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I discovered that the language of the country transmitted images of the country, and that the country fashioned the language, invented words likely to translate people, things, jobs, and landscapes that faraway literatures and high-minded dictionaries couldn’t manage to describe. The idea occurred to me to navigate this river of language to discover the language of the river.1 —Pierre Perrault, Le mal du nord Although he has now shifted his attention to what he sees as a broad and worldwide cultural decline, Desmond Fennell once had, as one of his central intellectual and polemical concerns, the future of the Gaeltacht. Articles, pamphlets, and books that he published in the 1960s until well into the 1980s bore the mark of Gluaiseacht Chearta Sibhialta na Gaeltachta, and frequently took the politics of language and its broader implications for Irish culture as their central concern. Although he didn’t have much to say about film or television as such, his ideas about regionalism and internationalism clearly form an intellectual superstructure for the Gaeltacht media activism of the 1970s and 1980s.Niamh Hourigan,in her comparison of the campaigns for Irish-language radio and TV, states that “Des Fennell’s advice helped to shape the ideology of Gluaiseacht”(“A Comparison”297). Furthermore, Fennell’s work dovetails with both the cinematic and literary work of Pierre Perrault.2 Both Perrault and Fennell see the cultural survival of isolated areas as crucial to the survival of minority languages and cultures and thus both have engaged with isolated areas where distinctive languages or language variants remain but are threatened : the Gaeltacht and Irish for Fennell, Charlevoix and its very distinct variant of French for Perrault. Moreover, both used Brittany as an analogy for 151 4 Desmond Fennell and Pierre Perrault their own community’s struggle against a monopolizing centre, although each had a very different sense of the cultural importance of centre-margin issues. Most importantly, both Fennell and Perrault are heavily invested in philosophical and political approaches to mapping. Thus Fennell’s work, like that of Perrault, is also quite close to that of the cartographer, essayist, and land-artist Tim Robinson (most famous for his work on the Aran Islands, and now based in Roundstone, Connemara), whose approach, as I discussed in the introduction, is quite suitable for understanding the way that this North Atlantic work approaches the task of philosophically informed geography. The most obvious connection between Fennell and Perrault is the degree to which they are engaged with rural areas. Each one has made significant interventions, whether in Ireland or Quebec, but there is a very real way in which Fennell’s work is defined by the period from 1968 to 1979, when he lived in and wrote about the Connemara Gaeltacht,just as Perrault’s work is arguably defined by the films he made on Charlevoix’s Île-aux-Coudres.The themes they developed most explicitly through this work—regionalism, the importance of embattled cultures and their languages, resistance to a homogenizing modernity —were issues that they never really left behind, even once Fennell had moved to Anguillara and Perrault had taken to making work about Abitibi or the high north. For both Fennell and Perrault, these rural areas were the places that brought into sharper focus the crucial issues of renewed nationalism that they both sought. As I mentioned in chapter 1, Perrault was originally introduced to the Charlevoix region by his wife Yolande Simard, a native of the region, although this place’s importance is rarely expressed solely in familial terms; Fennell writes of his own introduction to Gaeltacht politics in a similar way. He begins by recounting personal details, but in short order moves on to the politics that defined his work. In Beyond Nationalism, he recalls how “in the autumn of 1968 I moved with my wife and three young children from Dublin to Maoinis .” In the next paragraph, he writes that: Years later we discovered that in 1968, in West European countries and the USA, a trickle of families and individuals began to move voluntarily from the powercentres to the peripheries. In France, 1968 is looked back to as the year when a resurgence of the depressed cultures on the French periphery—Breton, Occitan, Alsatian and so on—began. In Paris, there was a revival of interest in these cultures , and a drift of young intellectuals and artists from the capital to the regions in question. (130) 152 part 2: the gaeltacht [13.58...

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