Dublin Opinion

A very long time ago on this blog, there was mention of a certain Twenty Major and his almost Proustian interest* in the naming of female genitalia. In a spirit of digression, this reminded me of a poetry class back in college where the brandname of ‘Silk Cut’ cigarettes was referred to.

In Elizabethan times a ‘cut’ meant something which our wasteful generation uses a whole letter more to describe (and a consonant at that).

Those fiends in marketing manage to lure us into lung cancer by subliminally evoking the place from which we all came. A place, subsequently, to which many of us are drawn irresistibly to return - a rich source of complication for many’s the already complicated existence.

I call to the witness stand Twenty Major and his struggle with the nomenclature of the thing…

Whatsoever, I find myself drawn to a converted railway station on the left bank of the Seine - the Musée d’Orsay. In this venerable institution there hangs a painting by a certain Gustave Courbet entitled ‘L’Origine du Monde’. This striking painting, as it turns out, is the very thing the recently doctored Ben, in another article on this blog, has found Irish
web browsers spend hours futilely seeking - it is a genuine example of Irish porn.

For, as it happens, the lady depicted in this mid-nineteenth century masterpiece is believed to be an Irishwoman who was, alternately, mistress to Courbet and to his friend Whistler. This information was garnered by me from French radio some time ago and then re-ocurred to me more recently. After yet another futile Google search for ‘Irish porn’, I found myself at a loss drifting through Wikipedea and somehow happened upon the article on ‘L’origine du monde’

‘The ways of the Lord…’ as someone once said ‘…are a bit like getting there by Ryanair’. From Wikipedia, we learn the lady was Joanna HIFFERNAN (the spelling certainly damaged by a British or French bureaucrat somewhere along the line).

We also discover the intriguing voyage of the painting from a rich Turkish collector of erotic art to the Musée d’Orsay. Judging by the number of works of fiction having been dedicated to the model of the painting she appears to have become a literary sub-genre of her own.

She appears, rather problematically, in another painting by Courbet ‘La belle irlandaise’ - problematic in that she has a head of red hair which would testify against her being the model of the more famous painting. I will leave the untying of this particularly pubic knot to Twenty Major.

Before long, I don’t doubt, Mullingar (she looks like a Mullingar lass) will celebrate the first edition of the World’s Origin Festival (celebrating exhibitionist redheads) and Nuala O’Faolain will waffle on about the fair Joanna on Sunday Miscellany.

Don’t forget to remember, how and ever, youse heard it first on ‘Dublin Opinion’.

* Proust, of course, was principally interested naming, and not at all in female genitalia…