"A Sense of Humour" by Mary Dorcey

"A Sense of Humour" by Mary Dorcey  (2002, 16 pages)

Irish Short Story Month III

March 1 to March 31

Mary Dorcey

County Dublin

Event Resources

Please consider joining us for the event.  All you need to do is complete a post on any Irish Short Story, maybe on a story that means a lot to you or a writer you admire, or any related matter and let me know about it.  I will publicize your post and keep a master list. Please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions.  

One of my goals during Irish Short Story Month III (ISSM3) is to read and post on  new to me Irish short story writers.   I know there are a huge number wonderful  writers from Ireland writing short stories that are as of now unknown to me.  One of them was Mary Dorcey.

“Well, I’d best be off if I’m going to get there at all,” her father stood up heavily, pushing his chair out from the table, lifting his jacket slowly from the back of it. Would Liam come to this, she wondered, in another twenty years—the pale, bloodshot eyes, the tremor in the speech. Her father did everything cautiously these days; with deliberate effort. Standing by the door in his Sunday suit he looked cramped and foolish; keeping his head lowered, not wanting to be noticed"

Author Data   (from the webpage of Salmon Poetry)

The award winning poet, short story writer and novelist, Mary Dorcey was born in County Dublin, Ireland. In 1990 she won the Rooney Prize for Literature for her short story collection: A Noise from the Woodshed. Her bestselling novel Biography of Desire (Poolbeg) was published in 1997 to critical acclaim and has been reprinted three times.  She has published four previous volumes of poetry:Kindling (Only Women Press, 1982), Moving into the Space Cleared by Our Mothers (Salmon Poetry, 1991), The River That Carries Me (Salmon Poetry, 1995), and Like Joy In Season, Like Sorrow(Salmon, 2001). In 1990 she published a novella, Scarlet O’Hara (1990) contained in the anthologyIn and Out of Time (Onlywomen Press). Five of her eights book have been awarded major Literature Bursaries by the Irish Arts Council, in 1990 and 1995 and 1999, 2005 and most recently, in 2008. 

My overview of Irish literature and the society in which it is written is being shaped by two very brilliant long books by contemporary Irish academics.   They are Declan Kiberd's totally illuminating Inventing Ireland:  The Literature of the Modern Nation and Occasions of Sin:  Sex and Society in Modern Ireland  by  Diarmaid Ferriter.  One of the things I learned and have seen over and over is that one of he very dominant themes of Irish literature is the weak or absent father, just as Kiberd taught me.  From Ferriter I learned some of the reasons for the seeming emotional reticence of the Irish, especially the rural people.  Behind this reticence there are often great depth of unexpressed almost unrealized emotions that sometimes produce explosive results.  I also learned that many of the marriage patterns of Ireland come from the consequences of the famine days, its long history of colonial domination and the consequences of Catholicism. 

I also see very often in the Irish short story, perhaps especially so in stories by women, an exploration of how their culture has somehow trapped them into an emotionally confining space where they are almost trained from birth not to expect a lot from life.   This and the themes enunciated by Kiberd and Ferriter are beautifully exemplified in Mary Dorcey's wonderful story, "A Sense of Humour".   It is all there in the quote from the story at the top of this post.  These lines also illustrate this well:  "No one ever mentioned feelings. Maybe it was too dangerous in a place where the same families lived heaped on one another like cattle in a barn, generation after generation".



"A Sense of Humour" is the story of Kate, married for five-teen years, with some kids.   She and her husband live with her parents.  They cannot afford to get their own place.  Lots of things have brought it about that people in Ireland often live with their parents beyond an age when those in other societies, for better or worse, would be on their own.  Her mother did not want her to marry the man she picked, a garage worker.  She was being courted by a farmer with 100 acres.   Much of the story is Kate thinking about what might have been.  Her husband,  this is part of the theme of the weak father, beats her and the kids to vent his frustrations over his failures.  

Ten years ago in an effort to attract what they hoped would be tourists her mother started a bar on their property.  The only people who come now are men who drink them selves near comatose night after night.  Kate's father, who is in theory the boss of the family, will give a  drink on credit knowing he won't be paid back to a man in need.  



There is a lot of emotional depth in this beautiful story and Kate's repressed emotions do produce an almost senseless seeming to those who think they know her act of violence.

There is one episode in the story that has as much to tell us about Sex and Society in Ireland as many a very learned academic text.    One of the lads has bought a life size blow up doll of a woman from a Soho sex shop.  He decides to make some money from the doll by charging his mates five pounds for a session with the doll.   He finds a lot of takers.  In one horrific and hilarious scene a man is having his time with the doll, pants around his shoes, when his mother walks in the barn where the action is taking place.   Of course the mother runs out shrieking hysterically and the man is incredibly humiliated. 

Kate also talks about how she does not like to hear other women complain about things, even repudiating a rape victim who is on a talk show retelling her experiences.  She thinks it very unseemly to talk about your feelings.  In rural Ireland you can talk about cows, the weather, your friends or family but not your feelings.

"A Sense of Humour" is a wonderful story which has a lot more too it than I have conveyed.  I hope to read more of the work of the author.

I read this in The Anchor Book of New Irish Writing.

The problems caused by drinking is, of course, one of the other dominant themes of Irish literature, perhaps it is a "subset" of the theme of the weak father but there are lots of women depicted with heavy drinking habits.   Compared to short stories from authors from India or the Philippines, drinking occurs a great deal in the Irish short story.

I want to close this post with this wonderful segment of the story:

He did it intentionally, she knew, to torment her. For years he had gone on in this manner, resisting her in everything. Nothing she did or said could make him show a moment’s attention to the affairs of his family. “Your children,” he called them. It was his revenge, of course, for coming between him and his pleasures. She had fought him in the past, bitterly; pleaded with him to spend one evening at home at his own fireside. And this was how she was rewarded. He had given up drink and life with it. She was left with the ghost of a man who could do nothing, only read his paper and brood over the hearth.

"No man has ever been foolish
enough to abuse me"
Carmilla