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Introduction
- Cork University Press
- Chapter
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With one exception, the main texts discussed in this collection were written over the last century and a quarter. Despite their relatively recent origin, however, many of these works also take as their essential subject matter the deep history of the Irish land and people. They seem determined above all to delve beneath conventional or sentimental images of Irishness. The present volume thus both looks at Irish literature through an ecocritical lens and focuses on a group of writers who are themselves revisionist, and at times even polemical, in intent. One prominent theme in the essays brought together here is that many Irish writers from the late nineteenth century to the present have sought to escape from the elegiac mode in their depictions of Ireland’s deeply rooted culture and history. This turns out to be true even for some figures who are often identified with the literature of the ‘Celtic Twilight’. George Moore, for instance, is framed here by the tension within his personal experience of both emigration and return. Greg Winston’s essay investigates Moore’s ambivalence towards romantic myth-making, as registered in his urge to connect ‘an impoverished present to a legendary past’. Similarly, as Joy Kennedy-O’Neill writes in her interpretation of Riders to the Sea, J.M. Synge wanted to avoid a vision of nature, and in particular the sea, that was ‘personified’ or ‘sentimentalised’ as in prevailing British literary models. His sense of it as being ultimately indifferent reflected both Synge’s experience of Aran fatalism and his discerning encounter with Darwinism. It’s instructive, when surveying a range of writings that are strongly oriented to nature, to see which exemplary landscapes crop up again and again. In the books considered in this set of essays, the Aran Islands often turn out to be the rocky ground where contending visions of Ireland play 1 Introduction John Elder out. Karen O’Brien’s fascinating discussion of the 1996 play The Cripple of Inishmaan highlights its devastating critique of Robert Flaherty’s famous 1934 documentary Man of Aran. Flaherty was, for the playwright Martin McDonagh, ‘a colonist’, one whose approach constrained the locals he portrayed within a simplistic and outmoded vision. O’Brien’s discussion of the famous scene in which a basking shark is harpooned points out the misleading nature of the episode, with relation to the fishing practices that were current during Flaherty’s visit; it also records the fact that many of these increasingly rare sharks were sacrificed for the sake of the film-maker’s atavistic vision. In this context O’Brien also notes the striking parallel between McDonagh’s and Synge’s efforts to engage respectfully and authentically with the Arans and their people. The belief that sentimentality about Ireland can be a form of colonialism also resonates in Eóin Flannery’s fascinating look at the history of tourism there. He is particularly trenchant when analysing depictions of Ireland as a ruined landscape. Citing Edward Said, Flannery notes that many tourist publications of the early twentieth century implied both that the Irish landscape was studded with picturesque ruined castles and abbeys and that it was also largely depopulated. While reading the essays in this original and important collection, I often found such affinities between ecocritical concerns and current approaches in postcolonial studies and cultural criticism. To put this another way, both the critical approaches represented here and the authors being discussed are aligned with a literary turning in which the appreciation of more lyrical forms of ‘nature writing’ has been balanced by an emphasis on environmental justice. Lawrence Buell has perceptively characterised this as a transition from ecocriticism’s ‘first wave’, with its primarily aesthetic criteria, to a heightened awareness of ethical issues in the ‘second wave’. The Irish writers discussed in Out of the Earth, and the diverse critical approaches taken to them, suggest some of the ways in which Buell’s contrasting terms may now both be integrated within a more encompassing vision. By way of examples, Edna O’Brien’s novels and Paddy Clarke, Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle illustrate how ripping down the gauzy curtain of conventional narrative can also shed light on unsuspected beauty. In her fiction O’Brien releases Irish women from the obligation to ‘act good’. Her fierce anger about evasive and hyprocritical depictions of women is mirrored in Doyle’s indignant portrayal of how corporate litter degrades the life of the poor in present-day Ireland. But Maureen O...