I: Rural Existence and the Mind at Large

First, it is worth clarifying the definition of the transcendental habit. In The Perennial Philosophy, Huxley proposes the existence of a unifying spiritual level that requires the individual to surrender their privately held desires in exchange for sensory transcendence. He describes this trans-personal ‘divine Ground’ as the universe and everything it encompasses when perceived beyond the illusory Self: ‘the ground in which the multifarious and time-bound psyche is rooted is a simple, timeless awareness. By making ourselves pure in heart and poor in spirit we can discover and be identified with this awareness. In the spirit we not only have, but are, the unitive knowledge of the divine Ground.’² Neoplatonism serves as one of the important contexts informing Huxley’s definition of the divine Ground: ‘The godhead or what Huxley was now calling the “divine Ground” (this phrase derives from the German mystic Meister Eckhart) is eternal; unitive knowledge of the Ground requires a transcendence both of one’s self and of time.’³ Huxley’s discussion of ‘that eternal Self in the depth of particular, individualized selves, and identical with, or at least akin to, the divine Ground,’⁴ and the proceeding description of the unitive Oneness of the divine Ground is squarely rooted in an understanding of the Neoplatonic underpinnings of Eckhart. A significant development in the area of perennialism at the time of writing was Stephen MacKenna’s 1930 translation of The Enneads, being the first full English-language translation which served as the basis for the anthology which Huxley cites in The Perennial Philosophy.

Between Stephen MacKenna’s involvement with the Gaelic League and his noted enthusiasm for the Irish language, there is reason to believe that na gCopaleen could share elements of Eckhart’s Neoplatonic philosophy even though it cannot be proved that he read MacKenna’s translation. The interwoven realities of At Swim-Two-Birds, the exploration of language as a source of psychic tension in An Béal Bocht, and most overtly, the eventual fascination with Neoplatonic figure Augustine of Hippo in The Dalkey Archive all indicate an implicit awareness of the perennial tradition that partially informs Huxley’s conception of the divine Ground. Carrying the notion of a divine Ground into The Doors of Perception, Huxley anchors his descriptions of first-hand mescaline use to the context of art, religion, and history as a method of both justifying and simulating the Mind at Large. By inhibiting the brain’s functions via the reduction of sugar intake, Huxley suggests that the reducing valve of cognition can be opened, letting in a torrent of biologically useless information:

But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet.⁵

The Mind at Large can have unexpected theoretical applications in a text such as An Béal Bocht, as the ‘reducing valve’ that parses the social reality of twentieth-century rural Ireland from the fantastical elements of parody provides one of the text’s most interesting stylistic tensions. For Huxley, mescaline represented a newfound release from the tyranny of the reducing valve. While the developments in psychedelic research that drew his attention to Osmond’s work in 1953 are completely detached from the world of insular poverty na gCopaleen lampoons in his novel, many of the conditions for self-transcendence are unintentionally represented in the lethargic, sensorily deprived denizens of Corkadoragha. The meagre diets, monotonous routines, and recursive social dynamics seen throughout Bonaparte’s life are heightened to mythological significance by the surrealist, hallucinatory qualities of na gCopaleen’s writing, which pairs nicely with Huxley’s assertions on the role of starvation in the visionary experience. In Heaven and Hell, he makes the following claim in relation to Lenten fasting: ‘their diet was meagre in the extreme. Hence those agonies of depression and scrupulosity described by so many spiritual writers; hence their frightful temptations to despair and self-slaughter. But hence too those “gratuitous graces,” in the form of heavenly visions and locutions, of prophetic insights, of telepathic “discernments of spirits”.’⁶ Just as Huxley’s ‘gratuitous graces’ are mediated by his extensive knowledge of mysticism, the unusual imagery that escalates throughout An Béal Bocht is informed by the unique political position of Irish language and culture within the new Free State.

In their chapter pertaining to the political basis of idleness in O’Nolan’s work, Gregory Dobbins refers to the underlying contradictions of Catholic conservatism: ‘In Bunreacht na hÉireann freedom of expression was restricted if it violated the state’s very strict notions of immorality. O’Brien was at pains to point out that ideas, practices, and modes of speech quite common in pre-Christian Ireland were frowned upon in modern Ireland.’⁷ Dobbins places emphasis on O’Nolan’s consistent view of idleness as a modern form of unintentional political resistance, particularly through the modernist ambitions of At Swim-Two-Birds’ narrator that keep him sedentary and inebriated. The transcendent vision that Huxley ascribes to the Mind at Large is contained within the narrator’s novel, and his idleness is enabled by material comfort;⁸ the cultural division between Dublin and the rural population is made evident by na gCopaleen’s inverse approach to absurdity in An Béal Bocht, where the unfiltered visionary experience overtakes objective narration entirely. In Huxleyan terms, the student’s novel in At Swim-Two-Birds serves as a reducing valve that cordons his visionary experience into a rational, digestible form. The luxury of a deliberate visionary experience is not afforded to the impoverished, poorly educated Bonaparte, who must contend with the unfiltered Mind at Large in its absurd totality.

Similarly, An Béal Bocht diverges from At Swim-Two-Birds in its representation of alcohol in accordance with Huxley’s view of self-transcendence. Huxley differentiates the heightened, egoless perception induced by mescaline from the inebriation of alcohol as such: ‘Unlike alcohol, it does not drive the taker into the kind of uninhibited action which results in brawls, crimes of violence and traffic accidents. A man under the influence of mescaline quietly minds his own business.’⁹ In An Béal Bocht, one notices a complete absence of cognitive stimulants and a quiet, ubiquitous presence of alcoholic spirits.¹⁰ The diverging states of Heaven and Hell induced by Huxley’s portrait of mescaline are predicated on an initial action, whereby the user decides the appropriate dosage, environment, and mental state before consciously ingesting the substance. The reality of na gCopaleen’s text, as in many of his narratives, presupposes a comical nightmare logic irrespective of his character’s intentions. Being placed in a palpable, unavoidable Hell, there is little recourse beyond what Huxley considers ‘the currently popular Doors in the Wall’¹¹ of poitín or porter. The drinking habits of At Swim-Two-Birds’ narrator lack the potency of the alcoholic consumption in An Béal Bocht, as the cultural climate that facilitates visions such as the Sea-cat has passed from the bounds of written fiction to the oral, embodied world of Bonaparte’s community. Upon consuming poitín during the Corkadoragha Feis, our narrator Bonaparte is completely deprived of his senses:

I did not feel anything for a long while; I did not see anything, neither did I hear a sound. Unknown to me, the earth was revolving its course through the firmament. It was a week before I felt that a stir of life was still within me and a fortnight before I was completely certain that I was alive.¹²

Instead of mild, sustained inebriation, Bonaparte is instantly concussed; the popular method of escaping reality in Corkadoragha is of such concentrated effect that it dislodges the user from time entirely: ‘A half-year went by before I had recovered fully from the ill-health which that night’s business had bestowed on me, God give us grace! I did not notice the second day of the feis’¹³ (PM, 61). The misuse of alcohol that obliterates Bonaparte’s consciousness brings about a more destructive lethargy than the sensorially intensifying effects of mescaline; the eternal ‘now’ of the Mind at Large is circumvented in favour of escaping the difficult present. Bonaparte’s consumption of the poitín enforces a degree of separation from the climax of the chapter, with the conclusion of the feis being recounted second-hand. The lethargy exhibited by Bonaparte and his community is at odds with typical portrayals of rural Irish poverty, especially against the honourable, suffering workers presented in the Gaeltacht literature An Béal Bocht aims to parody. There is an obvious satirical value to this, as na gCopaleen can make use of the corner-cutting selfishness of his cast to justify bizarre narrative situations such as Sitric O’Sannasa’s choice to live among seals for access to convenient sustenance and the Old-Fellow’s Gaelic feis scam. When the escape of alcohol is made unavailable to the narrator (as is the case for the remainder of the text), the consciousness-intensifying deprivation that makes the Mind at Large accessible can operate in full effect.

As the text will eagerly remind us, the disposition of Corkadoragha natives is defined by an incurable lack. Non-dialogic conversations almost exclusively concern the lack of sun, food, or a tolerable future with total resignation, and their incessant self-pitying betrays a fundamental dissatisfaction with their lived environment. With nothing but spite for the harsh landscape of the Irish west, the people of Corkadoragha understandably choose to dull their senses instead of heightening them. In a sense, the benefits of mescaline are founded on the belief that the mind should eventually return to a standard, blunted mode of perception. If the logic of nature were as irrational and pointedly hostile as presented in An Béal Bocht, the notion of returning to reality would be tantamount to re-entering a nightmare. By embracing their squalor, aggrandising their quiet, unchallenged suffering, and putting on the poor mouth, the residents of Corkadoragha can remain in the role of the punished Gaelic people and exist along the outskirts of their barbed and irrational world.

The portrayals of rural Irish poverty throughout the novel are inextricably tied to the malformed, highly politicised symbol of the noble Irish peasant proliferated by the Irish Revival.¹⁴ In his investigation of the literary Irish peasant, Edward Hirsch succinctly observes that to ‘speak about the “peasant” was always to speak about something beyond actual rural life.’¹⁵ Na gCopaleen plays with the common conceptions of his impoverished subjects beyond the standard renderings of class and reaches for a parodic heightening at almost spiritual levels of abstraction. As Hirsch notes: ‘To debate the characteristics of that peasant was to share a vocabulary; simultaneously, to undermine and attack someone’s idea of the peasant was to come uncomfortably close to attacking that person’s concept of Irish social classes.’¹⁶ The material status of Corkadoragha’s people serves as a formal justification for much of the novel’s farce while managing to skirt past its national implications, resulting in a pervading atmosphere of unreality.

By rigorously cartooning his subjects, na gCopaleen ironically reproduces the rural mysticism of W. B. Yeats, the ethereal occultism of George William Russell, and the crude scandal of J. M. Synge: writers who each respond to the Romantic literary tradition of Wordsworth and Blake that Huxley frequently identifies as examples of visionary artists.¹⁷ Despite his connections to the formal preferences of these writers, na gCopaleen’s satire may be most analogous to the perceptual clarity of psychedelics described by Huxley: ‘Table, chair and desk came together in a composition that was like something by Braque or Juan Gris, a still life recognizably related to the objective world, but rendered without depth, without any attempt at photographic realism.’¹⁸ Where the leading Revival writers elevate Irish peasantry as an embodiment of nationalist values,¹⁹ na gCopaleen curates a deliberately surface-level image of the rural population in order to undermine the politicised assertions of the Irish west in a similar fashion to William Blake’s reproductions of class struggle throughout his decidedly visionary mythos.

II: Internal and External Perception

Of the various details in Huxley’s account of the mescaline test, his altered perception of the garden chair provides the strongest reference point for An Béal Bocht’s heightened reality. Huxley likens the surging depth of the bamboo-legged chairs to Wordsworth’s daffodils, both serving as microcosms of the endless texture revealed by the Mind at Large; ‘they brought all manner of wealth – the gift, beyond price, of a new direct insight into the very Nature of Things, together with a more modest treasure of understanding in the field, especially, of the arts.’²⁰ Huxley continuously related this ‘Nature of Things,’ a form of transcendent truth that resides above material objectivity, to the artistic renditions of symbols (in this case, Van Gogh’s The Chair). In doing so, the visionary aspect of art is shown to ultimately fall short of the fullness of the Mind at Large. He concludes that ‘though incomparably more real than the chairs of ordinary perception, the chair in his picture remained no more than an unusually expressive symbol of the fact. The fact had been manifested Suchness; this was only an emblem.’²¹ In reference to similar ideas expressed in Huxley’s fiction, Uwe Rasch draws attention to the interplay of firsthand experience and the more externally reliant structures of belief:

Belief is not only tenacious; words, concepts, ideas pose as the thing itself, demoting the experience to the rank of “illustration.” The relationship of signified and signifier is reversed, belief patterns take over, much as in Derek Muller’s findings: we see our idea of a tree, we don’t pay utmost attention, and we do not see the “tree.”²²

These opposing means of relating to the world are shown to destabilise under the influence of mescaline, and the exchanges of sensory and cerebral consciousness encouraged by the Mind at Large is reflected in na gCopaleen’s method of conveying his rural Ireland through an unreliable narrative voice. Huxley’s conception of the Mind at Large accounts for linguistic relativity, whereby language conditions one’s ordinary perception of the world. As reality and allegory are ambiguously placed throughout Bonaparte’s story, the reader is neither freed from the conventions of language nor limited by them. Two of the novel’s strongest icons (the O’Coonassa family pig that grows to the size of a cottage and the Sea-Cat that hunts Bonaparte throughout his journeys) are examples of an ill-attained Mind at Large; these embodiments of Ireland’s political condition can only take on a ridiculous form when Bonaparte’s perception is heightened through starvation and want. Referring to the understanding of schizophrenic experience of his time, Huxley notes that ‘the illumination is infernal – an intense electric glare without a shadow, ubiquitous and implacable. Everything that, for healthy visionaries, is a source of bliss, brings to Renée only fear and a nightmarish sense of unreality.’²³ In Heaven and Hell, the border that separates an enlightening visionary experience from a harrowing one is often vague and indistinct.

Between these diverging states, there is a common requirement of deprivation, as the psychedelic effects of mescaline and the hallucinations brought about by prolonged fasting or isolation are ironically achieved by limiting cognitive functions: ‘By reducing the amount of available sugar, fasting lowers the brain’s biological efficiency and so makes possible the entry into consciousness of material possessing no survival value.’²⁴ Taking the narrative at Bonaparte’s word, Corkadoragha’s people are perpetually deprived yet never fully starved, existing in a liminal state between discomfort and desperate hunger. Despite their poor conditions, the malnourished community lacks the energy to take action beyond what is necessary for bare essential living, at most venturing to avail of easy money-making opportunities. One such example is the father and son ‘hunting’ trip that amounts to petty thievery – ‘in yet another house he took such a quantity of food that it replaced our lost energy after the perambulations and difficulties of the day’ (PM, 66).²⁵ This theft precedes Bonaparte’s first encounter with the Sea-cat, an entity that manifests immediately after its folklore is recounted by a village local. With their basic deprivation at such a significant level, a single good meal is incapable of staving off this mythical hallucination. The image of the Sea-cat, filtered through Bonaparte’s lucid mind and warped into the shape of his country, appears as he traverses the countryside alone in imitation of what Jane Farnon refers to as a common cliché of Irish folkloric hauntings: ‘Irish lore and literature, from the earliest times to the present day, is riddled with tales of this type. There are many accounts of strange creatures being encountered late at night in lonely, deserted places.’²⁶

When considering Huxley’s essay in the context of communal utopianism, Morgan Shipley draws attention to mescaline as an inward process that produces minimal outward activity; ‘As Huxley himself recognizes, the overcoming of ego often remains, at least initially, a solitary experience, portending not to heightened connection but to a dissolving of all senses of self –subjective, intersubjective, or otherwise.’²⁷ The quietism induced by mescaline certainly correlates with the selfishness displayed by An Béal Bocht’s narrator, but if we are to frame Bonaparte’s fictional biography as a series of prolonged visionary experiences, the unusual state of his ego will need to be addressed. Despite the text’s frequent insistence on Bonaparte’s limited first-person perspective, his biographical account is peculiarly non-solipsistic; to his mind, the only verifiable truths can be found in external reality. Bonaparte’s impressions are received second-hand, as though the translation from external reality to internal must be conducted by a mediating party. The manifestation of the Sea-cat is a fitting example of his aimless interiority, as the beast does not appear until the idea has been articulated by a separate personality.

Na gCopaleen’s previous texts frequently play with the interpretative dynamics, be it the student’s limited omniscience in At Swim-Two-Birds or the estrangement of mind and soul in The Third Policeman (1967). Curiously, An Béal Bocht ventures to name its narrator despite the comparatively minuscule presence of his thoughts and opinions. The protean identities of na gCopaleen, both in his fiction and his authorial presence, betray a fascination with names and titles. Intertextual synchronicities, such as the characters de Selby and De Selby across The Third Policeman and The Dalkey Archive respectively, contribute to an overall impression of dissatisfaction with the individual as a signifier within a broader community. In Bonaparte’s case, his name evokes associations with a period of pre-Famine rebellion in nineteenth-century Ireland, which is ironically opposed by the hapless, unambitious bearer of the title in An Béal Bocht.²⁸ His title as an individual connotes singularity and exceptionalism, whereas his school title Jams O’Donnell relinquishes his individuality for convenience within the wider social system, ‘I’ve heard that every fellow in this place is called Jams O’Donnell. If that’s the way it is, it’s a wonderful world we have and isn’t O’Donnell the wonderful man and the number of children he has?’ (PM, 31).²⁹ Stranded between these two identities, Bonaparte is left to occupy a precarious state of ego that can be circumvented in favour of the ‘divine Ground’ of An Béal Bocht’s ludicrous imagery.

If Huxley believed the ultimate goal of mysticism was to unify, as Shipley suggests, it is worth evaluating the potential for political symbolism in the hallucinatory aspects of An Béal Bocht. In her analysis of the political symbols throughout the novel, Sarah McKibben describes the Sea-cat as follows:

Irish and its speakers were paradoxically central to the ideology of the new state while remaining subordinated to the hegemonic anglophone majority. This point is hilariously made in The Poor Mouth when Bonaparte is terrorized by a horrible, foul-breathed monster known as the ‘Cat Mara’ […] which turns out to have the exact shape of the nation (tilted on its side to become a quadruped) – and which wants to eat him.³⁰

Setting aside the purpose of the Sea-cat as a solely narrative symbol, it can be seen as Bonaparte’s growing social consciousness manifested through the visionary experience. His education (as presented through the hostile teaching environment of the local school) and his aesthetic sensibility result in an abstract representation of the politics of his time, with the limited information gleaned from adult conversations and occasional out-of-county visitors informing this delusion. If the Sea-cat can represent the external anxieties related to the plight of the Irish state, then Ambrose the pig would signify the internal anxieties of a post-colonial community. The animal is nurtured with the aim of harvesting food, but he begins to swell beyond controllable size and produces an unbearable odour. With the above scenario in the reader’s mind, the visit from a British officer in the following chapter could recontextualise the pig as a metaphor for colonial efforts to restrict Irish lifestyle with the promise of fiscal gains.

The ideological struggle Huxley describes in the Native American people³¹ is a central source of parody in na gCopaleen’s subject of post-Famine Ireland, as each chapter approaches rural Irish appropriation in its various forms. It could be argued that Bonaparte and his family somewhat mediate the ‘best’ of Irishness and Anglicisation; the destitution that is exaggerated in order to justify self-serving action is portrayed as distinctly Irish, yet the family is content to contort their cultivated image to satisfy the desires of English-speaking officials. The only instance remotely resembling national pride takes the form of a comical speech for the sole benefit of tourists: ‘I’m Gaelic from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet – Gaelic front and back, above and below’ (PM, 54),³² which concludes with an admission of disingenuousness, ‘No liberty without royalty! Said the Old-Grey-Fellow in my ear. He always had great respect for the King of England’ (PM, 55).³³ The quietism that subsumes all drive toward political activity in An Béal Bocht bears similarity to Huxley’s notion of the Mind at Large as an all-consuming moment; interfacing with the bare and unfiltered present, the people of Corkadoragha have little incentive to envision their identity beyond the immediate future. If we view the narrative within a similar framework to Huxley’s visionary experience, the frivolity of personal, cultural, and political history helps contribute to the text’s hallucinatory effect.

III: Language and Structure

The forms of transcendental state illustrated in Huxley’s essays bypass the conventional methods of interaction, as the names, history, and politics that constitute one’s identity in the collective are aspects of the filter he posits as the barrier between an individual and the Mind at Large. A reading of An Béal Bocht under Huxley’s definition of visionary art would be remiss to ignore the role language serves in obscuring the position of selfhood in a community of altered perception. Throughout the text, attention is brought to Corkadoragha’s position as an Irish language community, typically in its contrast to the anglophone majority. Whenever language is directly addressed, it is for the enticement of outside groups as seen in the Gaeilgeoirs’ attempt to record authentic Irish folklore. In his 2018 article, Gregory Darwin refers to the dissonance between a folkloric tradition and its supposed subjects, a discord made apparent in the tradition’s formal archiving: ‘This difference foregrounds the cultural distance between the folklore collector and the rural peasants who are the subject of his research and undermines attempts to claim the traditions of the latter as national patrimony.’³⁴

To demonstrate their cultural authenticity, the community heightens this disparity of cultures which becomes essential in maintaining engagement with communities outside of the rural Irish population. The distinction is brought to absurdity in the aforementioned speech, where language and the topic of language are made inseparable: ‘every sentence I’ve ever uttered has been on the subject of Gaelic. If we’re truly Gaelic, we must constantly discuss the question of the Gaelic revival and the question of Gaelicism. There is no use in having Gaelic, if we converse in it on non-Gaelic topics’ (PM, 54).³⁵ This sentiment gains additional texture in Power’s 1973 translation,³⁶ as the quirks of an Irish-to-English translated text provide a convenient example of what Huxley refers to at the beginning of The Doors of Perception, quoting from philosopher C. D. Broad upon reflection on his mescaline test:

Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he or she has been born – the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people’s experience, the victim in as far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.³⁷

Broadly speaking, the Irish language contains many commonly used proverbs, or ‘seanfhocail,’ that convey emotion through mimetic phrases. As an Irish language novel (and a pointedly satirical one at that), An Béal Bocht is littered with such phrases, a noticeable recurring example being a reference to Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s writing: ‘I think that their likes will not be there again!’ (PM, 49)³⁸ and its many variations. Many of Bonaparte’s declarations feel borrowed, as though everything has been said before. As such, the accumulated record Broad suggests is very much alive here, and the reduced awareness induced by the limitations of language would inevitably accompany it.

Ultimately, the text’s engagement with Irish-language literary conventions betrays an inseparable quality of nostalgia. The repetitive phrases borrowed from Ó Criomhthain’s novel, while comical in their appropriation alone, emphasise a preoccupation with the past that dominates much of the rural Irish literature of its time. McKibben explores the role of nostalgia in national identity in her 2003 article on An Béal Bocht, noting the oppressive nature of nostalgia-induced repetition: ‘The novel’s repetitive excess further suggests that value within this system of conventions derives from the proposed near-extinction alone, rather than from anything innate to what is elegized, because the justification revolves around the catch-phrase itself.’³⁹ By lamenting the impermanence of every person, place, or principle in Corkadoragha, Bonaparte inadvertently debases his local culture by asserting its diminution as not only inevitable, but as the core attribute of the culture.

The temporally displaced status of Bonaparte and his family echoes an argument from Heaven and Hell, whereby Huxley suggests the romanticisation of the past is antithetical to the visionary experience: ‘sentimental lovers of the past complain of the drabness of our age and contrast it unfavourably with the gay brilliance of earlier times. In actual fact, of course, there is a far greater profusion of colour in our modern time than in the ancient world.’⁴⁰ He describes the various sensual elements (colours, textures, etc.) that were rarities throughout human history, reserved exclusively for those among privileged classes. He suggests that, due to the increased availability of these materials as a result of industrialisation, communities have been overexposed to sensations that would have previously inspired beatific vision, estranging themselves from the Mind at Large as a result: ‘We have seen too much pure, bright colour at Woolworth’s to find it intrinsically transporting.’⁴¹ Na gCopaleen’s portrait of rural Ireland adheres to this requirement in its isolation from urban commercial environments and its hyperbolic drabness, with Bonaparte’s eventual downfall revolving around the purchase of boots.

The desire for material wealth is central to each character’s behaviour, as the widespread awareness of their poor conditions increases the appeal of luxury and drives them to typically immoral actions. Despite the colonial history that produced their condition, the people of Corkadoragha treat their poverty as an inevitable state; the origins of their struggle are irrelevant unless they can be bartered for sympathy in the present. They rarely acknowledge the objective past, as literal history has limited use in the goal of profit-making, and the flexibility of memory (cultural or otherwise) amid the linguistic structure of Irish displayed in this idle opportunism showcases what Michel Serres describes as an encroachment of language upon sensory perception: ‘Efficient knowledge pays homage to language, from which it descends in a direct line, obliterating its more oblique history and submerging it in the anaesthesia of forgetting. We have lost our five senses in this way.’⁴² The ‘efficient knowledge’ that grants a justifying narrative to Bonaparte’s immoral actions is enabled by his stymied perception; when the oral tradition of his community is warped by years of, among others, starvation and alcoholism, words become an unreliable means of sealing the reducing valve.

Writing for Preternature, Shipley refers to Huxley’s belief in psychedelic mysticism’s influence beyond the immediate present, stating: ‘For Huxley, the essential moment is not how the mystical state of consciousness comes about, but what it reveals about the structures governing our daily experience of reality, and why this is meaningful spiritually, subjectively, and socially.’⁴³ Huxley’s semi-utopian perspective of psychochemical enlightenment is defined by its oppositions. This is seen in the freedom of unclouded vision versus the limitations of standard perception, and in the objectivity of firsthand experience against the subjective interpretation of history; just as the figures of Blake’s mythos engage in perpetual tyranny and usurpation, Huxley portrays the liberation brought about by psychedelics as the individual’s conscious estrangement from the destructive forces of external systems. An Béal Bocht is formally and thematically engaged with its parodic subject from a similar position, as the fictional townland of Corkadoragha exists in absolute opposition to the social structures that govern the rest of Ireland until they encroach upon Bonaparte during the final chapter. The ultimate fate of Bonaparte’s character is implied through sparse observations as he is passed through the judicial system, overwhelmed by new stimuli and unable to articulate his innocence:

I half-remember being in a big city full of gentlefolk wearing boots; they were speaking sincerely together, going by and climbing into coaches; no rain fell and the weather was not cold. I have a faint memory of being in a noble palace; being a while with a great crowd of peelers who spoke to me and one another in English; being yet another while in prison (PM, 122).⁴⁴

The deprivation that has induced Bonaparte’s heightened existence thus far is made explicit in the above passage. The ‘gentlefolk wearing boots’ embody the material sensations Corkadoragha could not provide, and the city’s climate lacks the banal hostility that is incessantly expressed in local small talk. The fantastical elements of na gCopaleen’s parodic mode begin to dissolve when the narrator is taken from cultural isolation and provided with consistent food and shelter, as the centre of urban Irish modernity and its many conveniences appear to reject the visionary experience on a fundamental level. Unable to comply with the objectivity of his new environment, Bonaparte is compartmentalised by the state through the criminal justice system. As the narrative builds to a final punchline, the reader may be left with the impression that the narrator’s recollections are coloured by his isolation in prison. Without chemical assistance, the visionary experience that served as a foundation for Bonaparte’s absurd life can only be provided by enforcing a separation between the individual and conventional modern life. As Huxley states in The Doors of Perception: ‘Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul.’⁴⁵ From the confines of his cell, Bonaparte is fully engaged with the Mind at Large in the tradition of na gCopaleen’s various protagonists: he is inactive, ignorant, and dubiously engaged with the past⁴⁶.

Needless to say, the worlds of Myles na gCopaleen’s fiction have no direct interest in psychoactive drug use nor its philosophical and theological implications, though Huxley’s account of his mescaline experience and na gCopaleen’s satire are unexpectedly congruous in their objectives. Although the frequent representations of selfish and lethargic Irish men throughout his work reinforce a cultural nihilism which Huxley viewed as the opposite of the mescaline experience, the various conditions that produce the fantastical reality of Corkadoragha presuppose a considerable physical and mental strain. The actions of his protagonists are often positioned as worthy of ridicule, yet in Huxley’s view, the objectionable qualities of na gCopaleen’s characters are merely consequences of a widespread tension between social orthodoxy and the unconscious desire for transcendence. The Doors of Perception evinces the human mind’s limited capacity for interpretation and consequently, expression, making clear that our private assumptions on life are both distinct and inherently incompatible with a great universal truth hidden beneath sensory debris.

The methods of perception we employ to interface with the outer world can be considered a buffer: a membrane that filters the vast unknowability of existence into an easily reconcilable form. Aldous Huxley sought to weaken that filter in the hope of achieving perfect equilibrium, to separate his consciousness from the cloistered ego while remaining grounded in the art and history produced by that same ego. He recognises the outer world as the source of effort, pain, and anxiety: ‘The outer world is what we wake up to every morning of our lives, is the place where, willy-nilly, we must try to make our living. In the inner world is neither work nor monotony.’⁴⁷ The universe as filtered through Myles na gCopaleen thrives on this assumption, with his characters often retreating into their self-curated portraits of reality without regard for their community. The lethargic and self-serving characters of An Béal Bocht are each engaged with their unique version of Corkadoragha, and the veils that separate each person’s internal realities are dirtied with a shared, irrefutable history. Strained and comical as this limited perspective may be, it suspends Bonaparte and his community in a state of transcendental lethargy that would honour the principles of Blake’s mythos, where ‘[improvement] makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius.’⁴⁸

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.