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

1 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 .The hubristic delusions of the so-called “Celtic Tiger” era have been replaced by the grim realities of the Hibernian Hyena: a postlapsarian landscape.”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.

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