Finn Elliott is an excerpt by Jack Rusher, published here Monday, January 19, 2004. It is part of Stories.
From an essay in the Irish language literary journal ClóIar-Chonnachta. Translated by Jack Rusher.
Finn Elliott, the greatest Irish writer since James Joyce, is an enigmatic figure. He never grants interviews nor does he write forewords or introductions for his work. He has published little, but every novel and short story has immediately entered the literary canon, even though he writes exclusively in Irish.
1. The title is actually a tri-form pun in the Irish language. The word crois means, depending on context, the verb “to traverse,” the cruciform shape, or a grave misfortune.
His first novel, Crìosd Crois Lough Neagh1 (Christ Crosses Lough Neagh), is a staggering meditation on the inhumane oxymoron of holy war. It’s believed that Elliott lost both parents, one Catholic and the other Protestant, in the Troubles; one story even suggests that they slew each other in a fit of drunken religiosity.
2. This structural technique pre-dates similar oulipo techniques, but appears to have been informed by the musical equivalent pioneered by Erik Satie’s Vexations.
In the first chapter of Christ Crosses, Elliott posits that “the power of tragedy, like that of gravity, varies inversely with the square of its distance — three hundred dead in Angola are less moving than an ice cream cone dropped on the street in front of you.” This statement sets the tone for the rest of the work, which, using extensive cross-referencing via a page-number hypertext scheme, ultimately constructs a much larger, self-referential novel that grows outward and upward in a delicate fractal pattern2. No known reader has yet explored all of the possible pathways, and thus structures, that exist within this novel, a fact that has prevented even the most dedicated of post-modernists from performing a successful deconstruction of the text.
[...]
3. This can also be translated, somewhat less gracefully, as The Money Attenuated Church.
In Cù Caolaich Ceall3 (The Coin Operated Reliquary) he takes careful aim at the Catholic establishment with sardonic wit. The metaphor of the church as a pinball machine and salvation the result of breaking the record score is both a deft, modern analysis of the Catholic practice of offering Plenary Indulgences and a sly wink at the Protestant tradition’s conceit that some will always be beyond salvation.
[...]
His nonfiction output has been thus far limited to a biography of Absalom Jones, the Afro-Caribbean hero of the 1793 yellow fever outbreak at Philadelphia. Although laymen consider this a peculiar choice of material for an Irishman who seldom leaves his retreat on the Aran Islands, experts regard it as the finest extant work on Mr Jones.
[...]
There are no English translations of Elliott’s work, but there is an effort underway by Trinity College at Dublin to produce rough drafts of the shorter works.