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Prologue – despotic Enlightenment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

Julie Candler Hayes
Julie Candler Hayes
Affiliation:
University of Richmond, Virginia
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Summary

We are in the west of Ireland around the turn of the century. On his first day at school, a boy confronts a menacing schoolmaster.

After a while he directed a long yellow finger at me and said:

– Phwat is your name?

I did not understand what he said nor any other type of speech which is practised in foreign parts because I had only Gaelic as a mode of expression and as a protection against the difficulties of life … I heard a whisper at my back:

– Your name he wants!

My heart leaped with joy at this assistance and I was grateful to him who prompted me. I looked politely at the master and replied to him:

– Bonaparte, son of Michelangelo, son of Peter, son of Owen, son of Thomas's Sarah, grand-daughter of John's Mary, grand-daughter of James, son of Dermot ….

The recital is interrupted when the master sends his student reeling across the room with a violent blow to the head.

… before I became totally unconscious I heard him scream:

– Yer nam, said he, is Jams O'Donnell!

The scene is repeated for each child in the school.

Type
Chapter
Information
Reading the French Enlightenment
System and Subversion
 , pp. 1 - 2
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1999

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