UCD Scholarcast - Series 7: The Literatures and Cultures of the Irish Sea

Irish literature has often been shaped by its relation to the national through land and the consciousness of land. New perspectives provided by Atlantic studies, however, now allow for new narratives unrelated to land to be put into conversation with older narratives. This lecture examines work by two twentieth-century poets, one early and one late, that offer insight on this.

By 1916 the British Empire was at a point of crisis. The beginning of the First World War marked the end of a half-century of expansion in trade and speculation that made the empire a global network for the exchange of capital. Consequently, the foundations of Irish separatism were built in movements antagonistic to world trade. Self-help, folk culture and native language were conceived as late compensation for human losses incurred by the displacement of local resources into the global flow. Irish culture had its own recent and bitter evidence for the decimation of an imperial attachment. The memory of the famine inhabited the same cultural space as the increasing import of traded goods in the second half of the ninteenth century and beginning of the twentieth. So it is that James Joyce's short story 'The Dead' pictures the legacy of hunger through the imagination of a meal. If this first wave of globalization came to an end in Britain with the declaration of war in 1914, it suffered fatal arrest in Ireland in 1916. Reaction to the global empire underpinned the cultural and political movements that fed the rebellion. The Easter Rising was a product of the old order and a siren of the revolutions still to come.

The Lecture explores the enduring fascination of the Irish Sea, focusing particularly on the Solway Firth, an area regarded by the nineteenth-century artist, art critic, writer and social reformer, John Ruskin, as second only to the Holy Land in its cultural importance. The ageing Ruskin wrote passionately about the Solway in his autobiography, Praeterita, which pays tribute to the beauty of the coast and its creative legacy, as evident in the work of Walter Scott, J. M. W. Turner and the local Scottish music. The lecture considers the connections between these works and the coast itself, with its changing history, before moving across the Irish Sea to Ciaran Carson's 1989 collection, Belfast Confetti, which includes a poem about Ruskin, Turner and the modern city, 'John Ruskin in Belfast'. Exploration of the dialogue between different writers on either side of the Irish Sea, and on either side of the Solway Firth allows the area to be viewed temporally as well as spatially. It thus offers a new model for reading landscapes and literature, in which geographical and historical aspects are mutually informing. What may appear to be fixed and unchanging is revealed as being subject to successions of developing technology and economic imperatives; but conversely, the longer view encouraged by returning to the same place over the centuries offers a different perspective on the contemporaneous impulse of contextualisation.

This lecture is an exploration of the archipelagic island imagination of artist, poet and writer Brenda Chamberlain (1912–71) under the rubric of literary cartography. Part of a wider study of the literary text's 'mapmindedness' – the ways in which imaginative writing accomplishes specifically cartographic 'work' – the paper examines Chamberlain's emotional geographies of the Irish Sea, focusing on her fabling autobiographical account of her residence on Bardsey Island (Ynys Enlli), off the Llyn Peninsula, north Wales: Tide-race (1962). Beginning with two suggestive examples of Chamberlain's composite graphic cartography, which plot an imaginative ethnography and gendered 'zoning' of Bardsey, the paper considers the Irish (specifically Syngian) alignments of her representations of the island self. The visual-verbal Tide-race is then brought into focus as a text powerfully invested in the process of mapping island space by means of layered (and knowing) folktale fantasies, troubled by thwarted desire and terror. The Syngian genetics of the work are revealed. At stake is the need Chamberlain felt, mid-century, to carve out her own space as a woman writer on a 'deluding scrap of rock and turf'. More generally, the paper seeks to accomplish a necessary reterritorialisation of Welsh Writing in English.

In 1722 an anonymous author styling himself with the degree 'A. M. in Hydrostat' published a proposal in Dublin with the title, Thoughts of a Project for Draining the Irish Channel, a satire on both the South-Sea Bubble and Anglo-Irish politics, as well as a comment on the craze for projects and speculation, scientific advances in hydraulics and circulation, resource management and political arithmetic, and improvement and reclamation. The conceptual leap made in Draining the Irish Channel is that the sea can and should be improved: in other words, done away with. The sea could become not only the medium but the very ground of British colonialism; land could be created from unproductive water; the Irish Sea could literally become a new territory. In practical terms, then, the sea is recast as a geography of natural resources that could potentially be pumped, mined, and diverted using locks and drains, all for the health of the British nation.