BURSTING THE TRINITY BUBBLE: DOUGLAS HYDE’S IRISH AVANT-GARDE FARCE

Abstract

This article examines a neglected bilingual farce by Douglas Hyde, one of the founders of the Irish language revival movement in the late nineteenth century and the author of a number of Irish-language and bilingual plays in the early twentieth. This play is Pleusgadh na Bulgóide/The Bursting of the Bubble from 1903, set in Bubble College, reference to Trinity College Dublin, where Hyde had been a student. I examine the dispute over the Irish language that forms the background for this play, while also turning to Peter Sloterdijk’s theory of bubbles as a means of understanding the linguistic and cultural issues that the play involves. Sloterdijk presents bubbles as spaces of intimate relationship to which any notion of egoautonomy is subsidiary. He also sees bubbles as predisposed to their eventual bursting. Sloterdijk further regards bubbles as microscopic instances of much larger spaces or spheres. Pleusgadh na Bulgóide exemplifies these various aspects of bubbles. The linguistic anarchy of mis-communication that it unleashes arises from the bursting of Bubble College, an explosion that lends the play a radical avant-garde character. Pleusgadh na Bulgóide extends beyond the specific question of the Irish language to engage the modernist crisis of language in literature and drama at the start of the twentieth century. On this basis, I contend that the neglect of Hyde’s play in Irish modernist studies is a significant oversight.