Out of the Earth: Ecocritical Readings of Irish Texts

Ireland of the welcomes: Colonialism, tourism and the Irish landscape

Ireland of the welcomes: Colonialism, tourism and the Irish landscape Eóin Flannery It is easy to see the fact of displacement in the colonial experience , which at bottom is the replacement of one geographical sovereignty, an imperialist one, by another native force. More subtle and complex is the unending cultural struggle over territory , which necessarily involves overlapping memories, narrative and physical structures.1 Responding to a Modern Language Association ‘call for comments on the growing importance and expanding scope of the fields of environmental literature and ecological literary criticism’2 , the critic Jonathan Levin argued at length in favour of the situated nature of experience. Clearly eschewing the historical binarism of culture versus nature, Levin contends that ‘our bodies, our language, our sociocultural environment all shape our distinctive styles of being in the world’; it is not a matter of erecting a mediating battery of discursive resources with which to digest our environmental experiences. As Levin suggests: ‘the choice is not between culture and nature, as if to locate redemption either in a fuller recovery of nature from culture or in a more complete and rational application of culture to nature, but rather among different styles of dwelling in the world.’3 Such ecocritical sentiments might easily be brought to bear on the histories of imperial travel narratives, cartography, visual representations and geography. One of the defining characteristics of the ‘modern world’, and ‘modernity’; ‘the experience of modernity’ has been an unrelenting assault on the natural world, whether that takes the form of exploitation, commercialisation or textual codification. From an environmental standpoint, then, ‘the incursion of Europeans into other areas of the world from the fifteenth century onwards’, according to Graham 85 Huggan and Helen Tiffin, ‘caused drastic changes in extra-European temperate as well as tropical environments [. . .] Under European colonial rule, the resources of the invaded, conquered and settled territories were exploited for imperial profit; and cash cropping and other European agricultural practices usually replacing hunting and subsistence farming, thereby damaging existing ecosystems.’4 Equally, under ‘imperial eyes’ the recalcitrant geographies of colonial landscapes were mirrored in the perceived uncivilised mores of the populations that resided therein. Thus both geography and morality were co-opted into imperial homologies of pacification and education. This chapter will investigate the extent to which such mindsets were exercised in an Irish context. Principally focusing on travel representations of the Irish landscape, both visual and textual, the chapter will read travel and touristic representations as gestures of containment. In other words, such representations attempt to evacuate the Irish landscape of the incendiary elements of its history and confine it to the politically inert domains of leisure and legend. Alternatively, following the work of the critic David Lloyd, in particular, who in turn is heavily influenced by Walter Benjamin, we will divine, within the verbal and visual flourishes of the touristic gaze, residues of resistance; tenacious pockets of political and cultural difference that speak back to the levelling violence of historicism. In particular we will focus on the ‘ruined’ artefacts of the Irish landscape and register the silenced voices of the Irish historical landscape, as well as noting the counter-cultural assertions of the natural world itself; the acts of ‘natural’ reclamation that the ruins themselves bespeak. In an early 1987 foray into the cultural politics of Irish postcoloniality, and drawing on the pioneering theorisation of colonial representation by Said, Declan Kiberd argues that a typical oppressive mechanism of power results in a reduction of ‘a complex network of cultures to a few recyclable clichés, it restores a puzzling people to the realms of the reassuring’.5 Kiberd’s point, as will be well appreciated, foreshadows the lateral postcolonial critiques of the philosophical tenets of British imperial modernity within contemporary Irish studies.6 These initiatives within the broader discourse of Irish studies have telescoped the ideational interdependencies of rational Enlightenment thought, particularly that of the Scottish Enlightenment, and the discursive exercise of empire. Under this philosophical purview, ‘first peoples’ and their cultures were construed as irredeemably pre-modern. Unsuitable for participation within the public sphere of civilised society, primitive cultures , of which the Celtic race in its Irish and Scottish Highland strains were constituents, were rescued by the imaginative tropes of Romanticism and the picturesque. They were offered ‘an imaginary realm Eóin Flannery 86 of myth and nostalgia as a consolation [for their exclusion] from the material benefits of citizenship...