Abstract
Wondrich investigates the most significant patterns than can be traced in Irish contemporary fiction’s interest in the sea and its related maritime topographies, and argues how the most resonant associations of the sea imagery lie in the vexed relationship between the historical past and communal and personal identity in the modern nation. Using the critical framework of the ‘chronotopes of the sea’ (‘at once geographies and topoi’, Cohen 2006) and most notably the seaside/shoreline and the ship in its analysis of novels by John Banville, Colm Toibin, Neil Jordan, Bernard MacLaverty and Joseph O’Connor, the chapter focuses on the association between memory, creativity and trauma, the sense of the past and the search for regeneration, and the trope of insularity as always referring to the identitarian tensions of Ireland.
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Notes
- 1.
Kristin Morrison, ‘Ireland and the Sea: Where is the Mainland?’, in Patricia Lynch, Joachim Fischer and Brian Coates, eds, Back to the Present, Forward to the Past: Irish Writing and Irish History since 1798 (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006), pp. 111–22, p. 111. It is significant, and related to Morrison’s contention, that the growing body of scholarship on maritime studies rates very few contributions from Irish literature. Morrison is among the minority of voices who have considered the sea in contemporary Irish fiction, and, with the exception of some titles in Joycean studies, no major works have focused on the topic so far.
- 2.
Morrison, ‘Ireland and the Sea’, p. 112.
- 3.
Carl Schmitt, Land and Sea, parts 7 & 8, trans. Simona Draghici (Corvallis: Plutarch Press, 1997). I borrow the definition from Schmitt’s argument, although the text does not mention the case of Ireland.
- 4.
John R. Gillis, The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), p. 135.
- 5.
I would signal, among others, a novel like John McGahern’s The Leavetaking (1975) and a play like Brian Friel’s Wonderful Tennesse (1993).
- 6.
Margaret Cohen, ‘The Chronotopes of the Sea’, in Franco Moretti, ed., The Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), vol. 2, pp. 647–666, p. 649.
- 7.
Cohen, ‘The Chronotopes of the Sea’, p. 660.
- 8.
A concept that originally refers to ‘social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination—like colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today’; Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 7. The term has expanded and been applied to many different contexts beyond its original formulation, and it has been applied to the context of Ireland, among others, by Vincent Cheng in his seminal Joyce, Race and Empire, with reference to 1904 Dublin in Ulysses. The cultural and linguistic hybridity of Ireland and its history of divided political allegiances seems to attest to a fruitful application of the concept to Irish literary culture, especially considering the further specification Pratt added in a later essay: ‘Autoethnography, transculturation, critique, collaboration, bilingualism, mediation, parody, denunciation, imaginary dialogue, vernacular expression—these are some of the literate arts of the contact zone’; Mary Louise Pratt, ‘The Art of the Contact Zone’, in David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky, eds, Ways of Reading: An Anthology for Writers, 5th edn. (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 605–26, p. 620. My reference thus considers its broader application, rather than a specific geographical correspondences of such social spaces.
- 9.
John Brannigan, Archipelagic Modernism: Literature in the Irish and British Isles, 1890–1970 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), p. 68 and passim.
- 10.
Alain Corbin, Le Territoire du Vide (Paris: Aubier, 1988); trans. as The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World 1750–1840, J. Phelps (London: Penguin, 1995).
- 11.
Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).
- 12.
As Corbin writes, ‘The irresistible awakening of a collective desire for the shore arises in the period from 1750 to 1840 […]. This was when the coasts of the ocean began to appear as a recourse against the misdeeds of civilization, as the place where it was easiest to grasp the new sense of time proposed by scientists, and experience the dissociation of mankind’s history from that of the earth’; Corbin, The Lure of the Sea, p. 54.
- 13.
Brannigan, Archipelagic Modernism, p. 86.
- 14.
Liam Harte, ‘“The Endless Mutation of the Shore”: Colm Tóibín’s Marine Imaginary’, Critique, 51:4 (2010): 333–65, p. 337.
- 15.
Neil Corcoran, After Yeats and Joyce: Reading Modern Irish Literature (Oxford: Opus, 1997), p. 98.
- 16.
Colm Tóibín, The Heather Blazing (London: Picador, 1992), p. 32.
- 17.
Harte, ‘The Endless Mutation of the Shore’, p. 344.
- 18.
Colm Tóibín, The Blackwater Lightship (London: Picador, 1999), p. 260.
- 19.
In addition, this echoes Thomas Hardy’s songs such as ‘Budmouth Dears’ or ‘O the Opal and the Sapphire of that Wandering Western Sea’; the Hardyesque tones were noted by Terry Eagleton in his review of the novel. See ‘Mothering’, review of The Blackwater Lightship, London Review of Books, 21:20 (October 1999): 8.
- 20.
Cohen, ‘The Chronotopes of the Sea’, p. 662.
- 21.
J. M. W. Turner, ‘Sunrise with Sea Monsters’, c.1845, unfinshed, The Tate Gallery, London.
- 22.
Neil Jordan, Sunrise with Sea Monster (London: Vintage, 1994), pp. 2–3.
- 23.
See Cohen, who writes that ‘the high degree of implausibility—this quality of “strange and therefore true”—is one of the important differences between the chronotope of blue water and novelistic depictions of life in land-based domestic and high society’; Cohen, ‘The Chronotopes of the Sea’, p. 652.
- 24.
Jordan, Sunrise with Sea Monster, p. 135.
- 25.
Cohen, ‘The Chronotopes of the Sea’, p. 652.
- 26.
For an in-depth and original reading of the Irish maritime element in Joyce, see John Brannigan’s chapter on ‘James Joyce and the Irish Sea’, in Archipelagic Modernism.
- 27.
The Belmullet peninsula is also the place where Catherine’s father, a member of the Royal Irish Constabulary who ends up involved in the violence of the Troubles, settles with his family and experiences the impossibility of ever coming to terms with the difference of the other Ireland between and beyond borders, conditioned by the political sectarianism of the period.
- 28.
Seamus Heaney, ‘The Sense of Place’, in Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978 (London: Faber & Faber, 1984), pp. 131–49, p. 131.
- 29.
Seamus Heaney, ‘The Peninsula’, in Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966–1996 (London: Faber & Faber, 1998), p. 21. For an earlier consideration of this aspect of the novel see R. Gefter Wondrich, ‘Islands of Ireland: A Tragedy of Separation in Dermot Healy’s A Goat’s Song’, in Bill Lazenbatt, ed., Writing Ulster: Northern Narratives (Jordanstown: University of Ulster Press, 1999), pp. 69–86.
- 30.
Bernard MacLaverty, Grace Notes (London: Jonathan Cape, 1997), pp. 272, 276.
- 31.
MacLaverty, Grace Notes, p. 204.
- 32.
Gerry Smyth, ‘“The Same Sound but with a Different Meaning”: Music, Repetition and Identity in Bernard MacLaverty’s Grace Notes’, Eire-Ireland, 37:3–4 (2002): 5–24, pp. 16–17.
- 33.
Maud Ellmann, ‘Joyce’s Noises’, in Modernism/Modernity, 16:2 (2009): 383–90, p. 383.
- 34.
MacLaverty, Grace Notes, pp. 213–14.
- 35.
John Banville, The Sea (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2005), p. 10.
- 36.
Rudiger Imhof, ‘The Sea: “Was’t well done?” ’, Irish University Review, 36:1 (2006): 165–81, p. 166.
- 37.
Imhof, ‘The Sea’, p. 166.
- 38.
Banville, The Sea, p. 87.
- 39.
Joanne Rosteck, Seaing through the Past: Postmodern Histories and the Maritime Metaphor in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011), pp. 17, 163.
- 40.
Rosteck, Seaing through the Past, p. 166.
- 41.
See Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator.
- 42.
Banville, The Sea, p. 180.
- 43.
Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. K. Blamey and D. Pellauer (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004), p. 413.
- 44.
Banville, The Sea, pp. 194–5.
- 45.
Banville, The Sea, p. 97.
- 46.
Jamie O’Neill, At Swim, Two Boys (London: Scribner, 2001), pp. 641–2.
- 47.
It was hailed as a novel which significantly renovated the so-called tradition of famine novels which Irish critics had generally considered inadequate with respect to the enormity of the event.
- 48.
Morrison, ‘Ireland and the Sea’, p. 112.
- 49.
John Peck, Maritime Fictions: Sailors and the Sea in British and American Novels, 1719–1917 (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 14.
- 50.
Peck, Maritime Fictions, p. 14. Peck interestingly reminds how ‘the distinguishing feature of a civilized or liberal or democratic society may be said to be respect for the individual, which necessarily involves respect for the individual’s body. By contrast, a maritime economy, particularly in a time of war, appears to treat bodies with contempt’; Peck, Maritime Fictions, p. 24.
- 51.
Heterotopias are ‘actual places […] sorts of actually realized utopias in which […] all the other real emplacements that can be found within the culture are, at the same time, represented, contested, and reversed, sorts of places that are outside all places […] a kind of contestation, both mythical and real, of the space in which we live’; Michel Foucault, ‘Different Spaces’, in James Faubion, ed., Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (New York: The New Press, 1998), vol. 2, pp. 175–85, pp. 178–9, 184–5.
- 52.
Cohen, ‘The Chronotopes of the Sea’, p. 664.
- 53.
Foucault, ‘Different Spaces’, p. 185.
- 54.
Schmitt, Land and Sea, p. 32.
- 55.
Brannigan, Archipelagic Modernism, p. 71.
- 56.
Joseph O’Connor, Star of the Sea (London: Vintage, 2003), pp. 374–5.
- 57.
Terry Eagleton, ‘Another Country’, review of Star of the Sea, The Guardian, 25 January 2003 http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/jan/25/featuresreviews.guardianreview12 [accessed 17 December 2015].
- 58.
Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre is mistakenly attributed by Merridith to the journalist and writer Grantley Dixon, who is his wife’s lover and, even more significantly, Dickens asks the evil Mulvey to tell him a story which he will reuse in Oliver Twist.
- 59.
See Margaret Cohen’s introduction ‘Seafaring Odysseus’ in her The Novel and the Sea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 11.
- 60.
O’Connor proclaims his intention to pay homage to the richness, variety and value of adventure of the nineteenth-century novel in his ‘A Guide to Star of the Sea’ http://www.josephoconnorauthor.com/for-book-clubs.html [accessed 17 December 2015].
- 61.
Bernhard Klein, ‘Introduction: Britain and the Sea’, in Bernhard Klein, ed., Fictions of the Sea: Critical Perspectives on the Ocean in British Literature and Culture (Farnham: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 1–12, p. 5.
- 62.
Elizabeth Ho, ‘The Neo-Victorian-at-Sea: Towards a Global Memory of the Victorian’, in Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss, eds, Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture: Immersions and Revisitations (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 165–78, p. 166. Ho refers to ‘a concentration of neo-Victorian novels based around and structured by the sea-voyage’, including Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda and Jack Maggs, Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers, and Andrea Barrett’s The Voyage of the Narwhal.
- 63.
‘I would like to think that I am objective in what I have put down, but of course that is not so and could never have been. I was there. I was involved. I knew some of the people. One I loved; another I despised. I use the word carefully: I did despise him. So easy to despise in the cause of love. Others again I was simply indifferent to, and such indifference is also a part of the tale. And of course I have selected what has been seen of the Captain’s words in order to frame and tell the story. A different author would have made a different selection. Everything is in the way the material is composed’; O’Connor, Star of the Sea, p. 386.
- 64.
O’Connor, Star of the Sea, p. 129.
- 65.
O’Connor, Star of the Sea, p. 130.
- 66.
W. B.Yeats, ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’, in Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921) (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2003), pp. 20–2.
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Wondrich, R.G. (2016). Shores of History, Islands of Ireland: Chronotopes of the Sea in the Contemporary Irish Novel. In: Mathieson, C. (eds) Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600–Present. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58116-7_6
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