Siren, Selkie Or Asylum Seeker: Neil Jordan's Ondine As Fairy Tale And

Siren, Selkie or Asylum Seeker: Neil Jordan’s Ondine as Fairy Tale and Social Critique

Once upon a time, there was Catholic colonized Ireland and then there was post-colonial Celtic Tiger Ireland. When Neil Jordan made his contemporary fairy tale about the fisherman named Syracuse who catches a woman-selkie or maybe asylum seeker-in his fishing net, his intension was to explore the tensions between traditional Ireland and the contemporary Celtic Tiger and post Tiger Ireland. When Paul McGuirk interviewed Neil Jordan about his 2009 film Ondine for Cineaste Magazine, he introduced the interview by describing Jordan‟s film as a portrait of an Ireland “cut adrift from cultural nationalism and Roman Catholicism that informed most of its communal and political discourse for the best part of the twentieth century.” According to McGuirk, Jordan evokes a “society that is both literally and metaphorically drunk . . .The hubristic delusions of the so-called “Celtic Tiger” era have been replaced by the grim realities of the Hibernian Hyena: a postlapsarian landscape.” Based on Jordan‟s comments during the interview, McGuirk interprets the film as the director‟s attempt to create a new narrative to replace these lost belief systems.

As Neil Jordan explains in this interview, he feels that Ireland is barren now, as if “denuded of imagination in some strange way, stripped of all of the traditional solaces we once had.” Like the film‟s fisherman, Syracuse, Irish people need hope and the possibility of happiness in a country raw from recent economic crises and the abrasive collision of the old and new Irelands. Thus Jordan‟s choice to populate his recovery narrative with a Romanian immigrant woman, an almost illiterate fisherman and his ailing precocious daughter is both ironic and magical.

My paper examines the film‟s perspective on Ireland‟s treatment of outsider others and also on fear of the mother as a dangerous threat of otherness in a patriarchal family structure. Since Freud constituted the family as a father son relationship haunted by the excluded absent mother, Madelon Sprengnether refers to the mother as spectral because she is a ghostlike presence, hence spectral in Freud‟s family narrative of the oedipal father-son dynamic. Derived from the latin verb specere, to see, to look at, this verb is also the root of „specter,‟ „spectacle,‟ „speculation,‟ and „suspicion‟ (Sprengnether p.5). Jordan‟s film subtly reveals how the people in this insular, rural village suspect and exclude those who are different whether the ex-alcoholic fisherman, his wheelchair bound daughter or the “foreign” woman from the sea.

Syracuse is divorced from Annie‟s mother because he realized he needed to quit drinking and therefore leave his alcoholic wife for the sake of his daughter. While she is receiving dialysis, Syracuse begins telling his daughter Annie a story about the fisherman who catches a woman called Ondine in a scene evocative of traditional storytelling. His tale however soon begins slipping beyond his control. Did Syracuse really catch a woman in his net? The local

2 priest, the coast guard and Syracuse himself have trouble believing this story. Syracuse is relieved when the coast guard board the boat to inspect his catch and „see‟ the woman, thus proving to him that she isn‟t merely his alcoholic hallucination.

His daughter Annie begins to think that her father‟s story might not be fiction although he frames it with “once upon a time.” Annie follows Syracuse until she manages to secretly meet the mysterious Ondine. Later in the film this woman reveals her „real‟ name is Yoanna and she was the “mule” for a Romanian drug runner, Vladic. Joanna was escaping the coast guard when she began to drown but Syracuse caught her in his net and saved her life. In Ondine‟s interpretation of the story, she died and was brought back to life with an opportunity to start over, hence her new name which also enables her to hide from Vladic. Similarly Syracuse views his rescue of Ondine as a type of resurrection. When she sings a mysterious song on his boat, her singing apparently changes his luck by causing abundant catches of lobster and salmon.

Annie decides that Ondine is indeed a Selkie, or seal woman, and researches the seal woman legend in her local library. According to the books she reads, a Selkie can fall in love with a human husband and have children with him but the Selkie will remain with her human husband only if he hides her seal skin causing her to forget her origins. Jordan‟s film blends the German and French myths of the undine or ondine, who is a water nymph, with Scottish and Irish tales of the selkie, a seal woman who loves a human man. Since Ondine brings Syracuse such fantastic luck with his fishing, Annie imagines this selkie could have the power to cure her kidney disease.

The child also cleverly recognizes the possibility that Ondine might be a better mother than her alcoholic biological mother. While his daughter is unusually bright and precocious using language such as “wish fulfillment” and “sartorially challenged,” nearly illiterate Syracuse seems as bewildered by his daughter as he is by Ondine. In comparison to Annie, Syracuse and Ondine both seem more naïve and less touched by civilization quite possibly because they are falling into their own fairy tale love affair.

Jordan‟s Ondine has intertextual relationships with two other Irish films about precocious children engaged with ostensibly supernatural realms, Into the West (1992), written by Jim Sheridan, directed by Mike Newell; and The Secret of Roan Inish (1995) directed by John Sayles, based on the novel, Secret of Ron Mor Skerry by Rosalie Fry. All these films portray the disappearance of rural culture and economies in Ireland and reference the multiple meanings of the west Ireland landscape as a site of authentic Irish culture.

In his interview about Secret of Roan Inish, Sayles mentions being attracted to Fry‟s narrative because it takes place in an era when story telling still prevailed over television but traditional culture and language were beginning to vanish. The collapsing fishing economy in the western islands forced local people to abandon their ancestral homes and seek work in mainland cities. While Sayles strives for fidelity to Fry‟s novel, he changed the setting from Scotland to

3 the west of Ireland in County Donegal partly under the influence of Flaherty‟s island and sea landscapes in Man of Aran but also due to his Irish American awareness of the centrality of loss in Irish history (Sayles? 208). Accordng to Maureen Turim, Haskell Wexler‟s cinematography in Secret of Roan Inish “beautifully renders both village and fantasy seas, [and] seeks to evoke the supernatural within a naturalistic painting of the island.” (Turim 136) The cinematography in Ondine similarly imbues the natural landscape with a supernatural aura.

Loss haunts the film through the mother‟s death, the disappearance of Fiona‟s baby brother Jaime and loss of their ancestral home. Though just a child, Fiona has faith in recovering her brother and their lost home. Turim uses Sprengnether‟s concept of the spectral mother in her discussion of the selkie myth a method of helping children like Fiona understand how a “loving mother” could ever leave her child (143). In Secret of Roan Inish and Ondine, the selkies are an absent presence, much like Freud‟s concept of the pre-oedipal mother, because the films only portray seals but create the possibility of believing in selkies through the faith of the young girls, Annie in Ondine and Fiona in Secret of Roan Inish. At times Fiona is filmed as if seen from the seal‟s perspective with the camera looking up at her standing in the boat.

Because of the story she hears from a relative Tadhg Coneelly about an ancestor named Liam who married a seal woman and built a cradle for their children,, Fiona isn‟t surprised when she sees Jaime riding in this same cradle, which carried him out to sea when the family evacuated their island home. When Fiona looks for her father in the factory where he works and finally finds him in the pub, the barmaid comments that Fiona is a poor creature, lost in the world “without a mother‟s touch.” Apparently her father, visible only from below the neck, has a drinking problem because of losing his wife and his familiar island life-style.

One of the scenes in Secret of Roan Inish represents the seal woman of Tadgs‟ story shedding her skin and spreading her now web-less fingers is mimicked in Ondine when she spreads her fingers in the nylons given her by Syracuse. Like Fiona, Annie has faith that Ondine is a selkie mother who could heal her and perhaps even marry her father, creating a happier family life than the alcoholic environment of her mother and the current partner, Alex.

Into the West is another film about an alcoholic father and two children whose mother is dead. Tito and Ossie, have faith in the white horse who is taking them to the west of Ireland on a healing journey. Papa Reilly and his sons are Travelers who are treated as outcasts by some Irish people, especially the policeman who steals their horse. According to Amanda Haynes, the Irish who were themselves othered by the British under colonialism, have in turn “racialised Ireland‟s indigenous Travelling Community and . . .the same process is now being applied to asylum seekers and refugees, who are racialised and stereotyped to represent the degenerate other” (Haynes p. 109).

After a policeman steals the mysterious white horse who followed their grandfather to Dublin, the children have the courage to recover the horse and allow her to take them on their

4 westward journey. When the horse enters the ocean with Ossie, he has a vision of a woman who seems to be his deceased mother saving him. The scene in which Ondine rescues Annie from drowning in the bay after she falls out of her wheelchair strongly resembles this scene when the mysterious underwater woman saves Ossie from drowning.

These three films are complicated by the contrast between their fantasy elements and the painful realities of economic collapse, island evacuations, a dystopic Dublin for the impoverished traveler family or in the case of Ondine, post-celtic tiger Ireland. Elements of a darker reality emerge to disrupt Jordan‟s fairy tale because his film weaves a complex tale of a dysfunctional family, the collapse of Ireland‟s Celtic tiger and globalization bringing strangers into the homogenous, insular, rural village.

Although Jordan recognizes that traditional Ireland was certainly not idyllic, he is drawn to selkie legends about the human seal relationship and traditions which previously provided meaning and a sense of the human connection with nature. In cultures where people needed to hunt seals for their skins and oil, Selkie stories assuaged their guilt about killing animals that are so similar to humans. Sayles mentions that human cultures from the Irish to the Native Americans created stories about human and animal metamorphosis because traditional cultures recognized the close bond between humans and nature.

Syracuse regularly confides in, rather than confesses to, a priest played by Stephen Rhea, who Syracuse regards as a substitute for an AA buddy. The townspeople, even the priest, refer to Syracuse as Circus, distorting his name to signify his clownish behavior when he was the town drunk. Because Ondine doesn‟t want anyone but Syracuse to see her, he brings her to his deceased mother‟s house. Ondine, Syracuse and his daughter Annie are all outsiders in this fishing village. Annie is taunted by other children because of her illness and wheelchair. Syracuse is ridiculed by people in the town as a loser and an alcoholic. Ondine is a foreigner of unknown and mysterious origins, probably illegal and possibly an asylum seeker.

Each of the three characters seeks a family and ultimately finds one, not through magical fairy tale intervention but by making a choice that changes their lives. Annie tries to maneuver Syracuse and Ondine into becoming her parents in a new family. She tests Ondine by letting her wheelchair roll to the edge of the pier, spilling her into the ocean. Ondine dives under water to rescue Annie in a scene reminiscent of Ossie‟s underwater rescue by an unearthly woman mentioned earlier.

Since Syracuse feels both desire and fear of Ondine, he explains to the priest that he is worried by his good fortune and the possibility that something wonderful or terrible might happen as a result of this woman from the sea. As Sprengnether observes, Freud‟s preoedipal mother is the “object of his fascinated and horrified gaze, at the same time that she elicits a desire to possess and to know” (p. 5).

Eventually something both wonderful and terrible does happen. Maura, Annie‟s mother, is driving drunk when she collides with the car of Ondine‟s Romanian drug partner. Maura‟s boyfriend Alex is killed in the crash and amazingly his kidney can be transplanted to Annie since he has the tissue match she needs. This terrible event saves Annie from her kidney disease and from Alex‟s sexually predatory behavior of watching her in the bath. Syracuse had a dream premonition of this event which he earlier told the priest. “I‟m at his funeral and she‟s beside me. I‟m panicking because I‟m back with her. It can‟t happen; she‟s still drinking.” Maura insists that Syracuse attend the funeral of her boyfriend and drink to Alex. When they are both drunk, Maura blames the accident on his “water baby” who brings “good luck and then bad.”

With Maura‟s encouragement, Syracuse displaces his ex-wife‟s responsibility for Alex‟s death onto Ondine, whose body as the mother and other “represents both home and not home, presence and absence, the promise of plenitude and the certainty of loss” (Sprengnether 232). An inebriated Syracuse takes Ondine to a small island of seals where he leaves her to be with her seal kin. The camera‟s view of Ondine wrapped in the big raincoat of Syracuse‟s mother captures her looking as if she has a seal‟s tail while she gazes out to sea.

When Syracuse recognizes “All Alright” on the television as Ondine‟s song, he realizes that she must be human, not selkie. Vladic, whom Ondine ironically refers to as her selkie husband, was stalking her in order to retrieve the sack of drugs she carried when she escaped from the Coast Guard. After Syracuse recovers Ondine from the seal island, they return home to find Vladic and his partner waiting to intimidate her into giving them the drug cache. She convinces them to go on the boat to retrieve the drugs and trips Vladic by pulling on the rope under his foot thus causing him to drown. Once again Ondine is the catalyst for a wonderful and terrible outcome.

Just as Freud‟s preoedipal mother is other, so also are Travelers and immigrants others in post-colonial Ireland. The Travelers of Into the West are social outcasts, experiencing discrimination. Immigrants, especially illegal asylum seekers, are dangerous in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland‟s economic collapse. They also threaten Irish identity in a previously very homogenous culture. The otherness of the immigrant woman Ondine and Traveler woman, Mary, in Into the West is expressed by representing them as able to assume an animal form.

Like the boys‟ mother in Into the West who returns as a horse, Annie‟s mother surrogate, Ondine, seems able to transform into a seal or at least be amphibious. Jordan‟s film interrogates the human animal boundary as well as boundaries between reality and fantasy, dream and fairy tale blurring these distinctions just as the film‟s cinematography blurs the lines between sea and sky. Selkie tales have been described as a means of expressing the communal guilt over killing seals out of necessity when these animals have eyes and cries that sound human.

While for some humans, animals are the ultimate other, those who have lived close to nature for survival have a different perspective. Thus tales about selkies have various purposes,

6 establishing bonds between humans and seals, assuaging guilt for killing kin but they also resemble changeling stories, which can be used to explain women who are somewhat unusual by local standards. Since seal women can be held captive only if the husband can hide her skin, the selkie story is also a message about women‟s captivity or autonomy. In the film, it is Ondine who hides the package of drugs, which Annie believes is Ondine‟s seal skin, thus deciding to stay with Syracuse rather than return to the abusive Vladic.

During the film Ondine mentions feeling at home in the house of Syracuses‟s deceased mother. When he confronts her about her real story, Ondine responds that she thought she had found her family with Syracuse and Annie. Syracuse longs for yet fears the return of his own mother in the uncanny selkie woman. Sprengnether notes in her analysis of the spectral mother that, “As both origin and Other, the preoedipal mother [can] allow for the possibility of maternal discourse as well as a nonphallocentrically organized view of culture” (p.9).

While Maura is linked to the toxic and alcoholic past of Syracuse, Ondine as outsider and selkie mother refuses his alcoholic past and offers Syracuse hope for a better future. The bond between Annie and Ondine is a mother-daughter prototype to replace the father son oedipal narrative. Both selkie mother and surrogate daughter navigate a new family structure toward a happier future than Syracuse could have imagined without them. Thus the other as selkie mother and illegal immigrant becomes the source of redemption in Ondine because she offers an alternative to the culturally post-colonial patterns of alcoholism and the hopelessness of post-Tiger economic collapse.

McGuirk, Paul Cineaste,Vol.XXXV No.3 2010

Grunnert, Andrea. Figures of otherness: images of Irish travellers in Traveller and Into the West.” In Facing the Other: Interdisciplinary Studies on Race, Gender and Social Justice in Ireland, eds. Borbála Faragó and Moynagh Sullivan. pp 150-161. Newcastle upon Tyne Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008

Haynes, Amanda, Devereux, Eoin and Breen, Michael “Fear, framing and foreigners: the othering of immigrants in the Irish print media,” Critical Psychology 16 (2006): 100-121.

Sayles, John and Smith, Gavin. Sayles on Sayles. Boston ; London : Faber and Faber, 1998.

Sprengnether, Madelon. Spectral Mother: Freud, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis. Ithaca: Cornell, 1990

Turim, Maureen and Turim-Nygren, Mika. “Of spectral Mothers and Lost Children: War, Folklore and Psychoanalysis in The Secret of Roan Inish.” In Sayles Talk: new perspectives on independent filmmaker John Sayles, eds. Diane Carson, and Heidi Kenaga, pp. 134-157. Detroit: Wayne State, 2006.

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“The selkies are gentler creatures who are seals by day but men and women by night. They are also called water kelpies, seal people or selchies. In their mortal form the selkies are described as posessing an unearthly beauty with dark hair and eyes. Silently they emerge from the sea to shed their skins and frolic on the sand. Like the merrows they have webs between their fingers and toes (or at least wide palms that hint of their watery origin) and must obey anyone who secures their oily skins. Selkies, also, make excellent wives. But they are solitary and quiet by nature. They will frequently wander from their mortal homes to the sea cliffs to meditate and sing their melancholy songs. When their fishermen-husbands are lost upon the sea, they sing from the cliffs to guide them home. If they ever find their seal skins again, they, too, will return to the sea. But unlike the merrow, the selkie will not forget her husband and children and can be seen swimming close to the shore watching over them.” http://pg4anna.tripod.com/Mer_silkie.htm

The selkie that did not forget about a man who didn‟t kill a seal‟s pups when he observed her maternal instincts and years later this same seal saved his life when he was stranded in the rising tide:

“Magnus turned to go away with the two young seals in his arms - they were sucking his jacket as if they were at their mother's breast - when he heard the seal mother give a groan so dismal and hollow, and so like a human being, that it went straight to his heart, and quite overcame him.

He looked around, and saw the mother seal lying on her side with her head on the rock, and he saw - as certainly as he ever saw anything on earth - tears brimming from both her eyes.” http://www.orkneyjar.com/folklore/selkiefolk/seltrans.htm

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Myths of gender, family, nationalism, capitalism etc. in these films are being questioned

Amphibious, water, alcohol

Articles on outsiders/travelers and masculinity

West as significant in Irish culture-check previous paper

The dreams of Annie and Syracuse