This Is Happiness

This is Happiness, by Niall Williams, is a gorgeously written book in a self-described Baroque style. Many reviewers have simply said, “this is happiness”, to read an author who weaves us into an intricately colourful tapestry of words.

This Is Happiness describes the transition of a small community from a traditional way of living to one of modernity. The transition takes place in the Irish village of Faha on the western edge of Ireland, via the arrival of electricity in the 1950’s. Until that time, the villagers are described as living much as they had for the last thousand years, using horse drawn carts, oil lamps, and in touch with the rhythm of the seasons. Very few ventured outside the limits of the village if they could avoid it and most were suspicious of “foreigners”, such as those from the next village. The community was largely self-supportive, interdependent, close and for the most part, happy. The villagers entertained themselves with music, stories and interpersonal relationships and didn’t miss modern conveniences they’d never had.

This village is a classic example of what Max Weber, a founding figure in sociology, would have called Gemeinschaft or one with strong traditional bonds of family and local community. Villages like Faha offer support and a sense of belonging that is important to everyone’s identity, so that people in Gemeinschaft communities tend to be grounded and emotionally strong.

Modern or Gesellschaft-based relationships, according to Weber, are rooted in “rational agreement by mutual consent”, the best example of which is a commercial contract. In these societies, the individual is the important element rather than the community. But because of this fragmentation of community into autonomous individuals, people are less connected to each other and where they live, and therefore less happy.

This is Happiness doesn’t describe the world after the electrification of the village when it becomes part of modernity. But Williams provides hints of what is coming and what will be lost, especially the music and language that provide connection and joy to the villagers. With electricity will come the tyranny of clock time, as opposed to the unregulated, convoluted but free sense of time that it replaces. He describes this pre-electrified sense of time:

“To conquer both time and reality then, one of the unwritten tenants of the local poetics was that a story must never arrive at the point, or risk conclusion. And because in Faha, like in all country places, time was the only thing people could afford, all stories were long, all storytellers took their, and your, and anyone else’s, time, and all gave it up willingly, understanding that tales of anything as aberrant and contrary as human beings had to be long, not to say convoluted…”

Williams also describes the villager’s music, like storytelling, as insubordinate to clock time:

“One of the things about Irish music is how one tune can enter another. You can begin with one reel, and with no clear intention of where you will be going after that, but halfway through it will sort of call up the next so that one reel becomes another and another after that,, and unlike the clear edged definitions of songs, the music keeps linking, making this sound map Even as it travels it, so player and listener are taken away and time and space are defeated. You’re in an elsewhere. Something like that. Which, I suppose, is both my method and aim in telling this story too.”

It is rare and pleasurable for an author to so clearly link his writing style to his subject and theme, and Williams has succeeded in writing a novel that reflects the time, the music, the people and their stories. Williams’ novel takes us deep into the heart and soul of the community of Faha which is the source of the power of the music and storytelling in that place:

“It seems to me the quality that makes any book, music, painting worthwhile is life, just that. Books, music, painting are not life, can never be as full, rich, complex, surprising or beautiful, but the best of them can catch an echo of that, can turn you back to look out the window, go out the door aware that you’ve been enriched, that you have been in the company of something alive that has caused you to realize once again how astonishing life is, and you leave the book, gallery or concert hall with that illumination, which feels I’m going to say holy, by which I mean human raptness.”

This is as good a description as any I have read of what makes any book, music, or painting worthwhile.

This is Happiness is an unabashedly nostalgic look at a pre-modern Irish countryside that fostered local arts and language born of the people and the place where they lived. Though not described, there is an implicit contrast with modern cities and arts that are divorced from the souls of those who write or create. But Williams is not attempting to provide a balanced vision of that rustic Irish past. As many other novelist have written about small town rural life, it can be stultifying and even violent toward those who don’t fit into the village norms.

In his study, Suicide, Emile Durkheim said, “…the taste for individuation, and the love of progress…cannot exist without generating suicide.” In order to combat “corrosive individual egoism,” and “the moral poverty of our age”, he suggested that decentralized occupational or social groups could replace the strong sense of community and connection to each other that we have lost with modernity. Ideally, these would also tolerate differences and allow for individual beliefs outside the norm.

This is Happiness raises similar questions about progress. Are we any better off driving in cars rather than horse drawn carts? Are we any better informed with electronic devices rather than books? Are we any happier with the over abundance of consumables in our stores? Williams doesn’t temper his strongly held conviction that we are not, having given up the true sources of happiness, which are the stories and music that come from our souls and connection to the place where we live.

In earlier blogs I have delved into the issue of modernity and the seemingly unstoppable onslaught of progress that has devastated the planet and risks the continuing existence of life on earth. If we had stayed at the pre-modern, pre-electrical, pre-industrial stage, there would be a much smaller number of human beings consuming a much smaller proportion of the earth’s resources. Other species would have benefited if we had remained in a state of Gemeinschaft, living in damp stone huts at a subsistence level. While this state may not have been one of happiness for all human beings, it would have been a state of greater happiness for other species and the Earth as a whole.