Affective Landscapes in Literature, Art and Everyday Life

Memory, Place and the Senses

Christine Berberich, Neil Campbell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781472431790
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317184713
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Bringing together a diverse group of scholars representing the fields of cultural and literary studies, cultural politics and history, creative writing and photography, this collection examines the different ways in which human beings respond to, debate and interact with landscape. How do we feel, sense, know, cherish, memorise, imagine, dream, desire or even fear landscape? What are the specific qualities of experience that we can locate in the spaces in and through which we live? While the essays most often begin with the broadly literary - the memoir, the travelogue, the novel, poetry - the contributors approach the topic in diverse and innovative ways. The collection is divided into five sections: 'Peripheral Cultures', dealing with dislocation and imagined landscapes'; 'Memory and Mobility', concerning the road as the scene of trauma and movement; 'Suburbs and Estates', contrasting American and English spaces; 'Literature and Place', foregrounding the fluidity of the fictional and the real and the human and nonhuman; and finally, 'Sensescapes', tracing the sensory response to landscape. Taken together, the essays interrogate important issues about how we live now and might live in the future.

PART I

Peripheral Cultures

Chapter 1

‘You’re Not in Ireland Now’: Landscape and Loss in Irish Women’s Poetry

Deirdre O’Byrne

‘[T]he land can be the muse’, declaims Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill (Somerville-Arjat and Wilson, 1990, p. 153), as if defying contradiction, and her judgement is confirmed by the presence of Ireland, and in particular the physicality of the Irish landscape, in the poetry of Eavan Boland, Catherine Byron and Maura Dooley. What I am concerned with here is how these three poets conjure topography in their writing to represent a sense of exilic loss, but also utilize it to assuage the pain inherent in that deprivation. Their poetry functions as a process of reclamation and restoration, seeking to establish a connection to Irish heritage and culture, even when the subject/narrator is physically at one remove from the country itself. This is of course by now an established tradition – Yeats famously wrote ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ while in London – but what is particularly interesting in the work of these three contemporary poets is the manifestation of a specifically female connection with the [mother]land.

Each of these writers has a different relationship to Ireland: Boland lived there until her father’s job required a move to London when she was six; as an adult, she chose to return to Ireland to live, though she spends part of her time in the United States. Byron, daughter of an English father and Galway mother, grew up in Belfast until the family moved to England when she was 17. Dooley was raised in England by Irish immigrant parents. Dooley dismisses what she calls ‘prurient’ readings of her work, saying in interview that her ‘poems offer glimpses of my experience and my perception, my imagination and my moods. They are not my autobiography’ (Vianu, 2006, n.p.). While this is a valid claim, it is nevertheless the case that a number of her poems are imbued with a strong sense of Irish heritage.

Despite their different experiences and backgrounds, the writings of all three poets contain some significant similarities in their reworking and reinvigoration of tropes of Irish exile. The Irish in Britain occupy a space variously defined by historians and cultural commentators in the language of liminality, as a case of ‘strange dualism’ (Jackson, 1963, p. 160), a ‘Middle Nation’ (p. 159). Their relationship to the society in which they live is described by Jackson as ‘in it but not of it’ (p. 158), and he argues that the children of immigrants have to learn ‘how to inhabit two worlds at the same time’ (p. 160). Bronwen Walter expands on this dualism in her Outsiders Inside, positing that Irish-identified women in Britain can be identified, and may even identify themselves, simultaneously as both insiders and outsiders (Walter, 2001 p. 266). Catherine Byron’s poem ‘Coffin. Crypt. Consumption’, though not ostensibly about emigration or exile, encompasses this paradox:

Oh, I knew then fine

what cleaving was:

to split with a blow

or to hold on tight. (Byron, 2000, p. 8)

These lines neatly sum up the diasporic experience, in their juxtaposition of separation and togetherness and the potential violence contained in both. In Byron’s poems, which refer directly to Ireland, this duality is evident. The same binary opposition of clutch and cleft also appears in Dooley’s ‘Second Generation’:

Wearing the Claddagh ring, hoping its two hands

would hold, not tear, this tiny heart. (Dooley, 1991, p. 30)

The interconnectedness of love and pain is explicit, with the acknowledgement that Irish identity, as symbolized by the Claddagh ring, embodies the ability to both woo and wound.

In some cases, the wound of exile is paralleled with parturition. In Patricia Boyle Haberstroh’s book, My Self, My Muse, Byron describes Ireland as ‘country of my mother, and mother of me for my first seventeen years’. In this statement, the writer makes explicit the matrilineality in her sense of Irish identity, as inherited not just from her own Irish birth-mother, but from the country itself as a maternal entity. Byron elaborates on this inheritance as poetic impulse: ‘My writing, my poetry in particular, came out of the matter of Ireland, its women’s histories, its landscapes, its long losses through emigration’ (Boyle Haberstroh, 2001, p. 65). The word ‘matter’ visually and aurally suggests ‘mater’, as well as emphasizing the physicality of the poetic connection to the country of her birth, and ‘Minding You’, written about the poet’s Galwegian mother, could be said to encompass all of the poetic inspirations identified by Byron above. The sense of loss is palpable, as the poem moves from depicting the physical exile of the narrator’s mother from ‘home’ in the opening line, to the emotional and mental anguish of dementia expressed in the ‘lost mind’ of the closing line. The first stanza asks if the daughter can bring the mother back to

the field that has been in your head

from seventeen years old

to seventy seven

the years you have been away. (Byron, 2000, p. 45)

It is now an established tradition in Irish literature to read ‘field’ as representing the land of Ireland (Potts, 2011, p. 173). Thus, the poem conjures up a land which has been ‘in [the] head’ of both mother and daughter since they were each 17, the age at which the poet herself left Ireland. The very age is liminal in itself, being on the cusp between young adulthood and grown-up womanhood. In its anomalous status of being considered old enough to have sex but not to have a vote, it is an age of both recently attained privilege as well as a lack of full enfranchisement, and raises, as Boland’s poetry does, the question of agency: how much choice can a not-yet-adult have in their election of a dwelling-place? Agency is similarly compromised in old age, particularly so when one is no longer in full possession of one’s mind. There are layers of loss represented in ‘Minding You’, as the poem, ostensibly about the losses experienced by the older woman, shows these to be inextricable from those of her daughter. The title becomes a shorthand for reminding both of a place which is only possible to inhabit in fantasy, as the older woman is now ‘away’ for good, in her terminal absent-mindedness.

In the work of all three poets, Ireland appears as a place ‘in the head’ of the poetic subject whilst the body is actually out of Ireland, inhabiting a space which appears in their writings as unwelcoming and even hostile. Boland’s poem ‘An Irish Childhood in England: 1951’, places a ‘barely-gelled … six-year-old’ as spatially alienated:

in a strange city, in another country,

on nights in a north-facing bedroom. (Boland, 2005, p. 155)

The child’s sleeping quarters, which might be expected to provide refuge and comfort, are depicted here as a space which offers neither. Its very aspect is both forbidding and foreboding, that ‘north-facing’ evoking the frosty physiognomy of an Ice Queen in her boudoir. In ‘The Game’, Boland replays that same chilly scene, like a Freudian revisiting of childhood trauma:

I was a child in a north-facing bedroom in

a strange country. (Boland, 2005, p. 169)

Not only does the room face north (not west towards the Ireland she has been taken out of) but, the narrator tells us, ‘I could see the railings when I looked out’, enhancing the feeling that she is imprisoned in this room. She takes flight in her dreams but on returning finds ‘no safe landing’ in a ‘room with sharp corners and surfaces’ (p. 169). The unheimlich and the ‘uncanny’, as conceived by Freud, are identifiable in this poem, with its home-space which is re-experienced as unfamiliar on every re-awakening. The child’s encounter with her new home also carries destabilizing echoes of Alice-in-Wonderland’s interaction with unpredictable authority; she finds ‘red-jacketed and cruel-eyed fractions of chance’ (p. 169) left by card-players the night before, representing the fortuitous circumstances which have separated her from her original home. ‘Did I choose to?’ the narrator asks in Boland’s ‘An Irish Childhood’ (p. 155), but as she’s a child, the selection of dwelling place is not hers, and apparently feels as arbitrary to her as the outcome of a game of cards. The red jackets remind us she is now in the heart of Empire, and the ‘cruel’ eyes seem to vindictively deny her a welcome there, emphasizing the feelings of alienation and powerlessness.

Maura Dooley in ‘Second Generation’ reflects similarly inhospitable surroundings for Irish exiles in Britain:

No Siege of Ennis in the Irish Club,

no convent childhood, shamrock through the post,

can net us back across that narrow passage

nor make this town a place we can call home. (Dooley, 1991, p. 30)

The poem identifies traditional markers of the Irish in Britain – the Irish Club, Catholic schooling and shamrock sent for St Patrick’s Day – but makes it clear that they are neither compensation nor replacement. Like any text related to exile that mentions nets, this list calls to mind that other trio of putative ensnarement, ‘nationality, language, religion’, that Joyce’s narrator in A Portrait of the Artist declares he will attempt to ‘fly by’ (Joyce, 1988, p. 184), but in Dooley’s poem, her triad is not powerful enough to net one back from Britain, never mind Trieste. What is more remarkable though, is that Dooley’s poem accuses these symbols of Irish identity of a further weakness: of lacking the capability to transform their current dwelling place into ‘a place we can call home’. The town here remains as unheimlich as the bedroom of Boland’s child-subject. Like the narrator in Byron’s poem, who envisages placing a Galway stone in her mother’s hand while acknowledging its inability to make her feel at home in either mind or body, Dooley’s narrator asserts that talisman cannot replace territory. The tokens do not in themselves suggest much comfort, metonyms of Irishness though they may be, as the dance’s title ‘The Siege of Ennis’ (my emphasis), and a convent education suggest both incarceration and cultural domination, whether colonial or religious. Even the shamrock is not entirely innocuous as a symbol; tradition has it that it only grows in Ireland. This is of course factually untrue, but its preponderance as a myth does carry the imputation that those displanted from Ireland may have trouble putting down permanent roots abroad.

The poet may subsequently have become wary of the sentiments implied in this work; ‘Second Generation’ appears in her pamphlet Ivy Leaves and Arrows, which forms a quarter of a 1986 Bloodaxe collection (Adcock, Dooley, Litherland and Maughan, 1986, p. 22), and again in Dooley’s own first full collection, Explaining Magnetism (Dooley, 1991, p. 30). However, it’s omitted from her Sound Barrier: Poems 1982–2002, which the Acknowledgments tell us includes ‘all the poems which Maura Dooley wishes to keep in print from her [previous] collections’ (Dooley, 2002, p. 6). It may be that Dooley is wary of over-simplistic autobiographical readings of this poem, but its inclusion in David Pierce’s Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century (Pierce, 2000, p. 1170) is proof that it is regarded as an important work, and it compares favourably with other examples of the literature of exile, in poetry and in prose.

If Dooley’s ‘Second Generation’ refutes the notion that emblems of Irish identity can confer a sense of home, what then can provide solace in exile? Homi Bhabha raises the possibility inherent in language in his theory of cultural hybridity as a third space which ‘bears the traces of those feelings and practices which inform it, just like a translation‘ [my emphasis] (Bhabha, 1990, p. 211). If writers of the diaspora occupy a third space that is neither ‘here’ nor ‘there’, in this case neither ‘Ireland’ nor ‘England’, their third space can be said to be carved out in language, throug...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halft Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Affective Landscapes
• Part I Peripheral Cultures
• Part II Memory and Mobility
• Part III Suburbs and Estates
• Part IV Literature and Place
• Part V Sensescapes
• Afterword: From Affect to Landscape and Back
• Index