In Dublin's Fair City: Citified Embodiments in Paula Meehan's Urban Landscapes

James Joyce would love to meet her. . . she could take himto avenues parks squares laneshe bypassed, didn't bother with

Brendan Kennelly, "It takes trees in summer"²

Disciplines devoted to the study of space have traditionally omitted references to gender, sex, and sexuality from their theoretical frameworks, thus ignoring the relevance of these issues in the (re)production and distribution of spaces in both the public and private realms. Whereas this flaw was early detected by feminist scholarship, the relationship between the corporeal and the spatial still remains a vexed issue. As Liz Bondi points out in "Sexing the City," the interrogation of canonical space analysis has heavily relied on the sex/gender distinction. This binary was initially useful in highlighting the ideologically grounded nature of space—culture (gender), and not biology (sex), would be responsible for the pervasive space distribution that related Women to the private spheres and Men to the public world—but its ultimate consequence was to reduce the body to the status of a tabula rasa with no discursive value and upon which gender asymmetries would be imposed.

Space theory has gradually incorporated the body as a primary concern of its agenda. In "Bodies-Cities," Elizabeth Grosz contends that neither the body nor the city can be considered two self-sufficient categories, i.e., they cannot be assumed to conform to "organically unified ecosystems" (242) linked by a casual relationship. Rather, they (re)produce each other and become mutually defining terms. And so, issues such as sexuality, age, social class, race, and ethnicity have a strong impact on the structure of the city, which in turn has a physical and emotional effect on the bodies dwelling in it, so that these bodies become "citified" (242) and, I would also argue, the cities become "embodied." In this way, bodies and cities would have a constitutive rather than a contingent relationship. This necessarily involves an ongoing negotiation of the body's interaction with its environment, which also has to adapt itself to the demands of the collective of bodies it shelters.

The long-neglected relationship between human bodies and space has become a powerful means to denounce the erasure of women's experiences from the public arena. In spite of its fluid character, the city reflects patterns of dichotomous thought underpinning the patriarchal society that built it in the first place. Accordingly, the normative character of male physicality turned men into the legitimate occupants of the public environs, and any somatic deviations were relegated to the margins of urban life. From this perspective, the city, just like the body, is no longer perceived as a passive context for social life but rather as an active agent of cultural production.

Ailbhe Smyth's "The Floozie in the Jacuzzi" provides Grosz's abstract theories with the specificities of the Irish context, where women have not been assigned a space in the public domain because they have always been space themselves. This has resulted in an undesirable stagnation for the corporeal and the spatial alike, both categories frozen under the rubric of a retrograde nationalist ethos. Connected with this sociocultural praxis is the association of the capital city of Ireland with the work of James Joyce. For the tourist industry, Joyce's mapping has proved more durable over the years than any cartographic approach to the city, and well into the twenty-first century sightseeing Dublin is still heavily dependent on Joycean configurations. In spite of all the movement and wandering about in Ulysses, Joyce's view of his city in Dubliners as "the centre of paralysis" finds an interesting parallel in what has become a frozen, "paralyzed"mapping of the town for many visitors. This static perception is at odds with contemporary conceptualizations of urban landscapes as fluid texts permanently "becoming" and is ultimately unable to account for the changing faces of the city, particularly evident during (and in the wake of) the Celtic Tiger phenomenon.

Originally from Dublin's north inner city, Paula Meehan has always been aware of the literary load of her native town. However, she is not blind to the invisibility to which the Irish tradition has consigned the northern side and its inhabitants. "I grew up in a city," she says,

that was incredibly well-mapped in literary terms. . . .An O'Casey play was like a documentary of what was going on around me. Similarly, when I read Joyce, all the settings were so familiar. I walked up the road and I was in those streets he wrote about. And then, the great great book of the city, Ulysses . . . it was like opening my door and walking out. So, the city was incredibly well-mapped in literary terms. But, yet, my city wasn't. . . . So, although there were all these maps I still felt rudderless in terms of my own life.

(González Arias 296)

In the last two decades, Dublin has witnessed the arrival of immigrants from Eastern European, African, and Asian communities. The relationship between the racialized bodies of the newcomers and the re/organization of cityscapes needs to be further interrogated and will probably trigger some of the most interesting urban theories and literary practices within the field of Irish Studies in the coming years.³ In the area around Parnell and Gardiner Streets, for instance, which feature prominently in Meehan's texts, economic expansionism displaced the indigenous population to shelter Africans that, in their turn, moved out to clear a space for what is now Dublin's Chinatown. Bodies previously marginalized on account of their social-class difference are "re-greened," so to speak, and moved to a more standardized center against which the "other-ed" communities of refugees and asylum seekers are spatially segregated in the city.⁴

This essay looks at the ways in which Paula Meehan's poetic renderings of Dublin function as a complement—rather than as a counter narrative—to a static, "paralyzed" perception of Joyce's cartography. Her treatment of the city has evolved over the years, adapting itself to the fluidity of lived experience. And so, in her latest collection, Painting Rain, the poetic voice inscribes her ecological preoccupations at fields that are absorbed in the name of economic interests. In this essay, however, the emphasis remains on the "citified embodiments," to use Grosz's phraseology, of women whose existence is marked not only by sex but also by class. As Donovan points out, "[p]overty . . . can make any native Dubliner feel like an outsider in his or her own city" (14). Economic pressures become a major force in subject-formation processes in Meehan's work and are never underestimated in their capacity to generate a bodily and urban topography.

This particular configuration of Dublin becomes the starting point for the inscription of the new racial realities referred to above, from which the issue of social class cannot, in general, be divorced. It also places Meehan at an interesting position within the Irish literary tradition: her poems are a necessary layer in the textual palimpsest of Dublin constructed by Joyce, O'Casey and, more recently, by the gender-specific renderings of Eavan Boland and Mary O'Donnell, among others. Meehan's poetry acquires the ethical value of archival material, as it records a part of the city that is gradually disappearing (figure 1) and becomes a monument to the memory of the streets that were swallowed up by the new communities.⁵

In the lines that open this essay, Brendan Kennelly imagines Paula Meehan taking Joyce for a walk through her city, whose "avenues parks squares lanes" were not recorded in the official cartography of Ireland. This essay partakes of this imaginary journey and accompanies the two authors in their urban tour. The poems have been divided in three sections—childhood, adolescence, and mature life—that offer a similar structure to that adopted by Joyce for his stories in Dubliners and that account not only for the shifting faces of the city but also for the evolution of female subjects whose bodily changes over the span of a lifetime are relevant in their experience of urban life.

Figure 1.

The Mullingar in Parnell Street, known by the locals as "The Milk Bar" (1960s–'70s). The area is currently part of Dublin's Chinatown and the premises are Chinese restaurants. Photographer unknown.

Childhood

In many of Meehan's childhood texts, the city is remembered as the potential locus of freedom from oppressive domestic realms. In her "Buying Winkles" (The Man 15–16) the poetic persona revisits her younger self and the excitement of being sent to the streets to buy a newspaper twist of winkles, a frequent enough experience in the area (figure 2).

The text opens with the young child being instructed by her mother on public behavioral patterns: "'Hurry up now and don't be talking to strange/men on the way.'" For the duration of her journey across the neighboring streets (figure 3), she feels a pleasurable sense of freedom and the space outside the home is perceived as a myriad of little discoveries:

out into Gardiner Street, all relief.A bonus if the moon was in the strip of skybetween the tall houses, or stars out,but even in rain I was happy—the winkleswould be wet and glisten blue like littlenight skies themselves.

(15)

Figure 2.

Boy with a bellyful of winkles in Summer hill (1970s). Photographer unknown.

The winkle-seller is found in her usual location, "outside the Rosebowl Bar," where she exhibits her merchandise on a discarded pram. Once the shellfish is bought, the girl initiates her way back home feeling triumphant after the street adventure. The last lines of the poem represent the protagonist in a heroic pose of celebration, an interesting contrast with the statues of male nationalists so abundant in Dublin's city center: "I'd bear the newspaper twists / bulging fat with winkles / proudly home, like torches."

Figure 3.

Gardiner Street (late 1960s). Photographer unknown.

This poem reproduces a traditional distribution of space based on the gender dichotomy: the men are associated with public spaces ("men heading out for the night"; "When the bar doors swung open they'd leak / the smell of men together with drink"), as opposed to the women, systematically located in the domestic sphere. The mother sends her little daughter on errands to stay within the spatial confines she has been assigned to; equally, the women waved at perceive the world from their windows, a dysfunctional liminal space that does not involve any participation in the public realm. Two kinds of women cross the boundary between the two universes: "those / lingering in doorways," and the seller herself. However, in both cases their transgression is only illusory, an "unbridgeable gap," as Mahoney suggests (149).⁶ The former are found talking in close proximity to their homes, as if prevented from moving beyond by an invisible border; the latter—although working in the open—never partakes of the public world of the males ("sitting outside the Rosebowl Bar," emphasis added) and as a counter she uses a pram, a signifier of women's symbolic and biological roles in Irish society. In all cases, female embodiment determines the women's non-discursive dimension in their community and is ultimately responsible for their spatial limitations.

It could be argued that the child's short journey through the streets confers upon her the mobility of the postmodern nomadic subject, characterized by constant redefinitions of his/her own subjectivity through his/her relationship with the shifting environment. However, the reliability of such a perception is highly problematized in Meehan's text. At some level, and in spite of her overwhelming adventure, the child experiences "envy"when aware of the spatial barriers she cannot cross: "I envied each soul in the hot interior [the pub]." Psychoanalytical theory offers an interesting layer of analysis for the apparent paradox in the child's futile mobility: the transit from the Imaginary Order—the maternal and pre-linguistic or, in Lacanian terms, pre-phallic universe—to the Symbolic—that regulates social life—would be a necessary step in the formation of subjectivity. In "Buying Winkles" the narrator is intimately connected with her mother, from whom she receives precepts on social behavior. Her subjectivity is not clearly delineated due to her young age and, therefore, she still moves in between the Imaginary and the Symbolic. This position allows her to sense the outside world beyond borders strictly domestic, and walk through Dublin lanes that, as she declares, "brought the sea to me." However, this freedom is only utopian, remains imaginary in Lacanian terms, as her links with the maternal hint at her future displacement from a male-oriented environment.

Again from a Lacanian framework, desire plays a major role in the formation of the subject, who must replace the original longing for the maternal body with new objects throughout life. These new objects of desire, in their turn, must be displaced once they are achieved, as their essence lies in their ultimate unattainability (Evans 103–4). In spite of her relative freedom of movement, the end of the poem pictures the young girl going back home to her mother, the bond with whom should be broken in order to reach for her new object of desire: the outside world that remains, as it happens, in the realm of the unattainable. Similarly, in "The Pattern" (The Man 17–20) the child measures the world against the limits of her family environ: "I was sizing / up the world beyond our flat patch by patch / daily after school, and fitting each surprising / city street to city square to diamond." Her aspirations at geographical mobility acquire an international dimension—"Zanzibar, Bombay, the Land of the Ethiops"—that stands for her desired personal fulfillment. However, the break with the maternal has not been possible yet, preventing her from moving on to the next step in the construction of the self. The perpetuation of gender roles proves all too powerful and paralyzes the young protagonist. The end of the poem reproduces the mother's discourse—"' One of these days I must / teach you to follow a pattern'"—that poignantly articulates the difficulty of breaking through received notions of femininity and their association with space consignments.

Adolescence

A confined Dublin childhood gives way to an equally oppressive sense of space in adolescence. In "When I Was a Girl" (Painting 52) the narrator relates the outside world to the freedom she dreams about ("I longed for a boat /. . . / for my setting forth"). Her journey would help her escape from an urban experience marked by poverty, domesticity, and compulsory motherhood ("to fly it through the waves / of bleached white nappies in their rows // line after line /wave after wave").However, escape remains, once more, in the domain of the imaginary and is at odds with her actual location: a window in "Sean McDermott Street // 22E Upper." The window works again as a dysfunctional space of liminality that pins the narrator down to her confinement. The naming of the actual street is part of Meehan's alternative mapping of Dublin and underlines the "citified" dimension of the girl's embodiment, inextricably interwoven with a specific location.

"Troika" is a three-poem sequence in Meehan's Painting Rain ("How I Discovered Rhyme" 74–75; "A Reliable Narrative" 76–78; "This Is Not a Confessional Poem" 78–80) written "in the light of ancient Greece" (78). To use Marcel Detienne's terminology, in the contemporary world Greek mythology has become a "signifiant disponible "—an available signifier, a visible surface upon which to inscribe political agendas in principle different from those of fifth-century-BC Athens. The Greeks have traditionally provided the Irish with the basis for a literature of protest (against British imperialism and gender preoccupations, mainly), so that apart from the aesthetic pull of the classical canon, the ethical component of this revisionist practice is usually acknowledged by critics and writers alike.⁷ In Meehan's Greek sequence the references to the mythical time present the poetic voice with a comfortable distance from which to approach Dublin as the site of trauma for an adolescent female body. But instead of "hibernicizing" her story and making a shield out of intertextual connections, as has been common literary practice, Meehan originally opts for using ancient Greece as a mere channel for her therapeutic act of writing, putting down past ghosts "in the hope that [they]'ll leave me be" (76). The separation of time zones (the past, the present, and the mythical) confronts the adult poet with the ethical dilemma of writing about "those days of no work, no roof, / no hope, no time like the present" (74) without any protective "signifiant disponible" at her disposal: "I do not know that I've the right to say such things. / I only know I must" (78), confesses the narrator.

This social witnessing is frequently connected in Meehan with the therapeutic power of words, which create art out of grief and put previously disregarded stories on the public map (Kirkpatrick, "Between Breath"). And so, the god of healing, Asklepius, is invoked before revisiting a familiar Dublin background of dispossession: "Dublin rain / and Dublin roads and Dublin streets / and Dublin pubs and Dublin pain" (74). In "The Apprentice" (Return 27–29) the female poet had accused the Irish male tradition of falsifying the reality of women under images of corporeal perfection: "Your swanlike women are dead, / Stone dead. My women must be / Hollow of cheek with poverty / And the whippings of history!" These "[m]asters, all bastards" of Meehan's angry diatribe had proven unable to account for the lived experience of the sexed bodies inhabiting the "wrong" side of Dublin. Meehan's "Troika" focuses on such corporeal realities in a powerful deconstruction of victorious, complacent Mother Ireland iconography: mothers have given up, appear beaten after too many pregnancies—"pre-natal, post-natal who knows now" (74)—the national dream is deflated in their domestic nightmare—"the mattress with its shaming stain / nearly the shape of Ireland" (75)—and their corporeality becomes a text to articulate all that the women of the literary masters had hidden—"a dark beauty with sad eyes and many tired sighs" (76).

"A Reliable Narrative" (76–78) focuses on the cycles of sexual abuse within family circles and describes the thirteen-year-old protagonist on the streets, again on errands for her mother. The chronological divide between the mythical and the personal pasts is formally accomplished here by the textual isolation of the traumatic experience, which appears as a separate section, enclosed in between two small stanzas set in the present and from where the poet starts and concludes her recollection. The journey across the city takes her from the maternal home to the home of her uncle, aman that would "pull our panties or pyjamas down / and spit on our bottoms and rub the spit in." From her Greek retreat, the poet struggles to understand the atrocities in a flashback that leads her to the inside of the wrecked house. Space distribution is constructed again around the gender dichotomy: the adolescent longs for the freedom of "the bus and the city and the river" but this time her journey through outdoor landscapes results in reification and sexual harassment. When her uncle gets home she is brought deeper inside the dwelling, to a parlor kept locked by his only key. The sexual connotations of this imagery empower the male within the household, and confine the young poetic persona to a silenced, and even more invisible, physical location.

This essay stems from the belief that our experience of the world is incarnated. In his phenomenological analysis of the corporeal, Drew Leder contends that this pervasive bodily presence is, however, of a highly paradoxical nature, since it is characterized by absence: "While in one sense the body is the most abiding and inescapable presence in our lives, . . . one's own body is rarely the thematic object of experience. When reading a book or lost in thought, my own bodily state may be the farthest thing from my awareness" (1). Bodies, he suggests, recede into silence in ordinary life. However, the bodily paradox is solved in states of sensory intensification accompanying extraordinary corporeal experiences. A body in pain, for instance, would speak out (71) and break the silence of everyday inertia, a perception very relevant for Meehan's representation of the sexual abuse. Although the body becomes articulate in protest for the perpetrations and is more accurate in its sensory perceptions—"[h]e smells of aftershave and stands too close tome"—the spaces of the house are complicit with the hierarchies of power they shelter and contribute to rendering the girl's body even more absent. The narrator concludes the poetic sequence by acknowledging that "[t]he past is a lonely country" for which there are "no charts, no maps" (80). One of the many merits of "Troika" resides in its provision of a cartography to explore what had been hidden under public and private forms of amnesia.

Mature Life

The relationship between adult women and the cityscape is varied in Meehan's work and resists any generalizing analysis. In some poems the city is the background for sexual fulfillment, as in "A Child's Map of Dublin" (Pillow 14–15). Here the passing of time has altered both the urban landscape ("not a brick remains / of the tenement I reached the age of reason in") and the corporeality of the poet, whose new citified experience grants her the possibility of movement ("we'll wander home, / only go the streets that are our fancy"). Both new territories are charted through the act of erotic love and are envisaged as the doorsteps to knowledge. On other occasions, spatial and bodily mappings are interwoven to become enabling metaphors for each other, as in "Grandmother, Gesture" (Dharmakaya 29), where an aging female body becomes a discursive cartography deprived of the passive connotations of the nationalist tendency to represent the land in the shape of a woman: "The lines on her palms are maps: / she makes the whole world up—// she disappears it." In "'When you left the city you carried …'" (Pillow 29) the longing of the female protagonist for sexual contact—" demented with desire for your body / weaving in sea motion under mine"—is inscribed in a city that empathizes with her through its "heavy skies"—"colour leached from blossom, birds fell mute, / the Liffey stopped dreaming of the sea, / the eyes of the citizenry grew frosty"—and becomes an alter ego for her physical experiences.

But the city is also recorded as a space of danger for women who wander about in its public spaces, as in "Woman Found Dead behind Salvation Army Hostel" (The Man 56). The poem consists of a series of instructions to an artist who is about to paint the broken corpse of an anonymous woman. This text has been read under the light of the male artist (in possession of the gaze) versus the female muse (passive and reified) dichotomy.⁸ The overwhelming contrast between the creative force of the painter and the absolute stillness of the female corpse sustains this interpretation. However, and although some of Meehan's texts overtly counteract the muses of the masculinist gaze, "Woman Found Dead behind Salvation Army Hostel" could also be addressed as a woman artist. After all, the poem is part of the sequence "Three Paintings of York Street" (1994: 55–57) that Meehan dedicated to the painter Ita Kelly, and I would argue that it moves beyond the gender dualism implicit in the dynamics of the gaze to reflect on the ethics of art and representation, whether of male or female authorship.⁹

In the first lines the narrator asks the artist to go outside and see the real image she will later reproduce on canvas: "You will have to go outside for this one. / The night is bitter cold / but you must go out, / you could not invent this." Meehan's "The Apprentice" again provides an adequate frame against which to seize the dimension of the instructions. As opposed to the masters of the Irish canon that "were always remote" and experienced the city from the comfort of "high Georgian windows" (Return 27), the radical contrast between their idealized femininity and the bruised dead body must now be recorded in all its cruelty. For the poetic voice, the ethical dimension of the work of art resides precisely in its capacity to inscribe the private history of the unknown corpse in the city annals:

You can make a quick sketchand later, in your studio, mix the colours,the purple, the eerie green of her bruises,the garish crimson of her broken mouth.

In The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Elaine Scarry argues that physical pain has been rather absent from the systems of representation due to its capacity to shatter linguistic articulation (5). For Scarry, pain produces an unsurmountable separation between the sufferer—for whom this becomes the experience that under pins all other aspects of his/her life—and the rest of the community—for whom corporeal states of decay pass unnoticed and become the abject. Pain brings about, she contends, "even within the radius of several feet, [an] absolute split between one's sense of one's own reality and the reality of other persons" (4). Scarry explains this process in highly linguistic terms: whereas other states of interior consciousness are generally accompanied by referential content (love for X or fear of Y), physical pain does not frequently have an easily recognizable referent in the external world (5). Pain's resistance to language, its unsharability, would be partly responsible for the scarcity of textual and visual representations of somatic deviations from the healthy-looking female bodies of the nude tradition.¹⁰ "Woman Found Dead" functions as an interesting counternarrative to this generalized practice and challenges the artist to confront her audience with realities previously edited out of the systems of representation, a project enhanced by the immediacy of the visual work. Meehan's description of the broken corpse spares none of the details and uses it as the very referent for its own textual representation. The previously unbridgeable gap between the victim and the community is thus crossed by an ethically engaged artistic activity.

In the last lines of the poem the city becomes a microcosm of patriarchal hierarchies of power. The symbolic return of the murdered woman to the womb—"as if at the very end / she turned foetal and knew again / the roar of her mother's blood in her ears"—turns the maternal into a space of security, radically different from the city structure:

Your hand will steady as you draw the cobbles.They impose a discipline, the comfort of habit,as does the symmetry of brick wallswhich define the alley and whose very heightcut off the light and hidthe beast who maimed her.

As Mahoney contends, the "feminine space is in direct contrast to the space of the city which is coded here as masculine and the design of which—here an unlit alley—is at least partly blamed for the attack" (150). The maternal Imaginary, so devalued in Western thought, undermines a cityscape complicit with a patriarchal establishment that victimizes the female and allows the murderer to escape with impunity. City planning in the twentieth century has its roots in "controllability and power over what was perceived as chaotic and irrational," namely women, "the lower classes and more recently racial and ethnic minorities" (Mueller 35). In this poem, the men can walk safely—emotionally and physically—through the city, but female transgression in terms of lived space must be controlled and results in symbolic and/or real death. The connection between corporeal and spatial experiences is paramount in this setting, as the brutal murder is perpetrated on a sexed body to satisfy a sexual impulse. The poem acts as a powerful declaration of principles concerning representation and asks for a code of ethics in artistic practice.

But in order for this ethical engagement to be effective, it must involve both the practitioner of art and its recipient. In "Molly Malone" (Dharmakaya 25) the narrator describes the eponymous statue as a signifier that renders the stories of the dispossessed visible—"the cast off, the abandoned, / the lost, the useless, the relicts." However, she painfully realizes that Molly Malone will remain just an aesthetic object in the cityscape as long as the eyes of the citizens are not able to decode her ethical accuracy: "her unafflicted gaze / on the citizens who praised her // and raised her aloft / who are blind as her own bronze eyes / to the world of her children."

Conclusions

Can we ever abandon the places we once lived in? Do old cities disappear when territory is swallowed up and transformed by economic interests? Or do spaces survive in our bodies, albe it with the alterations our memory imposes on them? A deeper exploration of the intimate links between our sexual and our spatial experiences is needed in order to provide some satisfactory answers to those questions. The ever-fluid nature of the corporeal adapts itself to the shifting demands of city growth, while this changing urban landscape is, in its turn, tattooed on the bodies inhabiting it. The embodied dimension of the city and the citified character of its dwellers conceptualize both humans and spaces as (inter)active agents of cultural production. This theoretical perspective forms an interesting frame from which to read Paula Meehan's urban writing, nurtured as it is by the changing faces of Dublin and its working-class female subjects.

Meehan's city always responds to the poetic voices—at times trapped, at times liberated by the specificities of female physicality in the settings of the inner city. Her poems take us to Dublin streets as they were before the city became the Post-Celtic Tiger landscape it is now. And this is what makes her an archivist of great value. Her cartography moves away from frozen mappings of Dublin, literary or otherwise, to incorporate a continuous exchange of influences between past and present, history and memory, the public and the private with the ease of a fluid, postmodern signifier. Meehan's archival task has the added merit of recording citified experiences not often dealt with on the literary page: bodies struck by poverty, sexually abused or broken. As it is intimated in "Troika," the writing of such texts into the open may be a painful activity. The city as a contested site of communal or personal grief always confronts the writer with a complex ethical conundrum that will demand time and negotiation before the texts find their own way out into the public light. At the 2008 IASIL Conference in Porto, Michael Longley beautifully described poetry as the act of waiting for something that may not necessarily arrive. Paula Meehan's urban poetry has arrived and the city continues to be one of her major creative impulses. Her Dublin has made the map look radically different.