'the Informant', Eilean Ni Chuilleanain (Critical Essay‪)‬

In 'The Informant' nothing happens. A folklorist arrives to record an old woman's story about a tuan disappearing, but ends up with silence on his tape: the story, like the tuan who is taken by the fairies, mysteriously disappears. This poem does not matter, in the sense that it repudiates consequence and action of any kind. It is not a poem about impact, moral intervention, public performance, or economic productivity, but rather, passivity, silence, inconsequence, and misdirection. Nothing happens, but this nothing does happen. There is a widespread societal desire for normative qualities of articulation: to express, or even instigate, action. Action is characterized by an insistence on achieving a specific goal, on prompting change rather than interpretation, on demonstrating impact rather than reflection. Literary criticism often focuses on this conservative mode of poetic communication: it attempts to reveal the hidden meaning in a work, and to make the reader privy to classified information. However, 'The Informant' seems to resist interpretation which is wedded to communicative action. We cannot expose or recover what 'actually happens' in this poem, but with this poetic reprieve from expectation, it becomes possible to appreciate, and contextualize, the ethos of missed action. The two characters who appear in 'The Informant'--the old woman and the young man--both contribute in their own way of creating silence, which becomes the locus of what Anne-Lise Francois terms 'uncounted experience.' (1) The first stanza opens with a roundabout description of the old woman, and the observing tuan: