Inside Out: Time and Place in Global Ireland

The piper, it is said, calls the tune, but in Ireland he is often expected in addition to explain it. The great piper and folklore collector Séamus Ennis was no exception, and he frequently prefaced his tunes with an account of their origin. One such tune was “Cornphípopa na Sióg,” or the “Fairies Hornpipe” and Ennis’s story went as follows. A man returning home from a wedding loses his way and is told “if that happens to any of you, you have but to take off your coat and turn it inside-out and put it on again and you’ll find your way home alright.”¹ The wedding reveler does this and he finds himself three fields away from his own house. At the bottom of the long field in which he finds himself there is a fairy host dancing to music played by a piper. Listening to the music, he falls asleep and when he awakes next morning and goes home to tell people what he saw, no one believes him. Only when they hear him play the tune he picked up from the fairies on the pipes do they decide he was not making it up. Thus, ever afterward the tune is known as the “Fairies Hornpipe.”

In a twinkling, the wedding guest is transported to the vicinity of his house. The vignette from Irish folklore anticipates the phenomenon of space-time compression in modernity where successive generations find getting people and information from one point to another takes progressively less time. In Ennis’s story, losing your way also is about finding your way, but finding your way involves change, transformation, and inversion—“you have but to take off your coat and turn it inside-out.” The coordinates in the musical parable are space and time. What happens when trying to find out where you are might involve turning your world upside down before the sceptical welcome of home-coming? In contemporary, late-modern Ireland, changes in perceptions and experiences of place and time are having real-world consequences.

The Czech novelist Milan Kundera, in his first French-language novel La Lenteur (1995), published in English as Slowness (1996), notes that when people try to remember, they slow down; when they want to forget, they accelerate. He describes a man walking down the street:

At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically he slows down. Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing too close to him in time.²

For Kundera, place is bound up with pace. The more you seek to get away from a place, the faster you go. Conversely, the slower you go, the more you become aware of place, and more particularly, the more you become aware of the place of memory. Mnemosyne for the writer is the deity of deceleration. It is not surprising, then, that when we go to look at narratives from contemporary Ireland, an exploration of place is going to involve the manipulation of time.

In order to provide a properly stereoscopic view of a place at a particular moment, let us begin with two prose narratives, one in English and one in Irish, both published in 2007 and both dealing with the lives and characters of suburban Dubliners. The novels are The Gathering by Booker Prize winner Anne Enright, and Cnoc na Lobhar by Lorcán S. Ó Treasaigh. In Enright’s novel the death in England of a family member, Liam, brings the family together for his funeral, a story narrated principally by his sister Veronica, who is responsible for the repatriation of his body. The protagonist of Ó Treasaigh’s work, Labhrás, is in an old-folks home awaiting in bitter recrimination the inevitable end stop of death. Death and old age bring with them their own rhythms. Both works, then, are studies in the effects of a change in tempo, memories bustling in as a...