commodification, or even as though identity and meaning have been
commodified.^6 Both the tranquilizer and the television are meaning-
less in the way that they annul lived experience, creating a vacuum.
Cuchulainn is imagined as part of a similar historical vacuum of the
inauthentic that is left behind by myth; he is little more than a brand
name. It is therefore appropriate that it is ëwatching the TV the other
nightí that the poet begins to construe Cuchulainn as a ëcorny
revenantí of science fiction. Cuchulainn is represented as a part of and
apart from everyday life in Ireland. In this way, his figure in the poem
provides a personification of the crisis within Irish identity that
OíLoughlin has identified in his comments on the ëparadoxical
mixture of belonging and alienationí.^7 The tradition by which
Cuchulainn has been beamed down to Irish school children as they
learn their national language is splintered: Irish myth is part of their
experience of Ireland and apart from it.
The Gaelic poet, Nuala NÌ Dhomhnaill, also relocates Irish myth
and the Irish language within a contemporary context. She too uses the
figure of Cuchulainn as a means of calling into question not only the
authenticity of Irish myth but also the purity of the Irish language and
names. Mary OíConnor notices her polygot use of diction, numerous
dialect usages and spelling variations from Irish itself. Readers of
Gaelic feel a sense of defamiliarization whilst reading NÌ
Dhomhnaillís Irish as she uses different forms and voices that serve as
a testimony to the multiple cultural influences of her poetry, and
challenge the ëat homenessí of the language for the reader. An
example of this is found in part two of her ëC ̇ Chulainní sequence
(1993) when C ̇ Chulainn says to his mother: ëtake the fag from your
lip a minuteí.^8 The standard Irish for cigarette, being ëtoitÌní is, in NÌ
6 Cf. Neil Corcoran, English Poetry Since 1940 (London: Longman, 1993),
p.210. Corcoran discovers this in the poetry of Ciaran Carson.
7 O’Loughlin, After Kavanagh: Patrick Kavanagh and the Discourse of
Contemporary Irish Poetry (Dublin: Raven, 1985), p.34.
8 Ní Dhomhnaill, Selected Poems: Rogha Dánta, trans. Michael Hartnett (Dublin:
Raven, 1993), pp.114–15.