My love for bureaucratic Gothic (which makes its way into my own work) may be the result of having spent so many years in the archives and among the records of public services. I fully expected Kafka, or maybe Ligotti’s ‘The Nightmare Network’, one of his “tales of corporate horror”, to be included in this anthology, but I plumped for ‘The Key’ instead. Part of my secondary school education included—as a mandatory subject—literature in Irish language. With the exception of the epic mythological narrative of Fionn Mac Cumhaill’s pursuit of his fleeing betrothed and her lover, I hated all of the prose (possibly unfairly, a result of my own linguistic limitations). Máirtín Ó Cadhain, or Flann O’Brien, would have been a welcome relief, and I might even have continued reading Irish.

Máirtín Ó Cadhain (1906–1970) was a language and political activist, whose work Seán Ó Tuama (late Professor of Irish Literature in University College Cork) compared to both Joyce and Beckett. Ó Cadhain produced, in the Connemara dialect of Irish, a wonderfully absurd novel featuring lively and sometimes scurrilous conversations (in “rough, earthy, salty speech”) between the buried dead. He also produced several collections of short stories, re-collected recently in an English translation. One of these, An tSraith ar Lár/The Mown Swath (1948), includes ‘The Key’. The plot of the story is straightforward: it concerns a junior civil servant, J, who is a paperkeeper, “the most responsible and difficult job in the Civil Service” (which Ó Cadhain called “a paperocracy”). His hated boss goes on holidays for two weeks, leaving J. in charge of the eponymous key which brings at once an intoxicating rush of power, and a state of near-panic over how he is to keep the key safe. What it does not bring, ultimately, is the ability to open the door.

Like Josef K. in Kafka’s The Trial, the protagonist, J, is a timorous and resentful cog in the bloated machinery of the administration. He is neither likeable nor engaging: his inner monologue is mostly complaints about his wife (who he calls his “Old One”, adding an inadvertent hint of Lovecraft to the proceedings) and his boss, his crippling uncertainty about the appropriate action, his mysterious itch. There is a numbing tedium, reminiscent of Kafka’s The Castle, about J’s inevitably advancing fate, and he is ultimately overwhelmed by the bureaucratic processes. Unlike Ó Cadhain’s earlier stories, ‘The Key’ is satirical more than empathic; whereas the protagonists of Ó Cadhain’s rural stories were shaped and restricted by their difficult environment, J is to some degree culpable in his own situation. In parallel with his anxieties about being trapped, both physically and psychologically, J’s musings introduce a mischievous absurdity of the story, which is the perceived agency of the administrative files themselves: “it was hard to believe the files weren’t alive, or like tinned cans of flesh and blood,” a sort of Gothic expression of bureaucratic resistentialism.

First published in An tSraith ar Lár in 1967, and in English in The Quick and the Dead, translated by Cló Iar-Chonnacht [West Connacht Press], Yale University Press 2021. Ó Cadhain’s sole novel Cré an Cille (1949) has been translated as The Dirty Dust (Alan Titley, Yale University Press, 2015) and as Graveyard Clay, trans. Liam Mac Con Iomaire and Tim Robinson, Yale University Press, 2016