Reading with the Phantom Fishtail: Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s Dried Merfolk Sequence (‘Na Murúcha a Thriomaigh’) and Transgenerational Haunting

This essay interprets Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s 1998 ‘Dried Merfolk’ sequence in Cead Aighnis [Leave to Disagree] as a speculative psychoethnography based on a hidden conceit. Much as the merfolk’s ‘dried’ way-of-life evolved from repressing their ancestors’ migration from Land-under-Wave to dry land, the covert analogy runs, contemporary Irish culture remains haunted by Victorian Ireland’s traumatic Anglicisation. The sequence is translated by Paul Muldoon as ‘Part Two’ of The Fifty Minute Mermaid: Poems in Irish by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill (2007). I contend that the emblematic phantom fishtail at the peripety of sea-person legend unlocks the disparate yet interdependent intertextual backstory-building essential for understanding the historical trauma interred within ‘Dried Merfolk’. Ní Dhomhnaill develops key features of sea-person legend – the emphasis on female embodiment, the reconstructive logic of throwback tales, and analogous make-believe – into bidirectional strands of psychocultural diagnosis and quasi-phenomenological mirroring. The two modes combine to demonstrate the compatibility between speculative theorising (wondering) and aesthetic wonderment found in Wonder Tales. The phantom fishtail diagrams how and why pairing enactive make-believe with etiological analysis helps to unravel the dynamics of transgenerational haunting.