Memory Ireland: Volume 2: Diaspora and Memory Practices

3. Chronotopic Memory in Contemporary Irish-Canadian Literature

36 3 Chronotopic Memory in Contemporary Irish-Canadian Literature K AT R I N U R SCH EL In contemporary Irish-Canadian literature, memory of Ireland is a site of careful negotiation because memory is such a powerful instrument: it is an agent that both constructs and constitutes the Irish ethnie, and, eventually, represents that ethnie. Authors Frances Greenslade, Mark Anthony Jarman, Pat Nevin, Thomas O’Grady, and Patrick Taylor have all set texts in Ireland that present memory as a form of negotiating belonging and of reevaluating the writer’s cultural positioning in relation to Ireland and Canada. A striking commonality among this group of contemporary Irish-Canadian authors—some born in Ireland and some in Canada—is their concern with Irish place as site of memory. Rather than commemorating the idea of Ireland as a people in the form of transplanted cultural practices, rituals, and community affiliations in Canada, this generation of writers is drawn to the physical manifestation of the ethnic homeland. Memory of Ireland among immigrants and their descendants is first and foremost an imaginative recollection of the place, as the place represents the main link that is broken. Languages or accents, beliefs or stories can be taken elsewhere; places are fixed. Historically, the Irish diaspora was shaped by an indirect experience of Ireland—a place that would not be seen again but lived on in letters, songs, poems, paintings, and stories. That has changed partly with the rise of the tourism industry and partly with ideological changes in Canada’s self-conception as a multicultural country. Direct experience of Chronotopic Memory in Contemporary Irish-Canadian Literature 37 Ireland as a physical space became not only possible but important, shaping a person’s emotional attachment to the idea of homeland and reinforcing a sense of ethnic origin. Because of Ireland’s colonial history, persistent land questions, and history of emigration and displacement, Irish identity and place have a “special relationship” (Smyth 2001, 56; Walter 2001, 9). Yet places change over time, both in their physical appearance and in their meaning for people; they are shaped by natural influences and human action, and by the histories and memories attached to them (Relph 1976, 57). Bakhtin’s conception of the chronotope is useful here in thinking about the ways in which diasporic writers perceive places to consist of temporal layers that contain cultural connections beyond their own present experience: it is the chronotope—rather than the place itself—that functions as the placeholder of memory.1 IrishCanadian literature engages with Irish place as chronotope but is further complicated by the conflation of two imaginative approaches to place. In postmodern writing, Paul Smethurst argues, a geographical imagination generally dominates over a historical one (2000, 15), but there is a difference in how European and North American spaces are perceived. Smethurst points out that the North American imagination is formed to a great extent by “the opportunities suggested in undifferentiated space,” whereas European writing of place is conditioned “by the physical evidence of history” (291). Thus Irish-Canadian writers view Irish places, on the one hand, with the eyes of the settler: as spaces that are open to being contemplated and conquered, offering endless opportunities for exploration. On the other hand, knowledge about their roots connects these authors to a tradition that can be explored not only spatially but by collecting histories and memories attached to place. The preservation of cultural memory requires the effort of passing it on over generations; however, the temporal dimension that is inherited cultural memory cannot alone create a satisfactory chronotope. Two Irish-Canadian memoirs make that clear. Frances Greenslade and Mark Anthony Jarman 1. Bakhtin defines the chronotope as the “intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (1998, 84). 38 Memory and the Irish Diaspora were both born in Canada, and although “Ireland” had always been present in their lives as an idea, they have difficulties reconstructing an ethnic heritage detached from the place that produced their ancestors and culture. Their travel memoirs thus chronicle journeys across Ireland and their attempts at drawing meaning from the physical engagement with geographical sites. Greenslade’s “quest for home” (the subtitle of her book A Pilgrim in Ireland ) develops from what she terms “culture envy”: “I envy people who have a place, and stories and a culture that grew out of that place. I’m native Canadian , but not...