Passing Spring Break in Ballymenone

Jay Caldwell
22 March 2009
[Glassie, Henry. Passing the Time in Ballymenone. 1982. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana U.P., 1995.]

I am absolutely astounded by this achievement. It takes Glassie over seven hundred pages (or nearly nine, if you factor in the notes, which you should), but in the end he creates for the reader a world of such elaborate depth and interconnectedness that is easy to overlook the reality that Ballymenone is not a fiction. Certainly this is not a complete description of Ballymenone: that would require an analysis akin to what is fictionalized by Jorge Luis Borges in his well-known short story, “Del Rigor en la Ciencia” (“On Exactitude in Science”), in which a map is created of the whole world that has the same scale as the world itself. Although, the sheer volume of the text may make you feel that you are in a 1:1 relationship with Ballymenone, there is little about personal hygiene, child development, education, even health care. But what is there is ever so fully developed.

I was struck throughout Ballymenone by the correspondence between Glassie’s construction of his text (Ballymenone) and his reconstruction of the world of Ballymenone. By this I mean the woven circularity of his text—its sentences, paragraphs, chapters, sections—reflecting the woven circularity of life in Ballymenone. He observes in a chapter titled “Clay,” in a section titled “Working the Land,” that “Time’s shape is not the line of progress or the circle of stasis, but the spiral, at once driving forward and rotating around primary points” (437). And this is how he frames his text. He enters at the beginning (“When I first stood on the road into Ballymenone” [11]) and leaves at the end as, one by one, his beloved informants pass away. But between these poles Glassie comes and goes, remembers and reconsiders, delves into history and ponders the future, but in doing so he cannot sidestep the burden of the historian. Simply said, history is a construct that can never be separated from its agenda, it’s design reflects purpose, while measuring and factoring the real. “History is a variety of imaginative literature, yet it shuns fancy for fact. As in making things, in thinking history, the real, the true is manipulated, arranged, made useful, accepted, made proof” (651). Try as he might he must accept that “[t]imes change, and responsible historians restring facts in accordance with their society’s needs” (649). As power shifts, he says, “[t]he past has to be reconstructed.”

But beyond Glassie’s dance with time, the same pattern of circularity + repetition + amplification that lies at the heart of the stories and songs on which scaffold Glassie constructs his text, is mimicked by the text itself. Glassie’s use of the ceili is central to his reconstruction. The opening hundred and fifty pages foreground this communal tradition of visiting and storytelling, and from there Glassie moves on to descriptions and analyses of patterns of work and the artifacts associated with these. Then, in the middle of an examination and explication of haying, he returns to the ceili, just as a ceilier will twist and turn a story for the entertainment of his auditors. Glassie’s text becomes a ceili:

"They bring up topics up again. And again. Repetition is risked to make sure every topic has been completed, that nothing of interest remains unsaid. As chat circles, as speakers are encouraged to say again what they have said, as new speakers repeat what has been said before, people seek centers, topics of rich potential lying beneath the surface of words." (437)

So, Glassie employs this geometric metaphor not only to describe life and activity in Ballymenone, but (and I suspect this was a conscious decision) to create Ballymenone. Likewise the idea of passing time (fruitfully, by which is meant an amalgam of productivity and rest)—generally viewed as doing work (as opposed to doing a job)—is repeated over and over again (but most clearly expounded upon in the Preface [xii] and in a middle chapter, “Moss” [458-63]), and if you read the book during a relatively brief period of time, say a week or so over St. Patrick’s Day week), it is easy to fall into the rhythm that is created. At whatever level a reader chooses to enter Ballymenone, s/he cannot escape without feeling a part of Ballymenone. Masterful, absolutely masterful.