot of ingredients together. The process here is to take a lot of ingredients and to distill them down. The distillation process is almost like an alchemical process; through the filters of the language being learned and through the child's listening, he takes the phrase "sore, sore." He knows that that's the word "sure" in English pronunciation. So, he’s using another language to remember words in a language. In the space between, of course, he’s beginning to develop a kind of satire. He’s becoming humorously dislocated from the very language in which he's becoming fluent. This parallels how his own naming is a double naming. Because what is discovered in the book much, much later, is that somebody is sitting in what is presumably Portrane, which was called a mental hospital. In those days, you could be institutionalized, which was the phrase used, but it wasn't always that people were locked up. There were different levels of engagement in the institution itself in the local area. It was half spoken about, half mentioned, and considered slightly shameful.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
And the process of naming is important throughout the book, in particular to a central emotional story of a character in the novel, who has two names.
HEALY
Somehow, an older version of what looks like an eraser seems to be talking about the fact that there is a double name due to the foster family, which is not the child's biological mother and so on and so forth. But according to custom, the official name on the birth certificate is kept in the school register, and he has the family name. Thus, he has a double name problem, a little bit like the problem of a double language—that there is both Irish and English. There are two names, two languages, and constant movement in between both of these so that you are both, and you are neither one nor the other.
I think one Irish writer once said, "You don't finish books; they abandon you." John McGahern said it, though I'm not quoting him exactly. It's that idea. At a certain point, you have to say, "schluss," that's it. Or "raus," out. You have to get out of it in some way. You can see that even though there are no great events occurring in the book, or there's no massive narration being piled up sequentially, it's kind of episodic, and you don't know what's coming next because voices just suddenly enter, and they're not given double quotation marks.
You almost have no single quotation marks; you get to know the voices because of how the characters earlier have been introduced. You know this is something from the parish priest or from Father O’Flynn or from Molly Eustace or from Mrs. Marmion or the various named people who are coming in and out of the book, who have certain interests and comments—Mr. Dunne on the flower and the usage for the flower show, the foster mother herself, who doesn't actually say very much within the book, but you get quite a lot of movement now, not only between the different language words but also between the characters. The characters are mostly real names of people, but on the other hand, some of them are invented. So, there is again a play of invention and reality.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
I think now would be a good time hear you read from Beyond the Pale.
HEALY
Beyond the Pale
hEri oll oilen aingel – noble Ireland isle of angels! Didn’t the pope call two slave boys in Rome the same, anglii, angelii, maybe it was all one duangley. Oh, we are the dwangleys the prittobrittoangelangliibrigatimenapphappyhappyluskcomitingadltery.
You might as well rave there as in bed.
Have you ever heard of a prey of horses?
Indeed, and an ounce of gold for every nose in Ireland. That was the Formorian tribute – you can ask Jim Walsh he knows about all those things as does Eily Daly – on the tip of her tounge if she didn’t have to mind Jane she would have been an archaeologist. Swears by the O’Rahilly and is reading it constantly.
Maybe that is why they say you end up paying through the nose.
You’re having me on. Pull the other.
Ocus uingi d’or ar gac shroin n Erinn . . . an ounce of gold for every nose in Ireland. Don’t ask me to spell it.
That is there, in the book, Fintan then said;
It will belong to clerics to the end of time . . .
No keeping them fed. I tell you there are bells and angels all right. But don’t worry on the last day all will be sorted out, and Perriwinkle Tom will lead a chorus: Oh, keep from the lake where 900 of the youth of Ireland drowned and from the river where the King’s daughter was swept away. He will prophesy in the Lake of no Birds and make offerings, like Hannibal. We shall hear them rattle in the House of Bleached Bones – sing in the Hall of Lyres, give Judgment in the House of Torts oh, and on and on and on. We had only two claims either it was from the nobles of Spain or via via the Phonecians. It is only with the Old English, who were the new Irish that the claims of the Celtic came about. You can thank Fr. Keating. Bell and catach going out in battle. That was the prophecy. The mighty shrine. You saw it didn’t you on the school excursion? No. The Catach – when you wanted to swear an oath, you did it on a relic, or a shrine. Now what, by the blood-stained handkerchief of Thomas Ash, by the bayonet of Pearse, on the cheque book of Sean Lemass. The scapular of Michael Collins.
A lovely summer shealing – one tree – we could see them but they couldn’t see us from where we were – rowing, spinning, milking, and grinding at the quern.
Yes, the queen.
Off to shear the sheep. They landed and went to a rock to kill seals, but their boat drifted because it wasn’t moored tightly, and the waves rose and they were swept away one by one, and the waves still sound the deed cha till, cha till cha till mi tuille . . . I return, I return, I rerun nevermore...
I can’t make head nor tail of this, what are you going on about?
Seeley, that is Seal Island.
A wild bluff, out there, and speaking with a loud voice but without an evil word, gun droch focal.
After the storm masses of seaweed driven onto the shore. The perchman holds up the seaweed with his pole when it arrives, and then it has to be moved before the next tide, but if there is not much the weed is divided into pennies – yes peighinnean and the land for the manure into rigs and ridges, didn’t you hear tell of that before?
I might have, I might have.
The fire is smouldering, its smoored by the Son of Mary.
– There is an angel in the door, by the door of every house.
The cawing and crowing sounds never end under those . . .
You are right, I must remember then, tie a knot there and I’ll have it again.
HEALY
So, there you have, of course, issues of the different languages interplaying with each other. Little scraps of Irish languages and idioms have stories that have been told, but how Ireland actually comes about as an idea, as to where the Irish come from. A lot of these kinds of debates are just placed, you know, in day-to-day conversation, and then they trail off. People start something; they trail off and might come back to it later. That phenomenon of speaking over each other, tales that are known and not known, I always found very interesting. It was literally like a radio that was kept on all day in the kitchen.
You would come in and out, and you would hear certain things, and you'd have to work out the context and the conversation and the speakers. In some way, one of the big personalities in the book is just a radio that’s playing, and some of these conversations are not actually taking place between characters in real-time. They're just snippets that have been overheard on radios.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
That open transmission is a sense that you do get a lot in Ireland. If you travel around and you might have just met somebody, they're talking to you like they’ve known you for years. Then they're referring to bits of history—your man who moved down the road—and you just have to be on your toes and decipher this archeology.
So, I do like that—the idea that it’s a radio. Sometimes I wondered if it was like ghosts because you're kind of into that at the end. You know, it goes back to the beginning. I really like that sense. I wonder, did you write it all at once? You opened there and in the middle.
Do you want to read some more?
HEALY
Beyond the Pale
She stood at the jamb of the door. She did nothing, Musty side to her. A thatched roof.
Crabbed, gibing they called her a hex.
Preparing meal for the hens. Selling eggs by the dozen. An old horse with a hollow back, fat as a goose. Twilight.
Smell of Old Spice aftershave.
Strutting and straddle of bantam cocks.
An unlikely pair.
A fox.
An eagle.
Erie.
Lair.
Littered in a brake at the foot of the tree on which the eagle alighted to survey his prey.
Awful racket.
And a certain day, the fox being away . . .
Let me guess, the eagle swooped down on the cubs and took them to feed the eaglets.
Fox could only curse on return.
The nestlings.
Soon after eagle swooped down on an altar where meat for the sacrifice was being burnt on a brand.
Like a stick.
And lo and behold it set fire to the nest, the eaglets fell to the ground and the fox ate them, in the very sight of the eagle.
Oh, to hear again the homing rook.
Scone of a . . . fat cabbage, peels of potatoes left in a white enamel bucket with a wood and wire handle and to think of her, she said, crumpled in piety.
A silver sixpence with a greyhound – a threepence with a hare – now if you can bend the iron band on the felloe of that wheel – she coughed and rasped, bowing, stooping holding a pitcher of milk, a pail of milk, and Periwinkle Tom with his sack of periwinkles, the milk was settling in the pitcher, yellow of the cream hue, as the cream settled, – leave her, leave her – and nothing of the stammerwort – for heart burn. Pharmacopia. We must wrack the flower-beds with sea weed, and ask for help from Perriwinkle Tom. Donsy, dill, dingle and dung, dingle, donsy, dung and dale oh the donsy fellow called a dingle a dale and said its yellow we ask who will bring dry flax for the mill if there is no dung in the rill. Dear to me is the swell. A sixpence for you to spin on. Ding, dong, dell. Pussy in the well. Who let her in? Little Johnny thin. Who let her out, little Johnny stout.
You, desist. You dunce, dolt, you dastard.
Call it Div’lyn the disaster.
Why should I, you cannot blacken a raven.
Oh higgledy-piggeldy and mud larking on the shore.
Did you know that a substantial number of our ancestors came originally from Anatolia, or the Levant. Light constant drizzle is perfect for agriculture. For wheat, for barley and so for cows and sheep, that is why the farmers came here and settled down, after that forest clearing. That must have been a herculean task as Mr. Madden says. Cleaning out the stables! You have to keep the hay dry and unmixed with tares, build up a bed of straw and keep the sides curled so the horse will remain in good tether. I don’t know about that what you said earlier, after all one family could clear half a mile of woodland in a century. What! Heard about a freak storm in the Orkney.
HEALY
Some people said we were very influenced by Joyce. I said, well, Joyce influences everything thereafter, of course, as a writer. But this is not set in the city; this is not among urban intellectuals. This is not a modernist setting of an advertising canvasser and sophisticated people having adulterous affairs. It is actually set in the countryside, where the intelligentsia, if you like, is the local vet, the chemist, the priests, and the school teacher. There is a very strong relationship with them as keepers of collective memory. People are always looking out. This gray hand on the sixpence is the actual currency of the time, which probably comes from the Spanish. In doing this, the book discusses fragments of material culture that are given the same weight as verbal play between characters. The verbal play between characters is given the same weight as snippets from a radio. Meanwhile, this is layered between different tiers of memory. We know from the beginning of the book that someone is learning Japanese. This is actually the memory of a writer who has just died in Amsterdam, which an editor has started to work on. We're given the first part of what would have been his book, but as the editor moves through the pages—because it’s a vast manuscript—he loses control of the pages. They have not been numbered, so episodes begin to hop in and out. He has to occasionally make comments or get help, and eventually, it looks like it is stabilizing itself, but only at about page 60. It starts to stabilize, and then you get these kinds of episodic in-and-out moments.
I suppose the technique is more like in cinema. You know, you never know, no matter how much you know in a film, you could never say, "This is what the next scene is going to show." It’s like when we speak; you can never say, "This is the next sentence I'm going to speak." You can't do it.
That process where we generate and transmit language because we are spoken to, or we are named, and we are engaged constantly in this naming and speaking is about trying to find something. Whereas in fact, we are perhaps just enjoying ourselves. Like Beckett says, it is just what we have to do because we have a brain, and we need to talk to find things out, to say things. I think that's also part of what is in this book. I tried to get as close to those processes as I can.
So, I think it's just that. I mean, when we're talking about different literature—writing anything—it’s all about being able to imagine different ways of living and doing things. You know, I used to think, "Oh, I have no money. Now I'm living on the margins." I was thinking about the word "margin." Then it struck me that margins were where the first little figures, like troubadour figures, in medieval manuscripts would draw themselves, and they were considered to be outside the margin. That’s where you get outsider art. In other words, that term is almost used as an abuse, as if to say, "Oh, there’s only one way to be an artist. You’ve got to go to art school, and you’ve got to have a gallery, and then you have to have your own studio in an atelier." I think, "What is this? This is a complete concoction." The long history of art spans over 15,000 to 35,000 years; it’s been going on for so long. This is our species' behavior. We do this the way bears sleep in the winter. We make art. There’s no external mystery to this. It’s not some kind of extra consciousness—we're art-making beings.
