“This undiscovered country” in Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Cré na Cille and George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo

• Main Author: Morse Donald E.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Sciendo 2018-10-01
• Series: Acta Universitatis Sapientiae: Philologica
• Subjects: the fantastic; irish classic; civil war; bardo; cemetery
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.2478/ausp-2018-0002

Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s The Dirty Dust (1949, trans. 2015) and George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) illustrate two very different uses of the literary device of conversations in a cemetery. Ó Cadhain distilled the venom of selfishness and vicious back-biting found in a small rural Irish village then refined it through comedy and satire, while Saunders created a collage of voices by employing a combination of fantastic devices together with fragments of history, newspaper articles and biography to eulogize Abraham Lincoln as grieving parent and to demonstrate that love does indeed transform the world – even the world of the dead.