Studies of Irish literary traditions have focused primarily on land and landscape, which stands to reason given that Irish writing has been so frequently involved in efforts to reclaim and reimagine a national terrain. But one could argue that Ireland’s history and cultures were actually more shaped by water, from the island’s situation in an Anglo-Celtic archipelago populated by waves of settlement, trade, and conquest, to its diaspora across the Atlantic and the seas of Europe, to its immersion in the expansive saltwater networks that mobilized objects, persons, and ideas throughout Britain’s maritime empire. The past fifteen years or so have seen an upsurge in oceanic studies and the “blue” humanities, interdisciplinary fields that study the associations between water and human histories and cultures, ranging from the sea as a symbol of otherness and geological time, to its role in and damage from transnational human movements, to its implicit offer of fluidity, depth, and the littoral as bases for epistemology. As well, the archipelagic approach to British history and culture—an effort to think of the region in mobile and sea-linked, non-Anglocentric frames—reorients our understanding of the Isles around notions of migration, circulation, and shared coastal ecologies. As John Brannigan (2015: 6) notes in Archipelagic Modernism, “To use the word “archipelago” to talk about the relations between the constituent parts of the British and Irish Isles implies a plural and connective vision quite at odds with the cultural and political homogenisation which lay at the heart of the Unionist project [and] the nationalist project which, largely in reaction to Unionism, cherished exceptionalism and insularity.” When we think of water in these terms, we get a sense of the richness of a “blue” approach to Ireland’s history and literature.After all, if postcolonial models implicitly reinforced the separateness of Ireland by steering attention to Celtic and Catholic subjection and resistance to external forces of capital, modernity, and empire, then “the archipelago as a form of attachment,” as Nicholas Allen puts it in Ireland, Literature, and the Coast, “sees the literatures of [Ireland] and its neighboring islands in the context of their overlapping associations” (10–11). This relational framework “invites a different perspective on literature and history than studies that focus on the territorial nation” (5). Allen’s aim is not simply to prioritize cultural fluidity over cultural particularity, but to consider that Ireland’s experience as an island is more complex than models of imperial subjection or national recovery can alone account for. In Ireland, says Allen, “the sea is never far away, and with it the world” (25). Hence, even in national literary projects such as W. B. Yeats’s, we find near-constant references to waterways, coasts, ships, and crossings. These are not incidental but part of an “archipelagic network of signs and associations that stretched from the west of Ireland to the Mediterranean, Africa and Asia” (18). Throughout the century, and in works by Northern and Southern writers alike, water and coasts are thus crucial, if overlooked, components of the Irish sense of place. Importantly, for Allen, abstract historical or political narratives fail to capture this sea-connected reality. Instead, it is revealed in the mingled lives of objects, characters, and ideas in literature: “Coastal work[s] in Irish literature share a common set of concerns, namely formal innovation, an attention to material objects as registers of human interaction, and a labyrinthine combination of source materials” (167).Allen’s book makes an important, and in many ways bold intervention into studies of imperialism and Union in Ireland, and the role of literary imagination and formal experiment relative to it. Modern Irish writing, says Allen, is “an archipelagic art situated between the late phase of British imperial maritime culture and the emergence of modernist practices that refuse to acknowledge the burden of meaning” (106). The signature of this interstitial art is the port city—Dublin, Cork, Belfast, Derry, but also smaller ones like Sligo—a space that in the nineteenth century was a site of global linkage and of Ireland’s layered participation in imperial economies and cultures but that in the twentieth century, amid imperial decline and compensatory movements of separation and national authenticity, became a haunted or elided zone to which Irish writers are repeatedly drawn. Empire, although undeniably a cause of submission and loss, also involved outward flows, archipelagic and global linkages, and transnational realities and imaginings that proliferated in myriad ways at the quotidian level. In James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914), for example, the Morkan sisters’ dinner table in “The Dead” is filled with American apples, Smyrna figs, almonds, cocoa, and port, yet attention is directed westward to the supposed isolation of the Aran Islands, “out in the Atlantic” (quoted in Allen 64); the schoolboys of “An Encounter” dream of “run[ning] away to sea on one of those big ships” (58) in the Dublin quays, an imaginative geography “antithetical to the starched patriotism of Irish separatism”; and the protagonist of “Eveline” stands frozen by the Liffey docks, trapped between the uncertain promise of Argentina and her father’s xenophobia. For Allen, such scenes represent a psychically charged area between water and land, as well as an oceanic material culture, “that colonialism and nationalism both struggle to account for” (56).The coast, like the sea, is a zone of dislocation, reorientation, and possibility—a space that “generates images of transgression that represent the sea-tangled condition of Ireland” (70). This is so in ecological, aesthetic, cognitive, and political senses—often all at once. While Allen’s project has historical, political, and ecocritical import, it is perhaps foremost a testament to the literary imagination, a critical homage to a littoral aesthetic that “provokes the senses to hold more than one place in mind” (3). Coast and sea are therefore more than incidental settings, but also more than historical contexts; they are components of “a grammar of liquidity as a cultural resource” (4) that is especially valuable as an artistic response to territorialism, borders, and partition.Ireland, Literature, and the Coast begins with a study of Yeats’s early verse and his largely forgotten novel John Sherman (1891), both of which depict Sligo as a port town “involved in the merchant networks that radiated from London and its great subsidiary ports in Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow” (21), and both of which are “watermarked” with rivers, streams, seas, and ships. In Yeats’s early work, “Ireland is a tributary of the maritime and archipelagic [in which] rivers and seas carried the freight of locality to remote regions and created a network of associations that complicated set ideas of nationality.” This water-suffused, late-imperial context recedes in Yeats’s later art, but his maritime and fluid imagination still vividly remains, from the troubled stream of “Easter 1916,” to the sea journeys of “Sailing to Byzantium,” to the haunted coasts of “The Ghost of Roger Casement.” Yeats’s thus remains “a littoral art that could hold a vision of life and death in one shifting panorama between earth and water” (37).Allen’s unique mixture of material culture, ecocriticism, aesthetics and maritime history is perhaps best exemplified in the chapter on the scrapbooks of Jack Yeats, volumes in which the painter pasted print images that vividly suggest the capacious spatial imagination of late imperial Ireland. The earlier of the two books, mostly compiled in the 1910s, is an eclectic panorama of stamps, print advertisements, maps, and sketches that reveals “one consistent interest, which is the maritime culture of Britain and Ireland in a period of revolutionary transformation” (76). The scrapbook recontextualizes Yeats’s painting, which is usually seen as local or regional, “in the transnational ephemera of early twentieth-century consumerism [that was] the visible product of maritime networks” (91–92). The scrapbook not only suggests “a global consciousness to Yeats’s art that is barely visible in his paintings” (81) but also evinces the “artist’s own migrant life . . . between Sligo, Devon, London, Wicklow, Galway, Dublin and New York” (92).The later of the two scrapbooks, from the 1930s, juxtaposes maritime-international images with pictures and objects that “speak to the diaspora of Irish nationalist movements across the world” (84). It places images of post–civil war republicanism (such as Easter lilies or clippings from An Phoblacht and the Irish Press on the rise of Fianna Fáil) alongside those of “a diverse world in motion between empires and nations, [wherein] orange, pear and mustard sellers [are] advertising their wares in a panorama that sweeps from Palestine to Florida” (95). This collage of material culture speaks far differently than historical narrative as it manifests the simultaneity of the national and transnational, even in the midst of the supposedly more insular 1930s. Allen then argues that Erskine Childers’s 1903 espionage novel The Riddle of the Sands exemplifies a similar interdependence of nationalist, archipelagic, and international-maritime perspectives. Like Roger Casement, Childers was something of a hybrid figure, a British-born, sea-traveled Irishman who later became a martyr for Irish nationalism. In his novel, two English yachtsmen who are learning the complexities of tidal navigation in the Frisian Islands uncover a German plot to invade Britain by sea. The story thus “challenges the oceanic imagination of empire by drawing a picture of empire as a map of coastlines and shallows such as diminished the security of Britain as a nation of definite borders” (43). Childers’s own nationalism is therefore a product of a maritime milieu, insofar as he saw that Ireland too “was shaped by its particular geography as one island of a north Atlantic archipelago whose shores were open to larger questions of sovereignty and self-determination” (39).Turning to James Joyce, Allen convincingly shows that the stories of Dubliners are suffused with transmaritime objects, trajectories, and sensations, as well as with the ironies and tensions inherent in being both the “second city” of a waning maritime empire and a site of rising nationalist separatism. Joyce’s fascination with the material cultures and transoceanic imaginations of late empire, evident throughout Dubliners, evolves into a fascination with water and fluidity that is simultaneously aesthetic and material. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), set in Dublin and composed in Trieste, is a “transnational, and transmaritime, novel” (66) that is deeply engaged with coasts, tides, and seas, ranging from Stephen’s lustful adventures along the quays and shipyards, which inspire the “sordid tides within him,” to his more mature awareness of the “interaction between the imagination, history, and the coastal margin” in his famous seaside epiphany of a “new and hybrid human form” (70). These ideas are further developed in Ulysses (1922), whose action unfolds on the littoral arc from Dalkey to Howth and whose focal characters are linked by sea and memory to other places (Stephen, Paris; Molly, Gibraltar; Bloom, Central and Eastern Europe). The antiterritorial implications of this watery poetics are evident throughout the novel, culminating in Molly Bloom’s mingling of the coasts of Gibraltar and Howth, an act that “blurs the lines between nations, states, and continents” and thus opens “a portal to [a] trans-maritime aesthetic which has the capacity to shift long established relations across the archipelago” (73).While some chapters focus at length on major figures, others cover a wide variety of authors and genres in relatively brief space. A chapter on midcentury Ireland, for example, ties together dozens of writers who were contributors to the influential and increasingly studied periodical The Bell. Allen casts the magazine’s contrary, cosmopolitan stance as one that was open, literally and figuratively, to the sea—that “fifth and spectral province . . . which always operates in The Bell as [a] silent, observable region that persists beyond society’s attempts to curtail the individual’s desire to be free” (106–7). Much of what was published in The Bell conveyed its editor Seán Ó Faoláin’s “sense of the island’s place within a wider maritime arrangement, shaped by conflicts over empire the world wide” (103). The chapter covers a lot of ground and thus some of its provocative claims call for fuller consideration—for instance that Elizabeth Bowen’s prose sought “an equation of worldliness with the liquid and maritime” (104) or that The Bell looked to Irish/ Scottish literary dialogues as a way to “think of ways around the boundary problem” (107) of nationalist Ireland—but it offers up scores of compelling possibilities for what it means to rethink the insular midcentury in archipelagic terms. It also intersects with recent work on The Bell by Kelly Matthews and Anna Teekell, who have each explored the periodical’s role in promoting a diverse and international Ireland.Allen suggests that the long shadow of partition, neutrality, conservatism, and ethnic nationalism was also marked by the decline of maritime connectedness in Cork and Belfast, a phenomenon that not only enhanced the era’s sense of isolation but also diverted energy toward Ireland’s internal differences. Allen memorably finds this best expressed in John Hewitt’s poem “Ireland,” which Geoffrey Taylor writes about in the December 1941 issue of The Bell. The excerpt that Allen quotes encapsulates much of his own thesis in Ireland, Literature, and the Coast:We are not native here or anywhere.We were the Keltic wave that broke over Europe,And ran up this bleak beach among the stones:But when the tide ebbed were left stranded hereIn crevices and ledge-protected poolsThat have grown saltier with the drying upOf the great common flow that kept us sweet. (109)For Allen, these lines exemplify “a wider attempt in The Bell to see Ireland from the outside in, beginning at the coast . . . where times and geographies meet” (110–11). This attempt can be traced in multiple genres and authors in the periodical including Frank O’Connor, Ernie O’Malley, Elizabeth Bowen, Maurice James Craig, and the travel writer Robert Gibbings.With regard to the literature of Northern Ireland, Allen’s archipelagic approach is potentially transformative insofar as it asks us to reconsider the region’s territoriality and borders in terms of the maritime histories, sea migrations, and coastal ecologies that link it with the rest of the Irish island, the other British Isles, and the world. In the poems of Seamus Heaney, for example, coasts, marshlands, fishing, and seaward visions serve collectively as a means of disarming binarism and territoriality while gesturing outward to “the sea world of the north Atlantic . . . from the coast of Europe westerly to the Americas” (130). His poems, known for soil, digging, and the local, also use “images of archipelago and periphery, of islands, coastlines and riverbanks, as points of crossing between historical reality and the imagination” (131). This “boggy hydroscape” is “a sign of the writer’s flexibility in writing about place,” a flexibility that is “a necessity when the poet is confronted with the immediate reality of territorial conflict” (129). Moving beyond Heaney to Medbh McGuckian, Ciaran Carson, and Louis MacNeice, Allen demonstrates similar ecological and littoral concerns in their work, as well as a tendency to “illuminat[e]” coastal spaces, elements, and distances so as to “trace a pattern that is aside from the public vocabularies of the Troubles” (154).Regarding Carson, Allen argues convincingly that a “different genesis” of the poet’s work, besides the Troubles, is “the idea of Belfast as a city at sea” (156), a city on the fringes of empire where modernity amounts to more “than the oppression of the senses in the service of capital” (157). As with Jack Yeats’s scrapbooks, the sensations associated with the objects and trajectories of empire are vehicles of a displacement and offshore imagination that is in turn registered in a kaleidoscopic aesthetic under which “the constraints of the Troubles begin to break” (159). An example is Carson’s “The Ballad of HMS Belfast” (1994), in which the speaker imagines himself on a Royal Navy destroyer with a crew of “Catestants and Protholics” who sail trading routes “unheard-of since the days of Homer . . . / Ice to Archangel, tea to China, coals to Tyne” (quoted in Allen 161). The city’s culturally hybrid past thus clashes with the declining and contested city of the present. The return to shore banishes the chronotopic vision, leaving the speaker “bound in iron chains, alone, [his] aisling vision gone.” Carson’s poetry thus “attends consistently to the cultural detritus of the maritime fringes of a port city whose arteries of connection to other places, languages and images [he] opens up with obsessive persistence” (165).Allen finds a related reimagining of Belfast’s history and geography in Glenn Patterson’s 2012 novel The Mill for Grinding Old People Young, wherein a former ballast officer, Gilbert Rice, at the tail end of the nineteenth century, recalls a time in his youth in the more cosmopolitan, nautical city when he fell for a Polish immigrant. The novel displays the “cultural heterodoxy” of the city’s global-maritime identity, when its “place in the Atlantic world [was] connected historically to its eighteenth-century political radicalism” and hence to its former potential as a site of reconciled Gaelic and planter societies. The result is a highly realized perception of Belfast as a “city adrift from the established narratives of its recent past” (165). This theme also emerges in Sinéad Morrissey’s On Balance (2017), whose watery motifs suggest that “in looking out to sea the city is born again with a future still before it” and convey a sense of motion “beyond the restraint of an environment engineered to a male perspective.” With Morrissey’s narrative glances outward across horizons of sea, sky, and stars, Belfast becomes “an archipelago of memory and imagination whose territory extends from her family to infinity” (170).The ecological, political, aesthetic, and historical points made throughout Ireland, Literature, and the Coast sometimes get vaguely mingled in Allen’s frequent use of maritime metaphor—for example, “a study of literature and art adrift on the rushing tide of imperial decline and the doldrums that followed it, taking sail again as the midcentury turned towards troubles in the north” (11); “the maritime quotidian gives context to a transnational imagination that is subject to the tides of history” (185). But this figurative language is in keeping with the volume’s dedication to a watery epistemology as a mode of critique, something that oceanic studies scholars such as Hester Blum and Elizabeth DeLoughrey have called for, and it is also inspired by the poetic effects being studied, such as McGuckian’s “visual apparition of light and water, each overlapping the other in the littoral, northern zone” (152).In later chapters, Allen looks at contemporary historical novels dealing with Irish crossings to New York and notes how they complicate “the tragic idea of the sea-scattered Gael” of the Famine, as well as the unidirectionality of diaspora narratives, by treating the Atlantic as a site of crossing and return and rendering New York as a migrant port city of constant arrival and departure. This reading invokes, and could productively consider, Paul Gilroy’s argument that Black culture and modernity were sea linked, being formed in constant motion between nation-states. Allen largely steers clear of correspondences between “Black” and “green” Atlantics, a notable absence given the relations between maritime empire, race, and enslavement. The complexities of this issue have admittedly required full volumes to unpack, such as David Lloyd and Peter O’Neill’s The Black and Green Atlantic, but there are missed opportunities here, as in other chapters that engage the colonialist aspects of maritime empire, to examine the ways in which a global-maritime Ireland relates to the oceanic traffic of enslaved persons and its legacies. Indeed, one of Allen’s key arguments in the chapter is that novels by Joseph O’Connor, Joseph O’Neill, and Column McCann complicate diasporic narratives by envisioning “the Atlantic as a place of continual transit, a back and forth whose migrations are the subject of historical catastrophes that do not, after all, overwrite their human attachments” (172), a claim that intersects in compelling ways with Gilroy’s multidirectional, postemancipation Atlantic.One of the more incisive chapters focuses on the contemporary fiction writer Kevin Barry, whose “edgy narratives are often set in wet weather by the sea” and who sees “the coastal margin . . . as a porous hydroscape in which the boundaries between innocence and experience fragment and shift” (237). Here the various threads of Allen’s argument come together particularly well. Indeed, wetness absolutely pervades Barry’s novels and stories, as do coasts, crossings, islands, and “the fluid conditions of a mental life” suffused with memory and longing (239). One thinks of the recent story “The Coast of Leitrim” (2018), which comically insists on the tiny coast of that otherwise inland county as the backdrop for the tale of an intellectual Irish drifter, his Polish immigrant love interest, and their shared penchant for French film. “The Fjord of Killary,” from Dark Lies the Island (2012), also comes to mind. The story deals with a group of pub regulars and immigrant drifters who drink on through a flood that crests just short of sweeping away the inn, a sloping structure erected just before Cromwell’s campaign that “listed westward . . . in the direction of the gibbering Atlantic” (Barry 2015: 28), a nod to Ireland’s history of seaborne invasions and settlements.Allen notes that Barry’s characters, thrown together by chance, “move in shifting packs through an archipelago that extends in a maritime circuit from the northwest coast of Ireland south through Limerick to Cork and from there north-east towards Wales and Liverpool” (239), a cartography to which, with the recent publication of Night Boat to Tangier (2019), we could also add Spain and North Africa. These movements not only ref lect the “always porous consciousness” (249) of his focal characters and narrators, but they also occur in the wake of “devolution, recession, and the death of the Celtic tiger” (239). Thus, form and content again merge in a fluid narrative that “integrates Ireland with a world tide of objects and ideas” (239). This integration is particularly evident in City of Bohane (2011), whose coastal urban setting is contested by rival gangs but also traversed by a steady stream of travelers, migrants, and “blow-ins” whose clothing, stories, and dialects embody the “continual migrations that are the push and pull of coastal life” (240).One of Barry’s wettest, most archipelagic texts is Beatlebone (2015), wherein John Lennon returns late in life to the island he purchased in Clew Bay (Dorinish, one of hundreds of islands off the Mayo coast, which he can barely find during a drenching storm, despite having a local guide). The story, which shifts between New York, Liverpool, and Mayo, thus transforms the Irish Revival’s idea of Ireland’s western seaboard as a repository of Gaelic tradition, seeing it instead as fractal, mutable, linked, and archipelagic.Male authors receive most of the attention in Ireland, Literature, and the Coast, and this may leave some readers wanting to hear more about the gendered implications and possibilities inherent in writing about seas, crossings, and coasts. That said, some of Allen’s more far-reaching arguments about the subversive “self-sovereignty” (280) of fluid and coastal aesthetics revolve around the works of Anne Enright, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Medbh McGuckian, and Vona Groarke. A chapter devoted to Ní Chuilleanáin returns powerfully to the idea of the littoral as a liberating response to political cartography. For Allen, Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry offers “a set of shape-shifting subjects whose structure is made from an assembly of images in a strange, and suggestive, mosaic” that mirrors the flux of tides, such as in the poem “Evidence,” which renders “the tideline [as a site of] an inventory of objects freed from their domestic fate” (195):Along the wandering strand the sea unloads glass ballsJellyfish, broken shells, its tangleOf nets, cork, bits of wood,Coral. A Crooked line paid out on sand.Here’s evidence; gather it all up. (quoted in Allen 195)Ní Chuilleanáin thus evokes the need for “evidence” in the Troubles while also offering the shifting foreshore, and its tangle of objects, as its counterpoint, a gesture that reflects a “feminist determination to see [the] world from the perspective of the silenced and invisible” (200). This determination increases throughout her second collection, Site of Ambush (1975), where the “gendered panorama of her art” corresponds with its “richer and more diverse” (197) coastal ecology, and on into her later poems, which are characterized by an “alchemy which finds its form, in nearly all cases, at the coastal margins, in rivers and by estuaries” (203). Form again mirrors terraquatic setting and context, as her “transitional hydroscapes” (205) mingle with her fluid lexical play, a “synchronicity of words across texts and cultures” (207). Her work thus challenges a “post-independence state [that] maintained a system of incarceration over women whose bodies it cast claim” (210).In sum, this new study is excellently written, capacious in scope, thoroughly researched, and original in approach. It leaves some open strands of argument—from the role of Ireland in the racial dynamics of maritime empire to the potential linkages between Scottish and Irish writing in a devolved archipelago—that others will pick up, tracing their analysis back to Allen’s watershed effort. All of which will be part of the lasting impact on Irish, ecocritical, modernist, and contemporary literary studies that Ireland, Literature and the Coast is likely to have.
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Apr 12, 2024
Kholoud AlGhamdi 