Playing the Hero: Reading the Irish Saga Táin bó Cúailnge.

Laila Abdalla is an associate professor of English at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington, and former professor at McGill University.

Ann Dooley examines the relationship between ninth- and twelfth-century versions of the heroic poem Táin Bó Cúailnge. Her avowed goal is not to discover a “reductionist” thematic unity to the tale, but rather to conduct “micro-studies” that provide “results on a local level of textual understanding.” If there is a link between these micro-studies, it is how texts “reveal themselves”—how they come to signify—and she localizes this exploration in the text’s multiple languages of heroism. The book consists of an introduction to establish methodology, a short conciliatory epilogue in which she indeed treats the tale’s endemic theme, so as not to “play [the saga] false,” and seven intervening chapters focusing on disparate elements of the text. These essays are “exercises in fissured reading.”

Theoretical, and indeed postmodern, approaches to medieval literature are not novel and, in fact, often result in insights not entirely divorced from older, “unified theme” discussions. In “The Invention of Women in the Táin,” for example, Dooley begins by critiquing the “essentializing” of women obtained by both the “structuralist or binary model” of feminist approaches and the “long-standing tradition of mythodological criticism.” She follows by focusing on the variances between the two versions of the text in areas that treat female characters, illustrating that the notion of woman was itself undergoing negotiation. The relationship between the texts signifies cultural constructions of woman as much as the women within the texts signify culture. This free play between culture and text is a postmodern, deconstructive observation that in truth builds on, rather than revises, the ideas offered by the methodologies she critiques earlier.

Dooley offers several interesting revelations about the Táin, its fabrication, and its role in the construction of readership, gender, heroism, etc. If one is able to look beyond the virtuoso writing, for she is eloquent and manipulates the complex postmodern languages and vocabularies dazzlingly, one will realize that her offerings are not so anti-thematic. Rather, she tackles several themes and, in addition, exposes the processes which go into making this text interested in these themes. Celtic scholars will profit.