Ep. 12 - Panel 2B - Part 2 - Breandán Ó hEithir's Lead us into Temptation - Chris McCann (NUIG)

NPPSH Conference

This paper analyses Breandán Ó hEithir's use of music in constructing and reconstructing community throughout his novel Lead Us Into Temptation (Lig Sinn I gCathú, 1976/1978). It also explores the role that music plays in memory, political affiliation and expression, and communitas within both the text and wider Irish society during the middle of the twentieth century. Musical participation is an important aspect of collectivity and communitas. It is a public articulation of adherence to community values, and carries with it culturally encoded understandings of cultural and political (dis)affiliation. While music is a kind of social mortar, as Ó Laoire (2005) observes it also exists as a “veiled discourse, which may at once uphold the social system at the very moment it criticizes it”. Ó hEithir’s novel deals with lingering issues of affiliation and disaffiliation, and points out the problematic nature of the nation through the eyes of a fictional town closely modelled on Galway. One of the preoccupations of the text is the competition between voices surrounding the declaration of the Irish Republic in Easter Week 1949, which is presented in the text as unifying and divisive in alternate measures. In Lead Us Into Temptation, music brings simmering tensions to the surface and shatters a tenuous sense of unity coloured by ambivalence and occlusion. This is encapsulated by snatches of music leading to a climactic cacophony of competing musical voices in the commemorative parade, during which ironically the louder the voice is, the less it is truly heard. Chris is a first year PhD candidate in English at the National University of Ireland Galway. His current research analyses the role of music as a device for the creation of social hierarchy within Irish prose literature of the twentieth century. His research interests are in word and music studies, and the coalescence of visual and aural art forms in prose literature. He completed his MA, entitled Singing Exile: Music in Irish Emigration Literature, at The University of Notre Dame Fremantle in Western Australia in early 2017.