Space and the Trace: Thomas Kinsella's Postcolonial Placelore

Irish literature has long been animated by a localizing impulse, with landscape featuring centrally in national narratives. The dinnseanchas tradition typifies this attitude toward topography. It is, in effect, a genre deeply invested in the semiotics of space—a poetics that "reads" history from place and publicly retells its tales. Dating back to the early Middle Ages, the dinnseanchas first appeared as a reaction of sorts against the regional advent of Christianity.¹ The genre quickly became the province of professional poets, who, as purveyors of what Gerry Smyth calls "ritualised memory," sought to preserve a pagan past by poeticizing place, particularly the high or holy places of druidic mythology.² National placelore punctuates Irish literary history—reverberating, for example, throughout the lays of the Fianna, a popular eighteenth- and nineteenth-century folk genre—and even today, topographical tropes serve as compositional near-constants.³ Indeed, read as a repository of collective cultural memory, contemporary dinnseanchas seems a kind of archaeological aesthetic, a poetics prompting genealogical understanding; as Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill has written,

In dinnseanchas, the land of Ireland is translated into story: each place has history that is being continuously told. . . . The landscape itself . . . contains memory, and can point to the existence of a world beyond this one. . . .[It] allows us glimpses into other moments in historical time.⁴

Numerous contemporary Irish writers participate in this excavatory project, nostalgically looking to landscape for historical continuity, but there are also writers who trouble the dinnseanchas tradition by rehearsing cultural ruptures at the very heart of "homeplace."⁵ Thomas Kinsella stands as a pioneer of this poetic practice. His essays explicitly engage colonial conquest and sectarian conflict, and his verse resonates with these critical concerns. Notably, Kinsella's discussions of British imperial imperatives in Ireland are particularly preoccupied with language policy; for Kinsella, the Elizabethan conquest's will-to Anglicize remains, as Patricia Palmer puts it, "the great drama of Irish cultural history."⁶ Kinsella's influential essay "The Irish Writer," for example, elaborates this foundational trauma, arguing that the strategic silencing of the Irish language enforces cultural amnesia: "I stand on one side of a great rift, and can feel the discontinuity in myself."⁷ This scepticismis precisely the point at which Kinsella's creative and critical work converge; his poetry thinks history and place together, but marks the limits of its own memorializing. While Kinsella writes of ancient ways and holy wells he also remarks the stony sound of a "dying language echo[ing] / across a century's silence," suggesting the inability of pastoral poetics to reclaim transparently a curtailed cultural inheritance.⁸

Kinsella's work self-consciously suggests, to borrow SeánÓTuama's turns of phrase, that while passion for place continues to motivate much Irish literature, a sense of place—an awareness of its mythological, historical, and familial associations—is no longer neatly accessible.⁹ This means that Kinsella moves both within and beyond the dinnseanchas tradition; while his poetry remains thoroughly localized, he pens a rather more politicized—one might say, a patently postcolonial—placelore. Notably, Kinsella's poetry habitually treats space as a shape-shifter; his Irish landscape is a vital force with, as in "The Oldest Place," a "firm life of its own" (CP 166). This chameleonic sense of place lends itself to Kinsella's "hermeneutics of discontinuity," suggesting that the would-be dinnseanchaí cannot simply "read the ground." It also serves as an anodyne to his poetry's scepticism: if the landscape's sentience fundamentally resists representation, it spurns both literary and cartographic advances.¹⁰ This strategy involves, in other words, an inbuilt critique of the colonial. Kinsella's Ireland is neither comfortably "homeplace" nor "another man's land"; its living landscape makes a mockery of the map. Cartography has, of course, long gone hand in hand with colonial claims to territory, with maps staging Empire's mastery of subaltern space. In Ireland, mapping, including both the Cromwellian Down Survey and the nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey, also served as a driving force of Anglicization; as Gerry Smyth observes, place name research in Ireland today...