Unfolding Irish landscapes

Tim Robinson, culture and environment

Derek Gladwin, Christine Cusick, Derek Gladwin, Christine Cusick

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780719099472
• eBook ISBN: 9781784996529
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

An unprecedented compilation of critical and creative essays and visual texts from leading international scholars, Unfolding Irish landscapes presents cross-disciplinary studies of the prose, cartography, visual art and cultural legacy of the award-winning work of cartographer and writer Tim Robinson. This book explores the process in which Robinson has addressed the historical and geographical tensions that suffuse the landscapes of Ireland. Robinson's distinctive methods of map-making and topographical writing capture the geographical and cultural consciousness of not only Ireland, but also of the entire North Atlantic archipelago. Through both topographic prose and cartography Robinson undertakes one of the greatest explorations of the Irish landscape by a single person in recent history, paralleling, if not surpassing, Robert Lloyd Praeger's extensive catalogue of writings and natural histories of western Ireland.

III

Place and the Irish cultural imagination

9

‘But his study is out of doors’: Tim Robinson’s place in Irish Studies

Eamonn Wall

We cannot make the argument that Tim Robinson is a traditional Irish Studies scholar; he is not an academic working and researching at a university; rather, he is a writer, as he says of himself, living with his partner Máiréad in the harbour master’s house they have restored in Roundstone, Co. Galway (see Figure 21). Instead of having a library close at hand, Robinson has the ocean and a garden. Roundstone and its surrounding areas are defined by fishing and farming primarily, both of which are as ancient as they are important. Traffic passes through the neat village while its harbour and roads, in and out, connect it to the wider world. When people come to visit Roundstone, they do not come to study – it is not a university town – but to bathe in its beauty and enjoy its seafood. A majority of visitors will not know that Robinson, one of Ireland’s most important and renowned writers, lives here and that his home is in plain sight.

Given Robinson’s reticence, independence and the important roles played by solitude and anonymity in his calling as a writer, it is likely that Robinson prefers it this way. In those West of Ireland places (the Burren, Connemara and Árainn), or spaces to use the term he favours, Robinson is nowhere visible though everywhere present, as Flaubert might put it. At the same time, Roundstone is in the process of becoming a centre of learning, the harbour master’s home having been deeded to the National University Ireland-Galway by its current occupants. Robinson, who has always worked at a remove from the academy, is bringing the university to Roundstone. Instead of the scholar making his way to the campus, the university, or a part of it, must relocate to the scholar’s home, and this is a sure indication of the significance of Robinson’s work as writer, cartographer and publisher, not to mention his generosity. Not only are the Robinsons making a present of their home and archive to NUI-Galway, and indeed to Ireland also it must be added, but they are also allowing for the continuance of their work. Their cultural enterprise is being gifted to the next generation in the same manner as a tune is passed on from an old fiddler to a young player. Both the Robinsons and the old traditional musicians remind us, by making these gestures, of the responsibility all share for keeping traditions – whether of inquiry or performance – alive.

Figure 21 The Robinsons’ Nimmo House in Roundstone (photo by Nessa Cronin).

To designate Robinson as an independent scholar, given the suspicion that the term can somewhat unfairly arouse, would seem impertinent in light of his many achievements. As we have learned from David Lodge’s explorations of the academic life in such novels as Changing Places, Small World and Nice Work, contemporary academic scholars are wont to be found hopping from classroom to library to airport terminal to scholarly conference.¹ After reading Lodge, one will surely conclude that the scholar’s true place is the check-in desk at the airport nearest to campus, not the lecture theatre or laboratory. While attending conferences, scholars deliver papers while simultaneously developing new networks, keeping up to date with fresh developments and theories in the field, getting academic kicks and building more weighty résumés. In writing his Aran and Connemara volumes, Robinson has travelled great distances without ever venturing far from home: he resembles the Yaghans Bruce Chatwin describes in the book In Patagonia who ‘were born wanderers though they rarely wandered far’.² Robinson’s endeavours have about them a seriousness and depth that is wholly absent from Lodge’s scholarly jet-setters. Robinson’s sacrifices have been great though so too have been his rewards. Almost universally, his work is admired and even venerated. He is an independent scholar in the same way that Coleridge and Thoreau were – all three being transgressive authors too restless, physically and psychically, to be tied to desk and quad.

The Irish Studies field is no different from others in the academic world, with attendance at conferences both a necessity and a lifeline. If a scholar decides to remain at home, he/she will be left outside of discussions, will fall behind with regard to scholarly trends and become as dated as bell-bottom trousers and puffed-up shoulder pads. In addition, particularly in North America, scholars need to attend conferences in order to lessen the sense of isolation that is often the burden that the Irish Studies scholars must bear. On many campuses, the Irish Studies scholar is a lone wolf who works without peers. Frequently, Irish Studies scholars have had to fight hard to be allowed to teach and publish in the discipline. In fact, the founding of the American Conference for Irish Studies (ACIS) in 1963 was spurred by resistance. Historians and literary scholars, primarily, felt that professional organisations such as the American Historical Association and Modern Language Association did not consider Irish history or Irish literature worthy of specialised study. To found ACIS was a necessity and the new organisation, with its interdisciplinary outlook and desire to undermine ingrained attitudes, embraced the zeitgeist of the times. Academic organisations gather individuals into groups though the types of people who join such organisations are almost by nature solitary. In many respects, scholars are at their happiest, and some would argue at their best, while working alone in libraries, studies or offices. Whereas the conference is the place where research is presented to an audience of peers, it is a truth that neither the research nor the conference can be possible without the scholar’s solitary work. Presentation is a reward for work while publication is confirmation of its originality and worth.

At a time – during the 1960s and 1970s – when Irish Studies scholarship was becoming increasingly professionalised, an important aspect of which was the gathering of like-minded scholars and teachers into institutes, departments and organisations, Robinson was stepping away from the metropolitan life of London, where the organisation had always flourished, to live on Inishmore. There, he would research and write his two seminal books – Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage and Stones of Aran: Labyrinth – before moving on to Roundstone where he continues to write his books and, with Máiréad, run his publishing venture, Folding Landscapes.³ Though Robinson’s scholarly work is of the same stature as that of such products of the academy as Declan Kiberd and Roy Foster, for example, he is hardly cut from the same cloth, having trained for his task first as a mathematician and later on as a visual artist. In fact, whereas Kiberd and Foster came to be an academic literary critic and historian, respectively, by choice, Robinson came to be the chronicler of Inishmore by accident. Though, like Kiberd and Foster, he is very much engaged with colonisation and its aftermath. Furthermore, Robinson’s work is as rigorous as any produced by his contemporaries in the academy.

Robinson refers to himself as a writer and it is among a select group of contemporary writers, generally working independently of institutions, that he belongs: Gary Snyder, Rebecca Solnit, Terry Tempest Williams, Bruce Chatwin and Colin Thubron. Though this group is learned and distinguished, each has, like Robinson, done much of his/her work out of doors and at a remove from urban centres of learning. In this regard, they follow the botanist and marine biologist rather than the literary critic or historian. All of these writers, fiercely independent and original, share a distrust of large institutions ruled over by cadres of organisation men and women. Among senior Irish Studies scholars working within the academy, Kevin Whelan’s and William J. Smyth’s work come closest to Robinson’s. In such volumes as the Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape, which Whelan co-edited, and Smyth’s Map-making, Landscapes and Memory: A Geography of Colonial and Early Modern Ireland c.1530–1750, we find gathered together and synthesised a wide variety of sources – ancient and modern – such as songs, poems, written histories, aerial photographs and so on, that reveal both scholars working comfortably across academic boundaries in the same transgressive manner that is a feature of Robinson’s work. In Irish Studies, Geography, more than any of the other disciplines, epitomises the interdisciplinary approach that is supposed to underline scholarship in the field.⁴

The academy, for all its wealth and importance and for the quality of its writers and researchers, has not achieved the same influence as such writers as Solnit, Robinson, Snyder, Williams, Chatwin and Thubron, many of whom are household names in their own countries and internationally and have sold countless thousands of books. In the humanities, the university’s reach is often quite narrow, a result of the frequently arcane and mind-numbing theoretical approaches paraded by scholars that alienate readers. It can happen that in an academic’s hands a vibrant text can be reduced to concrete. In their focus on what is local, even when the location is exotic, Thubron and Chatwin, for example, have always been able to make what is being described a living part of our own world. Instead of alienating readers, their work draws them in. These writers, often using a bioregional focus, are concerned with showing off the world – wonders, warts and all – and not just their own learning. In no way is the integrity of their work compromised by the fact that they are writing for a larger rather than a specialised readership.

In great part, we are concerned with issues of genre and style as much as substance. Robinson and Solnit, for example, favouring the literary essay as their genre of choice, an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword: Tim Robinson
• Map of Aran Islands and neighbouring coasts
• Introduction
• I Explorations in cartography and geography
• II Topographic writing and narrative
• III Place and the Irish cultural imagination
• Bibliography
• Index