Geofeminism in Irish and Diasporic Culture

Intimate Cartographies

Christin M. Mulligan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030192150
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Geofeminism in Irish and Diasporic Culture: Intimate Cartographies demonstrates the ways in which contemporary feminist Irish and diasporic authors, such as Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Tana French, cross borders literally (in terms of location), ideologically (in terms of syncretive politics and faiths), figuratively (in terms of conventions and canonicity), and linguistically to develop an epistemological "Fifth Space" of cultural actualization beyond borders. This book contextualizes their work with regard to events in Irish and diasporic history and considers these authors in relation to other more established counterparts such as W.B. Yeats, P.H. Pearse, James Joyce, and Mairtín Ó Cadhain. Exploring the intersections of postcolonial cultural geography, transnational feminisms, and various theologies, Christin M. Mulligan engages with media from the ninth century to present day and considers how these writer-cartographers reshape Ireland both as real landscape and fantasy island, traversed in order to negotiate place in terms of terrain and subjectivity both within and outside of history in the realm of desire.

© The Author(s) 2019

Christin M. MulliganGeofeminism in Irish and Diasporic CultureGeocriticism and Spatial Literary Studieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19215-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: A Prefatory “Postscript”

Christin M. Mulligan¹

(1)

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

Christin M. Mulligan

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

It is my privilege and presumption, despite the observations of Fr. Peter Lonergan, played by Ward Bond in John Ford’s The Quiet Man , that one should “begin at the beginning,” and rather start with the end or more aptly, one ending that was also a beginning. A debt of gratitude is owed to Prof. Katherine Rowe, who first introduced me to Seamus Heaney’s “Postscript” by reading it at the celebration to commemorate the completion of undergraduate honors theses by majors in the Bryn Mawr College English Department in 2007. I have been teaching it ever since. It was in teaching Seamus Heaney’s “Postscript” to my first- and second-year composition students that I began to consider a succinct version of the correlative phenomenon between mapping and subjectivity that so interests me in Irish and diasporic writers and filmmakers of all periods in Irish, English, and Hiberno-English. This slip of a poem ends both The Spirit Level (1997) and Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966–1996 (p. 411). The former is Heaney’s first collection after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, whose title refers to both Irish slang for the carpenter’s level and the tipping point of the physical, the metaphysical, the ethical, and the desirable—all of which coalesce in “Postscript,” while the latter collection that surveys the poet’s entire career prior to that point. There is an emphasis on political geography as personal geography, on time and space tentatively moored to a fragmentary being in flux. The poem represents a breath caught, a crystallization or distillation, as well as a transcendence of chronological time or what Elizabeth Freeman might consider a resistance to “chrono-normativity.” Temporality and spatiality in “Postscript” leave both speaker and reader suspended in the magical interregnum betwixt and between moments of consciousness, which can and do “catch the heart off guard and blow it open” (Heaney 1998a, ln 17).

The lyric figures Ireland both as real place and fantasy space, traversed by the poet-cartographer who is (re)claiming psychic territory both within and outside of history in the realm of imagination.

We are functioning in a particular sort of hetero-temporal double time, at once Kairotic or Divine, mythopoetic, and quotidian, as evinced by the journey “out west” by car and the names of specific regional locations—but pivotally, not too specific—which portray the “neither here nor there” feeling necessary to limn both a particular and a universal Éire (ibid., ln 1, 13). “Postscript” further invokes chronological and linguistic play through the flight of the swans, ¹ whose feathers are “roughed and ruffling” the border between these two times (ibid., ln 9), as legendary emblems of the Children of Lír, who exiled spirits of the nation. They are transformed by their wicked stepmother, Aoife, into birds, accursed to wander the Sea of Moyle for a thousand years, subject of Thomas Moore’s famous ballads, and an enduring metaphor of colonial occupation, whose “Gaelic tounge[s] remain” as Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill elsewhere reminds us, but not their human voices (trans. Ní Chuilleanáin, “Fionnuala” ll 28 TWH). In the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode of Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus allies this legend with the profound grief of Shakespeare’s King Lear, another narrative of displacement and loss, through a further linguistic displacement with the inclusion some Italian. His reference to “Cordoglio”—“deep sorrow” or “condolence” addresses Cordelia’s execution by hanging: “Cordelia. Cordoglio. Lír’s loneliest daughter” (U 9.314). Cordelia, despite the fact that her father repudiates and banishes her for refusing to offer proof of her devotion to him, is also Lear’s favorite child—her name widely considered to be derived from and evocative of the Latin “cordis” or “heart.” She is condemned to death as a result of her sisters’ desire to control or occupy Lear’s kingdom, another tragic colonial parallel. The Children of Lír are also the subject of an iconic sculpture in Dublin’s Memorial Garden.

As far as each of these chapters is concerned, I will be tracing the struggle for each of the authors and filmmakers to find their voices and tongues (Gaelic, Shakespearean, or otherwise) amidst this complex history filled with lacunae created by oppression from various authoritarian and misogynist institutions. Silence of all kinds will be charted, including those in the manner of Cordelia’s contention, “Love, and be silent” (Lear I.i.68), which demonstrate that to a certain extent language always already fails to account for mass deaths, mass immigrations, massive disease outbreaks as a result of An Drochshaol through to the austerity of a postcolonial state after the Celtic Tiger economic boom. However, language is also the means to express the samhás/jouissance one can experience despite this history, and sometimes, surprisingly in response to it—whether in Irish, English, Hiberno-English—or all of the above concerning all of the above, at the same time.

Seamus Heaney, as Nobel Laureate English-medium poet and eminent “translator” of both the Anglo-Saxon epic, Beowulf, and the Irish epic, Buile Suibhne or in his translation, Sweeney Astray (as opposed to the more literal and accurate Frenzy [or Madness] of Sweeney), clearly has little trouble finding his own voice when mediating between the competing demands of bi- (or multi-)linguality amidst this tangled past. Although granted, “Postscript” does grapple with the poet’s anxiety and affirm the ability to find just the right words in the moment, whatever language and context one is writing in. Heaney describes the fleeting nature of beauty, and the fluctuating nature of mapped subjectivity articulated in terms of the medium and particularities of place, though it may indeed be “useless to think you’ll park and capture it/more thoroughly” (Heaney 1998a, ll 13–14). The poet, here, seems to have wandered astray himself, albeit temporarily and supposedly unexpectedly, if not shrewdly and perspicaciously, into the magical-real relation that Ireland occupies among as well as in-between history, fantasy, and geopolitics.

The autonomous nation of the Free State or as Declan Kiberd famously quips in Inventing Ireland (1996), the “Not-So-Free State” exists as biogeographical, psychoaffective, sociopolitical, sexual, and cultural construct—as what Marx would term an “allegorical state” or more aptly, an “allegorical sovereignty” since the early Irish period—well before notions of national and ethnic identity were articulated in the terms I have just used. In “Postscript,” Heaney’s grasp of that concept permits the fast, loose, and unhurried—his contentions otherwise notwithstanding—interplay of ideas related to time, space, and place. He expresses an ideology that is simultaneously bound to Ireland’s cathected history and deliberately set apart from it, in which “known and strange things pass” (Heaney 1998a, ln 15). It is not only the wind and the light that are “working off one another” (ibid., ln 5).

Like the swans, rich emblem of Irish history, Heaney too is “busy underwater” at the spirit level (ibid., ln 11)—under the psychic waters of history and myth that are as deep, as primary, as foundational as the ocean itself, which surrounds Ireland the island on every side—with which all the writers and artists I examine must contend. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, too, uses a variation of this exact metaphor in the mermaid poems throughout her oeuvre, particularly The Fifty Minute Mermaid (2007) and Cead Aignis/The Astrakhan ² Cloak (1992). Heaney may call it a “Postscript,” suggesting a casually-dashed-off afterthought, but it truly represents his approach to the genus loci of Ireland, or the state of the State, as the source, the root of all the troubles and the unexpected thrills, which come from engaging with the past contained in the “earthed lightening” of catching not only the swans but just the right words, words, words above all (ibid., ln 8).

Thus, while acknowledging the seeming difficulties of “captur[ing] it/more thoroughly” (ibid., ll 12–13), Geofeminism demonstrates that contemporary Irish and diasporic women artists deliberately and repeatedly cross borders, literally (in terms of topography), ideologically (in terms of politics and faith), figuratively (in terms of conventions and canonicity), and linguistically. They are radically aware of their biogeography, often responding to a particular philosophy (Irish nationalism, British colonialism, and/or Catholicism), ethnic identity (Irish/Irish diasporic), sexual identity (male/female), a particular tongue (Irish, English, and/or Hiberno-English), as well as historical and cultural events, locations, and materials. Juxtaposing different chronological periods and genres, Geofeminism examines the ways in which their symbolic landscapes respond to centuries-old literary traditions and seek to resituate “occupied territory.”

Despite the fact that the term “geofeminism” has fallen out of favor among cultural ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: A Prefatory “Postscript”
• 2. “Saor an tSeanbhean Bhocht!”: Moving from Cailleach to Spéirbhean
• 3. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s Traumatic/Erotic Map: Transubstantiating the Body of Ireland
• 4. Sexing the Changeling: Magic Realism and Queer Geography in the Oeuvres of Yeats and French
• 5. Coda: The Necessity of Thinking Geologically and Globally on Irish Grounds
• Back Matter