3A: Buile Shuibhne: The Madness of Sweeney
Eorann: All the same, I would prefer a hollow tree and Sweeney bare - that sweetest game we used to play - to banqueting with him today. I tell you, Sweeney, if I were given the pick of all in earth and Ireland, I'd rather go with you, live sinless and sup on water and watcress — Seamus Heaney, Sweeney Astray
“I suppose that I had better take up my den in the tree,” Enniscorthy Sweeny had said. “They won’t know how to drive a goat out of a den in a tree, not a scapegoat. And the bigger things can’t very well be resolved until they do drive me out. I’m an impediment. I’ll have everything that I need here. But I will miss my wife.” —The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny, XI.3.
Last time, I wrote about the Sweeny/Scriabin connection. Today, I want to turn to the end of The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny, where Sweeny tries to hide in a tree.
Sweeny then, in those stretched-out, latter days of 1983 (wouldn’t that triple-counting year ever end!), did what the only rational man left in the world could do.He climbed into a hole in a hollow tree and announced that he would never come out of it alive. (XI.3)
Throughout the book, Lafferty draws attention to Sweeny’s sanity and his effect on the sanity of others. His retreat into the tree in 1983, part of the “scapegoat” trick, seems like a final act of madness. One can draw a line from his childhood preaching, which becomes “an ill-balanced rapture” (I.11), to the tree. The Devonian mathematician Elton Quartermas calls him a “crazy kid” who has “jumped his trolley” (III.3). The detective Branagan says he is “always a bundle of psychoses” (IX.1). Alistar Grogg’s psychic persecution creates an “insanity belt” that drives Sweeny to suicidal violence. During these episodes, he leaves his teeth marks in his studio woodwork (IX.1). The examples accumulate. Madness is a major theme.
This combination of madness and tree dwelling has an Irish precedent. Buile Shuibhne (BILL-uh HIV-nuh), the medieval narrative variously called The Madness of Suibhne, The Madness of Sweeney, or Suibhne’s Frenzy, received renewed attention in the twentieth century through Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds. Its hero, Suibhne (SIV-nuh), is an Irish king who offends Saint Rónán and incurs a curse. Overcome by frenzy during battle, he becomes a wandering, birdlike figure who shelters in trees and expresses his suffering through poetry. No surprise that this story, with its Vogelsprachenkunde theme, would have appealed to Lafferty.
I first encountered the Sweeney legend through Seamus Heaney’s Sweeney Astray, published in 1983, six years after Lafferty’s work. Lafferty probably knew the story through Flann O’Brien or through works that drew on J. G. O’Keeffe’s 1913 edition and translation, which I’ll include below as a PDF.
Against this background, consider Lafferty’s description of the bird-like Sweeny:
The face was skinny and ruddy. The nose was powerful and beaked; not like that of a bird of prey but like that one of the Roman-nosed water birds. (I.2)
And consider Sweeny's way of moving:
But he was always swift, and he always seemed light of weight. If he had had any real weight, then he would have been breaking all the laws of momentum all the time, the way he changed directions. (I.2)
The medieval Suibhne, too, moves with a lightness that doesn't even disturb the grass beneath him.
Other character parallels run through the novel, but because the coherence of Three Armageddons is a major problem for some readers, I want to highlight how the opening and ending are both Suibhne-centric. We meet Ennis as a Suibhne figure, and we last see him as one in his tree.
In the medieval narrative, Suibhne’s wife, Eorann (OH-run), says she would prefer a narrow hollow in a tree beside him to the comforts of another man’s royal household. At the end of Lafferty’s novella, the tree separates Enniscorthy from his wife:
“I suppose that I had better take up my den in the tree,” Enniscorthy Sweeny had said. “They won’t know how to drive a goat out of a den in a tree, not a scapegoat. And the bigger things can’t very well be resolved until they do drive me out. I’m an impediment. I’ll have everything that I need here. But I will miss my wife.” (XI.3)
Mary Margaret takes Eorann’s place but reverses her appeal. Eorann wants to live with Suibhne in the tree; Mary Margaret hectors Ennis to come down: “Aw, c'mon, Sweeny, come out of that tree!” Both men suffer separation from their wives, a cost Ennis acknowledges: “I'll miss my wife”; “I do miss my wife.” The Sweenys’ weird marriage helps bind together the beginning, middle, and end of the work.
The Suibhne story helps explain the tree scene and Ennis’s death, revealing how Lafferty explores history through the twinned themes of Vogelsprachenkunde (in the Armageddon operas) and Irish myth (Suibhne). My own view is that just as Suibhne, as Mad Sweeney, is tied to the violence of Mag Rath, Sweeney, as Mad Sweeney, is tied to the violence of Megiddo.
Finally, Suibhne’s story is a religious legend. It begins with a curse and ends with his reconciliation through Saint Moling (MOL-ing), describing Suibhne, in the end, as “the king, the saint, the saintly madman.” Lafferty’s opening section puzzles over whether Enniscorthy might be a saint.
The ending, with its seven dark spirits and one golden one, complicates that question. Lafferty had already begun playing with narrative and hagiography in his unpublished 1930s novel, Antonino Vescovo. He continued in Three Armageddons, where this aspect of his work has gone unrecognized.
Sweeny’s tree is a central attractor in the novel, an overdetermined symbol. It is Odin’s tree, the cross, the cockatrice’s den in Isaiah 11:8, the dry tree set against the green in Luke 23:31, Saint Simeon’s pillar, an anchorite’s cell, the topological rabbit hole that brings Alice’s rabbit into contact with Zeno, and the scapegoat’s den. But within the novel’s pattern, it is first and foremost the melancholy tree of Buile Shuibhne. From the first pages of Three Armageddons, where we meet the strangely birdlike Ennis, Lafferty knew that Ennis would end up hiding in its mad branches.
The suspicion that Enniscorthy was a saint required, perhaps, even more putting down, but put down it must be. Against the suspicion of sanctity was his pursuit and persecution of the few people that he just plain did not like. Against it was his sometimes excessive grabbiness in money matters, though his grabbiness always depended on his immediate need for money. Against it was his gift of satire and ridicule that stripped away skin and flesh and shattered bones. Enniscorthy made sure that, of the people he just plain didn’t like, nobody else would like them either. But there are a few people who ought to be persecuted and flayed, and Sweeny had the shrewd sense of knowing which they were. There are times when money should be grabbed relentlessly. And a ridicule deferred is a ridicule lost forever. Against the suspicion of Enniscorthy’s sanctity were a ringing half-dozen bawdy ballads that he sometimes sang. No, no, these weren’t the ordinary raunchy things. They were rotten, tree-top rotten. And he sometimes feuded more hotly than a saint would have done. And yet, while not quite an attested saint, he was surely one of the super good guys. Except that— —except that there remain, and stand up like heraldic and rampant beasts, Enniscorthy’s horrifying and hellish creations, the “Armageddon Operas” and other things. Most demons would draw back from them in repugnance. Those things were crammed with ravening superevils. But the suspicions that Sweeny was a genius, and that he was a saint, are not dead yet. They have outlasted the man. There is still a lot of logic in their favor, and Enniscorthy was a logical man. He did things so giantly grotesque that he had to have a genius for something there. I.3.
If not a genius, couldn’t Enniscorthy Sweeny at least be that greater thing, a saint? Ennis himself believed that anybody who wasn’t a saint had blown it all. Ennis never quite blew it. And he never came as close to blowing it as he seemed to. In spite of his being an usher for all the hellish things, in spite of (on the other hand) his being the kindest person in the world, he didn’t blow it either way. There is surely a mistake somewhere, and maybe he should be given the benefit of the confusion. But whoever saw a saint with ears like that? Whoever saw a saint with such a pigeon-toed gait that ate up the miles and leagues and parsecs? Who ever saw a saint who was perpetually sunburned and peeling in the most sunless of winters? Whoever saw a saint who shed his skin like a snake? He was a mighty good fellow even though he might be responsible for the most threatening and massive evils ever. So, he was the harbinger of the latter days that mean the destruction of the world. Was he not a fine fellow for all that? I.6.
What had happened to that innocent young adult? Oh, he was still innocent for all of his years, and his soul was still pure. He would even take that soul out in his hands and show it to people so they could see how unblemished it still was. I.12.
He was the Christus crucified there (Sweeny spent part of his time in arm-extended, yoga-like contemplation, and to the people who looked in the hole at him it appeared as if he were stretched out and then nailed to the wall of his grotto.) And he was also a sort of Saint Enniscorthy the Stylite. A tree is a form of pillar, and Enniscorthy was like one of the old desert saints who spent their whole lives in prayer on the tops of high pillars. Enniscorthy did spend a lot of time in prayer now, as he had always done. XI.3.
