Drink-Music: The ‘ól’ in Brian Ua Nualláin’s ‘!CEÓL!’ (1932)

Abstract

In the illustration accompanying ‘!CEÓL!’ (!Music!), Brian Ua Nualláin’s 1932 Irish-language story about radio and gramophone music, Ua Nualláin uses an established but outdated spelling of ‘ceol’ to suggest a polysemantic pun. This pun is significant given the story’s subtitle – ‘Eachtra an Fhir Ólta’ (The Tale of the Drunkard) – because it places ‘ól,’ the Irish word for drink, inside the word for music, ‘ceol.’ The resulting portmanteau in Ua Nualláin’s illustration is interfusional in Thomas King’s sense, because it blends the textual with the oral. The orthography Ua Nualláin uses for his visual representation of ‘!CEÓL!’ draws attention to how the word is spoken, and the stress on the second half of the word makes it sound drunken. We argue that the story’s implied title, ‘Drink-Music,’ thematises intertextual play in ways that anticipate Ua Nualláin’s Middle Irish Joycean pastiche ‘Pisa bec oc Parnabus’ (1935/1938). This note provides the first critical discussion of the ‘!CEÓL!’ illustration, observing the presence of Ua Nualláin’s initials in the bottom right-hand corner of the image.

Keywords

• CEÓL
• Music
• Cartoons
• Joyce
• Finnegans Wake
• Finn