Études irlandaises

44-1 | 2019 Nature, environnement et écologie politique en Irlande Nature, Environment and Environmentalism in

Catherine Conan and Flore Coulouma (dir.)

Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/etudesirlandaises/6788 DOI: 10.4000/etudesirlandaises.6788 ISSN: 2259-8863

Publisher Presses universitaires de Caen

Printed version Date of publication: 14 November 2019 ISBN: 978-2-84133-945-7 ISSN: 0183-973X

Electronic reference Catherine Conan and Flore Coulouma (dir.), Études irlandaises, 44-1 | 2019, « Nature, environnement et écologie politique en Irlande » [Online], Online since 21 November 2019, connection on 23 September 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/etudesirlandaises/6788 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ etudesirlandaises.6788

Études irlandaises est mise à disposition selon les termes de la Licence Creative Commons Attribution - Pas d’Utilisation Commerciale - Partage dans les Mêmes Conditions 4.0 International. Catherine Conan et Flore Coulouma : Introduction. 7

Marjan Shokouhi : Despirited Forests, Deforested Landscapes : 2019

The Historical Loss of Irish Woodlands . 17 | Études Nolwena Monnier : Nommer la nature : toponymie de la nature

dans la Topographia Hibernica de Gerald of Wales. 31 44-1 Marie Mianowski : Digging the Borderland in Brian McGilloway’s The Nameless Dead (2012). 47 irlandaises Florence Schneider : Geomantic de ou comment lire et dire la nature. 57 2019 | 44-1 Manuela Palacios : Relational Difference in Sinéad Morrissey’s Poetry : An Ecocritical Approach . 73 Tom Herron et Anna Pilz : Cursed to the Trees, Enchanted by the Woods : . 87 Maryvonne Boisseau et Marion Naugrette-Fournier : Nature, environnement ’s Geopoetic Horizons . 101

Yvonne Scott : Living Water : Irish Artists and Ecology. 117 et écologie politique en Irlande

Poems by Mary O’Donnell . 133 — irlandaises Comptes rendus | Book reviews . 137 Nature, environment

Notes sur les auteurs | Notes on contributors. 163 and environmentalism in Ireland Études Études

Numéro publié sous la direction de Catherine Conan et Flore Coulouma

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ISSN : 0183-9373X Isbn : 978-2-84133-945-7 20 € de Caen

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Revue publiée avec le soutien : – de l’Équipe de recherches interdisciplinaires sur les îles Britanniques, l’Irlande et l’Amérique du Nord – ERIBIA (université de Caen Normandie) ; – du Centre d’études en civilisations, langues et lettres étrangères – CECILLE (université Lille 3) ; – de l’équipe Langues, textes, arts et cultures du monde anglophone – PRISMES (université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3).

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ISSN : 0183-973X ISBN : 978-2-84133-945-7

© Presses universitaires de Caen, 2019. 14032 Caen Cedex – France Études irlandaises

Nature, environnement et écologie politique en Irlande ­– Nature, environment and environmentalism in Ireland

Sous la direction de Catherine Conan et Flore Coulouma

44-1 | 2019

ERIBIA Équipe de recherches interdisciplinaires sur les îles Britanniques, l’Irlande et l’Amérique du Nord Université de Caen Normandie Comité de rédaction Fabrice Mourlon (université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3), responsable Fiona McCann (université Lille 3), responsable littérature Hélène Lecossois (université Lille 3), responsable littérature Mathew Staunton (École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs – ENSAD), responsable civilisation Joana Etchart (université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour), responsable civilisation Valérie Morisson (université de Bourgogne), responsable arts visuels ThierryRobin (université de Bretagne occidentale), responsable des comptes rendus

Comité scientifique Il s’agit d’un conseil de revue composé de trois sous-comités :

• Comité de direction Catherine Maignant, Christophe Gillissen, Wesley Hutchinson, Pascale Amiot, Anne-Catherine de Bouvier, Françoise Canon-Roger, Karin Fischer, Yann Bevant.

• Comité consultatif Kevin Barry (NUI Galway), Fabrice Bensimon (Sorbonne Université), Michael Bøss (Aarhus Universitet), Fabienne Dabrigeon (professeure émérite, université Lille 3), Philippe Cauvet (université de Poitiers), Noreen Doody (St Patrick’s College DCU), Marianne Elliott (University of Liverpool), Maurice Elliott (York University, Toronto), Claude Fierobe (professeur honoraire, université de Reims Champagne- Ardenne), Anne Fogarty (University College ), Roy Foster (Hertford Col- lege, Oxford), Irene Gilsenan Nordin (Dalarna University), Anne Goarzin (univer- sité Rennes 2), Nicholas Grene (Trinity College Dublin), Richard Kearney (Boston College), Declan Kiberd (University of Notre Dame), Filomena Louro (Universidade do Minho, Braga), Eamon Maher (Institute of Technology Tallaght, Dublin), Sylvie Mikowski (université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne), Clíona Ní Ríordáin (univer- sité Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3), Mervyn O’Driscoll (University College Cork), Manuela Palacios (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela), Michael Parker (University of Central Lancashire), Ondrej Pilny (Univerzita Karlova, Prague), Shaun Richards (Staffordshire University), ChristelleSerée-Chaussinand (université de Dijon), David Shaw (University of Liverpool), Alexandra Slaby (université de Caen Normandie).

• Représentants des unités de recherche Alexandra Poulain (université Lille 3), Martine Pelletier (université Lille 3), Bertrand Cardin (université de Caen Normandie), Carle ­Bonafous-Murat (université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3), Maryvonne Boisseau (université de Strasbourg), Stéphane Jousni (université Rennes 2). Sommaire

Catherine Conan et Flore Coulouma : Introduction. 7

Marjan Shokouhi : Despirited Forests, Deforested Landscapes : The Historical Loss of Irish Woodlands...... 17

Nolwena Monnier : Nommer la nature : toponymie de la nature dans la Topographia Hibernica de Gerald of Wales...... 31

Marie Mianowski : Digging the Borderland in Brian McGilloway’s The Nameless Dead (2012)...... 47

Florence Schneider : Geomantic de Paula Meehan ou comment lire et dire la nature. 57

Manuela Palacios : Relational Difference in Sinéad Morrissey’s Poetry : An Ecocritical Approach...... 73

Tom Herron et Anna Pilz : Cursed to the Trees, Enchanted by the Woods : Sweeney Astray. 8 7

Maryvonne Boisseau et Marion Naugrette-Fournier : Derek Mahon’s Geopoetic Horizons ...... 101

Yvonne Scott : Living Water : Irish Artists and Ecology...... 117

Poems by Mary O’Donnell . 133

Comptes rendus | Book reviews...... 137

Notes sur les auteurs | Notes on contributors ...... 163

Introduction

The Emerald Isle, for all her lush pastures and forty shades of green, proved relatively impervious to environmental pursuits in the cultural and academic spheres or in economic and social circles, until the fall of the . The Celtic Tiger years successfully relied on, and reflected, a dual picture of global business attractiveness and unspoiled nature, promoting the pure waters of Green Erin – together with its fiscal leniency – as the ideal setting for pharmaceutical and IT companies and a unique location for salmon fishing. “Nature”, as a focal point in the stereo­ typical representations of Ireland – together with rain, leprechauns, and the modest of Saint Patrick fame –, is perpetuated at home and abroad as part of the nation’s brand. Thus Ireland’s totemic colour conveniently contributes to the country’s perceived closeness with the natural environment. Only after the fall of the Celtic Tiger did another landscape begin to emerge: that of a dilapidated, polluted environment, symbolized with striking effect by the mushrooming “ghost estates” that now scar the Irish countryside and suburban areas. Such visions of the New Ireland reflect the concrete, geographic impact of post-industrial late capitalism, thus placing Ireland onto a global map of environmental crises and largely debunking a myth that is still desperately advertised by the national tourism industry today. In this context of growing environmental concern, while the successive governments’ neoliberal agenda continues unabated, the past decade has seen a proliferation of academic works examining Irish cultural production from an ecocritical perspective. First heralded by Oona Frawley’s study of Irish pastoral in the 20th century 1, then spurred by American scholars already familiar with the environmental humanities 2, Irish ecocritical studies have now taken hold in the country’s academic circles 3. The present issue of Études irlandaises brings together Irish, French and international scholars to contribute to what has become a globally thriving academic debate. Historically, two conflicting visions of Irish nature coexist. On the one hand, a peaceful Irish pastoralism grounded in (credulous) Catholicism and tinged

1. Oona Frawley, Irish Pastoral: Nostalgia and Twentieth-Century , Dublin, Irish Academic Press, 2005. 2. Tim Wenzell, Emerald Green: An Ecocritical Study of Irish Literature, Cambridge, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009; Out of the Earth: Ecocritical Readings of Irish Texts, Christine Cusick (ed.), Cork, Cork University Press, 2010. 3. See for instance Eóin Flannery, “Ireland and Ecocriticism: An Introduction” in the special issue of The Journal of Ecocriticism, vol. 5, no. 2, 2013, Irish Ecocriticism, p. 1, and, by the same author, Ireland and Ecocriticism: Literature, History and Environmental Justice, London, Routledge, 2015. See also Donna L. Potts, Contemporary Irish Writing and Environmentalism: The Wearing of the Deep Green, London, Palgrave, 2018.

Études irlandaises, no 44-1, 2019, p. 7-15 8 Catherine Conan and Flore Coulouma with Celtic spirituality: such perception of domesticated nature culminates in the De Valeran nationalist ideal of cosy homesteads, grazing fields and comely maidens – illustrated in John Ford’s 1952 film The Quiet Man. On the other hand, the classic colonial representation paints simian-looking savages impervious to the civilizing forces of progress 4 and inhabiting a wilderness – the inhospitable landscape of the bogs which, ironically, results from thousands of years of human presence 5. Such threatening nature occasionally turns against men – for their sins, as evangelical providentialists conveniently understood the Great Irish Famine 6. Arguably, both stereotypes are the opposite sides of a single vision of Ireland as naturalized, or essentialized, generated by the colonial process but appropriated by the newly independent nation. Essentialist tropes positing Ireland as a refuge of authenticity and wilderness in the Western world have endured from the colonizer’s naturalizing discourse since the Norman era, to the surge of the nature tourism industry in Victorian time, and to British conservationism, thus identifying a specific attitude towards Irish nature with the colonizing process. The colonizer went through a symbolic process of dehumanization in order to reduce natives to mere parts of the land- scape – a landscape whose ownership by the colonizer was posited as a natural process of history. The confiscation of natural and agricultural resources and the alienation of the native cultural heritage were epitomized by the brutal overhaul of toponymy and subsequent destruction of the symbiotic link between native place and native language 7, thereafter fantasized by nationalist mythology. It is therefore no surprise that the early ecological activism of 1970s Ireland largely considered environmental degradations in terms of damages inflicted by outsiders and denounced the globalized avatars of British capitalist imperialism rather than the policies implemented at home 8. The issue of colonization has long dominated Irish Studies. Environmental debates intersect with it, albeit not in entirely predictable ways. Colonization has affected the geographical landscape of the country, from the massive deforestation that accompanied Elizabethan plantations to the transformation of Ireland into

4. Flann O’Brien / Myles na gCopaleen famously recycled this offensive stereotype in his 1942 satirical novel An Béal Bocht [The Poor Mouth], which portrays Irish peasants whose speech is undistinguishable from that of their pet pigs. 5. Tim Robinson, Connemara, Listening to the Wind, London, Penguin, 2006, p. 55. 6. See among many others Christophe Gillissen, “Charles Trevelyan, John Mitchel and the Historio­ graphy of the ”, Revue française de civilisation britannique, vol. 19, no. 2, 2014, p. 195-212, and Patrick Brantlinger, “The Famine”,Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 32, no. 1, 2004, p. 193-207. 7. See for instance Brian Friel’s acclaimed 1980 play Translations (London, Faber and Faber, 2012), and Tim Robinson, Connemara, Listening to the Wind, p. 81. 8. Hilary Tovey, “Environmentalism in Ireland: Two Versions of Development and Modernity”, International Sociology, vol. 8, no. 4, 1993, p. 413-430, and, by the same author, Environmentalism in Ireland: Movements and Activists, Dublin, Institute of Public Administration, 2007, p. 29. Introduction 9

Britain’s breadbasket in the first half of the 19th century 9. However, colonization cannot be considered as shorthand for univocal environmental destruction, following the stereotype used elsewhere of the “ecological native” 10. The mutual definition of England and Ireland in terms of each other under the colonial relationship 11 meant that, given England’s status as the industrial leader of the world from the mid-18th to the early 20th century, Ireland had to be conceived of as nature. Ireland therefore played a great part in how nature was conceptualized in an Anglocentric perspective. Early English conservationism was thus transplanted in Ireland with a colonial zeal that paradoxically played against the interests of the Irish environment, as John Feehan remarked as early as 1997:

The identification of nature conservation in the rural mind with a privileged elite (West Britons and Castle Catholics), which could afford to spend its abundant leisure time in the collecting and recording of wild plants and insects and in visiting and drawing old forts and castles […] has survived to our own time, and has been one of the most stubborn of all obstacles in the campaign to educate the community to an environmental consciousness. It still surfaces […] when individuals or organisations outside of Ireland voice their opposition to some development in this country, and it is […] skilfully exploited by protagonists of development projects who seek to mobilize the political power of the multitude behind them 12.

Today, Ireland’s carefully managed representation of the environment, to bolster tourism and attract foreign investors, aims to hide the very real damage done by neoliberal economic policies to Irish landscapes and wildlife, from urban sprawl to water pollution and the loss of natural habitats. Ireland’s poor environmental record can no longer be read as a perverse legacy of colonization, all the more so as the very actors of self-inflicted environmental damage are often those who recycle postcolonial arguments 13.

9. Frank Mitchell, Michael Ryan, Reading the Irish Landscape, Dublin, Town House, 1997; Francis Ludlow, Arlene Crampsie, “Environmental , 1550-1730”, in The Cambridge History of Ireland, vol. II, 1550-1730, Jane Ohlmeyer (ed.), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018, p. 608-637; Kevin O’Rourke, “Agricultural Change and Rural Depopulation. Ireland 1845-1876”, The Journal of Economic History, vol. 51, no. 2, 1991, p. 464-466. 10. See for instance Shepard Krech III’s The Ecological Indian: Myth and History, New York, Norton, 1999. 11. As Declan Kiberd famously quipped: “If England had never existed, the Irish would have been rather lonely. Each nation badly needed the other, for the purpose of defining itself” Inventing( Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation, London, Vintage, 1996, p. 2). 12. John Feehan, “Threat and Conservation: Attitudes to Nature in Ireland”, inNature in Ireland: A Scientific and Cultural History, John Wilson Foster, Helena C. G. Chesney (eds.), Dublin, Lilliput Press, 1997, p. 583. 13. See Rob Kitchin, Cian O’Callaghan, Mark Boyle, Justin Gleeson, Karen Keaveney, “Placing Neo- liberalism: The Rise and Fall of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger”, Environment and Planning, vol. 44, no. 6, 2012, p. 1302-1326, and Sharae Deckard, “World-Ecology and Ireland: The Neoliberal Ecological Regime”, Journal of World-Systems Research, vol. 22, no. 1, 2016, p. 145-176. 10 Catherine Conan and Flore Coulouma

Irish artistic and cultural production has become a fertile ground for critical reflection on Ireland’s ambiguous relationship with its “nature”, understood as a form of congruence between its identity and its environment. Thus the mythical status of the West, the central question of land ownership but also the puzzling under-representation of the sea given Ireland’s insular status constitute so many aspects of a national ecopsychology that transpire in artistic productions 14. How might we therefore develop an adequate theoretical and critical apparatus to describe the specific nature of the Irish relationship to the environment, while avoiding both essentialist and constructivist pitfalls? First, Irish Studies critics must be aware of the temptation to naturalize Ireland in variously detectable ways. The issue at stake is the relationship between Ireland’s nature, defined and romanticized from the outside, and its environment, the natural and non-natural surroundings of human societies. Nature tends to evoke landscapes, bucolic aesthetics and nostalgic longing. The environmentraises directly concrete issues such as urban planning and the future of extractive industries. Both terms have been criticized and it can indeed be argued that neither satisfactorily accounts for the relationship between human consciousness, behaviour and culture and the non-human world. Both set man apart from the rest of the known world. Nature, Descartes’ res extensa, is what the cogito has extracted itself from. This absolute distinction makes it easy for postmodern or deconstructivist thinkers to show that nature is first and foremost an idea, a cultural creation which veils the world (understood as a chaotic, “idiotic” and unattainable real) and ensures that it remains always beyond human reach 15. The environment also betrays an anthropocentric bias by placing human perceptions and needs at the centre of its ecological vision. It has been called into question by deep ecologists who have tried to reclaim the idea of nature and to offer a different understanding of man’s place in it16. On the other hand, the deep ecology movement falls in the opposite trap by ignoring the crucially social and historical dimension that links social and economic struggles to environmental crises past and present. Ecocriticism is part of a critical current that seeks to understand the relationship between human cultural productions and the world “out there” in terms that move beyond mere representationalism. Defined as “a field of literary studies that addresses how humans relate to non-human nature or the environment in literature” 17, ecocriticism allows for a read- ing of all literary productions through this perspective, including those not overtly concerned with environmental issues but which reflect a specific understanding

14. The concept is borrowed from historian Theodore Roszak. See Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind, Theodore Roszak, Mary E. Gomes, Allen D. Kanner (eds.), San Francisco, Sierra Club Books, 1995. 15. This is Clément Rosset’s central thesis in his book L’anti-nature: éléments pour une philosophie tragique [1973], 4th ed., Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 2004. 16. David R. Keller, “Deep Ecology”, in Encyclopedia of Environmental Ethics and Philosophy, John Baird Callicott, Robert Frodeman (eds.), London, Macmillan Reference USA, 2009, p. 206. 17. Loretta Johnson, “Greening the Library: The Fundamentals and Future of Ecocriticism”,Choice , vol. 47, no. 4, 2009, p. 623. Introduction 11 of our relationship with the natural world. Besides literature, however, it is our contention that the discipline is relevant to a wider range of discourses and attitudes to the environment, including the visual arts and social and economic discourses addressing, or impacting, the natural environment. Cheryll Glotfelty has shown how ecocritical studies share the awareness that “we have reached the age of envi- ronmental limits, a time when the consequences of human actions are damaging the planet’s basic life support systems. Either we change our ways or we face global catastrophe […]” 18. Awareness, then, is a common trait of ecocritical approaches to cultural and social productions. Another common feature is the fact that, as Lawrence Buell explains, environmental criticism (a term better suited to the variety of issues under examination than the reductive “ecocriticism”) is issue-driven rather than method-driven, uniting a wide range of critical practices over the common aware- ness of current environmental crises 19. As the so-called second-wave ecocriticism of the late 20th century considered iconic texts such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and Vandana Shiva’s Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Survival in India (1988), the discipline paralleled the rise of social environmental movements across late-capitalist countries and postcolonial countries in the past decades. Environmental criticism should not be seen as monolithic or programmatic. It overlaps with issues of imperialism, postcolonialism, race and class, and the politics of place. It is also the locus of passionate and necessary debate, as the succession of “waves” within the movement shows. Nor does it stand isolated in the critical landscape: environmental criticism is part of a wider theoretical tendency to rehabilitate the material world, the increasingly shared recognition that, as new materialist physicist-cum-philosopher Karen Barad puts it, “lan- guage has been granted too much power” 20. It is indeed time to move beyond an understanding of language as ultimately self-sufficient and self-referential, and the various recent “turns” in academic inquiry such as the spatial, material, and ethical turns, which all aim to rehabilitate the outside world, are congruent with environmental criticism. New materialisms, textual materialism 21 or geocriticism 22 all encourage the literary and cultural critic to gain a precise understanding of how the natural world works by borrowing insights from geography, the life sciences and quantum physics. It can therefore be expected to generate much

18. Cheryll Glotfelty, “Introduction: Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis", in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, Cheryll Glotfelty, Harold Fromm (eds.), Athens – London, University of Georgia Press, 1996, p. xx. 19. Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination, Oxford, Blackwell, 2005, p. 11. 20. Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter”, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 28, no. 3, 2003, p. 801. 21. See Bill Brown’s introduction to the issue of PMLA he edited on the topic (Bill Brown, “Introduction: Textual Materialism”, PMLA, vol. 125, no. 1, 2010, p. 24-28). 22. “Géocritique” is a term coined by French critic Bertrand Westphal in his book La géocritique: réel, fiction, espace, Paris, Minuit, 2007. It is part of a broader movement of “literary geography” that also includes geopoetics; see Michel Collot, Pour une géographie littéraire, Paris, J. Corti, 2014, as well as Maryvonne Boisseau and Marion Naugrette-Fournier’s article in the present volume. 12 Catherine Conan and Flore Coulouma stimulating cross-disciplinary discussion. In this respect, material ecocriticism, which invites us to see the non-human world as an assemblage of narratives, thus generating a sense of continuity, or co-construction, between matter and culture, is a particularly exciting development to follow 23. The first two articles in the present volume provide insights on the evolution of the Irish environment and in different ways remind us that nature should not be perceived as the immutable “other” to be opposed to human civilization. In other words, nature has a history too, both as material reality and as a concept. As such, ideas of nature interact and merge with political and ideological issues. Marjan Shokouhi’s broad-ranging study of deforestation in Ireland de-centres classic anthropocentric narratives of colonization. She traces the twists and turns of the complex relationship between the cutting and planting of trees in Ireland and the history of the colonization of the island, which to this day has one of the lowest rates of forest cover in Europe. Tudor Plantations involved deforestation both as a military strategy and for the purposes of timber exploitation, which drastically reduced Ireland’s forest cover. However, the manner in which reforestation was propounded by the landed gentry from the 18th century onwards, with little care for the value of the land as a source of food for a populous peasant class, led to a shift in attitudes to the forest. While colonizers considered Irish forests as a source of profit, the independent Irish state has in fact adopted the same viewpoint, as evidenced by the plantation of non-native species such as Sitka spruce for the growing forestry industry. Focusing on ’s translation of 6th-century poetic fragments, Shokouhi asks whether poetry can repair the broken link between the Irish and their formerly forested environment. In her analysis of Gerald of Wales’ Topographia Hibernica, Nolwena Monnier shows how topographical description served the purpose of justifying the Anglo- Norman colonial enterprise. The medieval, pre-Descartes understanding of nature was inclusive and did not posit a radical distinction between the human mind and the rest of the world. Therefore, writing about geographical landmarks, flora and fauna helps raise the question of origins and of the mythical affinity between landscape and people. Monnier traces stereotypes about the country and its people to Gerald’s account, thus explaining some of the origins of the essentialized vision of Ireland. However, Topographia also generates a sense of hybridity. By borrowing from Celtic sources – a method reminiscent of the dinnseanchas tradition – the text interrogates the boundaries that humans draw in order to define their individual and collective identity. These include the limits of the species: Gerald recounts narratives of inter-species hybridization borrowed from Gaelic lore, echoing ’s Sweeney Astray in the 20th century (see the article by Anna Pilz and Tom Herron in this volume).

23. See in particular Material Ecocriticism, Serpil Oppermann, Serenella Iovino (eds.), Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2014. Introduction 13

The next contributions to this volume focus on questions of nature and the material environment in literary and visual artworks, thus grappling with Seamus Heaney’s question “How does the real get into the made-up?” 24. The idea that art should probe the link between form and material reality interrogates the arbitrariness of the sign and the materiality of the work of art itself, something which is especially perceptible in artistic performance or in recent travel diaries such as Garrett Carr’s The Rule of the Land 25. As such, novels, poems or paintings, beyond their mimetic function of representation, ask if literature and the arts can make Ireland a habitable place. Marie Mianowski discusses the symbolic significance of buried human remains in the context of the detective novel. In Brian McGilloway’s The Nameless Dead, a search for the disappeared bodies of in the borderlands yields tiny skeletons buried in a cillín. In the novel, the land of the borderland, a theatre of endless violence and retribution, is opposed to the soil, whose vitality can generate new, liberating narratives. Mianowski draws from new materialist philosophy such as Karen Barad’s agential realism, in order to trace the intra-actions between the soil and human bodies both living and dead. This profoundly ecological vision in McGilloway’s novel transcends the ideological stasis generally associated with the Troubles thriller. In her reading of Paula Meehan’s poetry collection Geomantic (2016), Florence Schneider also considers the significance of the soil, as a surface upon which signs are inscribed. The earth retains the trace of events present and past, thus relocating humans within a geological and cosmic whole. Borrowing from Hinduism and Yeatsian occultism, Meehan recontextualizes Ireland’s recent past, focusing on the Celtic Tiger and the Irish fascination for commemorations. Her rejection of anthropocentrism ultimately has political significance as it reintegrates traditionally marginalized groups: women, Celtic Tiger victims, non-human animals. By paying close attention to form, the poetic voice goes beyond individual consciousness to uncover a mystical “language of nature”. Schneider shows how the tight-knit structure of the poems explores the relationship between language and the world, beyond mere representation. Manuela Palacios examines Sinéad Morrissey’s poetry, whose conceptual depth and intellectual rigour contrasts with the organic fluidity of eco-poets such as Paula Meehan or Medbh McGuckian. Using Merleau-Ponty’s ecophenomenology, Palacios uncovers the environmental stance of Morrissey’s poems, showing how speakers establish meaningful relationships with non-human “others”, from gulls to a beached dolphin. The human gaze is inherently political in Morrissey’s spectacularized nature, and rehabilitating sensory perception helps de-centre anthropocentric and logocentric perspectives. Following the posthuman insights of Rosi Braidotti, Palacios explains how Morrissey’s poetry considers the human body not solely as

24. Seamus Heaney, “Known World”, in Electric Light, London, Faber and Faber, 2001, p. 22. 25. Garrett Carr, The Rule of The Land: Walking Ireland’s Border, London, Faber and Faber, 2017. 14 Catherine Conan and Flore Coulouma an object but as an instrument of knowledge. Her ecological vision therefore sees humans not so much in the world as of the world. The issue of interspecies relationships is central in Anna Pilz and Tom Herron’s reading of Seamus Heaney’s Sweeney Astray. Drawing on Jane Bennett’s ecological philosophy, they show how interspecies encounters and hybridization lead to a re-enchantment of the world in the poem. Sweeney’s curse – his banishment to the woods in the form of a bird and subsequent madness – helped Irish culture negotiate the delicate transition between paganism and Christianism. The forest and the trees constitute the liminal space enabling the encounter between Celtic and Christian traditions, and between man and nature. Sweeney’s madness is only temporary, thus making him a poetic messenger between the human and animal, pagan and Christian worlds, finally enabling a re-enchantment of the world. The ethical significance of the poet’s engagement with the world is also central to Maryvonne Boisseau and Marion Naugrette-Fournier’s discussion of Derek Mahon’s poetry. For Mahon, global environmental issues take precedence over the timeworn questions of Irish self-definition. The sea and the beach are liminal spaces connecting Irish locales to the global environmental crisis. In this sense, Mahon’s writing is more accurately described as geopoetic than ecopoetic, being more about mapping out the world than promoting a definite political project. The sea enables the poet to articulate local and global concerns, while the motif of the stranded debris metonymically represents human activities and their environmental impact. The beach becomes a metaphor for the creative process whereby disjecta are recovered and re-presented by the artist. Yvonne Scott furthers the analysis of artistic responsibility in the representation of the sea as a critically endangered environment in the visual arts, focusing on Barrie Cooke and Gwen O’Dowd, whose paintings were displayed as part of the Clean Irish Sea exhibition at Dublin City Gallery in 1988. For these artists, the sea is not the stable background that it used to be in earlier landscape painting, but a dynamic, living entity, endangered by human activity. In the immediate post- Chernobyl period, Clean Irish Sea focused on the threat of nuclear fallout, a radical gesture in a country that was still largely unaware of environmental issues. The two artists use different techniques to convey the urgency of marine endangerment. Barrie Cooke explores the various shades and connotations of the colour blue, from the vivid hue of tourist brochures to the blue water of water expanses (as opposed, in hydrological terms, to the green water stored in the soil and living organisms). Gwen O’Dowd undermines viewers’ expectations of landscape painting through audacious compositions that suggest both the surface and depth of the water. As such, her work, often described oxymoronically as “abstract landscapes”, questions the relationship between emotional states and material reality. Last but not least, this issue is honoured to be hosting poems by acclaimed novelist, short story writer and poet Mary O’Donnell. Mary O’Donnell has won numerous prizes for her work, which includes seven collections of poetry. Her latest collection, Those April Fevers, came out in 2015 (Todmorden, Arc Publica- tions). Here, O’Donnell addresses our relationship with the natural world through Introduction 15 epiphanic encounters with animals – dolphins, crows, a heron – and the Irish landscape of the bog. Nature exposes the travails of time, as “the composition of ancient self continues”, imparting us with a sense of the unending vitality of the earth. O’Donnell’s final evocations are an apt note on which to conclude this issue. In a time of crisis, the poet’s urgent task – and gift to us – is one of hope.

Catherine Conan Université de Bretagne occidentale

Flore Coulouma Université Paris Nanterre

Despirited Forests, Deforested Landscapes: The Historical Loss of Irish Woodlands

Abstract: This paper studies the history of deforestation in Ireland under the impact of consequent arrivals and departures, among which the advent of Christianity and the Anglo- Norman colonisation left a permanent mark on both the Irish landscape and culture. The aim is to understand how the island of Ireland, once known for its dense woodlands, became almost entirely denuded of tree cover by the end of the 19th century and continues to be among the least forested regions in Europe. The history of deforestation in Ireland is an example of how environmental phenomena are closely linked with wider cultural and political concerns that characterise a certain period of history. Deforestation in Ireland was part of the colonial narrative that focused on subjugating the native population by taming the very landscape upon which they depended as a dwelling place. Keywords: deforestation, Irish landscape, colonisation, Christianity, dwelling.

Résumé : Cet article traite de l’histoire de la déforestation en Irlande, au travers des flux migratoires consécutifs, parmi lesquels l’avènement du christianisme et la colonisation anglo- normande, qui ont laissé une marque permanente à la fois sur la culture et le paysage irlandais. Il vise à comprendre comment l’île d’Irlande, autrefois connue pour ses denses régions boisées, est devenue presque entièrement dénuée de couverture forestière à la fin du XIXe siècle et reste encore l’une des régions les moins boisées d’Europe. Cette histoire de la déforestation en Irlande est un exemple du lien étroit entre les phénomènes environnementaux et de plus larges préoccupations culturelles et politiques qui caractérisent une certaine période historique. La déforestation en Irlande participe du discours colonial qui s’évertua à asservir la population locale en domestiquant précisément le paysage dont elle dépendait pour son habitation. Mots clés : déforestation, paysage irlandais, colonisation, christianisme, habitation.

Introduction

Once considered one of the most heavily-forested regions in Europe, the lies at the bottom of the European forest cover index with less than 11% of its total land area under forest cover. , with about 7% coverage, is often included with the rest of the with 13% forest cover 1. Yet as the commemorative epithets of “The Isle of Wood” and “Emerald

1. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Global Forest Resources Assessment 2015, 2nd ed., Rome, FAO, 2016, available at: http://www.fao.org/3/a-i4808e.pdf, p. 5, 8.

Études irlandaises, no 44-1, 2019 – p. 17-30 18 Marjan Shokouhi

Green” imply, the memory of Ireland as a country densely covered in woodlands persists in Irish place names that owe their existence to the once significant rela- tionship between people and trees in ancient Ireland. , for example, is taken from Doire, signifying an oak grove. The prefix “Kill / Kil / Cill”, common in Irish place names such as Kilcommon, Kildare, Kilkenny, derives from the Irish word Coill, which means a wood. MacCuill, son of hazel, MacCairthin, son of rowan, MacIbair, son of yew, and MacCuilin, son of holly, are also examples of Irish names related to trees. Trees are interpreted as “‘charismatic’ mega flora and fauna” 2, which play an important role in invoking feelings of geopiety among environmental and regional groups. Coined by J. K. Wright in 1947, geopiety denotes “the sense of piety felt by humans in relation to both the natural world and the geographical space” 3. In Ireland, feelings of geopiety as well as regional and national identity have often evolved around trees like oak, hazel, holly, and ash, which carry strong cultural implications. In Celtic cultures, “Every tree, mountain, rock and spring possessed its own spirit or numen” which had the power to “both foster and destroy living things” 4. Trees were venerated by Irish Celts as a source of spirituality and power 5. Along with herbs, they were used as medicine or associated with keeping off bad spirits or bringing good luck. Also included in the ancient Brehon laws, trees were considered communal property and cutting or mutilating them was a serious offence. Taking into consideration this early culture of tree veneration, it is worth asking how the island of Ireland became almost entirely denuded of tree cover by the end of the 19th century and now lies at the bottom of the European forest cover index. This essay addresses the cultural implications of deforestation in Ireland as a narrative that unveils the story of consequent arrivals and departures in the island of Ireland with an emphasis on two major events in Irish history: the Anglo-Norman colonisation of Ireland since the 12th century and the advent of Christianity in the 6th century AD.

A timeline of arrivals and departures

The interaction of man and woodlands in Ireland is believed to have begun with the arrival of Mesolithic people, who were primarily fishers, hunters, and gatherers. Timber was used to make boats and houses. The settlement of Neolithic farmers

2. Carl J. Griffin, “Space and Place – Popular Perceptions of Forests”, inNew Perspectives on People and Forests, Eva Ritter, Dainis Dauksta (eds.), Dordrecht – Heidelberg – London – New York, Springer, 2011, p. 143. 3. Ibid. 4. Miranda Green, Animals in Celtic Life and Myth, London – New York, Routledge, 1992, p. 1-2. 5. See Charles Squire, Celtic Myth and Legend: Poetry and Romance, London, Gresham Publishing Company, 1905; Miranda Green, Animals in Celtic Life and Myth; Eoin Neeson, “Woodland in History and Culture”, in Nature in Ireland: A Scientific and Cultural History, John Wilson Foster, Helena C. G. Chesney (eds.), Dublin, Lilliput Press, 1997, p. 133-156. Despirited Forests, Deforested Landscapes… 19 around five to six thousand years ago and the development of the blanket bog resulted in the earliest clearance of forests, which mostly affected the West and Midlands. The next group of settlers were the Celtic tribes who arrived in Ireland around 800 BC. The Irish Celts started a new phase of interaction with the wooded envi- ronment, commonly known as “tree veneration”. Hazel meant wisdom; ash, yew, and oak were considered as sacred, and birch was associated with love. Trees were included in the ancient legal code of Ireland, known as the Brehon laws. According to their size, use, and fruit type, tree species stood for social order. In contrast to Norman Forest Laws which gave absolute ownership to an individual, the woodland laws in the Irish legal system were part of the common laws, where one piece of land with its natural resources was allocated to an individual of a high rank in trust, to be transferred to the next patron, who was not necessarily a direct inheritor. Communal ownership gave way to the rise of feudalism after the Norman Conquest in 1161. Medieval ownership, the development of the blanket bog, and farming resulted in what could be regarded as the first major period of deforestation in Ireland during the 12th and 13th centuries. The felling of the forests and the change of land use accelerated in the 16th cen- tury when Ireland officially became a British colony. The industrial development of the fuel-hungry British Isle, the growing demand for cheap timber used for ship- building purposes, and the inefficient and corrupt system of forest administration in Tudor England put the pressure on Ireland as a suitable target for invasion, both strategically and economically. The vast clearance of forests for agricultural purposes continued during the plantation period. “[S]ystematic plantation on a vast scale” from 1556 to 1690, by the English, Welsh, and Scottish landlords, conquered and subdued the inhabitants whose defence capabilities were dependent on forests as shelter and ambush 6. The 17th-century plantation, which had started in the southern Midlands, spread through the entire country, leaving 1.5 million out of 2 million acres of Irish landscape under plantation 7. After the Tudors, deforestation continued during the Stuart and Commonwealth periods, decreasing wildlife biodiversity and gradually alienating the Irish, who had earlier relied on the woods as shelter, dwelling, and source of livelihood. In less than a hundred years the social and environmental effects of deforestation were already visible in Ireland. Native species such as wolves, eagles, birds of prey, and wild cats had dwindled as a result of losing their natural habitats. The , on the other hand, underwent immense pressure from the British colonisers who had not only bereft them of their shelter and source of income, but also gradually alienated them from their own dwellings in proximity of the woods. This was worsened in the aftermath of the Act of Union (1800) and the consequences of absentee landlordism,

6. Eoin Neeson, “Woodland in History and Culture”, p. 140-141. 7. “History of Forestry in Ireland”, Forest Service, Department of Agriculture, Food, and the Marine website, 2008. 20 Marjan Shokouhi which severely affected the countryside, already hit by the increasing demand for food and shelter as a result of population growth from 1700 to 1840. Nature, which had remained a source of livelihood and spirituality for cen- turies, had gradually become an awe-inspiring, threatening presence. The shift in attitudes is apparent in the reaction to the early reforestation schemes that planned to improve the rapidly dwindling Irish forests in the 18th century. Reforestation started in 1765, at the hands of the gentry who were direct descendants of the planters. The schemes were “insufficient” and “clearly elitist” 8, not paying the least attention to the local population and the negative impact of colonisation in poor rural areas. The Irish, who already regarded landowners as “‘foreigners’ and ‘grabbers’” 9, became more hostile towards both the owners and the land. The continuing hostility persisted for well over a century in the shape of mutilating and cutting trees as a sign of political protest. The reforestation scheme continued until 1845, regardless of the famine-stricken farmers who were denied all source of income during the minor periods of famine in the 19th century. Ultimately an Gorta Mór, the Great Irish Famine that resulted in the death of more than one million people and the emigration of another million from 1845 to 1852, proved the indifference of the formerly “benign” nature to the suffering of millions of poor farmers whose only means of survival was the land. The last but not least major cause of deforestation after the Great Famine was the Land Act of 1881, implemented for the purpose of transferring land ownership to farmers. Bereft of their major source of profit, th19 -century landlords cleared vast areas of forests to compensate for the loss of their previously owned lands. Furthermore, farmers exploited the remaining woodlands in search of tillage and grazing. When state forestry began replanting trees in 1903, only 69,000 hectares of Ireland’s ancient and long-established forests were left, i.e. 1 to 1.5% of the total land area 10. State forestry stopped during the decades that led to the independence of Ireland from Britain. The newly independent state had other priorities on the agenda and reforestation disappeared in the background for some time. The increased demand for fuel and timber during World War I had led to a further reduction of Ireland’s forest, and World War II also hindered state afforestation to a considerable extent until the Forestry Act of 1946, which accelerated the process of planting trees by up to 10,000 acres per annum. Furthermore, Ireland’s entry in the European Economic Community (now the European Union) in 1973 encouraged afforestation through the privatisation of Ireland’s forestry 11. The European funds, including European Commission grants, helped “eliminating the

8. Eoin Neeson, “Woodland in History and Culture”, p. 146. 9. Ibid. 10. Forest Service Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, “Irish Forests – A Brief History”, 2008, p. 3, available at: https://www.agriculture.gov.ie/media/migration/forestry/forestservice- generalinformation/abouttheforestservice/IrishForestryAbriefhistory200810.pdf. 11. Ibid. Despirited Forests, Deforested Landscapes… 21 sheep / tree conflict” among the farmers who had joined the reforestation scheme to plant trees in marginal farmlands. According to Neeson, “by 1979 Ireland had the largest and most rapidly expanding forest area per capita in Europe” 12. Yet this acceleration was to be hindered once again as the country entered a new phase of economic prosperity during the Celtic Tiger period. Among other factors, the growth of urban sprawl led to an increasing demand for building roads that connected the countryside to the cities, which at times required vast clearance of the wooded regions. The popularity of Ireland as a tourist destination since the last decades of the 20th century has also had a double-sided impact on the landscape. While cultural tourism has led to the preservation of certain areas such as Lough Gill in Co. Sligo or Coole Park in Galway, the increasing human interference with the landscape as a result of insufficient management, frequent visits, road construction, traffic, and pollution has had adverse effects on the environment. Afforestation, the creation of new forests, is still at the top of Ireland’s envi- ronmental agenda, targeting 1.2 million hectares to be covered by 2030, i.e. 17% of the total land use 13. Despite the continuing process of reviving Ireland’s woodlands during the last century, less than 11% of Ireland’s total land area is under forest cover today, leaving the Republic of Ireland at the lower end of the spectrum compared to the European average of 35.5% 14. Afforestation is now subject to strict environmental regulations due to biodiversity considerations. Planting the wrong species of trees or cultivating the wrong area would endanger the balance of the ecosystem, which would in turn lead to the extinction of more vulnerable species and the multiplication of others. The European Union-funded schemes to stop further agricultural land use by planting trees in marginal farmlands during the 1980s is one instance that caused a serious threat to bogland biodiversity. Instead of planting on marginal farmlands, the farmers who were given a grant to avoid further land use planted large areas of peat bogs with coniferous evergreen trees such as pine or spruce. The non-native species of Sitka spruce, Norway spruce, Lodgepole pine and Japanese larch make up a total of 60% of Ireland’s forest area compared to an average of 25% cover by native species like oak, with a growth period of 120 to 150 years 15. Sitka spruce, which takes about 35 to 55 years to mature, is considered a dominant and renewable source of timber in Ireland despite its lower wood quality as a result of fast growth. On a cultural level, conifers lack the symbolic significance of oaks as emblems of nationhood and spirituality in Ireland and might as well carry “further political and ideological discourses” as in the case of the British dislike of conifers mentioned by Owain Jones 16.

12. Eoin Neeson, “Woodland in History and Culture”, p. 154. 13. Richard O’Hanlon, “Forestry in Ireland: The Reforestation of a Deforested Country”, The Forestry Source, June 2012, p. 7. 14. Environmental Protection Agency, Ireland’s Environment – An Assessment, Wexford, EPA, 2016, p. 110. 15. Richard O’Hanlon, “Forestry in Ireland…”, p. 7. 16. Owain Jones, “Materiality and Identity – Forests, Trees and Senses of Belonging”, in New Perspectives on People and Forests, p. 168. 22 Marjan Shokouhi

Having briefly covered the major incidents that led to the deforestation of Ireland, the rest of this essay focuses on the arrival of colonisers and the advent of Christianity as two major events that altered not only the actual shape and form of the landscape, but also changed people’s understanding of their surrounding environment and consequently their relationship with it.

Deforested landscapes – the arrival of colonisers

The constant arrival of the neighbouring tribes and countries and the turbulent history of conquests and exploitations alongside periods of climate change and natural disaster modified the Irish environment in line with Irish culture. From the arrival of the first Christian missionaries to the Norman Conquest of Ireland and from the introduction of feudalism to the later British rule, the land appears to have been the first target of transformation in Ireland. The anonymous writer of “Ireland’s Lost Glory” in Birds and All Nature (1900) refers to “the gradual rise of English supremacy in the land” as the most important factor that led to the destruction of Ireland’s forests. The English landlords destroyed the woodlands “to increase the amount of arable land, to deprive the natives of shelter, to provide fuel, and to open out the country for military purposes”. The writer further refers to the increasing value of timber and the continual destruction of the wooded landscape from the 17th century to the 19th, leaving Ireland with only one eightieth of its forested landscape in 1900 17. At first glance, economic gain seems to be the primary motivation behind the exploitation of forests as well as the cultivation of land and the building of towns. Unlike the native who did not show much interest in landscaping and farming, the Norman and English settlers had an eye for the hidden profit in the development of an agricultural system as well as using Ireland’s dense forests in the form of a timber reservoir. In 1183, Gerald of Wales, who had travelled to Ireland “partly to join the Norman Conquest, partly to see and explore the country” 18, found the Irish lack of interest in farming and husbandry a sign of barbarity. In the tenth chapter of Topographia Hibernica (1187) he describes the character, customs, and habits of the Irish people as barbarous and slothful:

The Irish are a rude people, subsisting on the produce of their cattle only, and living themselves like beasts – a people that has not yet departed from the primitive habits of pastoral life. […] their pastures are short of herbage; cultivation is very rare, and there is scarcely any land sown. […] The whole habits of the people are contrary to agricultural pursuits 19.

17. N.A., “Ireland’s Lost Glory”, Birds and All Nature, vol. 7, no. 4, April 1900, p. 188. 18. Annette Jocelyn Otway-Ruthven, A History of Medieval Ireland, London, E. Benn, 1968, p. 1. 19. Gerald of Wales, The Topography of Ireland, Thomas Wright (ed.), Thomas Forester (trad.), Cambridge, In parentheses, 2000, p. 70. Despirited Forests, Deforested Landscapes… 23

Dependent on fishing, gathering, hunting, and keeping cattle for the most part, the Gaelic civilisation before the Conquest was automatically considered inferior by the Normans and later on by the English, whose comparatively developed system of agriculture had enabled them to draw benefit from the land. For Gerald of Wales, who described the movement from “the forest to the field, from the field to the town” as a natural course from barbarity to civilisation 20, the Irish way of life and customs were indeed a sign of incivility and lack of industry. Interestingly, it was not the uncultivated land per se that was subject to negative portrayal; more often than not, the description of the natives’ appearance matched the hostile description of their surrounding landscape as “truly barbarous”:

This people, then, is truly barbarous, being not only barbarous in their dress, but suffering their hair and beard barbis( ) to grow enormously in an uncouth manner […] indeed all their habits are barbarism. [Barbarism] sticks to them like a second nature 21.

The derogatory portrayal of the Irish people became a common reference in the later colonial period, when the English found the colonised “the perfect foil to set off their virtues” 22. Edmund Spenser’s description of Irish people in A Veue of the Present State of Ireland (1596) resembles that of Gerald of Wales in attributing characteristics such as wildness, barbarity, sloth, and disorder to the native inhabitants. In a dialogue between the English-based interlocutors Eudoxus and Irenius, the latter, who has recently returned from a recent trip to Ireland and appears to be an expert on Irish matters, explains the native laws, religion, and customs as why the “goodly and commodious […] soyle” of Ireland had not turned “to good uses, and reducing that salvage nation to better goverment and civillity” 23. The termsalvage (obsolete for savage) is a derivative of sylva, Latin for wood, which further explains the association of the natives with their wooded landscape from a negative perspective. What is seen in both narratives is a colonial point of view that ultimately justifies the exploitation of the neighbouring land. Like Gerald of Wales, Spenser points to the agricultural potential of the Irish soil, yet he goes a step further by asserting his colonial perspective on subjugating the people. Cultivating the land was not only to put the soil to “good use”, but to bring the so-called “savage nation” under control and civilise them. While describing the local Brehon laws to Eudoxus and explaining why the English rule had not yet tamed the natives, Irenius reduces the Irish people to animals left on their own, in need of a bridle 24.

20. Ibid., p. 70. 21. Ibid. 22. Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation, London, Vintage, 1996, p. 9. 23. Edmund Spenser, A Veue of the Present State of Ireland [1596], Risa S. Bear (ed.), Renascence Editions – Oregon University, 1997, p. 2 (HTML version: http://www.luminarium.org/renascence- editions/veue1.html). 24. Ibid., p. 5. 24 Marjan Shokouhi

The colonial narrative clearly functions on a dichotomous axis where the colonised are stigmatised as wild, barbarous, and uncultivated; in one word, as other. According to Oona Frawley, aligning “the uncultivated state that the Irish were believed to live in” with “the uncultivated state of the land” implied that taming the landscape would result in taming the people 25. Hence, the notoriety of the bogs and woodlands was not only a result of the hidden military threat from the Irish; rather the negative attitude towards wilderness and the association of the inhabitants with the wild landscape of their surroundings justified a reform policy to tame the landscape. In the words of William Cronon, the negative attitude towards a landscape is prerequisite to transforming it: “[…] the most basic requirement of [exploiting the land] is that the earlier form of that landscape must either be neutral or negative in value. It must deserve to be transformed” 26. Viewed from an ecocritical perspective, the colonised / coloniser binary also reinforces the negative attitude towards nature in the nature / culture dichotomy, justifying the modification and transformation of the physical environment. While referring to the rather unsuccessful project of subjugating the natives under the practice of English laws under Henry VIII and a further suppression of the Irish people during the reign of the “Faerie Queene” – Queen Elizabeth I – Spenser’s derogatory portrayal of the Irish system of law, religion, and customs can be studied under the English superior stance not only towards the Irish people but also towards nature. Man as the master of the universe, placed at the uppermost level in the Great Chain of Being – the fruit of Christian and Scholastic philosophies – was still a popular ideology during the Renaissance. This antagonistic view turned into physicophobia, the “alienated, hostile reaction to the natural world” 27, which the likes of Descartes and Hobbes promoted during the Enlightenment. While the negative attitude towards the landscape was a key strategy for transforming it, the potential economic benefit of the Irish soil reinforced the colonial narrative of progress based on cultivation and manipulation of the land. Hence, the density of the woods “was to be deplored but also welcomed”: deplored for the fear of the unknown harboured in the Irish wilderness, and welcomed for the potential economic benefit of its soil 28, described by Spenser as “good and commodious”. Cultivation was to bring the maximum energies of the land to the surface, releasing the hidden profit by taming the wilderness. To refer to the unprecedented felling of the forests during the colonial period in Ireland, either for the purpose of transforming woodlands to agricultural land or for the use of

25. Oona Frawley, Irish Pastoral: Nostalgia and Twentieth-Century Irish Literature, London – Dublin, Irish Academic Press, 2005, p. 26. 26. William Cronon, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative”, in Nature and Identity in Cross-Cultural Perspective, Anne Buttimer, Luke Wallin (eds.), Dordrecht – Boston – London, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999, p. 209. 27. Roy Jackson, “Overcoming Physicophobia – Forests as Sacred Source of Our Human Origins”, in New Perspectives on People and Forests, p. 29. 28. John Wilson Foster, “Encountering Traditions”, in Nature in Ireland: A Scientific and Cultural History, p. 26. Despirited Forests, Deforested Landscapes… 25 timber, the forests and the entire landscape had turned into a massive “standing- reserve” of timber “on call for a further ordering” – what Heidegger calls Bestand 29. The point of view that reduces the landscape to Bestand stands in sharp contrast with the comparatively less intervening role of early Irish culture, misinterpreted as a lack of civilisation in Norman and English views of Ireland. The relationship between colonisers and the Irish landscape can be further explained through the Heideggerian notion of Anwesen (presencing), which implies disclosure and “bringing-forth” an entity through unconcealment 30. The coloniser’s disclosure of the landscape, however, can be interpreted as Herausfordern, i.e. challenging or forcing an entity toward “furthering something else” 31. Rather than “setting-in-order” (presencing) as Heidegger observed in The Question Concerning Technology, Herausfordern “sets upon nature” 32. Hence it is an expedition in two ways:

It expedites in that it unlocks and exposes. Yet that expediting is always itself directed from the beginning toward furthering something else, i.e., toward driving on to the maximum yield at the minimum expense 33.

This is what Spenser referred to as making “good use” of the soil in Ireland. Viewing the landscape from a standing-reserve perspective is an ecological hin- drance to establishing a land community based on a mutual interaction between humans and the environment, mentioned by Aldo Leopold in A Sand County Almanac (1949) 34. One can possibly argue that a notion of land ethics or geopiety was present in Irish society before the Norman Conquest. As mentioned earlier, the land was a communally owned property in Brehon laws. The very fact that cutting or destroying the trees was consequent with paying fines is proof of a higher degree of ethics regarding the land community. As such, the linear notion of colonial progress is drastically reversed; the pre-Conquest Irish society would stand at a higher ecological level of progress compared to the colonisers’ anthropocentric view of the land as potential profit. Linked to the notion of land ethics, the human-environment interaction in early Irish culture can be interpreted as dwelling. In “Building Dwelling Thinking” (1971), Heidegger pursues the links between dwelling and being through the act of building: “The Old English and High German word for building, buan, means to dwell. This signifies: to remain, to stay in a place” 35. The German terms for building (Bauen) and neighbour (Nachbar) originate from “buri, büren, beuren,

29. Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, David Farrell Krell (ed.), London, Routledge, 1993, p. 322. 30. Ibid., p. 317. 31. Ibid., p. 321. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid. 34. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, New York, Oxford University Press, 1949. 35. Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking”, inPoetry, Language, Thought, Albert Hofstadter (ed. and trans.), New York, Harper & Row, 1975, p. 146. 26 Marjan Shokouhi beuron”, which signify “dwelling, the abode, the place of dwelling” 36. Heidegger continues digging up the root of the verb bauen (to build), only to arrive at the verb bin (to be). Therefore, ich bin and du bist mean “I dwell, you dwell. The way in which you are and I am, the manner in which we humans are on the earth, is Buan, dwelling” 37. It is from building to being (both derived from the verb “to be”) that mankind’s relationship with the environment takes the shape of dwelling, which in return leads to caring and sparing. Hence, building appears as a means to an end, we build to stay in a place, to dwell. Yet, the fundamental meaning of building as dwelling “has been lost to us” 38. The dwelling perspective in the human-environment interaction in early Irish culture can be exemplified in the building ofraths , first built in Ireland in the first millennium AD 39. Also known as forts or ringforts, raths were circular fortifications, which remained in use until the 12th century 40. A prototype of an Irish dwelling place in proximity of the natural landscape, raths along with duns, cathairs, and other fortifications were first abandoned or destroyed in the Christian period.

Despirited forests – the advent of Christianity

Among the poems preserved from the early medieval period in Ireland is the trio of fragments from the 6th century AD with which Thomas Kinsella has openedThe New Oxford Book of Irish Verse. The three fragments, read together as a whole, act as a premonition of how the arrival of the other – the Christian missionaries – disrupted the so-called “natural” order of the pagan world, in which the relationship between man and environment could be described as dwelling:

The rath in front of the oak wood belonged to Bruidge, and Cathal, belonged to Aedh, and Ailill, belonged to Conaing, and Cuilíne and to MaelDúin before them – all kings in their turn. The rath survives, the kings are covered in clay.

***

36. Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking”, p. 147. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., p. 146. 39. Bruce Proudfoot, “The Economy of the Irish Rath”,Medieval Archaeology, vol. 5, no. 1, 1961, p. 94. 40. Ibid. Despirited Forests, Deforested Landscapes… 27

Three rounded flanks I loved and never will see again: the flank of Tara, the flank of Tailtiu and the flank of Aed Mac Ainmirech.

*** He is coming, Adzed-Head, on the wild-heade sea with cloak hollow-headed and curve-headed staff.

He will chant false religion at a bench facing East and his people will answer “Amen, amen.” 41

The first fragment starts with “The rath in front of the oak wood” that had survived despite the death of the kings who were once owners of the rath. The construction of these dwelling places next to the groves, especially the oak tree which was considered sacred, sanctified the raths and placed man and nature in close proximity, making the words “environment” and “nature” truly interchangeable. Dwelling was not restricted to raths; rather the entire landscape environing these fortifications was considered a dwelling place by the early inhabitants. In the second fragment, the anonymous poet regrets that he would never see the “Three rounded flanks” of Tara, Tailtiu, and Aed Mac Ainmirech, again. As the fragment cuts short, the reason behind the poet’s sense of loss remains unknown. Yet, given the increasing power of Christianity in the 6th century, foreseen in the next fragment, the poet must have anticipated the near destruction of the sites. The sudden announcement of the arrival of the “Adzed-Head” in the first line of the last fragment – “He is coming” – is the harbinger of a sense of doom, arriving from the East. Chanting his “false religion”, the man with the “cloak” will soon be taking the first steps in changing the course of history in Ireland by desacralising the groves, bereaving the landscape from its protecting deity (genius loci) and disconnecting the native population from their surrounding environment. The Christian missionaries also played a fundamental role in the later abolish- ment of the native traditions of druidry and bardry and the destruction of assembly hills, inauguration sites, raths and forts; i.e. all that was associated with the pagan order of Gaelic society. An early example is the prologue from the 9th-century poem, “The Calendar of Oengus”, in which the destruction of the ancient dwelling places is hailed by the anonymous poet:

41. The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse, Thomas Kinsella (ed. and trans.), Oxford – New York, Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 3. 28 Marjan Shokouhi

Tara’s great palace perished with the fall of its princes while great Armagh remains with all its worthy choirs. […]

The Faith has spread and will last till the Day of Doom while evil pagans are borne off and their raths deserted. […]

The dún of Emain is vanished, only its stones remain, while thronged Gleann Dá Loch is the monastery of the western world. […]

The Pagans’ ancient cahirs not permitted to last long – they are wastes without worship now like the place of Lugaid – 42

The poet portrays thedúns , raths, and cahirs deserted and the pagan sites vanished with their kings. He compares the glory and majesty of the newly “crowded shrines” and monasteries to the deserted and destroyed dwelling places and worship sites of the pagan order. Destruction of the sites was equal to dislocating people from their dwelling places next to the forests, therefore distancing man from nature and bringing an end to an age when nature meant environment, a place that environs. Referring to Heidegger’s definition of dwelling, Patrick Sheeran argues that “the Irish, apart from the rath-dwellers, have never truly dwelt in Ireland any more than the aborigines have dwelt in Australia” 43. With the loss of status as dwelling and the distancing of man from nature, the forests and groves became a periphery, which nevertheless prepared the grounds for the felling of the trees during the colonial period. Christianity’s role in Irish cultural history is double-sided. On the one hand, it prepared the grounds for the further destruction of the forests and the annihilation of earlier customs and traditions; on the other, it led to the preservation of some of the finest examples of Irish oral tradition, such as that of early Irish nature writing, where Christianity remains a “dominant element”; however, as Kinsella notes, the majority of the poems between the 6th and 14th centuries share “a ‘pagan’ purity of view which gives the lyrics of the early Christian hermits their extraordinary directness

42. The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse, p. 38. 43. Patrick Sheeran, “The Narrative Creation of Place: Yeats and West of Ireland Landscapes”, in Nature and Identity in Cross-Cultural Perspective, p. 287. Despirited Forests, Deforested Landscapes… 29 and force” 44. “Pangur Bán” and “The Hermit Morbán” are famous examples, where the God of Christianity is seen in nature and the Christian hermits bewail the loss of an earlier connection to nature. Overall, there seems to be little unanimity as to whether it was the Norman Conquest or the English colonisation of Ireland that brought an end to early Irish nature writing. While Christianity desacralised the groves and the Norman Conquest opened the country to foreign exploitation, the decline of Ireland’s native traditions, including the genre of nature writing, accelerated under the reign of Tudor monarchs, exemplified in the following stanzas from a late 16th-century poem by the Monaghan poet Laoiseach Mac AnBháird:

A fond greeting, hillock there, though I’m cheerless at your decline: a source of sorrow your brown thorn, the smooth stem we knew at your top.

A grief to all, the gathering bush we knew as our assembly place: its boughs broken – a dismal day. The land is meaner now it’s gone. […]

The assembly hill – it troubles the schools – today in stranger’s hands. I am in sorrow for its slopes, the fair hill that held my love 45.

According to the poet, the cutting of the “beloved” tree and the decline of the hillock itself, which had been an inauguration site, had happened in the hands of the “stranger” – the English – who were also responsible for the decline of the bardic schools. By the end of the 16th century bardic poetry was on the wane as the continuous state of war and conflict in Ireland resulted in the banishment of the earls from their native lands, which put an end to the Irish patronage system. The final blow was the Flight of the Northern Earls, Tyrone and , in 1607, which led to the plantation of and the rising of 1641. The story of Christianity in Ireland is no less complicated than the history of colonisation and its impact on the environment. Regardless of its subtler effect, Christianity’s role in the history of deforestation in Ireland was rather fundamental. By devaluing the landscape, revered by the Irish, the Christian missionaries set the grounds for the expedition and exploitation of the Irish landscape at the hands of the Norman and English colonisers. In other words, depriving the land of its former status as dwelling, Christianity brought about the earliest form of cultural mutation in Celtic Ireland, i.e. desacralisation of the landscape.

44. Thomas Kinsella, “Introduction”, inThe New Oxford Book of Irish Verse, p. xxiii. 45. Laoiseach Mac AnBháird, “A Fond Greeting, Hillock There”, inThe New Oxford Book of Irish Verse, p. 149-150. 30 Marjan Shokouhi

Conclusion

The history of human civilisation is often synonymous with the history of defo- restation and Ireland is no exception in this case. Deforestation is a long and continuous narrative in Ireland, a narrative that links the colonisation of the land to the colonisation of man. As Eoin Neeson concludes in his study of “Woodland in History and Culture”, the history of deforestation covers a “full circle, from a country very largely covered by natural woodland, through one virtually denuded of tree cover, to one in which virtually all woodlands are cultivated as a crop and in which forestry is tree farming” 46. Today, about half of the Irish forests are in private ownership and less than thirty years of age. Besides, the Republic of Ireland is still considered one of the largest exporters of wood to the United Kingdom 47. The growing interest in Irish forestry as in many parts of the world falls back on multiple incentives among which economic gain seems to overshadow environ- mental concerns. Nowadays, forestry is considered a growing industry in Ireland with a total economic value of € 2.3 billion in 2012, equivalent to € 1,096.5 million in terms of GVA (Gross Value Added). Moreover, the forestry sector has been a source of employment, especially in rural areas while forest outdoor recreational areas have also been contributing to the Irish economy significantly 48. According to the latest Forest Statistics annual report published by the Department of Agri- culture, Food, and the Marine in 2019, Ireland still ranks among the least forested regions in Europe with an average of 10.9% in 2015. This is while the European and Worldwide forest cover averages stand at 33.5% and 30.6%, respectively 49.

Marjan Shokouhi The University of Tokyo

46. Eoin Neeson, “Woodland in History and Culture”, p. 155. 47. Department of Agriculture, Food, and the Marine, Forest Statistics – Ireland 2019, Dublin, DAFM, 2019, p. 9, 41, available at: https://www.agriculture.gov.ie/media/migration/forestry/ forestservicegeneralinformation/ForestStatisticsIreland280519.pdf. 48. Ibid., p. 54. 49. Ibid., p. 73. Nommer la nature : toponymie de la nature dans la Topographia Hibernica de Gerald of Wales 1

Résumé : Gerald of Wales rédigea à la fin du XIIe siècle l’Historia Hiberniae et la Topographia Hibernica, deux ouvrages ethnographiques dans lesquels la nature a toute sa place. Cet article analyse le rapport entre toponymie et nature en s’attardant sur les thématiques des îles, montagnes, lacs et rivières et sur le rapport entre faune et humain, notamment les saints irlandais. Latinisation des termes et utilisation du gaélique se côtoient pour donner une image inattendue de la nature irlandaise. Mots clés : faune, îles, lacs, noms, montagnes, Moyen Âge, rivières, saints.

Abstract: Gerald of Wales wrote the Historia Hiberniae and the Topographia Hibernica at the end of the 12th century. These two ethnographic works introduce many natural elements. This paper aims at analysing the relationship between toponymy and nature – islands, mountains, lakes and rivers – but also between fauna and humans, more specifically Irish saints. Latin and Gaelic roots mingle to draw an unexpected image of Irish nature. Keywords: fauna, islands, lakes, names, mountains, Middle Ages, rivers, saints.

Gerald of Wales naquit en 1145 et mourut en 1223. Le chroniqueur avait des origines nobles puisqu’il était le plus jeune fils du Normand William FitzOdo de Barry et d’Angharad FitzGerald, la fille de Gerald FitzWalter de Windsor. Sa grand-mère était Nest Ferch Rhys, fille de Rhys ap Tewdwr, le dernier roi de Galles du Sud. Cette double origine, normande et galloise, a marqué sa vie et son œuvre. Robert Bartlett définit parfaitement qui était Gerald :

He was a child of a frontier society at the edge of feudal Europe, a Paris-trained master, humanist, royal servant, court littérateur, historian, and naturalist. A study of his thoughts throws light on many of the complex processes of twelfth-century society 2.

Ce chroniqueur fut un auteur prolifique puisqu’il rédigea au moins une vingtaine d’ouvrages, ce qui est conséquent par comparaison avec ses contemporains. Certains de ses livres s’attardent sur l’histoire et plus spécifiquement l’histoire ecclésiastique mais d’autres sont de réels ouvrages ethnographiques.

1. Gerald of Wales connaît plusieurs formes à son nom. On peut ainsi trouver au fil des ouvrages le concernant la forme Giraldus Cambrensis, Giraud de Barri, Giraud le Cambrien, Gerald de Galles ou encore Gerallt Gymro. J’ai choisi de conserver ici la forme anglaise du nom. 2. Robert Bartlett, Gerald of Wales : A Voice of the Middle Ages, Stroud, The History Press, 2013, p. 14.

Études irlandaises, no 44-1, 2019 – p. 31-46 32 Nolwena Monnier

En 1184, Gerald devint le clerc lisant 3 d’Henri II Plantagenêt, roi d’Angleterre de 1154 à 1189. Ce dernier le choisit pour escorter son fils, le prince Jean, en Irlande en 1185. Gerald connaissait l’endroit puisqu’il y avait rejoint son frère aîné en 1183 afin d’aider leur oncle Robert FitzStephen, l’un des premiers conquérants normands de l’île, à réprimer une rébellion. Profitant de ces voyages, Gerald décida d’écrire deux livres : la Topographia Hibernica qui fut publiée pour la première fois en 1188 et l’Expugnatio Hiberniae, rédigée en 1189. Ces deux livres sont des témoignages authentiques sur l’Irlande et fourmillent d’informations sur la faune, la flore et la nature de l’île. Mais au-delà de l’observation bienveillante d’un territoire fraîchement conquis par la couronne anglo-normande, ces ouvrages contiennent également de nombreux éléments propagandistes 4. Lorsque l’on termine sa lecture, une conclusion s’impose rapidement : l’Irlande est un espace naturel riche et varié, parfois un brin hostile mais ce sont surtout les Irlandais qui se révèlent des êtres fainéants, sauvages, aux rites proches du paganisme et au christianisme populaire douteux. La terre d’Irlande est donc bonne à conquérir et cette démarche est même salvatrice puisqu’elle permettra de soumettre un peuple pitoyable. Mais cette terre mal connue est aussi une terre de merveille, de miracles, d’étonnement 5. Dans ces ouvrages, la nature est omniprésente : faune, flore et spécificités géographiques. Mais il ne faut pas oublier que la nature ne revêt pas totalement les mêmes notions qu’aujourd’hui. Elle est fréquemment associée au merveilleux ou au sauvage 6. Elle est alors un espace hostile dans lequel l’homme ne maîtrise pas tout et qui peut être le lieu de tous les dangers. Mais comme l’établit Robert Delort, la nature est aussi liée à l’homme :

La flore et la faune montrent la progressivité des interventions de l’homme dans des processus naturels. Pollens et flore « sauvage » (c’est-à-dire de la forêt : « sylvatica », « wild » et « Wald »), primaire ou secondaire dans le saltus, les friches, la forêt reconstituée ou

3. Le terme est utilisé par plusieurs auteurs du Moyen Âge (Wace et Geoffrei Gaimar entre autres), sans qu’ils ne nous fournissent d’explication sur cette fonction, cette dernière étant sans doute évidente à l’époque. Comme le rappelle Jean-Guy Gouttebroze : « Effort de documentation à partir de l’écrit et propagation de l’écrit par la parole, telles sont les deux activités fondamentales du clerc lisant » (Jean-Guy Gouttebroze, « Entre les historiographes d’expression latine et les jongleurs, le clerc lisant », Senefiance, nº 37, 1995, p. 147). On pourra également consulter à ce sujet Mary Dominica Legge, « Clerc lisant », The Modern Language Review, vol. 47, nº 4, 1952, p. 554-556. 4. Voir à ce propos l’ouvrage de Jeanne-Marie Boivin, L’Irlande au Moyen Âge : Giraud de Barri et la “Topographia Hibernica” (1188), Paris, H. Champion, 1993. 5. On pourra sur ce point consulter les ouvrages récents de Clare Downham, Medieval Ireland, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2017 ; et Keith Busby, French in Medieval Ireland, Ireland in Medieval French, Turnhout, Brepols, 2017. On pourra également se tourner vers Seán Duffy, Medieval Ireland : An Encyclopedia, New York – Londres, Routledge, 2005, et plus spécifiquement l’article de Caoimhín Breatnach, « Historical Tales », p. 221. 6. Voir notamment le texte de Christine Ferlampin-Acher, « The Natural World », in Handbook of Arthurian Romance : King Arthur’s Court in Medieval European Literature, Leah Tether, Johnny McFadyen (dir.), Berlin, De Gruyter, 2017, p. 239-258 ; et Comprendre et maîtriser la nature au Moyen Âge. Mélanges d’histoire des sciences offerts à Guy Beaujouan, Danielle Jacquart, Michel Terrasse, Emmanuel Poulle (dir.), Paris, Librairie Droz – Librairie Champion, 1994. Nommer la nature : toponymie de la nature… 33

modifiée, souvent dévorée par les champs de céréales ou broutée par le cheptel domes- tique ; tandis que sont « parqués », protégés, importés, installés dans des conditions de plus en plus artificielles les plus étranges d’entre les animaux 7.

Nature et Homme s’opposent et se complètent à la fois, l’un ne pouvant pas agir sans l’autre. C’est dans ce contexte que s’insère l’ouvrage de Gerald. Comme Robert Bartlett le rappelle, son écriture ethnographique était alors extrêmement innovante 8. Fort inhabituel en cette période médiévale, ce type d’ouvrage amène un certain nombre de questions, notamment d’ordre toponymique. En effet, quel traitement Gerald réserve-t-il aux noms propres ? Je me propose d’analyser dans cet article la manière dont Gerald aborde la question de la dénomination, car nommer la nature, c’est en définir la nature même. Dans un premier temps, j’examinerai la manière dont Gerald nomme les éléments de la nature, en m’attardant sur les éléments naturels, rivières, montagnes ou autres îles (nombreuses dans l’ouvrage 9) et sur la faune endémique de l’île. Je considérerai également le rapport toponymique entre l’humain et l’animal. Je tenterai alors de définir le rapport que Gerald entretint avec la dénomination de la nature 10.

Nommer l’île

Alors que Gerald commence sa topographie par la description du positionnement de l’Irlande en donnant des dimensions et des repères géographiques précis, il ne fournit aucune explication sur l’étymologie même du terme Irlande, qui s’avère être anglais. L’île est alors divisée en plusieurs royaumes et l’Irlande en tant que telle n’existe que sur le plan géographique, non politique 11. C’est curieusement à la fin de son ouvrage que le chroniqueur s’attarde sur cet aspect. En effet, Gerald y revient sur l’histoire et la colonisation de l’île. Gerald évoque ainsi les origines du terme Hiberniae 12, terme latin, issu du grec, qui désigne l’Irlande depuis

7. Robert Delort, « L’homme et la nature au Moyen Âge. Paléoenvironnement des sociétés européennes », in L’homme et la nature au Moyen Âge : paléoenvironnement des sociétés occidentales (Actes du Ve Congrès international d’archéologie médiévale, Grenoble, 6-9 octobre 1993), Michel Colardelle (dir.), Caen, Société d’archéologie médiévale, 1996, p. 9. 8. Robert Bartlett, Gerald of Wales…, p. 13. 9. Nolwena Monnier, « L’île dans les chroniques de l’espace Plantagenêt : du mythe à la réalité, du lieu commun au lieu peu commun », in Le lieu commun, Jacqueline Bel, Marc Rolland (dir.), Aix-la-Chapelle, Shaker Verlag (Les cahiers du littoral ; 23), 2017, p. 141-156. 10. Voir le très intéressant article de Stefan Zimmer, « A Medieval Linguist : Gerald de Barri », Études celtiques, nº 35, 2003, p. 313-350, qui s’attarde sur le traitement de la langue galloise dans les ouvrages de Gerald sur le Pays de Galles. 11. L’Irlande est alors une série de royaumes, plus ou moins unifiés sous l’autorité d’un haut roi. On pourra consulter Olivier Viron, « Géopolitique de l’Irlande médiévale (600-1200) », Hypothèses, vol. 5, nº 1, 2002, p. 27-38, qui présente plusieurs cartes montrant le découpage politique de l’île. 12. Gerald of Wales, Giraldi Cambrensis opera, vol. V, Topographia Hibernica et Expugnatio Hibernica, James Francis Dimock (éd.), Londres, Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1867, p. 146. Il sera désormais fait référence à cet ouvrage sous le titre Topographia Hibernica. 34 Nolwena Monnier l’Antiquité. La première mention latine apparaît dans l’ouvrage Geographia (150 de notre ère) de Ptolémée 13. Chez Tacite, dans son livre Agricola (98 de notre ère), on trouve la forme latine la plus proche de celle que nous connaissons : Hibernia 14. Ces auteurs se sont appuyés sur un terme proto-goïdélique pour le décliner en latin, Īweriū 15, qui signifie « terre de l’hiver » 16. Pourtant, Gerald évoque également le peuple des Heberus et la rivière espagnole Hiberus pour expliquer l’étymologie du nom, ramenant l’origine de l’île et de son peuple à la péninsule ibérique 17. Gerald évoque ensuite les termes Gaideli et Scoti pour désigner le peuple de l’île. Si aujourd’hui la distinction entre Irlandais, Gallois, Écossais et Bretons s’appuie sur des désignations plus politiques et géographiques que culturelles et ethniques, les termes employés par Gerald n’avaient pas la même valeur au cours de la période médiévale. En effet, alors que nous serions tentés d’associer le terme Scoti au peuple des Scots et donc à l’Écosse, ce mot avait un sens beaucoup plus large 18. Il désignait l’ensemble des peuples gaéliques de la région : Irlande mais aussi Écosse, Pays de Galles et Bretagne, désignant donc en même temps les futurs Bretons de Petite Bretagne qui ne tardèrent pas à immigrer sur le continent. Le terme ne désigna le peuple d’Écosse que plus tard 19. Quant à l’origine du mot, la polémique fait encore rage. Aonghas MacCoinnich, au XIXe siècle, suggéra que le terme venait du gaélique sgaothaich signifiant «foule » ou « horde » 20. Charles Oman pense que c’est une dérivation du terme scuit, signi- fiant « une personne coupée », ce qui fait allusion aux pilleurs qui auraient tranché la gorge de plus d’un autochtone 21. Philip Freeman évoque une origine grecque du mot, skotos, qui signifie « ténèbres, obscurité » 22. Enfin, le mot a également été rapproché du mot anglais scot et du vieux norois skot 23. Il ferait alors référence à une coutume liée à l’héritage des terres. Le roi suédois Olaf, au XIe siècle, aurait été qualifié de roi skot 24. Mais Gerald, lui, fait dériver ces deux noms de personnages

13. Claude Ptolémée, Traité de géographie de Claude Ptolémée, Nicolas B. Halma (trad.), Paris, Eberhart, 1828, p. 167. 14. Tacite, Dialogus, Agricola, Germania, William Peterson, Maurice Hutton (éd. et trad.), Londres – New York, W. Heinemann – The Macmillan Co., 1914, p. 210. 15. Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture, James P. Mallory, Douglas Q. Adams (dir.), Londres – Chicago, Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997, p. 194. 16. « Hibernia », Online Etymology Dictionary. 17. Gerald of Wales, Topographia Hibernica, p. 146-147. 18. Nicholas Evans, « Scotti / Scots », in Seán Duffy,Medieval Ireland : An Encyclopedia, p. 421-422. On pourra également consulter Les barbares, Bruno Dumézil (dir.), Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 2016. 19. Seán Duffy,Medieval Ireland : An Encyclopedia, p. 698. 20. Aonghas MacCoinnich, Eachdraidh na h-Alba, Glasgow, G. Mac-Na-Ceardadh, 1867, p. 18-19. 21. Charles Oman, England before the Norman Conquest, Londres, Methuen, 1910, p. 157. 22. Philip Freeman, Ireland and the Classical World, Austin, University of Texas, 2001, p. 93. 23. Jacob Truedson Demitz, Throne of a Thousand Years : Chronicles as Told by Erik, Son of Riste, Ludvika – Los Angeles, Ristesson Ent., 1996, p. 9. 24. Lars O. Lagerqvist, Nils Åberg, Öknamn och tillnamn på nordiska stormän och kungligheter, Boda Kyrkby, Vincent, 1997, p. 23. Nommer la nature : toponymie de la nature… 35 historiques : Gaideli serait dérivé de Gaidelus, petit-fils de Phenius (roi scythe) et de Scotia, son épouse 25. En réalité, Gerald n’invente rien : cette double référence grecque et espagnole se retrouve dans l’Historia Brittonum (IXe-XIe siècles) 26. Par ailleurs, les Lebor Gabála Érenn (VIIIe/IXe siècles) font venir les Gaëls en Irlande en passant par l’Espagne 27. Gerald ne fait donc que reprendre ici des éléments déjà énoncés avant lui : la supposée origine grecque des royaumes d’Angleterre et de France était connue et le chroniqueur n’innove guère sur ce point. À présent que l’île est nommée, tournons-nous plus précisément vers la nature irlandaise. Elle est omniprésente dans l’ouvrage de Gerald même si la flore y est quasiment absente. Seules les récoltes, nature maîtrisée, semblent l’intéresser. Le chroniqueur nous donne néanmoins des éléments précis sur d’autres aspects de la nature, citant de nombreux lieux : montagnes, îles et rivières. Il est intéressant d’examiner la manière dont Gerald les nomma.

Nommer les îles, lacs et autres montagnes

Dès le chapitre II, Gerald mentionne l’île de , précisant immédiatement qu’elle est appelée Torach : « Columbinam quae Thorach dicitur insulam » (« l’île de Columba qu’on appelle aussi l’île Torach ») 28. L’île accueillait une église consa- crée au saint. Gerald ne nous donne aucune explication sur le terme Torach. Le terme viendrait du vieil irlandais Tor qui signifiait « une colline escarpée » ou « un affleurement de rochers ». Aujourd’hui, l’île a retrouvé son nom d’origine, anglicisé, Tory Island. Le nom de Toraigh coexiste néanmoins : Oileán Thoraí (« île de Tory ») ou Oileán Thúr Rí 29. C’est ce terme qui apparaît dans les Lebor Gabála Érenn. Un peu plus loin, Gerald évoque l’île de Man :

De Mania insula ; quae, ratione venenosorum vermium, quos admittit, Britanniae censetur applicanda. Est insula quaedam, inter minores insulas non modica, quae nunc Manna vocatur, antiquitus tamen Ewania dicta, medio ut asserunt libramine inter boreales Hibeniae et Britanniae partes porrecta 30.

25. John Carey, « The Ancestry of Fénius Farsaid », Celtica, nº 21, 1990, p. 104-112. 26. John Carey, The Irish National Origin-Legend : Synthetic Pseudohistory, Cambridge, University of Cambridge Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, 1994, p. 5-6. Anonyme, l’Historia Brittonum est un ensemble de textes composés entre le IXe et le XIe siècle. On pourra consulter sur cette difficulté de datation Léon Fleuriot, Les origines de la Bretagne : l’émigration [1980], Paris, Payot, 1988, p. 248 ; et Historia Brittonum, Edmond Faral (éd.), New York, AMS Press, 1973. 27. John Carey, The Irish National Origin-Legend…, p. 16. 28. Gerald of Wales, Topographia Hibernica, p. 24, notre traduction (ainsi que toutes les autres citations latines de cet article). 29. Robin Fox, The Tory Islanders : A People of the Celtic Fringe, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1978. 30. Gerald of Wales, Topographia Hibernica, p. 97. 36 Nolwena Monnier

À propos de l’île de Man, laquelle est supposée appartenir à la [Grande-] Bretagne puisqu’elle accueille des reptiles venimeux. Parmi les plus petites îles, l’une d’entre elle est plutôt grande. Elle porte le nom de Man mais dans l’Antiquité, elle s’appelait Ewania. Il est dit qu’elle est équidistante du nord de l’Irlande et de la [Grande-] Bretagne.

Le nom vieil-irlandais de l’île est Manau ou Mano. On peut également trouver la forme Manaw. Cette appellation se retrouve dans le toponyme Manaw Gododdin, une zone qui recouvrait l’actuelle région d’Édimbourg 31. Les premières mentions de ce nom apparaissent dans l’Antiquité, chez Jules César (54 av. J.-C.), Pline l’ancien (Ier siècle), Ptolémée (IIe siècle) ou encore Orose (416). Beaucoup plus tardivement, aux Xe et XIe siècles, l’île est aussi mentionnée dans les Sagas des Islandais sous l’appellation Mön 32. Gerald, lui, nous livre ce qu’il nous présente comme son ancien nom, venu de l’Antiquité : Ewania. Robert Shaw 33 cite à deux reprises le terme dans son ouvrage, une première fois en évoquant le « the chieftain ofEwania » puis une seconde fois en expliquant « […] he was king of Ulster, or Ewania […] ». Si la première citation se réfère à la période légendaire du roi Eremon, venu d’Espagne pour conquérir l’Irlande, elle reste assez obscure. Le second passage permet de mieux comprendre : située au large de l’Ulster, l’île de Man faisait sans nul doute partie d’Ewania. Néanmoins, nous n’en connaissons pas l’étymologie. D’après Erik Björkman, Ewania pourrait venir du terme vieil-anglais signifiant « regretter » 34. John Lynch et Matthew Kelly évoquent le terme Ebonia 35 que Gerald, selon ces auteurs, aurait transformé en Ewania 36. Ewania pourrait venir de Ewan qui signifie « jeune » en gaélique ou de efen, le vieil anglais pour « calme, harmonieux » 37. Il est bien difficile de trancher entre toutes ces pistes. Gerald décrit ensuite les lacs et les montagnes présents sur l’île. Le chroniqueur associe des personnages « historiques » – les trois fils de Bartholanus, le deuxième envahisseur de l’île – à des noms de lacs et de montagnes. Ainsi explique-t-il que Lagilinus donna son nom à un lac (Loch Laighlinne) et que Salanga donna son nom à une haute montagne qui domine la mer face à l’Angleterre. Gerald précise que cette montagne est de son temps appelée « montagne de saint Dominique » puisque ce dernier y construisit un monastère 38. Enfin, Ruturugus donna son nom à un lac

31. Celtic Culture : A Historical Encyclopedia, John T. Koch (dir.), Santa Barbara, ABC-CLIO, 2006, p. 676. 32. R. H. Kinvig, The Isle of Man : A Social, Cultural and Political History, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 1975, p. 18-19. 33. Robert Shaw, Historical Origins, Saint Louis, Becktold & Cie, 1889, p. 56 et 69. 34. Erik Björkman, Scandinavian Loan-Words in Middle English [Uppsala, E. Karras, 1900], Londres, Forgotten Books, 2016, p. 46. 35. Terme que l’on peut trouver dans la version irlandaise de l’Historia Brittonum. 36. John Lynch, Cambrensis Eversus, The History of Ancient Ireland Vindicated, Matthew Kelly (éd.), Dublin, The Celtic Society, 1848, p. 155 ; The Irish Version of the Historia Britonum of Nennius, James H. Todd, Algernon Herbert (éd.), Dublin, Irish Archeological Society, 1848, p. 28. 37. « Even », Online Etymology Dictionary. 38. Gerald of Wales, Topographia Hibernica, p. 141 : « Cujus ad radices quia longis post temporibus sanctus Dominicus nobile monasterium construxerat, mons Dominici jam usitatius nomen liabet » Nommer la nature : toponymie de la nature… 37

(Loch Rudraige) 39. En réalité, Gerald ne livre, une nouvelle fois, aucun élément nouveau. Tout ceci est présent dans des ouvrages plus anciens : les Lebor Gabála Érenn mais aussi dans l’Historia Brittonum, dans les Annals of the Four Masters (compilation entre 1632 et 1636 mais textes, entre autres, des XIe et XIIe siècles) 40, et dans le Book of Leinster (compilation de 1160). D’après Nicholas Carlisle, Salanga serait devenue Slieve na Domangaird (slieve signifiant «montagne » en irlandais tout comme chairn) puis enfin Carnsore Point (Carn tSóir ou Ceann an Chairn en irlandais) et se situerait à l’extrême sud-est du comté de Wexford 41. Le terme Sliabh Slainge faisait référence au personnage que Gerald mentionne. D’après la légende, l’endroit est le lieu de son décès et de sa sépulture 42. Dans cette partie, Gerald reste constamment imprécis. Il ne livre aucun détail, aucune explication sur les noms qu’il mentionne mais s’en sert uniquement de repères au fil de son ouvrage. Nous allons voir dans la suite de cet article que Gerald procède différemment en ce qui concerne les noms des rivières. Ces rivières sont des composantes essentielles de l’Irlande et semblent être très importantes pour Gerald, qui détaille beaucoup plus ces explications, comme nous allons le voir. Le traitement des noms propres est aussi différent par rapport à la partie précédente. Enfin, les références culturelles locales y sont beaucoup plus présentes.

Nommer les rivières

Gerald of Wales mentionne de nombreuses rivières dans son ouvrage. Le cha- pitre VII, « De fluminibus novem principalinus ; et aliis pluribus nuper emersis » (« À propos des rivières principales ; et d’autres plus récemment apparues ») 43 lui permet de mentionner les neuf principales rivières d’Irlande. Le chroniqueur les situe géographiquement mais ne dit rien sur l’origine de leurs noms. Avenlifius, terme repris dans des ouvrages plus tardifs 44, est la Liffey. Le motaven désigne une rivière. L’ancien nom de la Liffey,An Ruirthech, signifie « débit violent ». La rivière Banna, terme qu’utilise Gerald, ne pose pas de réels problèmes puisque son nom moderne est Bann 45. Son nom viendrait de ban « blanc » et abainn « rivière »

(« Néanmoins, à présent, cette dernière est plus usuellement appelée montagne de saint Dominique, puisque saint Dominique y construisit plus tard un beau monastère à son pied »). 39. En réalité, cet endroit n’est pas tout à fait un lac, comme le rappelle John J. O’Meara : c’est la baie de Dundrum dans le comté de Down. 40. Annals of the by the Four Masters, from the Earliest Period to the Year 1616, John O’Donovan (éd.), Dublin, Hodges, Smith and Co., 1856. 41. Nicholas Carlisle, A Topographical Dictionary of Ireland, Londres, W. Savage, 1810, p. 160. 42. Sam Moore, The Archaeology of Slieve Donard : A Cultural Biography of Ulster’s Highest Mountain, Downpatrick, Down County Museum, 2012, p. 17-18. 43. Gerald of Wales, Topographia Hibernica, p. 30. 44. Edmund Campion, A Historie of Ireland : Written in the Yeare 1571, Londres, Forgotten Books, 2017, p. 2. 45. Owen Connellan, « On the , with Derivations of Their Names », Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, vol. 10, 1866-1869, p. 445 ; Topographia Hibernica, p. 30, 91. 38 Nolwena Monnier puisqu’elle passait par des carrières de craie. Moadus, An Muaidh, est la Moy 46. Gerald en a latinisé le nom comme il l’a fait avec la rivière Slicheius. An Gharbhóg, le nom irlandais de cette rivière viendrait de garbh óg qui signifierait « jeune, agité ». Mais la formulation Sligeach, qui signifie « abondant en coquillages », serait un nom encore plus ancien, l’un des plus vieux attestés en Irlande. Le nom pourrait égale- ment venir de Slighe, terme gaélique qui désigne une route importante 47. Luvius, quant à elle, serait la rivière Lee. L’origine de ce nom pourrait provenir du terme Laoi qui dériverait du terme Corca Luighe, le nom du fils d’un noble milésien, donc grec 48. C’est donc bien le terme latin que Gerald utilise dans son texte. Finnus est la rivière Finn, Abhainn na Finne en irlandais, qui signifie « rivière de l’Ouest ». La Mordanus de Gerald pourrait être la rivière Mourne, An Mughdhorn en irlandais. De son côté Samairus est l’Erne 49, dans le comté du , dont le nom vient d’une princesse légendaire, Eirne. Le terme utilisé par Gerald proviendrait d’une partie spécifique de cette rivière. Comme l’explique Patrick McKay :

The original of the Fermanagh / Donegal portion of the river was Samhaoir and this forms the final element of Inis Samhaoir “island of the Samhaoir”, a small island in the river close to Ballyshannon, now known as Inish Samer or Fish Island 50.

C’est sans nul doute ce terme que Gerald latinise. Selon James Ware, la Saverennus mentionnée par Gerald est la rivière Daurona, pour laquelle il donne deux étymo- logies : aven-more (en réalité, An Abha Mhór), qu’il traduit par « grande rivière », et Dav-rian, « la rivière reine » 51. Alors qu’il n’a donné aucun détail sur les noms des premières rivières citées, Gerald poursuit sa topographie et explique l’origine du nom de trois autres rivières. Gerald dit qu’elles prennent leur source au pied de la montagne Bladma puis coulent par Leighlin pour Berva, par Ossory pour Eoyrus et par Ardfinan et Tibraccia pour Suirus. Mais qui sont ces « trois sœurs » comme les appelle Gerald ? Les trois rivières qui coulent dans cette région se nomment aujourd’hui la Nore, la Barrow et la Suir et portent toujours ce surnom. Le nom irlandais de la Nore était An Fheoir. Son origine pourrait provenir de féar, mot signifiant « herbe ». Eoyrus serait donc une déformation et une latinisation du mot Fheoir. Le nom irlandais de la Barrow 52 était An Bhearú, du proto-celtique 53 boru qui signifie « bulle » et peut être associé

46. The Genealogies, Tribes, and Customs of Hy-Fiachrach, Commonly Called O’Dowda’s Country, John O’Donovan (éd. et trad.), Dublin, Irish Archaeological Society, 1844, p. 410. 47. « Slighe », Glosbe Online Dictionary. 48. Thomas Mowbray Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 186. 49. Charles T. Martin, The Record Interpreter : A Collection of Abbreviations, Latin Words and Names Used in Historical Manuscripts and Records, Londres, Reeves & Turner, 1892. 50. Patrick McKay, A Dictionary of Ulster Place-Names, , Queen’s University, 2007, p. 67. 51. James Ware, The Whole Works of Sir James Ware Concerning Ireland. Revised and Improved, Walter Harris (éd.), Dublin, S. Powell, 1745, vol. II, p. 39. 52. D’autres orthographes peuvent être trouvées : Berba, Birga, Baruwe et Berrowe. 53. Le proto-celtique est une proto-langue reconstituée à partir de toutes les langues celtiques et sup- posée les précéder. Pour plus de détails, on pourra notamment consulter Frederik H. H. Kortlandt, Nommer la nature : toponymie de la nature… 39 au dieu Borvo, dieu de la mythologie celte gauloise des minéraux et des sources 54 ; celui de la Suir était Siúr, l’inversion des lettres ayant été effectuée en anglais par erreur ; le vieil irlandais siur signifiait « sœur » 55. Gerald s’attarde sur une autre rivière, la Slana, nous expliquant qu’elle passe par Wexford. Son nom irlandais est Abhainn na Sláine et signifie « rivière de la guérison ». Cette rivière est en fait la Slaney 56. Le chroniqueur poursuit en men- tionnant la Boandus qui passe par Meath. Le nom irlandais en est An Bhóinn ou Abhainn na Bóinne. Elle est, là encore, mentionnée par Ptolémée. Boann serait une déesse ou une reine. D’autres légendes prétendent que c’est dans cette rivière que Fionn mac Cumhail captura et / ou goûta au saumon de la connaissance 57. Gerald poursuit sa latinisation des noms de rivières lorsqu’il évoque l’Avenmorus qui passe par Lismore dont le nom irlandais est An Abha Mhór qui signifie « la grande rivière ». Gerald nous parle ensuite de la Sinenus qui passe par Limerick. Abha na Sionainne, an tSionainn ou an tSionna en irlandais, le nom de cette rivière, le Shannon, fait référence à la déesse de la mythologie irlandaise Sionna 58. Mentionné une fois de plus par Ptolémée, le nom trouverait son origine dans le proto-indo-européen sai- 59. Gerald est très exhaustif en ce qui concerne les rivières citées et sa démarche est constante : les noms qu’il utilise dans son ouvrage sont systématiquement latinisés à partir des appellations gaéliques ou de ses sources antiques grecques. Un autre aspect de la nature intéresse également Gerald : la faune. Cette dernière est en effet très présente dans l’ouvrage du chroniqueur mais les références changent à nouveau. Alors que les rivières étaient directement tournées vers le passé celte de l’île et ses légendes, les animaux sont, quant à eux, liés à des personnages religieux et historiques comme nous allons pouvoir le constater dans la partie suivante.

Nommer la faune

Gerald est très précis dans son ouvrage sur la faune endémique de l’île. Il intitule ainsi l’un de ses chapitres : « De avibus, earumque defectibus » (« À propos des

Italo-Celtic Origins and Prehistoric Development of the , Amsterdam – New York, Rodopi, 2007 ; et Ranko Matasović, Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Celtic, Leyde – Boston, Brill, 2009. 54. Garrett S. Olmsted, The Gods of the Celts and the Indo-Europeans, Innsbruck, Verlag des Instituts für Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Innsbruck, 1994, p. 427. 55. « Sister », Online Etymology Dictionary. 56. Anthony Durham, document publié le 8 février 2019 dans le cadre du projet de recherche « Ancient Geographical Names », romaneranames.uk. 57. Thomas W. Rolleston, The High Deeds of Finn, and Other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland, Londres, G. G. Harrap and Co., 1910, p. 106-115. 58. Thomas F. O’Rahilly, Early Irish History and Mythology [1946], Dublin, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1971, p. 4. 59. « Sinew », Online Etymology Dictionary. La racine sai- signifie « attacher, nouer ». 40 Nolwena Monnier oiseaux, et de ceux qui sont manquants ») 60, manifestation claire de l’orientation propagandiste de l’ouvrage : Gerald est un fin observateur. Il décrit physiquement certaines espèces mais s’intéresse également à leur comportement qu’il décrit en détail : manière de s’alimenter, périodes de reproduction, plumages, etc. C’est une véritable observation éthologique à laquelle se livre Gerald mais certains éléments sont plus problématiques que d’autres. Gerald légitime en effet des phénomènes naturels en les mettant en parallèle avec des personnages historiques réels. Il attribue également des noms à certains animaux en relation avec les premiers saints de l’île. Ce sont ces points que je propose à présent d’examiner en détail.

Lien entre la faune et des personnages historiques

Gerald insiste clairement au fil de son ouvrage sur les liens entre animaux et person- nages historiques ; ces derniers servaient de repères. Gerald explique qu’un cheval devient fou après avoir mangé des céréales volées et en meurt. Le soldat propriétaire d’un autre cheval ayant consommé la même nourriture meurt brutalement éga- lement, sans raison biologique apparente 61. Pour authentifier l’histoire rapportée, le chroniqueur mentionne Hugh de Lacy. La famille de ce dernier, originaire de Lassy dans le Calvados, quitta la Normandie pour accompagner Guillaume le Conquérant. Hugh de Lacy père (avant 1135-1186) devint seigneur de Meath en 1172 après sa nomination par Henri II Plantagenêt. Son plus jeune fils, Hugh (après 1179-1242), fut nommé, par Jean sans Terre, premier duc d’Ulster et vice- roi d’Irlande 62, position qu’il occupa de 1205 à 1210. De la même manière, Gerald rattache la mention d’un loup qui parle à un personnage historique qu’il connaît bien : le prince Jean, qu’il a accompagné en Irlande 63. Le chroniqueur précise que

60. Gerald of Wales, Topographia Hibernica, p. 34. On peut trouver un autre exemple distinctio I, capitula XXVIII, p. 62 : « De vermibus, eorumque defectibus ; et venenosis omnibus hic deficientibus » (« À propos des reptiles et de ceux qui sont manquants et comment aucun reptile venimeux ne peut être trouvé sur l’île »). 61. Gerald of Wales, Topographia Hibernica, p. 134 : « Iterum exercitu ibidem pernoctante, annonam quam ab ecclesiis et molendino passim rapuerant Hugo de Laci totam restitui fecit, praeter pauculam avenae particulam de molendino surreptam, quam coram dextrariis suis duo milites occulte reli- querant. Quorum unus, in insaniam versus, eadem nocte in stabulo confracto cerebro interiit. Alter vero mane, milite qui ei insidebat alios qui annonam reddiderant super ficta religione deridente, subita et improvisa morte juxta latus Hugonis de Laci, vidente et admirante majori exercitus parte, obiter occubuit » (« Alors que son armée s’était regroupée pour la nuit au même endroit, Hugh de Lacy ordonna à ses hommes de rendre les céréales qu’ils avaient volées un peu partout dans les églises et les moulins. Ils s’exécutèrent mais gardèrent une petite quantité de grains que deux soldats déposèrent clandestinement devant leurs chevaux. L’un des chevaux devint fou et mourut cette nuit-là en s’assommant dans l’écurie. Quant à l’autre soldat, alors qu’il se moquait de ses camarades qui avaient ramené le grain par simple superstition, il mourut soudainement et de manière inattendue le lendemain matin, aux côtés de Hugh de Lacy. La grande majorité de l’armée put le constater et en fut abasourdie »). 62. Charles Kingston O’ Mahony, The Viceroys of Ireland, Londres, J. Long, 1912, p. 16. 63. Gerald of Wales, Topographia Hibernica, p. 101 : « Circa triennium ante adventum domini Johannis in Hiberniam » (« Environ trois ans avant l’arrivée du seigneur Jean en Irlande »). Nommer la nature : toponymie de la nature… 41 l’épisode qu’il rapporte se situe avant l’arrivée de Jean en Irlande. Gerald précise également que l’abbé saint Natalis (ou Naal, mort en 564) serait responsable de la malédiction 64. Nous pouvons trouver un autre exemple un peu plus loin dans l’ouvrage. Gerald parle en effet d’une femme barbue ayant une crinière dans le dos, qui appartient à la cour de « Duvenald, roi de Limerick » 65. Duvenald of Limerick ou of Twomund (aujourd’hui, le comté de Clare) se nommait Domnall Mór Ua Briain en irlandais et fut roi de Twomund, du Munster et de Limerick de 1168 à 1194. Gerald situe donc le phénomène dans le temps et dans l’espace. Nous pouvons observer la même formulation lorsque Gerald mentionne un homme à moitié veau 66 qui vivait aux alentours de Wicklow, au temps de Maurice FitzGerald. Lord de Maynooth, Naas et Llanstephan, Maurice FitzGerald est né autour de 1105 et mort en 1176. Baron gallo-normand, il participa activement à l’invasion de l’Irlande 67. Un autre exemple apparaît : une femme et un bouc ont une relation à la cour de Rotheric (1116-1198), roi du Connacht (1156-1183), connu sous le nom irlandais de Ruaidri mac Toirdelbach Ua Conchobair : « Rothericus, rex Connactiae, hircum habebat domesticum album, tam pilositate praelonga quam cornuum elatione suo in genere conspicuum » (« Rotherick, roi du Connacht, avait une chèvre blanche apprivoisée dont le pelage et les cornes étaient particulièrement longs ») 68. Enfin, un autre animal est mentionné par Gerald, une grenouille, non endémique, qui sème le trouble et annonce le malheur. Là encore la scène est ancrée dans la réalité : Duvenald est à nouveau mentionné – c’est d’ailleurs lui qui constate le mauvais présage – ainsi que Robert Poer (mort en 1178), gouverneur de Wexford et de Waterford, où se déroule la scène 69. L’existence même de tous ces animaux au comportement déviant (physique ambigu, accouplement hors normes, animaux ensorcelés ou annonciateurs de mal- heur) est crédibilisée par Gerald grâce à leur association avec des personnages dont la réalité historique est bel et bien avérée. Gerald navigue donc dans son ouvrage entre croyances celtes traditionnelles et ancrage dans la réalité historique de son époque.

64. Ibid., p. 102 : « Unde, quolibet septennio, per imprecationem sancti cujusdam, Natalis scilicet abbatis, duo, videlicet mas et femina, tam a formis quam finibus exulare coguntur » (« Depuis, tous les sept ans, à cause de la malédiction d’un certain saint, en réalité l’abbé Natalis, deux personnes, un homme et une femme, sont contraints de quitter non seulement leur pays mais aussi leurs corps humains »). 65. Ibid., p. 107 : « Duvenaldus, rex Limericensis, mulierem habebat umbilico tenus barbatam. Quae et cristam habuit a collo superius per spinam deorsum, in modum pulli annui, crine vestitam » (« Duvenald, roi de Limerick, avait une femme dont la barbe lui arrivait à la taille. Elle avait également une crête qui s’étendait de son cou au bas de sa colonne vertébrale, comme un poulain d’un an. Elle était couverte de cheveux »). 66. Ibid., p. 108 : « In partibus de Wikingelo, tempore quo Mauricius Giraldi filius terram illam et castrum obtinuerat, visus fuit homo prodigiosus, si tamen eum hominem dici fas est » (« Dans les alentours de Wicklow, à l’époque où Maurice FitzGerald prit possession de ce territoire et du château, un homme extraordinaire a été vu, enfin, si l’on peut appeler cela un homme »). 67. George Cokayne, The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom, Extant, Extinct or Dormant (D to F), 1re éd., Londres, G. Bell & Sons, 1890, vol. III, p. 358. 68. Gerald of Wales, Topographia Hibernica, p. 110. 69. Ibid., p. 349. 42 Nolwena Monnier

Il est important de mentionner que Gerald ne se préoccupe que peu de la flore irlandaise. En effet, on ne trouve qu’un seul exemple de cette catégorie d’élément naturel. Il s’agit d’une plante céréalière, et Gerald ne semble que très peu s’inté- resser à la flore endémique. L’évêque de Cork empêche le blé de pousser dans un qui lui a été dérobé par un soldat. L’année suivante, c’est du seigle qui pousse spontanément à sa place. Là encore, le phénomène naturel est ancré : « Cum apud Corcagiam miles quidam terram Sancti Miraculous Phinbarri » (« À Cork, un soldat prit la terre de saint Finbarr ») 70. Saint Finbarr est la principale cathédrale de Cork, qui date du XVIIIe siècle, mais le lieu est consacré depuis le VIIe siècle et une cathédrale médiévale se trouvait en lieu et place de l’actuel bâtiment. Curieusement, l’évêque n’est pas nommé clairement. Six candidats s’offrent à nous mais comme Gerald ne donne aucun indice temporel, il est difficile de trancher 71. En situant précisément les événements qu’il mentionne par une date (certes parfois approximative) et un personnage connu – soit des membres des grandes familles ayant participé à la conquête de l’Irlande, soit des nobles locaux –, Gerald ancre ces phénomènes naturels dans la réalité. Il en profite pour assoir idéologique- ment la présence des Normands en Irlande, liant croyances païennes irlandaises, religion traditionnelle chrétienne et domination anglo-normande. Gerald utilise la nature comme un outil de propagande mais oscille entre tradition irlandaise et fidélité à la couronne anglaise sans parvenir vraiment à se positionner de manière évidente. Certes, cet ouvrage de propagande est en faveur du colonisateur anglais 72 mais les croyances autochtones ne sont pas systématiquement niées ou dénigrées.

Animaux associés aux saints de l’île Un autre phénomène récurrent dans l’ouvrage de Gerald est l’association d’animaux avec les premiers saints (VIe-VIIIe siècles) de l’île. Le fruit de saint Kevin n’est autre que celui du saule 73. Il permet à un élève du saint de guérir. On le sait, le saule contient de l’acide salicylique ou acide spirique dont on a tiré l’aspirine moderne. Aucun miracle dans ce cas mais juste une utilisation intelligente des plantes. Gerald rapporte également la légende selon laquelle saint Kevin est souvent représenté un oiseau posé sur la main. L’oiseau est un symbole divin, c’est celui qui fait passer les informations envoyées par Dieu. Il paraît donc logique que le saint ait cherché à le protéger. Saint Colman et sainte Brigid sont également associés à des oiseaux 74. Le lac où résident les oiseaux de saint Colman devient noir et sale quand ils le quittent. Par ailleurs, ils n’y reviennent que lorsque ce qui les menaçait, eux ou des

70. Gerald of Wales, Topographia Hibernica, p. 131. 71. Ua Menngoráin (mort en 1147), Gilla Áedha Ua Maigín (avant 1148-1172), Gregorius Ua h-Aedha (fl. 1173-77-1182), Reginaldus (c. 1182-1187), Aicher (c. 1187-1188) et Murchad Ua h-Áedha (avant 1192-1206). 72. « This process can aptly be called “feudal colonialism” » (Robert Bartlett, Gerald of Wales…, p. 11). 73. Gerald of Wales, Topographia Hibernica, p. 113. 74. Ibid., p. 117 (pour Colman), p. 120 (pour Brigid). Nommer la nature : toponymie de la nature… 43 gens d’Église, s’est éloigné. Ces oiseaux semblent également empêcher la viande de cuire. Gerald le prouve en racontant une histoire, citant deux témoins, Robert FitzStephen (mort en 1183, oncle de Gerald par sa grand-mère Nest) et Dermot, roi de Leinster (1110-1171). Un soldat ne peut cuire sa viande et finit par s’apercevoir qu’un « oiseau de saint Colman » est dans son plat. Une fois l’oiseau libéré (il n’est donc pas mort !) la viande cuit sans difficulté. Le soldat, lui, meurt dans la misère peu de temps après. Dans le cas de l’oiseau de sainte Brigid, Gerald explique que ce sont les gens de la région de Kildare qui associèrent cet oiseau avec la sainte. C’était un « falco quidam egregius » (« un faucon assez exceptionnel »), ce qui pourrait paraître plus prestigieux que les corbeaux de saint Kevin ou les sarcelles de saint Colman mais il est l’oiseau des nobles, non pas celui du peuple qui peut transmettre la parole de Dieu. C’est un oiseau solitaire qui interdit aux autres de pénétrer dans son terri- toire. Gerald conte sa fin en évoquant à nouveau un événement contemporain : le départ du prince Jean du territoire. Alors que, jusque-là, l’oiseau avait contribué à la renommée du sanctuaire de sainte Brigid, il se fait tuer par un paysan armé d’un bâton, mort bien peu glorieuse pour une bête décrite comme assez extraordinaire. Et Gerald de conclure que chacun doit se méfier de la prospérité car elle peut cesser sans crier gare. Saint Nannan et saint Yvor semblent être moins bien pourvus puisque l’un est associé à des puces et l’autre à des rats 75. En ce qui concerne saint Nannan, Gerald évoque clairement une intervention divine. Il explique que les puces furent chassées jusqu’à une prairie voisine et déplore que personne, ni homme, ni animal, ne puisse plus y aller. Alors que Gerald reste géographiquement flou en ce qui concerne le miracle de saint Nannan (un village dans le Connacht), il est beaucoup plus précis en ce qui concerne saint Yvor : le miracle qui lui est associé a eu lieu dans le Leinster, à un endroit appelé Ferneginan. Il explique que le saint jeta un sort, notamment parce que les rats mangeaient ses livres, et précise qu’ils ne peuvent plus vivre à cet endroit, même s’ils y sont amenés. En jetant un sort, saint Yvor ressemble plus à un sorcier châtiant celui qui a abîmé ses livres qu’à un saint débarrassant un endroit de la vermine par intervention divine, comme l’avait fait saint Nannan. Par ailleurs, Gerald mentionne que saint Patrick a chassé les serpents d’Irlande 76, même si le chroniqueur reste sceptique sur ce point et pense qu’en fait, l’île n’en a jamais abrité 77. Les études menées sur des fossiles par le naturaliste Nigel Monaghan, du National Museum of Ireland de Dublin, ont pu déterminer que les serpents n’auraient jamais pu survivre dans une Irlande glaciaire 78.

75. Ibid, p. 119 (pour Nannan), p. 120 (pour Yvor). 76. Ibid., distinctio I, capitula XXVIII, p. 62. 77. Sans citer saint Patrick, Bède fait la même constatation quelques siècles avant Gerald. Voir Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, André Crépin, Michael Lapidge, Pierre Monat, Philippe Robin (éd.), Paris, Cerf, 2005, p. 10. 78. Nigel Monaghan, « Snakeless in Ireland : Blame Ice Age, Not St. Patrick », National Geographic, en ligne, 16 août 2018. 44 Nolwena Monnier

Il est curieux de noter à quel point ces interventions de saints liées à la faune de l’île sont discutables. En effet, saint Kevin se révèle en réalité n’être qu’un bon herboriste. On ignore la raison pour laquelle les oiseaux miraculeux de saint Colman portent son nom. La mort de l’oiseau de sainte Brigid est assez peu glorieuse. Certes, saint Nannan chasse les puces mais une prairie fertile est condamnée à servir de repère à ces dernières et saint Yvor se venge littéralement des rats qui mangent ses livres. Gerald donne à voir un saint Yvor fort peu chrétien. Quant à Patrick, les doutes émis par Gerald ne donnent pas une image de glorieux libérateur au saint. L’image de ces saints liés à des animaux n’en sort donc pas vraiment grandie et la nature n’a pas ici la valeur positive qui aurait pu permettre aux saints d’exprimer toute leur sainteté. En réalité, tous ces saints proviennent d’une tradition plus folklorique, sans nul doute locale, que religieuse. En effet, ces saints n’ont pas été canonisés au sens propre du terme par l’Église de Rome. Le culte qui leur est dévolu était un culte populaire et local qui mêle naturellement religion chrétienne émergente et croyance merveilleuse païenne. Comme le rappelle Leo Carruthers :

On ne peut qu’être frappé par la quantité de saints anciens qu’on découvre dans toutes les régions des Îles Britanniques. Faut-il le rappeler : la grande majorité des saints des premiers siècles n’ont jamais été canonisés, au sens juridique que ce terme prendra à Rome assez tardivement, à partir du XIe siècle 79.

La religion chrétienne en Irlande s’est imposée en quelque sorte de manière artisanale, grâce à des saints qui ont converti les populations, mais sans l’appui réel – administratif et / ou financier et / ou militaire – de Rome.

Que pouvons-nous conclure de ces quelques pages ? Tout d’abord, certaines orienta- tions se détachent. En effet, Gerald, comme le veut la tradition de l’historiographie au Moyen Âge, reprend des éléments plus anciens. Il s’appuie sur des termes d’auteurs classiques grecs même si rien ne prouve qu’il y ait eu directement accès. Il est probable que ses sources furent des sources latines reprenant des termes d’auteurs grecs. Néanmoins, la volonté de crédibiliser les éléments exposés dans son ouvrage reste la même. Il se fonde également sur des ouvrages médiévaux tels l’Historia Brittonum, les Lebor Gabála Érenn ou encore les Annals of the Four Masters. Enfin, le chroniqueur se réfère à l’histoire ecclésiastique du pays lorsqu’il fait allusion aux saints fondateurs de l’Irlande. Toute cette démarche cherche à authentifier les éléments avancés par Gerald. Quelle conséquence cela a-t-il sur la toponymie de la nature ? En réalité, au-delà de crédibiliser la démarche de l’auteur, cela crée une certaine confusion. En effet, entre noms d’origine gaélique, noms latinisés, noms modernes, Gerald crée un amalgame hétéroclite de termes où l’on peine à détacher une réelle volonté, soit d’utiliser uniquement les termes d’origine, soit de vouloir mettre en avant les termes anglais de l’envahisseur / colonisateur Plantagenêt.

79. Leo Carruthers, « Reconstruire l’Europe : les missions monastiques dans les Îles Britanniques et le retour vers le Continent (Ve-Xe siècles) », Bulletin des anglicistes médiévistes, nº 91, 2018, p. 37. Nommer la nature : toponymie de la nature… 45

Il peut sembler curieux que Gerald le Gallois ne soit pas sensible au – très proche – gaélique d’Irlande. On le sait, le chroniqueur était polyglotte. Il parlait français de naissance mais étudia également à Paris entre 1165 et 1179. Comme le rappelle Robert Bartlett, « His mother tongue was French, his occupational tongue Latin, and he had other languages to take into account too, particularly Welsh and English » 80. Il est possible qu’en tant que clerc et ecclésiastique, Gerald ait appris le grec. Comme l’établit Gilbert Dahan :

Ainsi, la culture occidentale au Moyen Âge, que l’on imagine encore trop souvent repliée sur elle-même et limitée culturellement à la seule langue latine, a été confrontée à de telles interrogations et y a diversement répondu : à des titres divers, avec des objectifs divers, l’arabe, le grec et l’hébreu ont été l’objet d’un enseignement 81.

Il est impossible de déterminer avec certitude que Gerald ait su le grec puisqu’il ne l’indique pas clairement lui-même. Dans ce cas, il a certainement eu connaissance des auteurs classiques grecs par des traductions latines. En ce qui concerne le gallois, la question est plus épineuse puisque Gerald ne l’établit jamais clairement lui-même. Nous pouvons suspecter qu’il pouvait le comprendre pour avoir grandi, peu de temps néanmoins, dans la région, mais il ne pouvait sans doute que difficilement le parler et encore moins l’écrire. Certains universitaires pensent que Gerald ne connaissait pas du tout cette langue puisqu’il avait été élevé dans une famille normande 82. Certes, il fut clairement envoyé avec Baldwin au Pays de Galles car il connaissait la région et les gens sur place mais Gerald n’agit jamais en tant qu’interprète lors du voyage alors que plusieurs interprètes sont mentionnés dans sa chronique. Ceci pourrait prouver qu’il ne maîtrisait pas suffisamment le gallois pour se faire interprète. Mais, en réalité, en tant qu’envoyé du souverain Plantagenêt, on aurait pu accuser Gerald de traduction trompeuse, orientée en faveur de la couronne anglaise. Quoi qu’il en soit, on ne peut pas trouver dans l’ouvrage de Gerald sur l’Irlande de trace nette de défense de la langue gaélique pour nommer la nature. Cependant, incontestablement, il est important pour Gerald de nommer la nature. Comme toujours dans ses chroniques 83, il se veut précis, fournissant de nombreux détails à son lectorat. Néanmoins, il est, comme toujours, brouillon. Certes, l’énumération est l’une des caractéristiques des écrits médiévaux mais Gerald va plus loin en s’auto-citant d’un ouvrage à l’autre, en revenant sur ses propos,

80. Robert Bartlett, Gerald of Wales, p. 19. 81. Gilbert Dahan, « L’enseignement de l’hébreu en Occident médiéval (XIIe-XIVe siècles) », Histoire de l’éducation, nº 57, 1993, p. 3. On pourra également consulter l’ouvrage The Sacred Nectar of the Greeks : The Study of Greek in the West in the Early Middle Ages, Michael W. Herren (dir.), Londres, King’s College (King’s College London Medieval Studies), 1988. 82. Voir Frederick M. Powicke, « Gerald of Wales », Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, nº 12, 1928, p. 399. 83. Dans la Descriptio Kambriae et l’Itinerarium Kambriae mais également dans De Instructione Principum ou encore Speculum Ecclesiae. 46 Nolwena Monnier en les contredisant ou les complétant au fil de ses écrits dans un désordre certain 84. Il peut se faire prolixe sur certains aspects du paysage irlandais, notamment les rivières, mais beaucoup plus discret sur d’autres, comme la flore. Au-delà de sa précision ou de ses manquements, sa démarche est bien celle de la légitimation par l’histoire et les liens avec le passé de l’île. La nature y participe incontestablement lorsque Gerald s’efforce de relier les noms aux croyances locales. Il nous dresse ainsi un portrait de l’Irlande de la fin du XIIe siècle entre traditions gaéliques et colonisation anglaise, certes incomplet mais tout en nuance.

Nolwena Monnier Université Toulouse 3 – Paul Sabatier

84. Nolwena Monnier, « Debts in Gerald of Wales’s Itinerario Kambriae ? », communication orale, International Symposium on Debt and Indebtedness in Medieval Texts, université de Nantes, 29 avril 2016. Digging the Borderland in Brian McGilloway’s The Nameless Dead (2012)

Abstract: In the entire Inspector series, the borderland is central to the plot of Brian McGilloway’s novels, but in The Nameless Dead, written in 2012, not only is the borderland a dividing line, a defining element in the plot and in the narrative, but the actual soil of the borderland is equally fundamental to the meaning of the novel. The attention of the reader is brought from the borderland and its post-1998 Agreement and post-Celtic Tiger crash issues, whether social, political or economic, to the soil that makes up the ground. As a material element the soil fulfils the role of a potentiality that disturbs what appears as a hopelessly already written future, and points towards the possibility of renewal. But above all, the shift of focus from the land to the soil also questions the notions of authority and responsibility in building that future. Because, as opposed to the land, the soil appears a-political, its power addresses issues that go beyond everyday politics on either part of the border and reach out to what actually can be done to build a better future. The land and the borderland are represented as stasis and part of a long never-ending chain of crimes, but it is also interesting to examine how, beyond the scraping and digging, the soil appears to have a life of its own. Finally, I will argue that, beyond metaphors, the materiality of the soil is a means to question the idea of authority and responsibility in building the future. Keywords: borderland, Northern Ireland, landscape, soil, thriller.

Résumé : Dans tous les romans de Brian McGilloway dont Devlin est le héros, la frontière est un élément central de l’intrigue. Mais dans The Nameless Dead, écrit en 2012, la frontière est non seulement un élément essentiel de l’intrigue et du récit, mais la terre elle-même qui constitue le sol de la frontière devient tout autant essentielle. L’attention du lecteur se déplace de la frontière et des conséquences de l’accord de paix de 1998 et de la fin du Tigre celtique – conséquences sociales, politiques ou économiques – vers le sol et la terre qui le constitue. En tant qu’élément matériel, la terre ouvre la possibilité d’un renouveau. Mais surtout, le déplacement du regard qui s’opère de la frontière à la terre, de la ligne qui divise à la matière qui la constitue, pose la question de la responsabilité dans la construction de l’avenir. Car contrairement à la terre « land », la terre « soil » apparaît comme a-politique. Mais elle a néanmoins le pouvoir de poser des questions qui vont au-delà des arrangements politiciens de part et d’autre de la frontière. La frontière est représentée comme immuable, symbole d’une logique de crimes sans fin. Mais au-delà des séances de fouille et de ratissage, la terre « soil » est tout le contraire de l’immuable. Au-delà des métaphores, considérer la terre dans toute sa matérialité consiste à poser la question non pas seulement du passé et du présent mais aussi de la capacité à construire le futur. Mots clés : frontière, Irlande du Nord, paysage, terre, thriller.

Études irlandaises, no 44-1, 2019 – p. 47-56 48 Marie Mianowski

Introduction

In the entire Inspector Devlin series the borderland is central to the plot of Brian McGilloway’s novels, but in The Nameless Dead, written in 2012, not only is the borderland a dividing line, a defining element in the plot and in the narrative, but the actual soil of the borderland is equally fundamental to the meaning of the novel. The plot shifts the focus from the land to the soil itself. The attention of the reader is brought from the borderland and its post-1998 Agreement and post-Celtic Tiger crash issues, whether social, political or economic, to the soil that makes up the ground. In The Nameless Dead, a lot of digging is described, and mounds of soil transform the landscape as policemen search for the skeleton of a young man who disappeared in the 1970s and stumble upon the tiny skeletons from an old cillín. In the end, as expected, the mystery at the heart of the plot is solved. And yet, the reader experiences no real sense of closure. In The Nameless Dead, not only does the soil conceal and reveal, but it also corrupts and recycles. Just as wounds take time to heal, the soil cannot be merely compacted back into place after a digging. McGilloway’s novel does not represent the soil only as a metaphor for hidden secrets of the past that would have been transformed and brought to the surface; nor as a material element to be simply dug up in order to find skeletons and settle the scores of the past. More crucially, as a material element, the soil questions the notion of responsibility in building the future. In his book The Thriller and Northern Ireland since 1969: Utterly Resigned Terror 1, Aaron Kelly wishes to redeem not only the thriller as a form of fiction, but also the historical dynamics present in Northern Ireland, to affirm “a potentiality that disrupts” what in many of these books appears most fated, contemptuously dismissed, “statically stereotyped and without hope” 2:

I want to suggest later that there is also a utopian formal politics to conspiracy in the thriller form, which actually proffers a speculative grasp of the social totality but which is conventionally masked by this traumatic paradigm 3.

My contention is to show that in The Nameless Dead the soil as a material element fulfils the role of a potentiality that disturbs what appears as a hopelessly already written future, and points towards the possibility of renewal. But above all, the shift of focus from the land to the soil also questions the notions of authority and responsibility in building that future. The land and the borderland are represented as stasis and part of a long never-ending chain of crimes, but it is also interesting to examine how, beyond the scraping and digging, the soil appears to have a life of its own, in turmoil. Finally, I will argue that, beyond metaphors, the materiality of the soil is a means to question the idea of authority and responsibility in building the future.

1. Aaron Kelly, The Thriller and Northern Ireland Since 1969: Utterly Resigned Terror, London, Routledge, 2005. 2. Ibid., p. 1. 3. Ibid. Digging the Borderland in Brian McGilloway’s The Nameless Dead (2012) 49

Digging in limbo: the land and the borderland as stasis and continuity

Brian McGilloway’s novel Borderlands, published in 2007, sets the opening scene in December 2002 with the discovery of the body of a dead girl straddling the border:

Presumably, neither those who dumped her corpse, nor, indeed, those who had created the border between the North and South of Ireland in 1920, could understand the vagaries that meant that her body lay half in one country and half in another, in an area known as the borderlands 4.

In November 2001 the Police Service of Northern Ireland was created, replacing the Royal Ulster Constabulary. In erasing the adjective “royal”, the change also highlighted the effort to downplay the institutional barrier between the police forces of Northern Ireland and those of the Republic. The two novels were written in that specific context. But whileBorderlands displayed the complex cooperation between the ’s Garda and the Police Service of Northern Ireland over Christ- mas 2002, The Nameless Deadencompasses the period of, presumably, the years 2010 or 2011, and displays how Inspector Devlin questions the limits to further investigation imposed on him. He wants to investigate the deaths of newborn children that he thinks were murders, but because the remains were found during a dig for the Disappeared, he is not allowed to lead any investigation. The period of the year coincides with All Souls’ Day and the return of the dead, which befits the specific space on which the plot focuses, described as a “geographical limbo” 5. Also, as Devlin eventually finds out, the names of the murdered babies were later secretly given to adopted babies and therefore the identities of the dead newborns are forever haunting the world of the living. The space where the remains were found is an island. In fact, it corresponds to an existing island situated on the River Foyle between Lifford and Strabane:

Running for about two and a half miles, but less than a mile wide, the island sits in the middle of the river Foyle, its two lateral shores no more than 200 yards from either Northern Ireland or the Republic. But the island belongs to both and neither; the Irish border, which runs along the riverbed from Derry to Strabane, dissects the island down the middle. (p. 5)

Because of its geographical situation, the island, Islandmore, also called the Isle of Bones, has a long history of smuggling. The bridges connecting it to the North side and to the South side both fell into disrepair in the 1960s, so that the island “became separated from both sides and grew wild” (p. 6). Its limbo nature, in between two spaces, neither North nor South, is accentuated thanks to another meaning of the word “limbo”, the island having been known as early as the 18th century as an unofficial burial site for babies known as “limbo babies” or unbaptized babies.

4. Brian McGilloway, Borderlands, London, Pan Macmillan, 2007, p. 3. 5. Brian McGilloway, The Nameless Dead, London, Pan Macmillan, 2012, p. 5. Page references in brackets refer to this edition. 50 Marie Mianowski

As the novel opens, a team of diggers, who is part of the Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains, is trying to locate the remains of a young man, Declan Cleary, “disappeared” in the 1970s. For all its invented and fictitious events and descriptions, the plot of the novel revolves around historical facts and real-life scandals, linking the 18th century, the period of the Troubles and present-day Ireland in a seemingly uninterrupted line of crime, secrecy and violence. The Nameless Dead is more particularly based on the work of the Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains, which as McGilloway mentions in an Author’s Note at the end of the novel, had recovered only nine of the sixteen “Disappeared” when the novel was published in 2012. But it is also based on the work of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse in State Institutions in relation with 211 girls having been used in Mother and Baby Homes 6, without parental consent, to test trial vaccines in the 1960s and 1970s. McGilloway reminds his readers of the double injustice done to these girls because “[…] in 2003, following court action from doctors involved in the trials, the Commission’s investigation in this regard ended” (p. 380). The novel is also based on yet another scandal which took place in the United States, where, to treat their acne during pregnancy, 2,000 women were given a drug called Isotretinoin, leading to miscarriages. Yet, 160 babies survived, but with severe facial disfigurement, due to an induced syndrome called Goldenhar syndrome. The novel therefore opens with the discovery by the digging team working on Islandmore in search of the remains of Declan Cleary, of dozens of tiny skeletons wrapped in white sheets, evidently part of a cillín, but also of other tiny skeletons whose skulls are severely deformed, belonging to babies who had suffered from Goldenhar syndrome and, as we learn in the course of the narrative, either died spontaneously at birth, or were murdered to cover up the scandal. The discovery of these two separate sites of baby skeletons prompts Inspector Devlin to lead a separate and secret inquiry into these deaths, although technically he is not allowed to, as they were found in relation to a dig for the Disappeared. One of the key rules in relation with the work of the Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains is that the discovery of the remains of a “Disappeared” cannot lead to any investigation. As one of his superiors reminds him for the second time: “The legislation is very clear ‘any evidence obtained, directly or indirectly, shall not be admissible in any criminal proceedings’” (p. 42). This fact is repeated at regular intervals in the novel, and yet Inspector Devlin investigates the mystery of the deformed baby skulls and eventually manages to unveil a huge corruption network linking an Isotretinoin-type scandal dating back to the 1960s and 1970s, and a modern-day corruption deal around social benefits and illegal adoptions in a ghost estate called Islandview, built right across Islandmore. The border is hence presented as a place of ongoing smuggling, cyclical corrup- tion, violence and revenge in the traditional vein of Northern-Irish thriller writing, where ritualized anniversaries materialize on the present-day border. The memory

6. Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation, http://www.mbhcoi.ie. Digging the Borderland in Brian McGilloway’s The Nameless Dead (2012) 51 of violent past events is celebrated, which were themselves the trigger of a cycle of violence and revenge. This aspect of the narrative gives credit to what Aaron Kelly describes, quoting Joep Leerssen, as the “traumatic paradigm” 7 in which “a nightmarish model refuses dialectical transformation and reverberates ceaselessly in irresoluble crisis” and where the thriller vainly reproduces a “cyclical iteration” 8. In this general context, the borderland is represented as a highly politically and socially contested space, still deeply ensconced in corruption and revenge, as if things were never going to change and thriller literature was bound to go on describing this state of things. And yet, the soil – whether earth, clay, land-fill, slime or sewage – appears as a fundamental agent in McGilloway’s novel, in the sense that Karen Barad gives to the word “agent” in her work on the entanglements of meaning and matter. Agential realism is an ongoing process of material causes and consequences:

Agential realism does not start with a set of given or fixed differences, but rather makes inquiries into how differences are made and remade, stabilized and destabilized, as well as their materializing effects and constitutive exclusions 9.

The soil brings this sort of dynamics to the overall terrifying stasis and reveals how elements and events intra-act, stabilize and destabilize, make and remake, thus creating the possibility of ongoing change.

Digging, scraping, sifting, oozing: the soil in turmoil

The novel opens on a scene of digging, scraping and sifting as the police team search for Declan Cleary and stumble across an ancient cillín:

The cadaver dog, a small black spaniel, was moving across the field towards the island’s edge, its snout pressed close to the ground, its body twisting and flexible as it turned this way and that, following whatever scent it had picked up. It snuffled into the surface vegetation […]. (p. 3)

The first word of the novel, “cadaver dog” (dogs trained to trail or air-scent decom- posing flesh) sets the tone. But the first paragraph also already points towards the soil, below the surface vegetation. In fact, the materiality of the soil is the main object of focus throughout the novel. The soil needs to be dug up, sifted through, so that it might reveal secrets of the past and resolve problems in the present. The word “soil” is used as early as the second page of the novel, to describe the first of the “mounds of soil” through which the “forensic archaeologist” (p. 4) sifts after the

7. Aaron Kelly, The Thriller and Northern Ireland Since 1969…, p. 1. 8. Ibid. 9. Karen Barad, “Intra-Actions: An Interview with Karen Barad by Adam Kleinman”, Mousse, no. 34, Summer 2012, p. 77. 52 Marie Mianowski mechanical digger has completed its digging job. The digging and sifting of the soil are clearly linked to the understanding of past history. The digging is actually the material heaving to the surface of elements concealed in the dark, compacted soil of Islandmore, the limbo island. The scene when Declan Cleary’s skeleton is found, one-third into the novel, is described with a clear focus on the way the soil is treated:

The progress was slow and methodical. The digger operator scraped across the surface of the site where they were digging, lifting soil to a depth of four inches or so at a time. This soil was then deposited to his right-hand side, clear of the flagged spot the dog handler had marked two days previous. Jonas then sifted through the clay, looking for bone fragments, or anything which might indicate the presence of a corpse. (p. 101)

The earth around Declan Cleary’s “raggedly-clothed skeleton” (p. 105) is described as having compacted around the legs and the right arm, requiring extra care from the diggers as they dig and lift it. On several occasions, the text also insists on the necessity to re-fill the holes with the previously dug up soil, closing a cycle, resuming another, with no hint at the possibility of any regeneration process, only patching up what had been dug up, linking past events to the present, in a desolate continuing chain of crime and sorrow. And yet, although it is described as compact, being lifted into mounds, the soil, not only on Islandmore, but in the rest of the novel as well, displays a form of spontaneity, as if it were alive, as opposed to the “rubberized tarmac” (p. 52) of the playground where the body of Declan Cleary’s son, Sean Cleary, is found, two days after the dig for his father’s remains has begun. As a grave, the soil absorbs life and decomposes elements. But in McGilloway’s novel, the soil escapes the stasis of representation to which the land and the borderland in particular are submitted. The soil cannot be actually dug up, sifted through and compacted back exactly into place as if the ground were an envelope to be simply sealed back over stories that can be dug out but not investigated. At the end of the novel, Martin, the main culprit at the root of the network of scandals over four decades, is hunted down on Islandmore where the slime almost swallows him up. The tide is low and the soil of the island is described as “waterlogged earth” (p. 333), ever “soggier”. The verbs “oozed” and “sucked” are repeated several times as everything that falls into the slime is being “sucked beneath the surface” (p. 334). The rescuing of Martin requires several people as the soil threatens to swallow both Martin and Inspector Devlin into its black and slimy entrails:

The sucking of the wet mud marked my progress, slow as it was, as I freed myself from the slime and allowed Dunne to pull me, with Martin in tow, onto the rocks of the shoreline. (p. 337)

In the end Martin is almost buried alive on the island and the description of his second rescue highlights once more the characteristics of the soil as being alive. As Martin is being buried alive in Declan Cleary’s former hole, Inspector Devlin arrives and the earth is described as “still raw” (p. 367): Digging the Borderland in Brian McGilloway’s The Nameless Dead (2012) 53

Callan had not compacted the soil and my hand sunk down into the loamy earth, cold and damp between my fingers. […] my hand connected with cloth and flesh in the ground […] wriggling suddenly where Martin lay beneath the soil. (p. 368)

In this novel Inspector Devlin overtly fights the ban on investigating the deformed skeletons found during the dig for Cleary’s remains. But he also seems keenly aware of the nature of the soil beneath his feet and especially of its power to swallow not only the past, but also the present, almost a form of otherworldly realm. Another key culprit, Sheila Clark, disappears towards the end of the novel, without being caught, and Devlin’s guess is that she has mysteriously and secretly been buried on Islandmore:

Ironically, the dig for the Disappeared had created perfect conditions for the disposal of further bodies, for the recent disruption of the earth would make geophysical tests unreliable. The island was quiet now, those nameless dead that still rested there seemingly content that one more had joined them in their eternal sleep, taking her rightful place on the Isle of Bones. (p. 379)

These are the last words of the novel, which therefore ends with no real sense of closure, since nothing proves that Sheila Clark, who was instrumental in the crimes Devlin denounces, is indeed buried on Islandmore or still on the run. And yet the tone of this last paragraph ironically implies that a sense of closure is indeed being acknowledged, as if the fact that more dead bodies had filled the recently dug out holes were the only thing likely to bring peace and quiet to the area. But if McGilloway ends his novel on this paradox, he also explicitly describes it as ironical (“ironically”, p. 378-379), hence implicitly denouncing the form of solace and satisfaction that such cycles bring. In McGilloway’s novel the soil goes beyond metaphors of tomb, womb and recycling. The limbo island and the soil as in-between place and surface are used by McGilloway to question notions such as “causality, agency, space, time, matter, meaning, knowing, being, responsibility, accountability, and justice” 10. The crimes that Devlin denounces are of course crucial as part of the plot of a crime novel, but the fact he denounces them despite the ban on investigating those crimes is paramount. The use by McGilloway of the soil, not as a metaphor, but as a material agent, highlights the fundamental notions of responsibility and authority in building a fairer future.

Beyond metaphors: the soil as a pretext to question authority and responsibility Whereas questions related to the land are political, all the more so if the borderland is the actual subject of the narrative, in placing the soil as agent at the centre of his

10. “The notion of intra-action marks an important shift in many foundational philosophical notions such as causality, agency, space, time, matter, meaning, knowing, being, responsibility, account- ability, and justice” (Karen Barad, “Intra-Actions…”, p. 77). 54 Marie Mianowski plot, McGilloway disrupts the usual cycles and the usual way of representing crimes on the border. In doing so, he raises the questions of authority and responsibility as a means to take another stance on the ways to envision the future. The subplot of The Nameless Dead, as in all the Inspector Devlin novels, is Devlin’s family life and his role as a husband and father. In The Nameless Dead his children have grown up, they have become teenagers, and the question of authority and responsibility runs as an obvious leitmotiv in Devlin’s relationship with his daughter (p. 112). The glimmer of hope which Aaron Kelly mentions in his introduction as a new strand in Northern Irish fiction lies in The Nameless Dead, not so much in any interpretation of the soil as a metaphor of a state of in-betweenness, that would illustrate yet again the limbo motif. The soil is indeed mostly hidden, beneath the visible and palpable surface. But it is also partially visible: it can be touched, stepped upon and smelt. It is in-between life and death. But in The Nameless Dead the soil reveals elements of the past which Inspector Devlin decides to investigate despite the official order to inaction and silence and very much like his teenage daughter, he decides to shun the authorities and take his own responsibility to denounce scandals of the present day, which have their roots in crimes of the past, as if to state that the future of the children being born today also depends on the ways in which justice is done to the children born in ages gone. Throughout the novel, Islandmore is viewed from many geographical and historical viewpoints. It is also interesting to contemplate Islandmore from the perspective of the ghost estate called Islandview, from which Islandmore can be viewed. Islandview itself is an island of sorts, a ghost estate with its sophisticated show house and its deserted houses squatted by drug dealers. The explicit mirror construction of Islandmore / Islandview, the limbo island and the ghost estate Islandview, raises the implicit question of the ways in which the crimes and scandals of the past are treated in contrast with those of the present. The soil of the ghost estate appears sterile and has not even been seeded. The words used to describe the ghost estate Islandview point at a neglected and sterile site with no gardens, where the outlines of the houses are portrayed as “skeletal”, “the pavements loosely comprising hard-fill but no tarmac” and where the pot-holed roads are “weedy” (p. 87). The garden of the show house is compared to “a pot of clay which the builder had not even prepared for seeding”. And yet, despite this, “a few hardier tufts of grass and weeds had struggled through the lumps of hard-fill littering the ground” (p. 138). Nature here lends a deaf ear to human actions. The keywords to describe the soil in the ghost estate are “clay”, “hard-fill”, “litter”, “weed”, as if through the hard surface of clay loosely disposed as “hard-fill” – the word itself materially opposed to the soil of the island that can be compacted – weeds and grass managed to sprout through. In the same vein, one page later Devlin is portrayed “picking his way through” the “piles of clay” (p. 139) littering the ghost estate. The soil of the ghost estate actually resurges “as the sewage system dysfunctions and the effluents of the households are pumped out of a pipe to the rear of the estate into a mound in the corner of a field” (p. 87). Digging the Borderland in Brian McGilloway’s The Nameless Dead (2012) 55

In Islandview, the soil resurges into a mound, but a mound of sewage. The description of the mound of sewage is done by several characters and in the narrative it precedes immediately the careful and respectful discovery of Declan Cleary’s remains on Islandmore, creating a sharp contrast. Devlin explains to his colleagues the situation of the sewage system below the ghost estate:

The pumping station here is broken, everything that goes down the toilets around here gets flushed out into a mound in the field running along the back of the next street across. (p. 95)

The word “mound” is repeated several times in association with the image of effluent and sewage, and immediately juxtaposed with the scene of Declan Cleary’s neat digging up as if to stress the jarring contrast between an almost religious scene around Cleary’s skeleton being scrupulously lifted to the surface forty years after his death, and the present-day insalubrious living conditions in the ghost estate. The description seems to highlight the contrast between the scent followed by the cadaver dog on Islandmore and the inescapable stench pervading the air in Islandview. The situation in the ghost estate also echoes Mike McCormack’s novelSolar Bones 11 based on a real contagious virus called “cryptosporidiosis” which contami- nated the network of drinkable water in the Galway area in 2007, when thousands of people were taken ill with intense vomiting and diarrhoea, their digestive system in intra-action with the region’s water network, itself connected and related to the political decisions made at local and regional levels. And yet, in The Nameless Dead, the future of the ghost estate Islandview is not explicitly raised, as opposed to that of Islandmore:

What would happen afterwards was not so clear, whether the island would become isolated once more or, having been received into the community’s collective conscience, remain connected again to the mainland, no longer in limbo. (p. 252)

The real issue of the novel seems indeed to be how to bring to the surface and clearly acknowledge what was previously in limbo, neither here nor there, and question what will happen in the future if lands hitherto unconnected eventually connect. In fact, the actual issue brought to the fore by McGilloway’s novel is that of the future, not so much of Islandmore, but that of today’s children. In recent Irish fiction, such as Solar Bones by Mike McCormack, City of Bohane 12 by Kevin Barry, The Forgotten Waltz 13 by Anne Enright and other novels or short stories, children are often ill, handicapped, on the edge between real and virtual realms, or utterly absent. The title of the novelThe Nameless Dead points at two types of lost identities: mysterious and anonymous deaths during the Troubles – names that have been lost and concealed; and mysterious burials of babies who had never been

11. Mike McCormack, Solar Bones, Dublin, Tramp Press, 2016. 12. Kevin Barry, City of Bohane, London, Vintage, 2012. 13. Anne Enright, The Forgotten Waltz, London, Norton, 2011. 56 Marie Mianowski named. At the heart of the scandal of the buried children with Goldenhar syndrome which Devlin investigates there is also the recycling of their names re-attributed to adopted children, as if they were given a second chance in the recycling of their identities being transferred to the adopted babies. McGilloway subtly links all the scandals unveiled through Devlin’s investigation to the future of the children: the lines of the plot concerning the cillín babies and the Goldenhar babies found in the soil of Islandmore all have ramifications with the ongoing adoption scandal of which the ghost estate Islandview is a strategic base. Even Declan Cleary and his son Sean are both found dead in positions described as foetal positions, as if all those deaths from the past, either political, religious, or the consequence of greed and corruption, all led to one question: that of the future of the children of Ireland.

Conclusion

Such are the dynamics of the soil in McGilloway’s novel: a reading of the land of the border neither abstract nor imprisoned in unstoppable cycles, but focused on the materiality of the soil, an apparently neutral matter, but by nature changeable. At once invisible and visible, compacted and sifted, it is a place for graves but also a place for germination, a living agent (in Karen Barad’s use of the word) intra- acting with human beings, being destabilized by their actions, but at the same time destabilizing in its own unpredictability. In McGilloway’s novel the soil goes beyond symbolic or metaphorical interpretations of renewal. It is a way to inscribe in the representation of the borderland, not only logics of silence, compensation or even reconciliation, but the dynamics of change and responsibility for the future of younger generations. In putting the soil at the forefront, scattering the landscape with mounds of soil, this novel calls upon the responsibility of present-day citizens, diggers, mourners, designers, politicians, to disrupt the stasis denounced by Aaron Kelly and make the borderland a better place to live.

Marie Mianowski Université Grenoble Alpes Geomantic de Paula Meehan ou comment lire et dire la nature

Résumé : Cet article envisage la façon dont Paula Meehan place la nature au centre de son dernier recueil, Geomantic (2016). La crise post-Celtic Tiger et les commémorations de 1916 conduisent à articuler les enjeux écopoétiques aux questions politiques de la mémoire (collective et individuelle) dans des poèmes où magie et divination ont la part belle. Les quatre-vingt-un poèmes, tous composés de neuf vers, de neuf syllabes chacun, allient un formalisme extrême et une langue affichant une grande matérialité, amenant à la lecture d’une terre-livre, source de signes et de cultures. Mots clés : Meehan, Geomantic, environnement, magie, écopoétique.

Abstract: This article tackles the way Paula Meehan places nature at the centre of Geomantic (2016), her latest book of poems. Post-Celtic crises and the commemorations of Easter 1916 have linked ecopoetical issues to political questions of individual and collective memory. The book comprises eighty-one poems (each one is divided into nine lines of nine syllables) and is pervaded with magic and divination. It binds formal and material qualities in order to read the Earth as a source of signs and cultures. Keywords: Meehan, Geomantic, environment, magic, ecopoetry.

À l’heure où les débats politiques et économiques sur l’environnement et le réchauffement planétaire semblent à la fois faire rage et s’abîmer dans une forme d’impuissance, les enjeux théoriques de l’écocritique, de l’écopoétique 1, prennent de l’importance et amènent une profondeur culturelle et symbolique prégnante. Si les États-Unis se sont intéressés, dès les années 1990 2, à cette approche critique

1. Nous opterons pour le terme « écopoétique », et non « écocritique » dans cette étude. Thomas Pughe résume bien les enjeux terminologiques : « Nous partageons l’avis de [Jonathan] Bate selon lequel “[e]cocriticism does have a contribution to make to green politics, as postcolonial and feminist readings contribute to race and gender politics, but its true importance may be more phenome- nological than political. If that is the case, ‘ecopoetics’ will be a more helpful denomination than ‘ecocriticism’” » (Thomas Pughe, « Réinventer la nature : vers une éco-poétique », Études anglaises, vol. 58, nº 1, 2005, p. 69). 2. The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) a été fondée aux États-Unis dès 1993. Et dans son article sur deux livres importants de Lawrence Buell et Greg Garrard concernant l’écocritique, Ursula K. Heise situe les débuts de ces études littéraires dans les années 1990 (Ursula K. Heise, « Greening English : Recent Introductions to Ecocriticism », Contemporary Literature, vol. 47, nº 2, 2006, p. 290).

Études irlandaises, no 44-1, 2019 – p. 57-72 58 Florence Schneider des textes, le développement de cette dernière est plus récent en Irlande 3 mais s’est trouvé renforcé par le contexte de crise après l’effondrement du Tigre celtique, crise qui a amené, entre autres, à reconsidérer la question de la terre et de la pro- priété. Les études sur la poésie menées par Jody Allen Randolph, James McElroy, Kathryn Kirkpatrick, ou Oona Frawley, sont autant d’éclairages sur ces nature poems contemporains, dont l’essor actuel est commenté ainsi par Jody Allen Randolph : « Ironically, the nature poem, which did not thrive in Ireland as a meditative or transcendental form, shows signs of thriving as an ecocritical perspective » 4. La place centrale des relations entre homme et nature est depuis longtemps affirmée dans la poésie de Paula Meehan, qui n’a pas attendu les crises bancaires et idéologiques d’une Irlande séduite par les sirènes de la mondialisation pour inter- roger ces liens complexes entre l’homme et son environnement, urbain surtout. De nombreux articles ont étudié la place centrale que jouent la nature et la ville dans la poésie de Paula Meehan 5. Née et élevée dans les quartiers nord et défavorisés de Dublin, cette dernière revient volontiers, dans des entretiens ou lors de lectures de poèmes, sur l’importance de cette ville, à la fois palimpseste d’écritures et carrefour toujours changeant des forces économiques, sociales ou historiques qui façonnent une ville, un quartier. Dublin, certes, mais Paula Meehan a souvent souligné combien il est impossible d’établir des frontières étanches entre ville et campagne, entre culture et nature 6, soulignant son intérêt pour les zones liminales, dans un pays où parler de nature véritablement sauvage relève de l’illusion 7. D’ailleurs, elle expliquait en 2009 combien elle était réticente à s’imaginer nature poet, et déclarait : « I wouldn’t have ever allowed myself to write “nature poetry” because I would have associated it with a narrow, pastoral, English tradition I was wary of » 8. Elle assume désormais

3. Il en va de même pour la France, où un nombre significatif d’articles, de centres de recherches, d’ouvrages ont vu le jour, depuis les années 2000 surtout. Voir pour ceci l’article de Claire Jaquier, « Écopoétique, un territoire critique » (Fabula atelier, été 2015) qui pose les questions de terminologie et fait un recensement de sites intéressants à ce sujet. Le numéro intitulé Littérature & écologie : vers une écopoétique de la revue Écologie & politique, vol. 36, nº 2, 2008, est lui aussi passionnant. Les articles de Thomas Pughe, dont « Réinventer la nature : vers une éco-poétique », abordent aussi cette question de l’articulation entre littérature et nature, examinant comment le discours littéraire s’attache à dire / réécrire la nature. 4. Jody Allen Randolph, « New Ireland Poetics : The Ecocritical Turn in Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry », Nordic Irish Studies, nº 8, 2009, p. 57. 5. Voir l’article de Luz Mar González-Arias, « In Dublin’s Fair City : Citified Embodiments in Paula Meehan’s Urban Landscapes », An Sionnach : A Journal of Literature, Culture, and the Arts, vol. 5, nº 1-2, 2009, p. 34-49, ou les entretiens avec la critique Jody Allen Randolph dans ce même numéro (Jody Allen Randolph, « The Body Politic : A Conversation with Paula Meehan », p. 239-271). 6. Elle affirme ainsi, lors d’un entretien avec Janna Knittel, « Nature doesn’t stop at the limits of the city […] we are part of a greater continuum » (Janna Knittel, « “Nature Doesn’t Stop at the Limits of the City” : An Interview with Paula Meehan », New Hibernia Review, vol. 20, nº 1, 2016, p. 79). 7. Voir par exemple son attrait pour les parcs ou les jardins, ces lieux hybrides à la fois urbains et naturels, dont elle parle dans Anne Karhio, « “Imagined Domains” : A Conversation with Paula Meehan », Nordic Irish Studies, nº 8, 2009, p. 75. Plusieurs articles se sont ainsi penchés sur les jardins dans sa poésie. Citons aussi Kathryn Kirkpatrick, « Paula Meehan’s Gardens », New Hibernia Review, vol. 17, nº 2, 2013, p. 45-61. 8. Jody Allen Randolph, « The Body Politic : A Conversation with Paula Meehan », p. 266. Geomantic de Paula Meehan ou comment lire et dire la nature 59 beaucoup plus franchement cette identité, affirmant récemment : « I would actually see myself as a nature poet. I’m inclined to think that all poets are nature poets. What else do we engage in ? » 9. Dans son dernier recueil de poèmes, Geomantic 10, paru en 2016, son affran- chissement vis-à-vis de l’héritage littéraire anglais va de pair avec une réaffirmation de ses influences américaines (celle de Gary Snyder par exemple) et d’une position poétique et idéologique qui conjugue irrationnel, chamanisme, magie et codes poétiques. Ainsi, dès la quatrième de couverture, le titre grec lie interprétation et divination et donne cette définition de geomantic : « “earth divination” – a method of divination that interprets markings on the ground of the patterns formed by tossed handfuls of soil, rocks or sand ». Interpréter les motifs et dessins de la terre, telle est la proposition poétique de ce recueil, de quatre-vingt-un poèmes de neuf vers chacun. Cette idée d’une lecture magique du monde n’est pas nouvelle chez Paula Meehan : elle intitulait déjà son deuxième recueil Reading the Sky, puis un autre Dharmakaya – terme tibétain qu’elle emprunte au Livre des Morts et qui souligne les influences du chamanisme sur l’auteure ; mais cette idée est magnifiée dansGeomantic où l’Irlande est observée également au prisme des commémorations de 1916. Celles-ci permettent de voir comment l’histoire collective est réappropriée par le présent, comment la communauté envisage son passé et se projette dans un avenir qu’elle imagine en continuité, ou en rupture, avec ce passé révolutionnaire de 1916. Ce qui frappe à la lecture de ces courts poèmes est la manière dont Paula Meehan articule justement une divination de la terre commune et une voix très personnelle (en témoignent les poèmes où les références familiales apportent des horizons autobiographiques importants). Or cette voix singulière, individuelle, est aussi publique et politique. Ainsi, nous verrons dans un premier temps combien cette poésie géomantique amène à envisager l’histoire, la géographie et l’identité autrement, grâce à un lien avec la nature qui passe moins par l’intellect que par un contact direct, charnel ou magique. Cette démarche poétique pose de fait l’interrogation de la langue pour dire la nature, avec les risques impliqués par des visions cratylique ou romantique d’une unité perdue entre l’homme et son environnement. Ce deuxième temps d’analyse amènera à envisager finalement comment Paula Meehan parvient à éviter les écueils d’une appréhension nostalgique de la nature et à articuler une vision écopoétique du monde, à la fois phénoménologique, charnelle et textuelle.

Lire la nature : vers des hybridations identitaires et temporelles critiques

Dès son titre, Geomantic, le dernier recueil de poèmes de Paula Meehan propose d’interpréter la nature et ses signes laissés par la poussière, les roches ou le sable,

9. Janna Knittel, « “Nature Doesn’t Stop at the Limits of the City” : An Interview with Paula Meehan », p. 80. 10. Paula Meehan, Geomantic, Dublin, Dedalus Press, 2016. 60 Florence Schneider et amène à se situer dans un temps géologique mais aussi astrologique. De fait, il aborde le présent à l’aune d’un temps immémorial et rendu concret à la fois par la présence de cette poussière millénaire. Le présent dans ces poèmes est ainsi placé sur une échelle spatio-temporelle cosmique, une ère dépassant l’humain. Le poème d’ouverture, « The Moons », vient confirmer ceci, en inscrivant les événements personnels tels que la naissance et la mort dans un cycle lunaire plus large, agrandi encore par douze répétitions et l’inscription de moons au pluriel aux premier et dernier vers qui élargit lui aussi cette perspective temporelle démultipliée. Cet ancrage fort dans le cycle lunaire amène un changement d’échelle et une inscription du personnel dans le cosmique :

[…] moon of my first breath, my mother’s death, grandfather moon, my father’s frail boat, moon of my lost child, my sister’s fall, moon of my beloved’s waking dream, moons of my life adrift on the stream 11.

Cet ancrage dans le retour cyclique va de pair dans Geomantic avec une continuité temporelle et chronologique forte. Le symbole de ce continuum est cette poussière que l’on foule, qui est empreinte de tout notre passé et permet également de prédire le futur. Ainsi, « The Handful of Dust » explique à son propos : « […] it tells us all / we need to know about our futures, / it being composed of our past lives […] » 12. La récurrence cyclique permet un décentrement mais aussi un rapprochement littéraire significatif avec W. B. Yeats. On sait à quel point ce dernier a élaboré, dans A Vision entre autres, de nombreux systèmes faits de calendriers lunaires, et de cônes imbriqués, ces gyres qui représentent des ères historiques à la fois différentes et répétées, pour interroger l’histoire et ses retours. Avoir recours à la géomancie permet donc à Paula Meehan d’interroger cet héritage littéraire très significatif en ces temps si particuliers de commémorations du centenaire de l’insurrection de Pâques. Elle explique lors d’un entretien avec Jody Allen Randolph en 2016 combien l’influence de Yeats a été importante dans l’écriture de Geomantic, jusqu’à la conduire à des pratiques de méditation et de divination similaires 13. Revenir à ce poète, à son goût pour l’occulte et la magie, en cette époque de commémoration, c’est tout d’abord inscrire la poésie dans une continuité littéraire et aussi réaffirmer le lien entre voix poétique, publique et politique que Yeats a su si bien développer. C’est aussi marquer une continuité qui s’inscrit en décalage vis-à-vis de ces commémorations quelque peu compassées, vantant un idéal révolutionnaire que l’Irlande marchande et libérale de 2016 a bradé dans une crise financière encore proche. L’élégie yeatsienne à une Irlande morte et perdue,

11. Paula Meehan, Geomantic, p. 15. 12. Ibid., p. 93. 13. « Paula Meehan, Reading and in Conversation », entretien avec Jody Allen Randolph à la National Library of Ireland, avril 2016, consulté en ligne sur dedaluspress.com. Geomantic de Paula Meehan ou comment lire et dire la nature 61 aux héros révolutionnaires de « September 1913 » par exemple, trouve ainsi un écho dans quatre poèmes qui se suivent et se répondent dans Geomantic : « The Commemorations Take Our Minds Off the Now », « The Graves at Arbour Hill », « The Peace » et « The Clue » 14. Comme chez Yeats dans Responsibilities, l’approche de Meehan est dès le départ politique ; et lorsque le cadre est personnel ou familial, c’est une perspective plus large qui domine malgré tout. Ainsi dans « The Clue », le père, plongé dans ses mots croisés, inscrit ses propositions personnelles dans une grille préétablie :

Three down “sold out” eight letters –betrayed “essential to life” five letters – water “flag of the people” –the 15.

Sentiments privés et passe-temps collectif se croisent ici pour aboutir à une ouverture historique et cosmique, hors d’un cadre irlandais de commémoration confinée. À la grille partagée des mots croisés et des sentiments du père répondent plus loin les signes d’un horoscope national, dont on imagine qu’il présidait à la naissance de la République, comme le soulignent les deux dernières strophes :

The seven stars on a field of blue – dream of a republic, dream of hope. Flowering on the island every spring, Stars and dreams : the natal horoscope.

Pâques revient ; la Grande Ourse cosmique répond à celle de la bannière révo- lutionnaire irlandaise, « starry plough » ; les rêves répétés de République, « stars and dreams » (échos lointains des étoiles du drapeau américain), invalident dès lors une commémoration qui n’a lieu qu’une fois tous les cent ans. Le dé-paysement cosmique permet une critique à peine voilée de politiques à court terme. Dans ces quatre poèmes cités plus haut, Meehan inscrit le retour à la fois dans la commémoration des combattants enterrés au cimetière militaire de Arbour Hill, mais surtout dans celui de ces pauvres de « The Commemorations Take Our Minds Off the Now », piégés dans une société pour qui la République ne reste qu’un vague espoir, et qui perd le sens « commun », au propre comme au figuré :

[…] The kharmic wheel goes round and round. I commemorate the poor going round and round the bend. How mad do you have to be to make sense of the state of the State we’re in 16 ?

14. Paula Meehan, Geomantic, p. 58, 59, 60, 61. 15. Ibid., p. 61. 16. Ibid., p. 58. 62 Florence Schneider

Si l’histoire fait retour chez Yeats comme chez Meehan, cette dernière offre une place particulière aux oubliés, aux pauvres. Impossible élégie romantique ici de cette révolution ratée mais commémorée cent ans plus tard. Yeats pleurait dans « September 1913 » la fin d’un idéal de bravoure jusqu’à la folie, « All that delirium of the brave » ; un siècle plus tard, c’est un État fou qui n’a pas su s’occuper des plus démunis qui est violemment attaqué. Le titre du poème de Meehan indique clairement combien le passé peut être l’outil politique d’une occultation du présent – « The Commemorations Take Our Minds Off the Now ». Comme on le voit, souligner l’importance de Yeats permet de revendiquer un attrait pour le poème politique et pour l’occulte, symbolisé ici par la roue karmique. Toutefois, l’accent porté sur les répétitions de l’histoire ne va pas sans une interrogation profonde des changements contextuels, et la poésie de Meehan affiche une fois encore la dimension sociale et très contemporaine de l’engagement poétique. La métaphore centrale du patchwork, « the quilt », structure tout le recueil bâti sur ces assemblages de neuf vers, « […] nine squares / by nine squares, blue on green spots, stripes » 17. Elle fait entre autres référence aux commémorations annuelles organisées pour les jeunes, morts trop tôt du sida, le jour de la Saint-Brigid, dans les quartiers pauvres de Dublin 18. Se placer dans l’héritage de Yeats permet donc tout à la fois de questionner une histoire cyclique et de réaffirmer une voix personnelle et publique. Dans les quelques vers cités plus haut, le recours à l’hindouisme et à la roue de vie karmique permet de déplacer les enjeux irlandais et de replacer l’Irlande dans un contexte global, ultralibéral 19. Ce changement de focale va de pair avec un décentrement du sujet. On observe ainsi un brouillage des limites entre singulier et anonyme, entre héroïsme et vie banale. « The Graves at Arbour Hill » s’ouvre par exemple sur un constat polémique : « We all die for Ireland in the end » 20. Les signataires de la Proclamation de Pâques dans leur tombe de ce célèbre cimetière militaire, le « je », et le « nous » 21, tous se retrouvent finalement dans une mort patriotique surprenante. Tout retournera à la poussière : « there’ll come a day I’ll be dust in the wind, / Irish dust in Irish wind, a hundred / and a hundred million years from now ». L’humain retourne à la nature, dans des temps géologiques qui amenuisent les singularités identitaires, et rapprochent l’aspect universel de la

17. Paula Meehan, Geomantic, p. 90. 18. Correspondance personnelle avec Kathryn Kirkpatrick, 29 octobre 2016, reproduite dans Kathryn Kirkpatrick, « Memory in Paula Meehan’s Geomantic », Irish University Review, vol. 47, nº 1, p. 10 : « Every February 1st, St. Brigid’s Day […] there’s a memorial service, cross faith, in what was one of the churches of my childhood, Our Lady of Lourdes, Sean McDermott Street […]. The different family networks (community groups from all over the island) hang their memorial quilts from the high walls of the church and they are there throughout the service. I think they are the bravest, most powerful iteration of memory and [they] challenge the official lipservice paid to the deceased ». 19. Les pauvres qui tournent en rond rappellent un autre poème situé quelques pages auparavant, « The Luck », où ce sont les chevaux sur lesquels on parie qui tournent (Paula Meehan, Geomantic, p. 55). 20. Paula Meehan, Geomantic, p. 59. 21. Le référent du pronom « we » à l’initiale dans « We all die for Ireland in the end » est particulièrement complexe, interrogeant entre autres la frontière politique de l’Irlande du Nord. La question de ceux qui finalement meurent pour l’Irlande reste ouverte. Geomantic de Paula Meehan ou comment lire et dire la nature 63 poussière et des caractéristiques spécifiquement irlandaises, « Irish dust in Irish wind » 22. Dans ces moments commémoratifs complexes où la mémoire nationale est en jeu, les oppositions binaires et classiques entre le sujet et l’autre, soi et autrui sont ainsi niées grâce à une réinscription de l’identité dans un processus naturel où, avant d’être quelqu’un, on est avant tout un homme. Tout comme le retour cyclique yeatsien, l’élargissement du cadre temporel qui passe du temps humain, calendaire, à un temps géologique permet une mise en perspective de la singularité identitaire, réduite quand celle-ci est placée sur des échelles géologiques larges 23. L’existence humaine envisagée sur le plan biologique de la poussière après la mort permet de dépasser les antagonismes ou les sectarismes. C’est donc un enjeu profondément politique qui se dégage ici de cette vision anatomique de l’homme. Geomantic interroge également les frontières entre les espèces : le chamanisme qui traverse ces poèmes amène ainsi à brouiller les différences entre homme et animal. Il est au cœur d’un recueil où est affirmé le côté instinctif de l’homme – ce que le poète américain Gary Snyder, influence revendiquée deGeomantic , nomme le sixième sens, « the sixth sense ». Enraciner son expérience dans la terre et la connaissance des arbres, des animaux, telle est la leçon de ce poète à ses confrères. Son célèbre poème, manifeste poétique et écologique, « What You Should Know to Be a Poet », indique dès ses premiers vers que, pour être poète, il faut connaître tant la faune, que la flore ou les astres 24. La magie, la transe, un contact physique et spirituel avec la terre sont autant de thèmes développés par ce poète, dès les années 1970. Meehan s’inspire beaucoup de ces enseignements et déclare : « One of the first contemporary poetry books I held in my hands was Gary Snyder’s Regarding Wave, back in the seventies. I still read Snyder on a daily basis » 25. Elle clôt d’ailleurs son recueil par « The Island » et par ces trois derniers vers : « and last night’s owl, startled into flight, / has us unsettled and creaturely / ourselves, sweeping the sea-girth garden ». La chouette nous ramène à notre animalité, « creaturely ourselves ». Le sujet est hybride, humain et animal, vivant dans un habitat complexe lui aussi – ce jardin aménagé par l’homme, mais ceint par la mer immense, à la fois biblique (en témoigne la présence du serpent quelques vers auparavant) et antique, mythique dans cette île grecque d’Ikaria. L’oxymore d’une animalité humaine se défait dans cette vision biologique qui replace l’homme dans le cadre élargi des êtres vivants. Depuis ses premiers recueils Paula Meehan revendique les influences américaines de Gary Snyder pour

22. Paula Meehan, Geomantic, p. 59. 23. L’allusion à la poussière de la Genèse dans la Bible se trouve elle aussi placée dans un contexte dépassant la temporalité chrétienne, pour s’abîmer dans un temps cosmique amenuisant toute différence identitaire ou religieuse, « a hundred / and a hundred million years from now » : « C’est à la sueur de ton visage que tu mangeras du pain, jusqu’à ce que tu retournes dans la terre, d’où tu as été pris ; car tu es poussière, et tu retourneras dans la poussière » (Gen. 3:19). 24. « all you can about animals as persons. / the names of the trees and flowers and weeds. / names of the stars, and the movement of the planets and the moon » (Gary Snyder, « What You Should Know to Be a Poet », in Regarding Wave, New York, New Directions, 1970, p. 40). 25. Amanda Sperry, « An Interview with Paula Meehan », Wake Forest University Press, novembre 2008, en ligne. 64 Florence Schneider qui le poète est chamane et guérisseur, dans un monde où les identités ne sont pas stables, où les glissements identitaires règnent, chez les hommes, et entre ces derniers et les animaux. Les métamorphoses et autre shapeshifting sont fréquents dès les premiers poèmes de Paula Meehan 26. Cette dernière assume la perte d’identité que ceci implique et explique dans un entretien : « I think people shapeshift all the time. It’s a natural thing. I know I do it walking through different areas […]. The animal part of us… the more we trust that part of us, the more safe we are » 27. Dans « Planet Water », elle explique d’ailleurs avoir elle-même fait ces expériences de sortie de soi, de changement de corps, devenant un oiseau, planant, perdant le sens du temps. Les métamorphoses permettent ainsi d’imaginer l’homme comme un élément parmi d’autres, dans une nature envisagée dans sa forme la plus simple de coexis- tence et de survie. Ainsi, dans « The Food Chain » 28 hommes et animaux se font dévorer tour à tour, sous le regard de la lune rouge. Dans Geomantic, Paula Meehan brouille également les limites entre vie et mort ; dans « The Road to Agios Kirikos », les fantômes amoureux se promènent, éclairés par la pleine lune et par les lucioles dont l’âme ne s’est pas encore envolée. Dans « The Conjuration » aussi des fantômes déambulent et « The Ghost Song » est traversé de ces airs chantés par des morts, tandis que « The Hide » est peuplé de fantômes d’enfants qui se cognent contre les vitres 29. La perte possible d’une identité humaine stable est explicitement revendiquée, dans un environnement naturel qui unit hommes et animaux, dans un cycle où le biologique et le géologique défont les différences. Le mythe d’une identité unique et stabilisée est ainsi refusé, dans des poèmes où le sujet joue à cache-cache, comme l’explique Paula Meehan : « I don’t use a trustworthy I in the poetry […]. I’m playing all the time with I because I don’t have an identity […]. Part of the game in poetry is playing with that transformative I » 30. Changement de « je » et déplacement des limites sont ainsi autant de moyens de situer le sujet dans un rapport différent à la nature, ce qui implique une interrogation sur la façon de dire ce rapport autre.

Nature et risques d’écriture

Faire intégralement partie de la nature permet aussi de la lire. Mêler l’homme et l’ani- mal, interroger la position de sujet et d’objet, ne sont possibles qu’en envisageant des

26. C’est le cas dès « Instructions to an Absent Husband », in Reading the Sky, Dublin, Beaver Row Press, 1985, p. 34. 27. Eileen O’Halloran, Kelli Maloy, « An Interview with Paula Meehan », Contemporary Literature, vol. 43, nº 1, 2002, p. 13. Dans un de ses poèmes, Meehan semble se moquer d’ailleurs d’elle-même : « It’s just her style to trick about / shapechanging all the while » (« One Evening in May », in Pillow Talk, Oldcastle, The Gallery Press, 1994, p. 16). 28. Paula Meehan, Geomantic, p. 91. 29. Respectivement p. 18, 84 et 33. 30. Enregistrement sonore d’un entretien de 1999 avec Danielle Sered, cité par Kathryn Kirkpatrick, « Between Country and City : Paula Meehan’s Ecofeminist Poetics », in Out of the Earth : Ecocritical Readings of Irish Texts, Christine Cusick (dir.), Cork, Cork University Press, 2010, p. 124. Geomantic de Paula Meehan ou comment lire et dire la nature 65 changements de catégories, en remettant au centre ce qui est relégué à la périphérie, en termes de pouvoir. Ainsi, dans son texte passionnant sur la poésie de Meehan, Kathryn Kirkpatrick lie la place marginale des femmes à celle des animaux, dans un monde patriarcal et capitaliste qui exacerbe les différences 31. L’article montre bien combien la question du lieu urbain ou naturel est centrale chez Meehan : « In this chapter, I want to explore the ways an urban poet writing from the location of working-class woman represents nature as unappropriable Other » 32. Écrit six ans plus tard, Geomantic va probablement plus loin que ce qu’analyse la critique. Il semble que le projet initial de Meehan, affiché dès le titre du recueil,Geomantic , invalide en partie cette idée que la nature ne peut être lue, connue, reste « an unappropriable Other ». Déjà, dans Painting Rain, particulièrement dans un poème comme « Death of a Field », l’un des enjeux du sujet poétique est de posséder la nature et que celle-ci la possède à son tour, grâce à un contact charnel, pour atteindre la connaissance de ce lieu – « I’ll walk out once / Barefoot under the moon to know the field / Through the soles of my feet » puis « I might possess it or it possess me » 33. Cette affirmation du corps, des pieds nus, pour parvenir au savoir va de pair avec une terre à la fois matérielle, animée et lisible. Interpréter les marques laissées sur le sol par la terre, les cailloux ou le sable implique que la nature parle, a une langue longtemps oubliée mais que le corps, la divination, les tarots ou la magie peuvent comprendre, comme le font ou le faisaient des peuples indiens entre autres 34. Le défi posé à toute écriture écopoétique, de « dire l’altérité de la nature sans la civiliser, la cultiver » 35, est bien présent dans Geomantic. Dans ce recueil, le fait que la nature soit lisible se double d’une recherche sur la transcription de la voix au sein du poème. En 2016, année de la parution du recueil, Paula Meehan publie et lit les essais écrits pendant ses mois comme titulaire de la Ireland Chair of Poetry. Voici comment elle commence « Planet Water », l’un de ces essais :

I need the language of water, a tongue that can speak in river vowels, in the glottal stops of rapids, a language turned in the great tides and braided on the shores of the world 36.

Parler (avec) la langue de l’eau, revenir à un cratylisme qui n’est pas sans rap- peler « Broagh », « Anahorish » 37, ou un autre poème sur l’eau de Seamus Heaney,

31. Kathryn Kirkpatrick, « Between Country and City… », p. 108. La critique explique ici qu’il y a, depuis les premiers poèmes, une tension entre ce qui est connu et ce qui ne peut pas l’être. 32. Ibid., p. 112. 33. Paula Meehan, Painting Rain, Winston-Salem, Wake Forest University Press, 2009, p. 14. 34. Gary Snyder a étudié certaines tribus indiennes et le bouddhisme au Japon. Il écrit : « As a poet, I hold the most archaic values on earth. They go back to the late Paleolithic : the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth » (Gary Snyder, Myths and Texts, New York, New Directions, 1978, p. viii). 35. Thomas Pughe, « Réinventer la nature… », p. 68. 36. Paula Meehan, « Planet Water », in Writings from The Ireland Chair of Poetry. Imaginary Bonnets with Real Bees in Them, Dublin, University College Dublin Press, 2016, p. 55. 37. Seamus Heaney, Wintering Out, Londres, Faber and Faber, 1972, p. 27, 16. 66 Florence Schneider

« Gifts of Rain » 38, et sa dernière section surtout. Dans Painting Rain, qui précède Geomantic, les liens entre littérature et nature étaient visibles dans la connexion répétée entre les matériaux ou les matières – l’arbre, métaphore centrale de tout le livre, était à la fois feuille de papier et verdure dans « A Remembrance of my Grandfather, Wattie, Who Taught Me to Read and Write ». Et les pas dans la neige blanche de « The Mushroom Field » étaient autant de marques sur la page 39. Si les enjeux des rapports avec la nature ont toujours été au centre de la poésie de Paula Meehan, il semble que la question de la retranscription poétique d’une nature qui entrerait de plain-pied dans le texte se pose avec plus d’urgence ou d’acuité dans les derniers écrits. Recourir à la fois à des méthodes non rationnelles de compré- hension du monde et au contact physique direct permet de déplacer les binarités classiques entre sujet et objet ou entre animé et non animé, mais il n’en reste pas moins que le médium de l’écriture reste ce lieu codé, singulier et culturel, qui n’est pas du même ordre que la nature. La volonté d’amenuiser cet écran entre la nature et son appréhension passe ici par une double démarche a priori contradictoire : une extrême artificialité des vers mêlée à une insistance sur l’aspect phonique, matériel de la langue. L’artifice s’affiche dans la métatextualité et l’interrogation directe du médium, qui se déploie, dès le deuxième poème, dont le titre, « The Patternings », se fait programmatique. Le vers initial annonce le projet artistique et s’avère une mission impossible puisque les motifs à représenter sont toujours à la fois similaires et non identiques :

I sketch the patternings of the sea : the iter- and reiteration of event. Similar ; not the same 40

Les projections subjectives du / des « moi » et la confusion entre nom et référent invalident eux aussi la possibilité de retranscrire l’événement :

Lulled by dull predictability of my own selves’ dreary projections, I’ve confused the sacred with its name.

Dès lors, le dernier tercet annonce un retour à l’écriture, et en particulier à sa texture sonore :

Better scan fractals, rhyme sea with tree, tune into tantric syncopation my mortal gods, frantic and profane 41.

38. Seamus Heaney, Wintering Out, p. 23. 39. Paula Meehan, Painting Rain, respectivement p. 46, 87. 40. Paula Meehan, Geomantic, p. 16. 41. Ibid. La tension entre peinture et écriture pour saisir au plus près la nature se jouait déjà dans le poème qui clôturait Painting Rain, « Coda : Payne’s Grey », dont le vers initial « I am trying to paint rain » annonce en quelque sorte, avec le verbe try, les esquisses de sketch au début de « The Patternings », liant ainsi les deux recueils (voir Painting Rain, p. 96 et Geomantic, p. 16). Geomantic de Paula Meehan ou comment lire et dire la nature 67

Geomantic est marqué par de nombreux poèmes métatextuels, comme « The Hexagram », « The Mother Tongue », « The Poetry » 42, bâtis explicitement sur des interrogations mettant au premier plan les rapports complexes entre langue, poète et environnement. « The Last Lesson » reprend, quant à lui, le titre du recueil dans son premier vers « Romantic, geomantic, antic » 43, jouant des rapprochements des signifiants pour à la fois définir les enjeux poétiques et s’en moquer. Dans tous les cas, les poèmes du recueil exacerbent leurs caractéristiques formelles : quatre-vingt- un poèmes de neuf vers, de neuf syllabes chacun, qui souvent se répondent de page en page, et se structurent tant par le rythme que par les idées qu’ils développent. Le médium poétique s’affiche, ne cherche pas une transparence que l’arbitraire du signe rend inaccessible de fait. Par ailleurs, les jeux sur les signifiants et leurs sonorités s’exposent eux aussi, dans une poésie qui a toujours valorisé le rythme 44, et qui ici exacerbe, dès le premier poème, le côté hypnotique, envoûtant, de la musique et du silence, pour dire la nature, les lunes (dans le premier poème), ou toutes les variations de bleus dans « The Blues » : « In moonlight the landscape was all blue – / frit of cobalt, french ultramarine, / far-off hills of phtalocyanine » 45. C’est le cas aussi dans « The Struggle », où la poète-jardinière et les mauvaises herbes s’affrontent – « In my garden – teasel, nettle, thistle, / taken hold since I lifted my hand ; / with thorn, sting, clawed hooks they do battle » –, mais elles sont aussi réunies par les rimes internes et la comparaison entre plantes et poème du deuxième tercet : « like poetry – territorial / and patient » 46. Orties, chardons ou poésie, tout est question de territoire, de sol et de patience. Un double mouvement anime donc ces poèmes : extrême artificialité du code poétique et volonté d’une langue naturelle, organique pour dire les liens qui nous lient à ces plantes, à ces lunes. Toutefois, si Meehan joue, dans le vers précédemment cité, avec le côté géo- mantique et romantique, « Romantic, geomantic », on peut s’interroger sur les risques d’un retour à une tradition poétique liant homme, langue et nature dans une relation idéale, naïve peut-être, où la nature parle et peut être comprise par celui ou celle qui sait l’entendre. On reviendrait à l’idée selon laquelle, comme dans la pensée romantique, il y a une sorte de « co-naturalité du monde et du langage, qui produit le rêve d’une poésie qui serait l’expression de la terre et des êtres vivants » 47. Claire Jaquier souligne combien, dans les écrits romantiques et écopoétiques, l’épiphanie, la défamiliarisation et l’indicible sont régulièrement autant de sources pour transcrire des expériences esthétiques découlant d’une nature dotée d’un langage propre. Elle explique ainsi :

42. Paula Meehan, Geomantic, p. 73, 47, 48. 43. Ibid., p. 25. 44. Paula Meehan revient souvent sur la tradition orale qui l’a baignée dans son enfance. Elle explique : « Sometimes I have the music before I have the poem. There’s a danger in that, a lyric danger : it doesn’t matter what you say as long as it sounds good. I try to avoid the trap » (Janna Knittel, « “Nature Doesn’t Stop at the Limits of the City” : An Interview with Paula Meehan », p. 85). 45. Paula Meehan, Geomantic, p. 87. 46. Ibid., p. 74. 47. Claire Jaquier, « Écopoétique, un territoire critique ». 68 Florence Schneider

Toujours ces expériences supposent, en lui attribuant des formes de réalité diverses – personnelle, divine, symbolique, vivante, atomique – une présence de la nature comme unité ou entité, se manifestant par des signes, des messages ou des voix : cette croyance romantique dans une parole de la nature, balayée pourtant par la rationalité moderne, ne cesse de faire retour dans la littérature, jusqu’à nos jours 48.

Elle va même jusqu’à poser la question du romantisme comme « horizon indépassable de l’écopoétique ». Le romantisme (mais aussi le transcendantalisme) qui a critiqué le matérialisme, l’anthropomorphisme, imagine une véritable parenté entre l’homme et la nature – thème et idéal que partagent certains écrivains contem- porains. Toutefois, le risque de ce retour à une vision romantique de l’espace est réel : nostalgie pour une nature perdue, occultation d’une temporalité et d’un espace présents et méfiance envers la littérature, l’écriture même 49. L’idée la plus marquante des revendications poétiques de Geomantic et des lectures faites par Paula Meehan après ses mois passés à la Ireland Chair of Poetry est celle d’une langue naturelle. On a vu plus haut combien l’écrivaine espérait trouver le caractère cratylique d’une langue où l’arbitraire du signe s’amenuiserait ; le besoin de « parler les voyelles de la rivière » est pressant pour dire le cosmos, et la zone liminale du ici-maintenant. Ce lien entre langue et réel remonte bien avant le romantisme, mais ce dernier a magnifié cette relation étroite entre homme, nature et langue. Or l’aspect mimétique est illusoire – la multiplicité des langues et leur évolution ou l’arbitraire du signe viennent en effet invalider cette possibilité d’une transparence des langues vis-à-vis du réel. De même, l’idée de Jonathan Bate selon laquelle la poésie serait naturelle, offrant par ses rythmes un équivalent des battements du cœur de la nature, et par sa complexité un reflet de la complexité de la nature, est démentie par la variété des rythmes en poésie entre autres et par les changements de critères 50. Thomas Pughe montre bien dans son article combien les critères pour décider de ce qu’est une écriture plus ou moins proche de la nature varient selon les époques et les cultures.

Nature et dépassement des contraires

Geomantic parvient à sortir de cette impasse philosophique et linguistique, semble-t-il : l’une des caractéristiques du recueil réside probablement dans le choix paradoxal d’un langage organique et d’une exacerbation de la forme, de

48. Claire Jaquier, « Écopoétique, un territoire critique ». 49. On se référera aux articles de Thomas Pughe et de Claire Jaquier pour plus de détails sur les méfiances de Jonathan Bate et de Lawrence Buell concernant l’écriture, vue comme écran entre l’homme et la nature. 50. Jonathan Bate explique ainsi : « […] it could be that poiesis in the sense of verse-making is language’s most direct path of return to the oikos, the place of dwelling, because metre itself – a quiet but persistent music, a recurring cycle, a heartbeat – is an answering to nature’s own rhythms […] » (Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth, Londres, Picador, 2000, p. 76). Geomantic de Paula Meehan ou comment lire et dire la nature 69 l’aspect rhétorique des poèmes. Inscrire l’humain, le culturel au sein de la nature amènerait chez Meehan à cette écriture complexe, qui met en place les tensions au sein des poèmes sans les résoudre : la sonorité de la langue (et l’on se souvient combien l’oralité est fondamentale pour Meehan, depuis l’enfance), la géomancie et un code poétique affiché comme tel (que l’on pense au chiffre 9 qui structure tous les poèmes) se mêlent. La coexistence des opposés recoupe d’ailleurs plus largement la philosophie taoiste et celle que Yeats développe dans A Vision ; elle est l’une des bases de la pensée de Meehan. Par ailleurs, cette dernière aborde, à la toute fin du recueil, la question d’une relation pré-verbale, dans un poème où l’identité se brouille, le temps et la mémoire aussi, dans un espace amniotique. « The Sea Cave » mêle les sources d’eaux chaudes et le ventre de la mère, avant la naissance, dans un bain où flottent poissons et sujet poétique – « to float in her amniotic dream / of children, of a husband, of home. / Flickers of light there where minnows teem » 51. Meehan rejoindrait en cela des théories linguistiques telle celle développée par Julia Kristeva et son concept de chora, moment avant le langage, lorsque le sujet est traversé de pulsions, de rythmes. Selon la philosophe,

[…] la chora elle-même, en tant que rupture et articulations – rythme – est préalable à l’évidence, au vraisemblable, à la spatialité et à la temporalité. […] elle est antérieure et sous-jacente à la figuration donc à la spécularisation, et ne tolère d’analogies qu’avec le rythme vocal ou kinésique 52.

L’origine du langage serait ainsi un espace indéterminé, associé au corps maternel, en perpétuel mouvement, baigné dans le rythme. De nombreuses critiques, fémi- nistes entre autres, se sont d’ailleurs élevées contre cette idée de ce qui ressemble à un éternel féminin, situé hors du champ de la culture 53. Cependant, il est intéressant de voir combien Geomantic parvient à déplacer les polarités classiques. Le liquide amniotique n’est que rêvé, et il est autant biologique que déjà marqué par les liens sociaux, comme l’indique « husband » 54. Par ailleurs, les poèmes affirment aussi l’importance de la magie dans le domaine linguistique. Le projet initial de lire la nature, sa poussière, ses étoiles, ses plantes est lié à la magie, la divination ; et il semble qu’on ne puisse isoler ceci de l’approche linguistique du recueil. Ainsi « The Moon Rose Over an Open Field » 55 lie-t-il la matérialité du signifiant linguistique à la nature, tout en soulignant la magie de l’inspiration. Les

51. Paula Meehan, Geomantic, p. 94. 52. Julia Kristeva, La révolution du langage poétique. L’avant-garde à la fin du XIXe siècle : Lautréamont et Mallarmé, Paris, Seuil, 1974, p. 24. 53. Maria Margaroni résume en quelques phrases ces critiques dans son article « “The Lost Founda- tion” : Kristeva’s Semiotic Chora and Its Ambiguous Legacy », Hypatia, vol. 20, nº 1, 2005, p. 79 : « In the area of feminist theory in particular, the semiotic chora was repeatedly dismissed as “one of the most problematic aspects” of Kristeva’s work […], one lending itself to utopian constructions of “a quasi-mystical realm” that, as Gerardine Meaney puts it, “looks suspiciously like the eternal feminine” ». 54. Paula Meehan, Geomantic, p. 94. 55. Ibid., p. 53. 70 Florence Schneider vers initiaux, « Count the syllables, a perfect line : / the way moon rises with vowels », finissent par « muse magic wrought from the power of nine ». Les o de moon la font s’élever dans le ciel, « moon rises with vowels », liant graphisme et référent ; mais ceci est complété par l’alchimie de la poésie et la puissance du chiffre 9. L’inspiration artistique est ainsi magique mais travaillée aussi, « wrought ». Dès lors, l’arbitraire du signe se mêle à une autre source, qui ne relève pas de l’explicable, du rationnel. La nature, à la fois merveilleuse et lisible, se fait aussi source d’inspiration, dans un rapport animiste, hindouiste aussi comme dans « The Fear », où la peur de la parole disparaît lorsque la pluie battante s’arrête : « The stanzas / open up to the sun’s healing rays / answering my prayers – this mantra ! » 56. Ce lien mystique et linguistique à la terre permet aussi de retrouver, renouer des liens différents avec la culture et les communautés. Dans « The Handful of Earth » 57, la poussière déchiffrée, constituée de notre passé, permet de prédire l’avenir (« […] it tells us all / we need to know about our futures ») et cette lecture amènerait à retrouver des histoires de deuil, « narratives of grief », et aussi se reconnecter avec les premières civilisations, « its aboriginal patternings ». C’est ainsi la question de la mémoire qui est posée par l’intermédiaire de ces lectures, comme elle l’était déjà dans les précédents recueils. Dans « Death of a Field » 58, la mort du champ est aussi celle de la mémoire du lieu (botanique et humaine). Pour contrer la conservation informatique par l’architecte, Meehan proposait une mémoire du corps, dans un rapport phénoménologique au réel. Dans d’autres poèmes, c’est la réminiscence sociale, historique, de certains quartiers de Dublin, qui est en jeu – quartiers défa- vorisés rasés dans « The Old Neighbourhood » 59 ou aménagement du centre-ville dans « Six Sycamores » 60. Dans Geomantic, la mémoire humaine est à l’échelle du reste du recueil ; elle se déploie sur des milliers d’années, permettant de retrouver des récits oubliés, des modèles aborigènes. Si ces derniers nous parlent, c’est que les poèmes proposent une temporalité et un monde unifiés, interdépendants, où microcosme et macrocosme se répondent. Ils sont d’ailleurs traversés par une image empruntée aux mathématiques, celle des fractales 61, ces « objets dont la structure est invariante par changement d’échelle » 62 où l’infiniment petit et l’immensité cosmique, le proche et le lointain se répondent. La question de l’histoire et de la mémoire, que nous abordions plus haut, est ici déplacée : l’ethnocentrisme européen, le regard colonisateur s’abîment dans cette temporalité qui fait se rejoindre et se ressembler l’aborigène et le lecteur contemporain, réunis par l’écriture et la perte – « narratives of grief » 63.

56. Paula Meehan, Geomantic, p. 23. 57. Ibid., p. 93. 58. Paula Meehan, Painting Rain, p. 13. 59. Paula Meehan, Geomantic, p. 34. 60. Paula Meehan, Painting Rain, p. 28-34. 61. Paula Meehan, Geomantic, p. 16. 62. « Fractale », Futura-Sciences, en ligne. 63. Paula Meehan, Geomantic, p. 93. Geomantic de Paula Meehan ou comment lire et dire la nature 71

Cette lecture d’une terre-mémoire, d’une terre-livre permet de brouiller des temporalités figées. Il en va de même avec l’intertextualité, très présente dans le recueil. On a vu combien W. B. Yeats était central, jusqu’au dernier poème, « The Island », où Innisfree devient Ikaria, dans « At home again on Ikaria, / our own bee-loud glade » 64. Gary Snyder, cité dans « The Inscription », est aussi une source majeure de réflexion, depuis toujours et particulièrement dans les derniers écrits. Mais ce sont aussi des références à Seamus Heaney, dont Paula Meehan explique que « A Postcard from Iceland » 65 a été une inspiration majeure pour le choix des neuf vers, et pour le lien entre signifiant et nature. Rainer Maria Rilke est aussi cité, dans « The Poet » 66, tout comme Gwendolyn Brooks, dont les vers sont en dédicace de « The Ghost Song ». Et que dire de « The Bird », qui déplace la complainte keatsienne amoureuse vers des registres plus sauvages et meurtriers encore ? L’intertextualité est l’un des moyens pour échapper à l’enfermement d’une lecture organique et passéiste de la nature. Si l’approche phénoménologique d’une connaissance par le corps est revendiquée, grâce à une écriture hybride faite d’arti- fice et de matérialité, elle ne se pose pas en opposition à une approche culturelle et politique de l’environnement. Tout comme le discours de Paula Meehan remet en cause clichés patriarcaux et féministes (et certains poèmes du recueil comme « The Trust » ou « The Witch’s Tit » 67 abordent frontalement la violence des mères), il se défie aussi des oppositions binaires. Les poèmes, élégies fondamentales disant la perte de la nature et de notre symbiose avec elle, sont aussi des chants où peut se nouer une communauté de lecture, et d’écritures.

Conclusion

Le mot de la fin pourrait revenir à Tim Robinson, écrivain, cartographe et explora- teur de l’Ouest irlandais, qui ne cesse d’interroger notre rapport aux lieux, à l’espace. Dans l’un de ses derniers livres, il invente un néologisme, la « géophanie », dont voici sa définition : « A theophany is the showing forth, the manifestation of God, or

64. Ibid., p. 95. 65. Seamus Heaney, « A Postcard from Iceland », in The Haw Lantern, Londres, Faber and Faber, 1987, p. 7. 66. Rilke est une influence fondamentale dans ce recueil qui aborde la question duoikos et de l’appar- tenance à un lieu. Il écrit : « Nous naissons, pour ainsi dire, provisoirement, quelque part ; c’est peu à peu que nous composons, en nous, le lieu de notre origine, pour y naître après-coup et chaque jour plus définitivement » (Rainer Maria Rilke, lettre du 23 janvier 1923, in Lettres mila- naises 1921-1926, Renée Lang (éd.), Paris, Plon, 1956, p. 28). Par ailleurs, il semble annoncer toute la problématique environnementaliste dès 1910 : « Pour écrire un seul vers, il faut avoir vu beaucoup de villes, d’hommes et de choses, il faut connaître les animaux, il faut sentir comment volent les oiseaux et savoir quel mouvement font les petites fleurs en s’ouvrant le matin » (traduction de Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge [1910] de Rainer Maria Rilke : Les cahiers de Malte Laurids Brigge [1926], Maurice Betz (trad.), Paris, Le Point, 1995, p. 25). 67. Paula Meehan, Geomantic, p. 17, 48. 72 Florence Schneider of a god ; geophany therefore must be the showing forth of the Earth » 68. Geomantic pourrait bien être ceci, une géophanie, une présentation des menues poussières et de la Terre sous un jour nouveau. Ou plus exactement des retrouvailles poétiques avec des visions passées, oubliées, mais fondatrices 69 – grâce à une écriture ancrée dans un environnement à la fois lisible et étrange, comme l’annoncent les vers de , en épigraphe du recueil, « Indefatigable dazzling / terrestrial strangeness ».

Florence Schneider Université Paris Nanterre

68. Tim Robinson, Connemara and Elsewhere, Dublin, Prism, 2014, p. 47. 69. C’est le cas des premiers poèmes d’Amergin, « the first poems of the first poet », marqués déjà par les métamorphoses animales et botaniques et que Paula Meehan cite à plusieurs reprises comme influence dans ses derniers entretiens. On peut se référer à l’éclairage de sur cet héritage poétique lié à la nature (To Ireland, I, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 3). Relational Difference in Sinéad Morrissey’s Poetry: An Ecocritical Approach 1

Abstract: The poet from Northern Ireland Sinéad Morrissey has among her concerns that about our conflicting relationship with nature ‒ be it the human body, the environment or the animal world. This paper aims to analyse Morrissey’s ecopoetics: her denunciation of environmental degradation, the rendering of nature as a speaking subject and the exploration of relational difference to construe nature as a necessary Other. Keywords: Sinéad Morrissey, ecocriticism, poetry, otherness, Ireland.

Résumé : La poétesse d’Irlande du Nord Sinéad Morrissey a parmi ses préoccupations celle de notre relation conflictuelle avec la nature ‒ que ce soit le corps humain, l’environnement ou le monde animal. Cet article vise à analyser l’écopoétique de Morrissey : sa dénonciation de la dégradation de l’environnement, le rendu de la nature en tant que sujet parlant et l’exploration de la différence relationnelle pour concevoir la nature comme un Autre nécessaire. Mots clés : Sinéad Morrissey, écocritique, poésie, alterité, Irlande.

Sinéad Morrissey, a poet from Northern Ireland (Portadown, 1972), is not usually labelled as a nature poet, although ecology features as a conspicuous concern in her poetry. Author of six poetry collections to date – There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996), Between Here and There (2002), The State of the Prisons (2005), Through the Square Window (2009), Parallax (2013) and On Balance (2017), all of them published by Carcanet in Manchester (UK) –, her books have been praised for their formal and conceptual achievement, as well as for the rigour of their political, historical, ecological, intellectual and personal inquiries 2. In an interview with Declan Meade in 2002 after the publication of her second collection, Morrissey commented, for instance, on her heartache on seeing the fields disappear in Japan – the country where she lived for two years – and her distress at the contradiction between the Japanese veneration for the cherry blossom and the escalating envi- ronmental degradation: “I thought I could see the mountain becoming smaller and

1. This article is part of the research projects “Eco-fictions” and “The Animal Trope” (MCIU, AEI, ERDF, EU: FEM2015-66937-P and PGC2018-093545-B-I00) as well as the competitive reference group and network EDC431C 2019/01 and ED431D 2017/17, funded by Xunta de Galicia. 2. Such are the accomplishments highlighted on the back cover of Sinéad Morrissey’s poetry collection On Balance, Manchester, Carcanet Press, 2017.

Études irlandaises, no 44-1, 2019 – p. 73-85 74 Manuela Palacios smaller” 3. Both as a public figure and as a writer, Morrissey struggles to enhance environmental consciousness. In this article, I intend to identify and analyse the main ecological concerns in Morrissey’s poetry not only because of their important role in her poetic project, but also because of their relevance to understand and engage with environmental degradation, one of the most formidable challenges we are facing today. For my analysis, I will turn to ecocriticism and ecofeminism, two relatively recent critical approaches with an auspicious application to the analysis of Irish literature due to the preponderant display of natural motifs in its various genres and texts. Although ecofeminism as a social movement can be traced back to the 1970s and ecocriticism began to yield important results in mostly US literary criticism in the 1990s, the application of ecocritical concepts to Irish literature is only recent and deserves a thorough and comprehensive examination. I will make a selection of the most pertinent proposals in Morrissey’s poetry concerning the tensions in the relationship between humans and nature – nature understood here as an inter- connected web that comprises environment, animals and human body –, between their kinship and separateness, by focusing on the notion of relational difference and on concomitant concepts of otherness, vulnerability, interdependence and the interrogation of anthropocentrism. For the discussion of the former concepts, I am indebted to a number of foundational debates in this field, such as Merleau- Ponty’s ecophenomenological analysis of the human-animal continuum 4, Patrick D. Murphy’s ecocritical approach to the notion of relational difference 5, Julia Kristeva’s inquiry into external and internal alterity 6, Judith Butler’s questioning of the sovereign subject and her appeal for vulnerability as an ethical force 7, and Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman feminism and de-centring of the human subject 8. Ecocriticism has gone through a number of stages in its development that have resulted from its more or less theoretical or activist orientations. Debates on the tensions between nature on the one hand and, on the other, culture, science, human perception and subjectivity, gender, race, class, and other identity factors have often turned around notions of sameness and difference regarding the rela- tionship between nature and humankind. However, a number of environmental philosophers have urged us to overcome dualistic thinking and have proposed the idea of an expanded relational self 9. Among these thinkers, Freya Mathews has

3. “Sinéad Morrissey: Interview with Declan Meade. Part One: Becoming a Poet”, Culture Northern Ireland, first published inThe Stingling Fly, vol. 14, no. 1, Winter 2002-2003. 4. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La nature [1968], Dominique Séglard (ed.), Paris, Seuil, 1995. 5. Patrick D. Murphy, Literature, Nature, and Other: Ecofeminist Critiques, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1995. 6. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, New York, Columbia University Press, 1991. 7. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, New York, Fordham University Press, 2005. 8. Rosi Braidotti, “Four Theses on Posthuman Feminism”, inAnthropocene Feminism, Richard Grusin (ed.), Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2017, p. 21-48. 9. Margarita Estévez-Saá and María Jesús Lorenzo-Modia have provided an enlightening survey of these various positions in “The Ethics and Aesthetics of Eco-Caring: Contemporary Debates on EcoFeminism(s)”, Women’s Studies, vol. 47, no. 2, 2018, p. 123-146. Relational Difference in Sinéad Morrissey’s Poetry… 75 also warned against understanding otherness as exclusion and conceiving kinship as sameness or assimilation. She has also denounced the utilitarian conception that nature is there to be mastered and exploited, and the hierarchical relation that puts humankind in a dominant position over nature. Furthermore, Mathews draws attention to the phenomenon of “backgrounding”, which I find especially illuminating for literary analysis, by which nature is merely part of a background, a setting or location in an ancillary function to human action and protagonism 10.

The human-animal expanded relational self

For my analysis of those poems by Morrissey that explore bonds of continuity and empathy between humans and animals, I will turn to her first poetry collection There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996), a book of contrasts between home and abroad, childhood and adulthood, godlessness and spirituality. Through this collection, written before the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, resounds a plea for reconciliation. The poem “Monteverdi Vespers” aptly compares human singing voices with the cry of seagulls, though their respective realms are divided by a wall. There is a clear pattern of opposites: inside-outside, human-animal, earthly-spiritual city, but the poem ends with the accommodation of the Other in the self: “The cry of gulls accompanies you with knowledge” 11. The poem consists of three quatrains with end-of-line sound patterns that come close to rhyme, all of which reinforces the formal equilibrium and produces a kind of musicality that suits the context of Monteverdi’s music: “wall / stalled”, “outside / cry”, “how / cower”, “worm / stern”, “wreckage / damage / knowledge”. However, most of these end-of-line words actually refer to the gulls’ actions, thereby making the birds the true protagonists of the poem and the agents of transformation in the poetic persona’s frame of mind. The lyric subject is attentive and receptive to the animals’ message, which is conveyed through their body language: “cower / Nowhere, fought shell to be here, stern” 12. Morrissey rarely holds a serene or pastoral view of nature and, in poems such as this one, she acknowledges the animals’ fierce struggle for survival: “I know the knacks of gulls: after the rain how / They stamp the lawns to fool the worms” 13. The disruptive presence of the animals is paralleled in the fragmentation of the lines, with their numerous caesurae, and line breaks that underscore division and destruction: “wall”, “Outside”, “wreckage”, “damage”. The poem “Monteverdi Vespers” discerningly illustrates one of the most challenging aspects in ecocriticism to date: the problematic tension between

10. Freya Mathews, “The Dilemma of Dualism”, inRoutledge Handbook of Gender and Environment, Sherilyn MacGregor (ed.), London, Routledge, 2017, p. 54-70. 11. Sinéad Morrissey, “Monteverdi Vespers”, in There Was Fire in Vancouver, Manchester, Carcanet Press, 1996, p. 57. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 76 Manuela Palacios difference and sameness, the recognition of the animals’ alterity on the one hand and the acknowledgement of a continuum between the human and the non-human animal on the other. In her discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s ecophenomenology, Louise Westling has drawn attention to his emphasis on the embodied nature of perception and experience and on the concurrent kinship and separateness of humans and animals. Westling points out Merleau-Ponty’s endorsement of a common evolutionary history for humans and animals without erasing the distinctions between the two 14. I find Westling’s reading of Merleau-Ponty’s theses especially relevant to Morrissey’s “Monteverdi Vespers”, because the poet highlights the lyric subject’s simultaneous sensorial perception of both human voices and animal cries: “The voices sing to me […]. I hear them cry” 15, and con- cludes the poem by referring to knowledge that derives from attentive listening to the birds: “The cry of gulls accompanies you with knowledge” 16. Morrissey also identifies the embodied logos of animals and understands the gulls’ needs, fears and determination through their body language: “I know they fly to chimneys to be warm” 17. Although it is difficult to ascertain the precise content of the final epiphany, the allusion to Jerusalem – most likely from the psalm Lauda Jerusa- lem in Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers – suggests a common destiny to humans and animals in a hostile environment: “Jerusalem, / The voices sing. City compacted in faith and damage” 18. The earthly city – although there is no explicit reference to Belfast, the phrase “City compacted in faith and damage” sounds like a suitable description – shares the predicament of the spiritual city, while humans and animals share experiences and knowledge. Another poem of interest for the analysis of the human-animal expanded relational self in There Was Fire in Vancouver is “Restoration”, which closes the book and consists of two sections with a six-year time gap, “Achill, 1985” and “Juist, 1991”. Both parts are set on islands – an Irish and a German one respectively – and the temporal and spatial divide between these sections evince a substantial change in the poetic persona’s outlook on life. The first part, “Achill, 1985”, is a compact stanza of twelve lines of irregular length and no rhyming pattern which tells us of the poetic persona’s memory of an encounter with a beached dolphin that was rotting on the shore. This experience reminds us of other contemporary Irish poems about stranded cetaceans, such as “Baleen” by Doireann Ní Ghríofa and “Beached Whale” by Victoria Kennefick 19. The lyric subject feels a special attraction

14. Louise Westling, The Logos of the Living World: Merleau-Ponty, Animals and Language, New York, Fordham University Press, 2014, p. 41-43. 15. Sinéad Morrissey, “Monteverdi Vespers”, p. 57. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Doireann Ní Ghríofa, “Baleen”, The Level Crossing, no. 1, 2016, p. 33; Victoria Kennefick, “Beached Whale”, in White Whale, Cork, Southword Editions, 2015, p. 17. For an in-depth analysis of the motif and trope of the whale in contemporary , see Manuela Palacios, “Inside the Whale: Configurations of An-other Female Subjectivity”, Women’s Studies, vol. 47, no. 2, 2018, p. 160-172. Relational Difference in Sinéad Morrissey’s Poetry… 77 towards the dolphin’s decomposing body: “I remember how its body / Opened in the sun, / Caught me” 20. I would like to suggest that this compelling two-syllable expression “caught me” – the shortest line in the poem –, rather than merely imply “caught my attention” actually suggests the metaphorical incorporation of the observer’s human body into the open animal body. In a poem where the dolphin’s body is rendered in passive verb forms – “washed up”, “abandoned”, “opened” – and as the object of other agents’ actions – the wind rips it, the gull and the poetic persona watch it, the latter remembers it – the active verb form “caught me” is the dolphin’s only action, which, albeit symbolical, becomes all the more striking. In her analysis of this poem, Katarzyna Poloczek has commented on its elegiac tone, reinforced by the use of passive verbs, and by its iambic rhythm evocative of a heartbeat. Poloczek relates the motif of the rotting dolphin to common cultural processes of animal erasure that empty animals of life and meaning. However, she pinpoints in this poem a double strategy of denunciation of the assault on life-giving nature – reminding us of the Greek origin of the word dolphin, delphys, “the womb” – and, concurrently, identifies the observer’s compassion and act of keening, of witnessing and keeping company with the dead 21. We see that Morrissey shares Ní Ghríofa’s and Kennefick’s expression of female attraction to, – whether of the female authors or of the more or less explicit female personae in their poems 22 – and empathy for, the decaying cetacean. “Achill, 1985” weaves a bond of human-animal vulnerability and explores the possibility of physical contiguity of human and animal bodies. However, contrary to Ní Ghríofa’s configuration of the stranded whale’s hospitable belly where “dozens of ladies […] stood together” 23, the stinking, washed up dolphin of Morrissey’s poem primarily conveys a nihilistic desire for personal dissolution in the pitiless course of nature: “And I remember how the sea / Looked wide and emptied of love” 24. The stinking corpse of the dolphin may be interpreted as a kind of message conveyed through body language, which the poetic persona registers attentively. This odour of decay brings about an epiphany about the merciless conditions of existence. Contrarily, “Juist, 1991”, the second part of “Restoration”, presents a landscape that is infused with God’s presence and words, although here, God is a figurative simile – “It is as though God said” – and nature is the true and insistent source of wonder: “Meeresleuchten, lights of the sea // One touch and the water explodes /

20. Sinéad Morrissey, “Restoration”, in There Was Fire in Vancouver, p. 59. 21. Katarzyna Poloczek, “‘Their disembodied voices cry’: Marine Animals and their Songs of Absence in the Poetry of Sinéad Morrissey, Caitríona O’Reilly, and Mary O’Donoghue”, in Animals in Irish Literature and Culture, Kathryn Kirkpatrick, Borbála Faragó (eds.), Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, p. 78-79. 22. Although Sinéad Morrissey clearly said, in her interview with Declan Meade in 2002, that she does not like “the straight confessional”, she admitted in the same interview that her first book There Was Fire in Vancouver is mainly concerned with her personal experience (“Sinéad Morrissey: Interview with Declan Meade…”). 23. Doireann Ní Ghríofa, “Baleen”. 24. Sinéad Morrissey, “Restoration”, p. 59. 78 Manuela Palacios in phosphorescence” 25. The poem refers to the phenomenon of bioluminescence of organisms in surface layers of the sea and, although this light is presented as having no origin and no purpose, there is expressed an overt desire to infuse the world with this light that traverses and erases physical and poetic line boundaries: “Let there be light in this world / Of nothing let it come from / Nothing let it speak nothing / Let it go everywhere” 26. The biblical overtone and the God-like simile point towards the poetic persona’s psychical and spiritual transformation from a position of hopelessness and extinction in part one of “Restoration”, to one of beatitude and expansion in part two. Both stances deeply intertwine the mind and the bodily senses, as well as human and non-human nature, thereby interrogating dualistic thinking and emphasizing the possibility of an expanded relational self. From the witnessing, remembering I of “Achill, 1985”, the poem “Restoration” leads us on to a second I-less section, “Juist, 1995”, in which the real protagonist is the light. Although Morrissey pays no attention to the organisms that produce the light, it is the sea phosphorescence that fills the poetic voice with wonder. We perceive in the poem a postanthropocentric, or even posthuman, progression that, as in Rosi Braidotti’s proposal in “Four Theses on Posthuman Feminism”, celebrates Zoe and de-centres the human subject: “The decentering of Anthropos challenges also the separation of bios, as exclusively human life, from zoe, the life of animals and nonhuman entities. What comes to the fore instead is a human- nonhuman continuum” 27.

Nature as a speaking subject

The next poem under analysis, “Pilots”, portrays endangered nature and adumbrates a necessary rectification in human interaction with the natural world. This poem belongs to Morrissey’s third collection The State of the Prisons (2005), which is largely concerned with historical change and intercultural negotiations, as well as with the care, discipline and punishment of the human body. Catherine Conan, in her analysis of persisting ideological schemes of the Troubles in Sinéad Morrissey’s and Ciaran Carson’s poetry, has identified in their writing the following themes and motifs, many of which deal with notions of alterity of ecocritical relevance: division and fragmentation of the territory, strangeness of home and family, exile, tension between here and elsewhere, silence, and violence against the body 28. Indeed, The State of the Prisons pays attention to human nature as it manifests itself in the human body in poems such as “The Yellow Emperor’s Classic”, “The Second Lesson

25. Sinéad Morrissey, “Restoration”, p. 59. 26. Ibid., p. 60. 27. Rosi Braidotti, “Four Theses on Posthuman Feminism”, p. 26. 28. Catherine Conan, “Quelle poésie de la sortie de guerre en Irlande du Nord? L’exemple de Breaking News de Ciaran Carson (2003) et The State of the Prisons (2005) de Sinéad Morrissey”, Études irlandaises, no. 34-1, 2009, p. 4. Relational Difference in Sinéad Morrissey’s Poetry… 79 of Anatomists” and “Migraine”. Additionally, this collection explores other types of relationships between humans and non-human nature, as in the case of “Pilots”, a poem about the arrival of a group of whales into Belfast Lough, their endanger- ment, the spectacularization of their behaviour and, of particular relevance to this article, about human failure to understand the message the animals are attempting to convey. Conan has commented on Morrissey’s frequent use of regular stanzas with clear structures and grammatical clarity 29, and such is the case in “Pilots” too, where formally harmonious six-line stanzas share an additional line with the following stanza, thus adding to the narrative continuity of the poem. However, this apparent formal equilibrium clearly contrasts with the unsettling theme, setting and plot of the poem. The spatial setting of “Pilots” is described in terms of dystopia and pollution: “It was black as the slick-stunned coast of Kuwait / over Belfast Lough” 30. Fifty pilot whales – identified in the poem as cetaceans of the species Globicephala melaena – have strayed into the Lough, an intertidal sea inlet by the city and port of Belfast. Various narratives are produced to try to explain this unexpected arrival of the animals or to relate it to previous encounters with whales – among them, the economic exploitation of whale products: “as though a hill had opened onto fairytale measures / of blubber and baleen, and this was the money − / god’s recompense” 31. The admission of failure to understand why Newfoundland whales are so far from their habitat – “Nothing would fit” 32 – com- bines with the critique of the spectacularization of the whales: “Children sighed when they dived, then clapped as they rose / again, Christ-like and shining, from the sea, though they could have been / dying out there” 33. Morrissey usually ends the stanzas of this poem with half-lines of high conceptual and emotional value: “on their globular foreheads”, “god’s recompense”, “with all the foresight we lack”, “dying out there”. These phrases convey several of the most important ideas in the poem: the animal body’s vulnerability, the allegedly divinely-condoned economic exploitation that has led to the extinction of some species, and humans’ inability to grasp the dimension of the environmental problem. In her analysis of this poem, Katarzyna Poloczek compares the sacrificial image of the “Christ-like” whale with the albatross in Samuel Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, the killing of which is a reenactment of the crucifixion of Christ. Poloczek warns of the risk of mythical narratives like this one that make of the real animal and its circumstances an “absent referent” 34. In sum, the poem “Pilots” denounces the degradation of the environment, the endangered situation of cetaceans, human rapacious exploitation of this species, the radical otherness of animals whose behaviour leaves humans in puzzlement,

29. Ibid., p. 3. 30. Sinéad Morrissey, “Pilots”, in The State of the Prisons, Manchester, Carcanet Press, 2005, p. 14. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., p. 15. 34. Katarzyna Poloczek, “‘Their disembodied voices cry’…”, p. 81. 80 Manuela Palacios and the spectacularization of animal life regardless of its needs and rights. The human-animal relationship that is staged in this poem is one of human insensitive greed and animal vulnerability. However, Morrissey also invests the whales with the capacity to convey a message that could help to save the planet, and makes humans responsible for their lack of discernment: “some dismal chorus of want and wistfulness / resounding around the planet, alarmed and prophetic, / with all the foresight we lack” 35. The alliteration and assonance in “resounding around” reinforce the idea of humankind’s responsibility and their heedlessness. Ecocriticism can assist us in the analysis of this instance of human inattention considering, in particular, its proposition that we conceive nature as a speaking subject whose message humans should take heed of. In his book Literature, Nature, and Other (1995), the ecocritic Patrick D. Murphy advocates literature that renders nature as a speaking subject, even if nature does not use our sign system or has conscious volition (just like the human unconscious, Murphy notes 36). Murphy also makes the distinction between speaking for nature and “render[ing] the signification presented us by other elements of nature”, since he is highly critical of writers’ use of “nature as an object for the self-constitution of the poet” 37, as in some romantic nature writing. Murphy clarifies this dilemma with an example that is relevant to Morrissey’s poem:

When our system of overcultivation poisons ground water is this a sign that we can read, and by integrating this sign into our texts, are we letting that land speak through us or are we only speaking for it 38?

The critic’s answer is that we may find two simultaneous voices in the literary text: “The nonhuman speaking subject and the rendering human author” 39. I would like to contend that Morrissey’s “Pilots” endorses Murphy’s double- voiced approach by making use of, on the one hand, a collective, human “we” – that includes the insightful poetic persona and the baffled spectators – and, on the other, an implicitly speaking “they”: the “alarmed and prophetic” “chorus” of the whales and the sign of their anomalous arrival. We may say that we find here the non-human speaking subject and the rendering poetic persona, as the latter is letting the whales speak through her. However, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has warned, speaking does not entail being heard: “So, ‘the subaltern cannot speak,’ means that even when the subaltern makes an effort to the death to speak, she is not able to be heard, and speaking and hearing complete the speech act” 40. Such is

35. Sinéad Morrissey, “Pilots”, p. 14. 36. Patrick D. Murphy, Literature, Nature, and Other…, p. 9, 11. 37. Ibid., p. 12-13. 38. Ibid., p. 14. 39. Ibid. 40. Donna Landry, Gerald MacLean, “Subaltern Talk. Interview with the Editors”, in The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Donna Landry, Gerald MacLean (eds.), New York – London, Routledge, 1996, p. 292. Although Spivak refers here to women as the subaltern, the correlation between women and non-human nature has long been argued by ecofeminism in Relational Difference in Sinéad Morrissey’s Poetry… 81 the case in the poem itself, where there is an explicit comment on humans’ failure to listen due to their inappropriate attitude and location: “Though not one of us / heard it from where we stood on the beaches and car-parks / and cycle-tracks skirting the water” 41. As readers, we are also implicitly interpellated, and it is our responsibility to decide whether we will listen and respond adequately. The challenge of an equitable dialogue between humans and nature requires both that human beings recognize non-human nature as a speaking subject and that they foster a disposition to listen.

The body’s relational difference: vulnerability and empowerment

This article has, up to here, been concerned mainly with animal bodies: their vulne- rability – the rotting dolphin in “Achill, 1985”, the strayed whales in “Pilots” –, their struggle for survival – the gulls’ strategies to get food and keep warm in “Monteverdi Vespers” –, the messages that animals convey to humans through their behaviour and body language – the epiphanies at the end of “Monteverdi Vespers” and “Achill, 1985”, the failed reception of the message in “Pilots” – and the interaction of human with animal bodies – the human singing voices and gulls’ cries in “Monteverdi Vespers”, the human observer “caught” by the opened, decomposing body of the dolphin in “Achill, 1985”. “Juist, 1991” seems to be concerned with a different manifestation of a body in that the focus of the poem is not the sea organism itself – bacteria, crustaceans, jellyfish, etc. – but the phosphorescence it produces. The aspects just mentioned – vulnerability, struggle for survival, communicative power and human-animal interaction through their bodies – hardly apply to this poem which, on account of its I-lessness, looks rather like a suggestive illustration of the postanthropocentric and posthuman stance defended, among others, by Rosi Braidotti 42. I would like to turn now to the human body, a shift that can be justified by the way philosophical, religious and scientific discourses have construed it as the animal, abject and natural component of our identity, an Other that must be, if not possibly transcended, at least controlled and opposed to the rational, cultural and spiritual yearnings of the mind 43. Merleau-Ponty’s ecophenomenology also helps us in the transition from the animal to the human body and in our questioning of the mind-body dualism when he highlights the shared evolutionary history of

its analysis of the interconnection of forms of oppression, as Ynestra King has done in “Healing the Wounds: Feminism, Ecology, and the Nature / Culture Dualism”, in Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism, Irene Diamond, Gloria Feman Orenstein (eds.), San Francisco, Sierra Club Books, 1990, p. 106-121. 41. Sinéad Morrissey, “Pilots”, p. 15. 42. Rosi Braidotti, “Four Theses on Posthuman Feminism”. 43. Lynda Birke, Feminism, Animals and Science: The Naming of the Shrew, Buckingham, Open University Press, 1994, p. 5; Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding, Chicago – London, The University of Chicago Press, 2007. 82 Manuela Palacios humans and animals, as well as the way our bodies determine what we perceive to the extent of considering language as an extension of embodied activities 44. The body is therefore crucial to understand our relationship with alterity, not just with an external Other like the animal, but also with the Other inside us. This is why Grzegorz Czemiel, in his analysis of Sinéad Morrissey’s post-mortem poems, includes the human body, alongside the category of the foreigner, in his study of alterity following Julia Kristeva’s and Paul Ricœur’s theories 45. Sinéad Morrissey’s poem “The Yellow Emperor’s Classic”, fromThe State of the Prisons, is a poem inspired by the homonymous treatise of traditional Chinese medicine that “enquires about the nature of health, disease, and treatment” 46. Besides its focus on the human body, the poem is of interest to ecocriticism for its emphasis on the interdependence of the various parts of a complex body system and the necessary balance of opposites. In its plea for an active sexual life between men and women, the poem admonishes that repressing sexual activity would be: “Like trying to survive / without our opposite / inside us / when opposites equal life” 47. As usual, Morrissey deftly uses lineation for emphasis both by means of expressive line-breaks and by playing with line-length. Furthermore, the repetition of “opposite” stresses the idea that the Other is not just of vital importance for our wellbeing but must also be incorporated and recognised as a constitutive part of our selves. This inclusive logic recalls Julia Kristeva’s reflection on the frequent occurrence of foreignness among the very founders of nations, which leads her to affirm “Strangely, the foreigner lives within us” 48 and to suggest that the external Other helps us to reconcile ourselves with the alterity within us. This consideration of the constitutive and relational role of the Other is also of relevance to ecocriticism and, in particular, to Patrick D. Murphy’s notion of “anotherness”:

What if instead of alienation we posited relation as the primary mode of human-human and human-nature interaction without conflating difference, particularity and other specificities? What if we worked from a concept of relational difference andanotherness rather than Otherness 49?

Apart from its plea for the inclusion of the Other, the poem “The Yellow Emperor’s Classic” exhibits a candid representation of the body, its functions and fluids: “We muster control / of our orifices” 50, “There is a highway / of sexual

44. Louise Westling, The Logos of the Living World…, p. 4-7. 45. Grzegorz Czemiel, “‘When China meets China’: Sinéad Morrissey’s Figurations of the Orient, or the Function of Alterity in Julia Kristeva and Paul Ricœur”, Text Matters, vol. 4, no. 4, 2014, p. 117-131. 46. James Curran, “Medical Classics: The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine”, British Medical Journal, vol. 336, no. 7647, 2008, p. 777. 47. Sinéad Morrissey, “The Yellow Emperor’s Classic”, inThe State of the Prisons, p. 47. 48. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, p. 1. 49. Patrick D. Murphy, Literature, Nature, and Other…, p. 34-35. 50. Sinéad Morrissey, “The Yellow Emperor’s Classic”, p. 46. Relational Difference in Sinéad Morrissey’s Poetry… 83 awakening, / a road rather than a river / in spite of water” 51, “slashes with his sword the blood – / silk ribbon and cries ‘Open!’” 52. This forthright account of bodily functions – the poem is after all inspired by a medical treatise – actually contradicts Western constructions of the body as abject and may have been the reason for Morrissey’s good-humoured take on this topic – laughter is a way of placing and displacing abjection, Kristeva says 53. Ecocriticism considers the body to be a locus of knowledge and condemns those discourses that have presented the body as inferior to the mind and an obstacle to the progress of culture 54. The human body is a liminal space where culture and nature meet and, concomitantly, an arena where contradictory discourses about them struggle. The body, therefore, is a privileged site to identify social constructions of what is human, what is natural and what is cultural, that is, for a critique of the duality culture-nature. Morrissey’s poem “The Yellow Emperor’s Classic” depicts a body that is honoured and not debased, a body that can be the source of pleasure and must be taken care after. A reservation, however, that modern ecocriticism could have with respect to the treatise of traditional Chinese medicine as rendered by the poet is its representation of hierarchical rather than heterarchical relations within the body: “The heart is its Emperor. / All other organs are the Emperor’s courtiers” 55. “Life on earth is an interconnected web, not a hierarchy”, claims the ecofeminist Ynestra King 56. Heterarchy acts in fact as a synonym of interdependence. The apparent contradiction between empowerment and vulnerability undergoes an interesting revision in Morrissey’s poem, as the body is empowered not, I would say, because it is an imperial system but as a result of the thorough and positive attention it receives. Concurrently, its vulnerability and need for care is made evident by the medical nature of the inspiring treatise. Health and the ethics of care question the dualism empowerment-vulnerability also in Sinéad Morrissey’s poem “Display” from the collection Parallax (2013). The book begins with a definition of the word parallax, which refers to the apparent displacement of an object caused by the observer’s change of position. It is, therefore, a collection of poems fascinated with the role of perspective and representation. “Display” refers to the gathering of fifteen thousand women who performed a public display of gymnastics in Hyde Park in 1936, an event organized by the Women’s League of Health and Beauty (1930-1939). The poem begins with the

51. Ibid., p. 47. 52. Ibid. 53. Julia Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur: essai sur l’abjection, Paris, Seuil, 1980, p. 15. 54. Greta Gaard, Patrick D. Murphy, “Introduction”, in Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy, Greta Gaard, Patrick D. Murphy (eds.), Urbana – Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1998, p. 9. 55. Sinéad Morrissey, “The Yellow Emperor’s Classic”, p. 46. Grzegorz Czemiel refers to these images as “feudal body politics” (“‘When China meets China’…”, p. 130). 56. Ynestra King, “The Ecology of Feminism and the Feminism of Ecology”, inHealing the Wounds: The Promise of Ecofeminism, Judith Plant (ed.), Philadelphia, New Society Publishers, 1989, p. 19. 84 Manuela Palacios slogan “movement is life” 57 and thereby equates physical exercise and life. Morrissey, however, goes beyond the wholesome effect of gymnastics and implies that women’s repossession of their own bodies will bring about decisive changes in their lives and in society at large: “to them belongs the future! – while the ghost of Mary Bagot Stack, / whose dream this is, smiles back” 58. These women’s bodies are no longer obstacles to the progress of culture, as in the traditional discourses denounced by Gaard and Murphy 59, but quite the contrary: the free movement of women’s bodies is the key to social progress. Michel Maffesoli has rightly reminded us of the etymological correlation between existence and mobility – Latin ex(s)istere: to stand out – when he claimed “Exister, c’est sortir de soi” 60. However, the capacity to move is not universal and gender has been a determining factor in people’s mobility, as Barbara Ehrenreich has shown on exposing a series of Western constructions of masculinity as motion and femininity as stasis 61. For this reason, Morrissey’s poem adroitly identifies a crucial moment of social change that connects women’s mobility to their struggle for freedom. “Display” is a truly agonistic poem in that it represents struggle and resistance, female gymnastics and the spectators’ gaze that attempts to fix and return the women to their traditional role of objects of male desire and, interestingly enough, to the animal condition: “like eyeing up the horses at a racecourse, but with much more choice” 62. This animalization of women’s bodies recalls the previously discussed poem “Pilots”, as in both texts the process of spectacularization threatens the communication of the message and the possibility of change, although the women in “Display” have a much higher degree of agency than the whales in “Pilots”. We find the antithesis of these women’s athletic bodies in the corpses of the abused Scandinavian women of the poem “The Evil Key”: “where corpses // have been left: plastered into a crevice in a flat / in an affluent suburb or strung amongst the cables // of a lift-shaft in a disused meat-packing plant” 63. The use of the passive voice, the past participles, and the motif of animal exploitation and meat consumption emphasize the inanimate and immobile nature of these women’s corpses.

Conclusion

An ecocritical approach to the analysis of Sinéad Morrissey’s poetry brings to light the many tensions in the relation between self and Other and unfolds the poet’s sundry explorations of other possible relations between humans and nature.

57. Sinéad Morrissey, “Display”, in Parallax, Manchester, Carcanet Press, 2013, p. 21. 58. Ibid. 59. Greta Gaard, Patrick D. Murphy, “Introduction”, in Ecofeminist Literary Criticism…, p. 9. 60. Michel Maffesoli,Du nomadisme: vagabondages initiatiques, Paris, Livre de Poche, 1997, p. 28. 61. Barbara Ehrenreich, “The Decline of Patriarchy”, in Constructing Masculinity, Maurice Berger, Brian Wallis, Simon Watson (eds.), New York, Routledge, 1995, p. 284-290. 62. Sinéad Morrissey, “Display”, p. 21. 63. Sinéad Morrissey, “The Evil Key”, inParallax , p. 48. Relational Difference in Sinéad Morrissey’s Poetry… 85

A number of pernicious practices in our relationship with nature are identified, such as the exploitation, degradation, spectacularization and repression of natural beings and forces. Morrissey also scrutinizes the problematical bond between woman and nature, especially through the motif of the body, its empowerment and vulnerability, its potential liberation or further constraint. Among Morrissey’s proposals, we may single out her inquiry into the human-animal continuum, her advocacy of nature as a speaking subject and her de-centring of the human subject in favour of Zoe, an expanded, relational figuration that may integrate human and non-human life.

Manuela Palacios Universidade de Santiago de Compostela

Cursed to the Trees, Enchanted by the Woods: Sweeney Astray

Abstract: Drawing on Jane Bennett’s theory of “crossings and enchantment”, this essay considers interspecies transformations in Seamus Heaney’s Sweeney Astray (1983). As a bird-man, Mad King Sweeney discovers that the arboreal environment is a vibrantly interstitial space in which paganism and Christianity coexist. By negotiating this liminal space, he opens himself to forms of attachment and enchantment that radically ameliorate his accursed existence in the trees. Keywords: Seamus Heaney, Sweeney Astray, arboreal, enchantment, liminality, crossings.

Résumé : S’appuyant sur la théorie de « croisements et d’enchantement » de Jane Bennett, cet article traite des transformations inter-espèces dans Sweeney Astray de Seamus Heaney (1983). En tant qu’homme-oiseau, le roi fou Sweeney découvre que l’environnement arboré est un espace interstitiel foisonnant où coexistent paganisme et christianisme. En appréhendant cet espace frontière, il s’ouvre à des formes d’attachement et d’enchantement qui améliorent radicalement son existence maudite au milieu des arbres. Mots clés : Seamus Heaney, Sweeney Astray, environnements arborés, enchantement, liminalité, traversées.

Sweeney Astray is the story of Sweeney, a 7th-century king of Ulster who, on hearing that Ronan Finn is marking out a church-site on his territory, assaults the cleric, throws his psalter into a nearby lake, and thus precipitates a series of curses that banish him to a life of madness in the trees 1. Once exiled from his kingdom, Sweeney abides in numerous roosts across the length and breadth of Ireland as a part-human, part-avian figure. Suffering dreadful privations and uttering his poetry of lamentation and praise, he awaits his death “at spear point”, as Ronan’s curse foretells 2. Eventually – and, it has to be said, somewhat uneasily – Sweeney undergoes an amelioration of his woes as he is enfolded by Saint Moling into the care of the very church against which he had once raved so violently.

1. First published by the Field Day Theatre Company in 1983 and then by Faber and Faber in 1984, Seamus Heaney’s version is based largely on James George O’Keeffe’s first full translation into English: Buile Suibhne (The Frenzy of Suibhne): Being the Adventures of Suibhne Geilt, a Middle- Irish Romance, James George O’Keeffe (ed.), London, Irish Texts Society, 1913. 2. Seamus Heaney, Sweeney Astray, London, Faber and Faber, 1984, p. 8. Page references in brackets refer to this edition. Sweeney Astray is sensu stricto a prosimetrum but, for convenience’s sake, we will use the term “poem”.

Études irlandaises, no 44-1, 2019 – p. 87-99 88 Tom Herron and Anna Pilz

Whilst Ronan’s curse is intended to diminish Sweeney to physical and intel- lectual inferiority – “bird-brain among branches” (p. 7-8) – what occurs is in fact something far beyond anything envisaged by the cleric. Mad Sweeney’s responses to his accursed existence take the form of adventitious becomings and, hence, resonate compellingly with Jane Bennett’s ideas on crossings and enchantment in which, as she puts it, “metamorphing creatures enact the very possibility of change; their presence carries with it the trace of dangerous but also exciting and exhilarating migrations” 3. It is precisely by leaving the stratified social world in which he is king and crossing the threshold into the woods that Sweeney begins an imbrication with the natural world in all its harshness and its pleasures. Sweeney’s knowledge of the manner of his death could well have resulted in terminal disenchantment. Unexpectedly, however, his metamorphosis results in an incomparably rich experience of life in the natural environments of Ireland. While Sweeney flies across the full range of Irish topographies – mountains, glens, bogs, plains, and rivers – it is in certain trees and woods that his becoming- enchanted happens. The woods offer him a liminal environment, simultaneously beyond the social world from which he has been so peremptorily ejected and in some respects in close commerce with that world, in which his physical and mental transformations and privations are sublimated in intense poetic expression. The arboreal world is where things change, where borders and boundaries collapse. It is in and through nature that Sweeney is able to fend off disenchantment. For Sweeney, his “interspecies crossings” awaken within him a fierce “wonder at life” 4. As king of Dal-Arie he would have passed through the forests of his kingdom as hunter on the trail of prey. Of those forays the poem reports no wonder, no sense of enchantment. But as an undefinably-hybrid thing he is fully part of a natural world teeming with species of animal and arboreal life with whom and with which he is in constant commerce. It is via this “interactive fascination” that he escapes the simple binary terms of Ronan’s curse 5. As king he reacted to difference in similarly binary and aggressive ways; as an interspecies he encounters difference with a surprised “feeling of being charmed by the novel and as yet unprocessed encounter” with his new environment and other species 6. We can read Ronan’s curse, therefore, not solely as a punishment but rather, with an eye to Bennett, as bringing into being a “surprising encounter” that leads to Sweeney’s enchantment which, in turn, finds expression in his spare and beautiful poetry 7. For Seamus Heaney, Sweeney is the embodiment of the palimpsestic and at times antithetical character of the landscape. The early Irish landscape was, Heaney

3. Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics, Princeton – Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2001, p. 17. 4. Ibid., p. 13, 32. Jos Smith briefly suggests that Sweeney can be read as an example of Bennett’s “crossings”. See Jos Smith, The New Nature Writing: Rethinking the Literature of Place, New York, Bloomsbury, 2017, p. 71-72. 5. Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life…, p. 5. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. Cursed to the Trees, Enchanted by the Woods: Sweeney Astray 89 remarks, “sacramental, instinct with signs implying a system of reality beyond the visible realities” 8. As we will demonstrate, Sweeney, as interspecies, is able to access and give articulation to these invisible realities. Commenting on the development of early Irish nature poetry, Heaney identifies a characteristic tension in the imagination between pagus, “the pagan wilderness […] unrestrained,” and disciplina, “a religious calling that transcends the almost carnal lushness of nature itself” 9. This, he suggests, comes most vividly to the fore in Sweeney’s story as set out in Buile Suibhne:

It was the bareness and durability of the writing, its double note of relish and penitence, that first tempted me to try my hand 10.

And herein lies the fundamental doubleness of both Sweeney’s story and his voice. Cursed to the trees by Ronan’s bell, Sweeney’s penitential journeying reflects the disciplina. But yet his praise of nature’s richness is an echo of pagus. In his essay “The God in the Tree”, Heaney appears to sense the possibilities of enchantment in nature when he points to two gods in the tree: “the Christian deity” and the “powers of the Celtic otherworld” 11. Bennett offers a “quasi-pagan model of enchantment” that seeks to offer an alternative to the “powerful and versatile Western tradition […] that make[s] enchantment depend on a divine creator” 12. Figured initially as landscapes that, in their apparent desolation, are fittingly punitive for a frenzied king in disgrace, the woods shift in the course of the poem to realms that are, despite their harshness, full of beauty and wonder. Far from mere wilderness, the woods of Ireland are vibrantly interstitial spaces in which paganism and Christianity coexist. They are the habitats in which Sweeney forges ways of living his different configurations, unbound to either dispensation, free to move between the worlds of animals and humans, the natural and the social, insanity and reason.

Into the woods

Sweeney Astray is part of a much older tradition of “wild men in the woods” stories that emerged prior to the arrival of Christianity in Ireland and Britain 13. Sweeney’s

8. Seamus Heaney, “The Sense of Place”, inPreoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968-1978, London, Faber and Faber, 1980, p. 132. 9. Seamus Heaney, “The God in the Tree”, inPreoccupations …, p. 183. 10. Seamus Heaney, “Introduction”, in Preoccupations…, p. ii-iii. 11. Seamus Heaney, “The God in the Tree”, p. 186. 12. Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life…, p. 12. 13. The “wild man in the woods” genre is ancient and extends beyond Europe. William Sayers has argued that Buile Suibhne bears striking similarities to the story of Nebuchadnezzar as he appears in the Book of Daniel. See William Sayers, “The Deficient Ruler as Avian Exile: Nebuchadnezzar and Suibhne Geilt”, Ériu, vol. 43, 1992, p. 217-220; Penelope B. R. Doob, Nebuchadnezzar’s Children: Conventions of Madness in Middle English Literature, New Haven – London, Yale University Press, 1974. See also Bridgette Slavin, “The Irish Birdman: Kingship and Liminality inBuile Suibhne”, in Text and Transmission in Medieval Europe, Chris Bishop (ed.), Newcastle Upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007, p. 17-45. 90 Tom Herron and Anna Pilz enforced migrations are a consequence of his repeated assaults against the authority of a Christian Church that by the mid-7th century was establishing itself as “the newly dominant […] ethos” throughout most of the island 14. Although the Christianization of Ireland was a remarkably pacific process (there are no recorded instances of martyrdom among early missionaries), an “older, recalcitrant Celtic temperament” persisted at odds with the new dispensation 15. In embodying this recalcitrance, Sweeney finds himself both “the enemy and the captive of the monastic tradition” 16. This is not without psychological consequences. In the manuscript notebooks of Sweeney Astray, Heaney records his initial thoughts on the task of translation ahead of him: Sweeney is both “GUERILLA / TRUCE BREAKER” and “SURVIVOR OF WAR” and “VICTIM” 17. More explicitly, Heaney remarks:

Sweeney is at once Lear and Poor Tom. […] His voice slips naturally into postures of complaint. He is paranoiac and schizophrenic 18.

In fact, Sweeney is “paranoiac and schizophrenic” not simply as a result of his transformation, but from the outset of the narrative. In the historical context of early medieval Ireland, he would have been a rí tuaithe, a king of a territory of perhaps two-thousand subjects, owing allegiance to a rí ruirech, the king of the province. As a minor ruler, he would have been bound by the principles and protocols of good kingship, which were frequently promoted in vernacular prose and poetry. Maintaining these regnal qualities was, as Edel Bhreathnach notes, a “constant concern of early medieval Irish churchmen, lawyers and poets”, if not always of the kings themselves. “Core attributes of the ideal king”, she states, were “encapsulated in the concepts of hospitality, justice, peace, strength, truth and valour” 19. It is at the that Sweeney’s deficiencies as a ruler are most vividly displayed, as he breaches the terms of engagement set out by Ronan (arbiter of the battle), and then hurls a spear, killing one of the cleric’s acolytes, who had had the temerity to sprinkle him with holy water. In an attempt to kill Ronan himself, Sweeney throws another spear that “pierced the bell that hung from his neck” (p. 7). This results in Ronan’s curse:

My curse fall on Sweeney for his great offence. His smooth spear profaned my bell’s holiness,

14. Seamus Heaney, “Introduction”, p. ii. 15. Ibid. 16. Seamus Heaney, “The God in the Tree”, p. 186. 17. Seamus Heaney, “Notebook with ms drafts for the poem ‘Sweeney Astray’”, MS 41, 932/1, Dublin, National Library of Ireland. 18. Ibid. 19. Edel Bhreathnach, “Perceptions of Kingship in Early Medieval Irish Vernacular Literature”, in Lordship in Medieval Ireland: Image and Reality, Linda Doran, James Lyttleton (eds.), Dublin, Four Courts Press, 2007, p. 21. Cursed to the Trees, Enchanted by the Woods: Sweeney Astray 91

cracked bell hoarding grace since the first saint rang it – it will curse you to the trees, bird-brain among branches. Just as the spear-shaft broke and sprang into the air may the mad spasms strike you, Sweeney, forever. (p. 7-8)

Sweeney’s violent repudiation of the Church is not restricted to his assaults on Ronan and his followers. We are told that he has earlier flouted good advice offered him by Colmcille (p. 12). And the fact that Ronan’s holy bell – the bell that Sweeney’s spear pierces – belonged originally to Patrick, “the first saint” (p. 8), suggests the thoroughgoing nature of Sweeney’s rejection of the Church from its origins through to its current hegemony. Later, when Sweeney enters the deepest passages of his exile, each term of Ronan’s curse is explicitly evoked: his synesthetic responses to the bellowing of stags recalls the clanking of Ronan’s holy bell; his preoccupation with stags’ antlers and the top-most branches of trees evoke the spears with which he has done so much damage at Moira; his terrifying ordeal when he is harried by “bleeding headless torsos and disembodied heads” (p. 69) summons those he killed in violation of the rules of battle set out by the cleric. Ronan’s curses have multiple consequences for Sweeney. By being transformed, his authority as king is annulled, he is exiled from the company of men and women, and crucially, he is cursed to the trees. From a state of questionable sanity, he shifts into alternating bouts of raving madness and melancholic dejection as he flies interminably over the plains and mountain ranges of Ireland in search of respite and relative safety in the forests that become his new abodes. In these arboreal landscapes, Sweeney reflects on his losses and bemoans his indignities and hardships, while at the same time paying tribute to the natural world of which he finds himself a constituent part.

Sweeney’s becoming

ThroughoutSweeney Astray, considerable emphasis is placed on the mutuality of Sweeney’s condition and his arboreal habitat. Sweeney proclaims: “I need woods for consolation” (p. 55). He rests for as long as a year in the company of “mad friends” (p. 22) in the sanctuary of the “pleasant woods” (p. 13) of Glen Bolcain 20. In this “natural asylum where all the madmen of Ireland assembled once their year in madness was complete” (p. 13), Sweeney establishes a new dominion almost

20. Although there are twenty-two references to Glen Bolcain in Sweeney Astray, its actual location remains obscure. 92 Tom Herron and Anna Pilz immediately after he is exiled from Dal-Arie. As his “ark and his Eden” (p. 21), Glen Bolcain is the place to which Sweeney repeatedly returns to find solace:

[…] a starved, pinched, raving madman, but sheltered in that lovely glen, my winter harbour, my haven, my refuge from the bare heath, my royal fort, my king’s rath. (p. 65) 21

Sweeney presents this particular landscape as his natural court: “life outside Glen Bolcain” becomes unimaginable to him (p. 23). Yet even in this “Eden” he is not free from suffering:

[…] I am the madman of Glen Bolcain, wind-scourged, stripped like a winter tree clad in black frost and frozen snow. (p. 17)

In this liminal environment, Sweeney is exposed to severe conditions of wind, coldness, blizzards, and the piercing thorns of bushes and trees. However, the woods of Glen Bolcain also offer consolations in the form of shelter, food, and companionship, all of which ensure his survival. There is, furthermore, an etymological felicity whereby the roots of the noun “madness” can be found in the Old English word, “woodness”. The Oxford English Dictionary refers to an early use of the noun “woodness” as denoting a) “Mental derangement, insanity, mania, frenzy, lunacy, craziness”; b) “Extravagant folly or recklessness; vehemence of passion or desire; wildness, infatuation”; c) “Violent anger, wrath, fury, rage; extreme fierceness, ferocity, savageness, cruelty” 22. All three definitions aptly describe Sweeney’s character. The adjective “wood” insinuates “out of one’s mind, insane” and, intriguingly, there is a further connection between the adjective “wood” meaning “mad” and the Old Irish word for poet, fáith 23. Sweeney’s

21. Inevitably, “bare heath” invokes King Lear, and in so doing we sense Sweeney Astray’s place in a tradition of the outcast king stretching from Nebuchadnezzar to, in the Irish literary tradition, Yeats’ “The Madness of King Goll” (1889) andOedipus at Colonus (1927), through to Kavanagh’s poet-figure in “Inishkeen Road: July Evening”: “I am king / Of banks and stones and every blooming thing” (, The Complete Poems, Peter Kavanagh (ed.), Newbridge, The Goldsmith Press, 1972, p. 19). 22. “Woodness, n.”, Oxford English Dictionary Online. 23. “Wood, adj., n.2, and adv.”, Oxford English Dictionary Online. Likewise, the Irish word geilt (used to describe Sweeney in the early manuscripts of the text) can either translate as terror, cowardice, frenzy, and fear or can refer to someone who dwells in the woods or deserts: a wild man or woman. See Feargal Ó Béarra, “Buile Shuibhne: vox insaniae from Medieval Ireland”, in Mental Health, Cursed to the Trees, Enchanted by the Woods: Sweeney Astray 93 state of madness is ambiguous and he shifts between moods of anger, pity, and acceptance; even in heightened moments of hallucination, he is self-aware. “Mad as you are, you are sharp-witted” (p. 77), says Moling. Complementing this etymological link, the arboreal landscape of Sweeney Astray is richly symbolic and highly codified. The woods perform a variety of functions: they are prison and sanctuary, wasteland and Eden, poison and cure. As such, they correspond to Sweeney’s newly-formulated liminal being. Ronan perceives the woods as a fitting environment for Sweeney to perform his eternal contrition, and there is certainly something purgatorial in the ascetic nature of Sweeney’s forest-dwelling. His banishment to the trees is an entirely appropriate punishment when we think of woods as the natural preserve of outlaws. Describing himself as “disabled now, outcast” (p. 16), Sweeney lives “[…] in solitude, / no glory flames the wood, / no friends, no music” (p. 14). In The Forest of Medieval Romance, Corinne J. Saunders shows how woods functioned in complex and at times contradictory ways, as sites of “exile, escape, prophecy, penance, vision and temptation” 24. She suggests that “[t]he forest, like the Biblical wilderness, may ultimately lead its inhabitant to a higher level of spirituality, its discomforts allowing for a proof of faith and a sloughing off of the sinful past” 25. In this sense, Sweeney Astray follows medieval conventions of imagining woods as unregulated and uncivilized, standing in opposition to civil culture but yet as places where – for our protagonist, at least – enchantment occurs. In a similar vein, Joep Leerssen observes that the medieval court’s “code of civility” was based upon a “de-naturing” of social life 26. In this regard, Sweeney’s exile to the treetops sees him forcibly re-natured, as he shifts abruptly from a king residing at court to a levitating creature roaming the landscape. Stripped of his royal attire – denuded, in other words, of all the markers of civilization, of his cardinal position in Dal-Arie – he is transformed from a lavishly-clothed, adorned, trophied, and armed-to-the-hilt potentate to a naked, bruised, frost-bitten “bird- brain” 27. “I have lived among trees”, he says, “going cold and naked” with “no

Spirituality, and Religion in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age, Albrecht Classen (ed.), Berlin, De Gruyter, 2014, p. 242-289 and particularly p. 263-269. Note that Ó Béarra lists as the third definition for the term geilt, based on the Dictionary of the Irish Language, “a crazy person living in the woods and supposed to be endowed with the power of levitation”. He highlights the absence of verifiable other source texts that substantiate such a definition, wondering “what other texts apart from Buile Shuibhne (if any) were excerpted to arrive at such a definition” ibid.( , p. 266). On Heaney and geilt, see Stephen Regan, “Seamus Heaney and the Making of Sweeney Astray”, Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, vol. 21, no. 2, 2015, p. 331-332. 24. Corinne J. Saunders, The Forest of Medieval Romance: Avernus, Broceliande, Arden, Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 1993, p. 18-19. 25. Ibid. 26. Joep Leerssen, “Wildness, Wilderness, and Ireland: Medieval and Early-Modern Patterns in the Demarcation of Civility”, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 56, no. 1, 1995, p. 27. 27. Sweeney’s interiority encompasses both human and animal attributes (a “bird-brain” brings with it the “fears of a bird”). This opens up avenues for further inquiry, particularly in relation to Philippe Descola’s suggestion that “similarity of interiorities [of human and non-human] justifies extending a state of ‘culture’ to nonhumans” (Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, Janet Lloyd (trans.), Chicago – London, The University of Chicago Press, 2013, p. 129). 94 Tom Herron and Anna Pilz spear and no sword” (p. 14). Repeatedly bemoaning the loss of life at court with its endless banquets, entertainments, admiring women and retinue, he now lives an eremitic life on a diet of water and watercress. He is able to leap (p. 35) and fly and is endowed by Ronan with the “fears of a bird” (p. 24); he is “feathered” (p. 46) and “plumed” (p. 23); he nests and “roosts” (p. 85). Sweeney is, however, far from alone or isolated. He lives “bare” (p. 5) among “herons”; he “is wintering out among wolf-packs” (p. 23); he finds himself in the company of foxes, woodcocks, blackbirds and badgers (p. 42). Sweeney’s transformation into an unclassifiable being permits his sensuous “active engagement” with nature and its inhabitants, and opens up his perception to multiple beings and states of being which in turn is fundamental to his enchantment 28. Whilst to the newly-transformed Sweeney the woods are a place of exile, the emergence of his poetic voice as a form of redress against his purgatorial conditions allows him to sense resemblances to that world from which he has been banished. He remains within a territory that is in many ways in tune with his former societal status. As king of Dal-Arie, we can assume that Sweeney would have owned and had access to forests: the poem’s various references to hunting indicate the woods as the king’s preserve. Prior to Ronan’s curses, Sweeney was accompanied by his fellow noblemen and warriors, but now he is in the company of wolves and birds. And while previously, he was armed and poised to attack, he is now in his “bare pelt” (p. 18), “in panic / a rickle of skin and bones” (p. 27). Formerly the hunter, he now feels hunted: he is “on the run” (p. 22), feeling “so terrified, / so panicky, so haunted” (p. 75). Fear, then, is intrinsic to Sweeney’s existence. “But”, as Bennett argues, “fear cannot dominate if enchantment is to be” 29. And Sweeney is never paralysed by his state of anxiety. His sojourn in the woods is not simply one of punishment and mortification: as we will show, something far more ambiguous happens to, and within, him. There are two particularly uncanny aspects to Sweeney’s experiences. One is spatial, the other temporal. First, Sweeney takes on a total knowledge of Ireland, its topography, toponymy, and inhabitants, so much so that he always appears to be in known territory: in other words, he is never lost. On the very day of his transformation “he was a hurtling visitant of plain and field, bare mountain and bog, thicket and marshland, and there was no hill or hollow, no plantation or forest in Ireland that he did not appear in that day” (p. 11). Second, in addition to this miraculously-acquired knowledge of every place and placename in Ireland, Sweeney also becomes a prophet. Ronan may have specified the manner of his death, but Sweeney knows that it will take place at Moling’s monastery at St Mullins. At the heart of Sweeney Astray, in its longest and most famous section in which he praises Ireland’s trees, Sweeney prophesizes:

28. Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life…, p. 5. 29. Ibid. Cursed to the Trees, Enchanted by the Woods: Sweeney Astray 95

My only rest: eternal sleep in holy ground when Moling’s earth lets fall its dark balm on my wound. (p. 45)

Whilst he possesses this knowledge, he does not know exactly when he will meet his fate. One of the unintended consequences of Ronan’s curse, then, is Sweeney entering a “surprise state” that includes “a more unheimlich (uncanny) feeling of being disrupted or torn out of one’s default sensory-psychic-intellectual dispo- sition” 30. So while there is no escaping Ronan’s reach in that Sweeney is fated to die by spear-point, this does not lead to a meek acceptance of his accursed state 31. That Sweeney chooses to roost in particular trees exemplifies his steadfast attempt to mitigate his dethroned and exilic position. He primarily associates himself with yew trees that were classified in ancient Irish law as “lords of the wood” 32. His first hideout after his transformation at Moira is “in a yew tree in the glen” at Ros Bearaigh (p. 9) 33. Found there by his kinsmen, Sweeney “spoke out of the yew”, referring to the tree as “his tree” (p. 10) 34. In claiming ownership, he establishes his “high court in the yew” (p. 50), thus retaining his elevated position in relation to his former subjects 35. It is notable that Sweeney frequently rests in yews close to holy wells or churches, locations associated respectively with pagan and Christian forms of worship, something noted by Cambrensis:

30. Ibid. 31. When Heaney collaborated with photographer Rachel Giese on a revised version of Sweeney Astray, he supplemented the text with a new sequence of poems entitled Sweeney’s Flight (London, Faber and Faber, 1992). Michael Nott senses that the “original title, Sweeney Astray, suggests aimlessness, a rambling without beginning or end, whereas Sweeney’s Flight, naming Sweeney’s endeavour rather than describing his state, suggests a fleeing from danger, a departure or retreat, and implies a sense of purpose. […] Heaney’s retitling acknowledges, if not a specific destination to Sweeney’s roaming, a different experiential relationship with the natural world” (Michael Nott, Photopoetry, 1845-2015: A Critical History, London – New York, Bloomsbury, 2018, p. 220). 32. Fergus Kelly, “Trees in Early Ireland”, Irish Forestry: Journal of the Society of Irish Foresters, vol. 56, no. 1, 1999, p. 41. The other “lords” were oak, hazel, ash, pine, holly, and apple. Trees were evaluated by their usage, their comparative stature, and their longevity, and a complex system of penalties was in place for their misuse. Indeed, there are surviving references in 7th-century texts to a lost law tract titled Fidbretha (Tree Judgments) that indicates woodland as a legal jurisdiction. See Niall Mac Coitir, Irish Trees: Myths, Legends and Folklore, Cork, The Collins Press, 2003, p. 13. 33. For further instances see: “he went into the yew tree of the church”; “he cowered in the yew tree” at the church at Drum Iarann in Connacht. At one point, he rests “for six weeks in a yew tree” in Rasharkin (p. 28, 74, 29). 34. Emphasis added. 35. Yews were strongly associated with kingship in medieval Irish culture. In the story of the Fianna, an ancient Irish legend, we find reference to the yew as “the most beautiful of the wood, it is called a king” (Lady Augusta Gregory, Gods and Fighting Men: The Story of the Tuatha de Danaan and of the Fianna of Ireland, London, J. Murray, 1910, p. 41). Ironically, although the yew tree offers shelter and sanctuary, it is also associated with violence as the tensile strength of its branches made it a favourite material in the production of spears and bows: see Niall Mac Coitir, Irish Trees…, p. 142. The spears that inaugurate and, in the end, fulfil Ronan’s curse would, most probably, have been fashioned from yew. 96 Tom Herron and Anna Pilz

[…] you will see them principally in old cemeteries and sacred places, where they were planted in ancient times by the hands of holy men, to give them what ornament and beauty they could 36.

The yew’s association with death, eternity and the afterlife, indicates the half-pagan layer in the narrative that gestures towards Sweeney’s liminal state: caught between pagan and Christian dispensations. According to Celtic mythology, the yew was among the five Irish legendary trees regarded

[…] as the source of sacred wisdom and [that] were closely associated with the druid priests as the men of learning responsible for maintaining forms of sacred wisdom, the poet replacing the priest as the last vestige of the old religious order 37.

To a large extent, then, Sweeney’s becoming-poet – a process intimately bound up in his changing relationship with the arboreal environment in general and yew trees in particular – involves a taking on of a wisdom pointedly absent during his time as king. Yet at the same time, it is only as bird-man, as arboreal being that Sweeney enters into proper relationship with Christ and Christian practice. Despite his earlier attacks on the Church, Sweeney increasingly follows disciplina. Throughout the text the narrator refers to Sweeney’s resting places as “stations” 38. With this term, Heaney introduces the element of pilgrimage into Sweeney’s wanderings. As Janet Timbie explains,

In Christian usage, the statio (= standing or military guardpost) or station is originally the fast on Wednesday and Friday […]. The meaning of station evolves from fasts to assemblies on fast days to ecclesiastical assemblies […] to the place of liturgical assemblies 39.

In more common Christian usage, station refers to those specially designated places and times of reflection during pilgrimage. Sweeney’s, however, is a solitary pilgrimage; we find him resting on one occasion in “his cold and lonely station” (p. 48).

36. Giraldus Cambrensis, The History and Topography of Ireland, John J. O’Meara (ed.), Dublin, The Dolmen Press, 1982, p. 111. Alexandra Walsham compellingly outlines how pagan traditions were consciously manipulated by re-inhabiting sacred landscapes. As an example, she refers to yew trees in English churchyards which can be understood “as living relics of ecclesiastical attempts to colonize previously hollowed spaces” (Alexandra Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 28-29). 37. Della Hooke, Trees in Anglo-Saxon England: Literature, Lore and Landscape, Woodbridge, The Boydell Press, 2010, p. 13. 38. Stephen Regan compellingly brings into dialogue Sweeney Astray with Heaney’s collection Station Island, also published in 1984 (Stephen Regan, “Seamus Heaney and the Making of Sweeney Astray”, p. 333-338). 39. Janet Timbie, “A Liturgical Procession in the Desert of Apa Shenoute”, in Pilgrimage and Holy Space in Late Antique Egypt, David Frankfurter (ed.), Boston, Brill, 1998, p. 420. Cursed to the Trees, Enchanted by the Woods: Sweeney Astray 97

Sweeney’s journey through the woods is one of penitence, marked by an adherence to Christian practices such as fasting on Fridays. For instance, as he encounters a woman giving birth by the church at Cloonburren, he is enraged that she is doing so on a fast day (p. 19). Repeatedly, he implores “Christ”, “God”, the “Lord” to have mercy on him:

Keep me here, Christ, far away from open ground and flat country. Let me suffer the cold of glens. I dread the cold space of plains. (p. 66)

Sweeney’s awareness and acknowledgement of his sin appear to be in keeping with Ronan’s disenchanting curse. Yet this is countered by the wood’s enchantment. On this lonely pilgrimage, Sweeney, instead of wishing for a return to court, comes to yearn for the solace of the woods. On Ailsa Craig, “[a] hard station!” (p. 53), he laments:

I tread the slop and foam of beds, unlooked for, penitential, and imagine treelines somewhere beyond, a banked-up, soothing, wooded haze[.] (p. 54)

The repentant aspect of his pilgrimage is reinforced by Sweeney’s description of the inhospitable and wounding arboreal environment. His physical transformation leaves him exposed to the elements and he has no roof over his head as he “roosts” in tree-tops. Thus, despite the refuge offered to Sweeney by the woods, the beauty of his habitat is countered by its roughness, especially during winter season:

Hard grey branches have torn my hands, the skin of my feet is in strips from briars and the pain of frostbite has put me astray[.] (p. 18)

Exposed to the elements, Sweeney suffers deep cuts and lasting wounds, clearly aligning him with the sufferings of Christ:

My dark night has come round again. The world goes on but I return to haunt myself. I freeze and burn. I am the bare figure of pain. (p. 70) 98 Tom Herron and Anna Pilz

Stephen Regan senses that Sweeney’s association “with trees makes possible numerous allusions to Christ’s crucifixion” 40. This is amplified when we return to the symbolic richness of the yew. Sweeney is directly linked to the figure of Christ via the particular trees of yew, hawthorn and blackthorn. The yew, with its connotations of death and sanctuary, is also believed “to be the tree upon which Christ was crucified” 41. Speaking “from [his] high court in the yew”, Sweeney states: “I have no place to lay my head” (p. 50), evoking Christ’s words “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” (Matthew 8:20) 42. These signifiers of Christ-like suffering become more overt with Sweeney’s announcement only a few stanzas later with “my cut feet, my drained face”: “I am crucified in the fork of a tree” (p. 66-67) 43. Furthermore, the hawthorn, buckthorn and blackthorn are associated with Christ’s crown of thorns. Seeking out places to rest, Sweeney, at one point, chooses “a tall ivy-grown hawthorn.” However, he “could hardly endure it” and “the thorny twigs would flail him so that he was prickled and cut and bleeding all over” (p. 13). In search of another “station” early on in his pilgrimage, he lands on a “young blackthorn” for his bed, but is wounded by the thorns:

He changed from that station to another one, a clump of thick briars with a single young blackthorn standing up out of the thorny bed, and he settled in the top of the blackthorn. But it was too slender. It wobbled and bent so that Sweeney fell heavily through the thicket and ended up on the ground like a man in a bloodbath. (p. 13-14)

It is in the trees where his penance is enacted:

[…] disabled now, outcast for the way I sold my Christ,

fallen almost through death’s door, drained out, spiked and torn, under a hard-twigged bush, the brown, jaggy hawthorn. (p. 16)

Reflecting on his fate, Sweeney finds himself between life and death. In this purgatorial state, amidst the branches and the tree-tops, he is no longer firmly grounded on earth, nor has he yet reached heaven.

40. Stephen Regan, “Seamus Heaney and the Making of Sweeney Astray”, p. 329. Regan highlights that Heaney had no “reservations in emphasizing the penitential qualities of Sweeney’s suffering”. 41. Niall Mac Coitir, Irish Trees…, p. 3. 42. Stephen Regan, “Seamus Heaney and the Making of Sweeney Astray”, p. 330. 43. “I am a bent tree / in misfortune’s wind”, says Sweeney in an early draft (Seamus Heaney, “Sweeney Astray”, Draft (13 January 1973), MS 41, 932/1, Dublin, National Library of Ireland). Cursed to the Trees, Enchanted by the Woods: Sweeney Astray 99

Conclusion

Irish woods are figured inSweeney Astray as liminal spaces apposite for Sweeney’s threshold-existence between life and death, human and animal, and “between craziness and reason” (p. 15). His exile is not complete, as he returns intermittently to civilization. His isolation is not total, as he meets and enters into relationships with humans and animals. His transformation is not final, as he is “restored to his old shape and manner” (p. 34) during his temporary return home. Crucially, he is not in a state of constant madness, as “his sense and memory came back” (p. 34). Indeed, Sweeney’s poetic voice attests to a cogent and clear-headed self-reflection. But Sweeney becomes something other during his time in the woods. While he never entirely relinquishes his sense of himself as king, he nonetheless changes shape, repeats endlessly his losses, suffers hallucinations, is exposed to the elements, and experiences pristine visions of the Irish landscape, flora and fauna. He slowly transforms his view of the woods from a purgatory to a place in which he finds sanctuary and a degree of peace. From secular obscurity as a minor king, Sweeney ascends into indigenous sainthood and is celebrated for the poetry that both records his travails and provides a means of endurance. As a king and a “blooded swordsman” (p. 30), he inflicted needless suffering on those he considered his enemies. But as a bird-man and a penitent he enters into a form of perpetual suffering balanced with the enchantment of his poetic understanding of changed circumstances. Sweeney’s nature poems articulate, to adapt Heaney’s words about Patrick Kavanagh, a lonely but resilient “inner freedom”: they attest to “a way of re-establishing the authenticity of personal experience and surviving as a credible thing” 44.

Tom Herron Leeds Beckett University

Anna Pilz Rachel Carson Center Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich

44. Seamus Heaney, “The Placeless Heaven: Another Look at Kavanagh”, inThe Government of the Tongue: The 1986 T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures and Other Critical Writings, London, Faber and Faber, 1988, p. 14.

Derek Mahon’s Geopoetic Horizons

Abstract: Derek Mahon’s poetical œuvre can be read as a critical reflection on man’s relation to Earth. This paper first examines how the basic elements of familiar landscapes (land, soil, earth, sea) interact, thus defining a poetic territory viewed from thesea as the prime element to which one inevitably returns. Then the poet’s ecological perspective is re-interpreted in wider geopoetic terms. Thirdly an analysis highlighting the vulnerability of an endangered earth yet able to draw out of its depths the energy to ceaselessly renew itself is carried out, focusing on the topos of the beach as a no man’s land of indeterminacy through which renewal is made possible and “rejectamenta” may access new horizons. Keywords: Derek Mahon, Earth, sea, beach, geopoetics.

Résumé : L’œuvre de Derek Mahon peut se lire comme une réflexion critique sur la relation de l’homme à la Terre. Cet article analysera d’abord comment les éléments constitutifs des paysages (la terre, le sol, la mer) interagissent pour former un territoire perçu à partir de la mer, cet élément premier vers lequel chacun revient inévitablement. Puis, la perspective écologique du poète est examinée à la lumière de la géopoétique. Enfin, l’analyse mettra en lumière la vulnérabilité d’une terre menacée, néanmoins capable de puiser dans ses profondeurs l’énergie de se renouveler sans cesse. On insistera sur le topos de la plage, cet espace liminal aux contours indécis, à travers lequel un renouveau est possible et nos « rejectamenta » se voient ouvrir de nouveaux horizons. Mots clés : Derek Mahon, Terre, mer, plage, géopoétique.

Most of us sense that the Earth is more than a sphere of rock with a thin layer of air, ocean and life covering the surface. We feel that we belong here as if this planet were indeed our home. Long ago the Greeks, thinking this way, gave to the Earth the name Gaia or, for short, Ge. In those days, science and theology were one and science, although less precise, had soul. James Lovelock, “What is Gaia?” 1

Introduction

Prior to the rapid changes of the Celtic Tiger years, Derek Mahon’s poetry was haunted both by dereliction and renewal as described in poems like “Thammuz” (first

1. James Lovelock, “What is Gaia?”, in Earth Shattering: Ecopoems, Neil Astley (ed.), Tarset, Bloodaxe Books, 2007, p. 12.

Études irlandaises, no 44-1, 2019 – p. 101-116 102 Maryvonne Boisseau and Marion Naugrette-Fournier published in 1975) or, in an altogether different register, “A Garage in Co. Cork” (first published in 1982) 2. Those were the years when environmental issues started to come to the fore in Ireland. However, it took some time before the poet developed what may be called an ecopoetic or geopoetic sensitivity which gradually became more prominent in the works he published from the mid-2000s, from Harbour Lights (2005) to Rising Late (2017) 3. That this awareness of ecological issues in Mahon’s poetical works may be indebted to the fin-de-siècle and early 21st-century Zeitgeist or, presumably, to the poet’s deeper personal preoccupation with the future of the planet only reveals the poet’s acute sense of the power of artistic imagination and production in highlighting the scope of the changes and “cycles of doom and gloom” 4 that affect the life of our planet. Moreover, and interestingly enough, his attention has always been turned to the sea so that when it comes to ecology Mahon does not seem to be especially preoccupied with the issue of the land, or of the soil, and especially of the Irish soil. His ecological preoccupations lie rather with the earth, or Earth (as Ge or Gaia, as a global force capable of renewing itself by itself), and in particular with the beach, which is a go-between, between land and sea, a no-one’s land, so to speak, that does not belong to anyone since it is continually covered and recovered by the sea. The beach belongs to the sea and the sea decides whether to engulf it, or, more rarely, to abandon it and let the land reclaim it, as has recently been the case on Achill Island where two beaches have miraculously reappeared 5. Given this, two issues in particular need to be addressed: firstly, how do land, (Irish) soil, earth and sea, as reality, poetic material and metaphors, interact in Mahon’s poetry, thus fashioning a multifaceted approach to these notions, from the poet’s distrust towards any mercenary utilization of the Irish landscape to a more universal or global vision of man’s relationship to earth; secondly, how the beach, this fluctuating liminal space cornered between two natural borders, the land, on the one side – the shore –, and the ocean or the sea on the other side, becomes a space full of creative possibilities, with its sand, pebbles, rocks and toys, in summary the rubbish left by the tide on the sand.

2. Derek Mahon, “Thammuz”, Lines Review, no. 52/53, 1975, reprinted in The Snow Party, London – New York, Oxford University Press, 1975, p. 11, subsequently “The Golden Bough”, inPoems 1962- 1978, Oxford – New York – Toronto, Oxford University Press, 1979, p. 66; “A Garage in Co. Cork”, Times Literary Supplement, May 1982 and Irish Press, 21 August 1982, reprinted in every single volume of selected and collected poems published afterwards (seeNew Collected Poems, Oldcastle, The Gallery Press, 2011, p. 121, andNew Selected Poems, London, Faber and Faber, 2016, p. 48). 3. Derek Mahon’s latest collection, Against the Clock, Oldcastle, The Gallery Press, came out in September 2018. 4. We borrow the expression from Marie Mianowski: “Writing the Stories of the Celtic Tiger: An Interview with Literature Scholar Marie Mianowski”, Working Notes, vol. 31, no. 82, 2018, p. 27. 5. Achill Island, Co. Mayo, is situated off the west coast of Ireland and, indeed, in March 2017, the beach at Dooagh reappeared, after more than thirty years (in 1984 the sand had been washed away by storms, leaving only rocks and rock pools), and in November 2017, a second beach also reappeared in Ashleam Bay on Achill, after vanishing twelve years before. Derek Mahon’s Geopoetic Horizons 103

Land, soil, earth and sea: some linguistic comments

In the first place, it can probably be ascertained that any preoccupation with “Irish- ness” as a marker of identity bears no affinity with Mahon’s poetry even though a non-Irish reader would recognize the backdrop, situations and tradition in which it is set as, somehow, Irish. However, it is not “Irish” in a local – or narrowly parochial – sense and the poet’s relation to nature is pensive, concerned, and sensitive. There is a universal dimension in Mahon’s poetry which precludes any narrow interpretation of it in terms of “Irishness”. The following extract illustrates both the universal scope of this poetry and the poet’s sense of active contemplation and belonging:

(1) Above rising crops the sun peeps like an eclipse in a snow of hawthorn, and a breeze sings its simple pleasure in the nature of things, a tinkling ditch and a long field where tractors growled. Second by second cloud swirls on the globe as though political; lilacs listen to the wind, watching birds circle in the yellow glow of a spring day, in a sea stench of kelp and trench. Are we going to laugh on the road as if the whole show was set out for our grand synthesis? Abandoned trailers sunk in leaves and turf, slow erosion, waves on the boil… We belong to this – not as discrete observing presences but as born participants in the action, sharing of course “the seminal substance of the universe” 6 with hedgerow, flower and thorn, rook, rabbit and rat […] 7.

6. This quote is recycled from Aidan Higgins’ novel Balcony of Europe, Neil Murphy (ed.), Champaign, Dalkey Archive Press, 2010 (see Derek Mahon, “Life as Story Told”, in Selected Prose, Oldcastle, The Gallery Press, 2012, p. 199). 7. Derek Mahon, “A Country Road”, in New Collected Poems, p. 309. Most of the excerpts quoted are from New Collected Poems (henceforth NCP) and Collected Poems, Oldcastle, The Gallery Press, 1999 (henceforth CP). 104 Maryvonne Boisseau and Marion Naugrette-Fournier

“It might be anywhere” 8, and it might “synthesize” several locations all at once. This extract is fairly representative of the poet’s vision of an involvement in his surroundings and shows that the poet does not focus on ø land or a land or the land as denoting a specific country, or on ø soil as referring to the ground one treads or cultivates. He does not focus either on ø territory as a bordered identified area. Instead the poem describes a live landscape of hedgerow, ditch, field, hawthorn and lilacs, birds, rook, rabbit and rat at springtime. In these lines, the notions 9 of /land/, /soil/ and /territory/ are indirectly evoked through the components of a country road landscape including cultivated land, wild hedgerows, clouds and wind, fauna and flora. Besides, the country road described is not far from the sea whose distinct smell fills the air: “sea stench / of kelp and trench”. As if to confirm this indirectness, the number of occurrences of the wordsland and soil in the whole of New Collected Poems (2011) is surprisingly low: there are about ten to fifteen occurrences of land including compounds, only two or three occurrences of soil. In contrast, the words earth (thirty to forty occurrences) and, in particular, sea, are conspicuous in the whole of the poetry: nearly half of the 212 poems collected in NCP contain one or several occurrences of the word sea either as a single lexical item and/or a sea-compound 10. The poems describe a seascape, have the sea as a background setting, or reflect on the relation between man and his familiar environment through the perception of an enunciator-poet who once wrote “But how could we / survive indefinitely / so far from the city and the sea?” 11. The linguistic context of these occurrences shows that the notions themselves do not make sense as individual concepts but in relation to one another, as can be observed in the extracts below:

(2) Far from land, far from the trade routes, In an unbroken dream-time Of penguin and whale The seas sigh to themselves Reliving the days before the days of sail 12.

8. Derek Mahon, “A Lighthouse in Maine”, in NCP, p. 299. 9. Notions are “complex systems of physico-cultural properties”; “In the lexical domain: one must think in terms of a semantic field around a root, a set of representations varying according to the language. […] Words are a kind of summary of these notional systems of representation. They are collectors: with a word, one can refer to a notion. It evokes all the notion, but the relationship is not symmetrical: a notion will only be partially contained in a word” (Antoine Culioli, Cognition and Representation in Linguistic Theory, Michel Liddle (ed.), John T. Stonham (trans.), Amsterdam – Philadelphia, J. Benjamins, 1995, p. 34-35). 10. The numbers of occurrences are not absolutely accurate, resulting from a manual count after reading over the poems. Mahon’s corpus of poems has not been digitalized and cannot be explored electronically. We have counted around 125 occurrences of the word sea, including compounds (with sea as a qualifier as insea music, sea-chest, sea-thrift, and so on). 11. Derek Mahon, “The Woods”, inNCP , p. 124. 12. Derek Mahon, “The Banished Gods”, inNCP , p. 77. Derek Mahon’s Geopoetic Horizons 105

(3) Up there where silence falls and there is no more land your scared, scary voice calls to the great waste beyond 13.

(4) […]. An astonishing six inches fell in a single night from inky cloud. Not much distinction now between sea and land: some sat in dinghies rowing where they’d sown, navigating their own depth-refracted ground and scaring salmon from among the branches. Global warming, of course, but more like war as if dam-busting bombers had been here […] 14.

In these three extracts, the absence of determiner can be analyzed as the trace of an operation constructing a reference to the notional domain of /land/ as “a complex system of physico-cultural properties” 15, in contrast with another one, which it is not: land is not sea (and vice versa); land is not “the great waste beyond” either, and even when the material difference or limit between them has been effaced by some exceptional meteorological event as described in (4), the language still makes the difference: “Not much distinction now between sea and land” (our emphasis). Imagination mixes the two in an unnamed “scape”, neither landscape nor seascape, but flooded ground (water and earth mingling together). Moreover, the very discontinuities of the landscape – “the trade routes”, “the seas” (2), “hinterland” (5), an “island” (6) and (8), “the sandy soil” and “the ocean rim” (7), “meadows” and “strand” (8) – define a territory which is, most of the time, viewed from the sea:

(5) We might be anywhere but are in one place only, One of the milestone of Earth residence Unique in each particular, the thinly Peopled hinterland serenely tense – But with a sure sense of its intrinsic nature 16.

(6) The wholeisland a sanctuary where amazed Oneiric species whistle and chatter Evacuating rock-faces and cliff-top 17.

(7) It [the cup of the coconut] rots in sandy soil here at the ocean rim,

13. Derek Mahon, “Homage to Gaia”, in NCP, p. 322. 14. Derek Mahon, “After the Storm”, in NCP, p. 344. 15. See footnote 9. 16. Derek Mahon, “A Garage in Co. Cork”, p. 122. 17. Derek Mahon, “Rathlin”, in NCP, p. 98. 106 Maryvonne Boisseau and Marion Naugrette-Fournier

changing to coal and oil through geological time 18.

(8) As promised, the Corfu crew put him [Ulysses] ashore at dawn, still dozing, where the sea’s roar turned in his ears, and so he woke at last on his own soil. Athene threw a sea mist over the rocks, and after many a year he didn’t know his native earth at first. ‘Oh, not another island!’, he complained. ‘Whose meadows are those above the strand?’ 19

The two occurrences ofsoil in (7) and (8) are both qualified. In (7), besides the need for a rhyme (soil / oil), the qualificationsandy draws the reader’s attention to the processes of erosion that transform some substance into another one, itself the repository for a biological process of transmutation of a plant into combustible matter, coal or oil, through “geological time”. Thus every substance is connected through metamorphosis (sand and soil, coal and oil). The second occurrence in (8) is located in relation to him [Ulysses] via the determiner his, thus marking a close relationship between locator and located element. Two lines of verse later, “his own soil” becomes “his native earth”, then “another island” before he “knows” his own island. Theisland as a finite territory is emblematic of the whole earth itself, mother of all living things and humans, encompassing land and sea: “It boasts fine pasture for cows and goats, / oak, pine and boatyards. It’s not vast, as you will see, but rich in crops and wine / and generously fed with dew and rain” 20. In this respect the notion /earth/ 21 is most significant since it conveys the idea of a “reality” which is spiritual and material all at once, spectacle and interplay between order and chaos. A network of semantic threads are interlaced to form not just a pattern but a fabric subsumed under the notion /earth/ with land and sea both juxtaposed and joined by a liminal strand, with soil, sand, and rock(s) as testimony to a perennial process of disintegration, oblivion, and regeneration through transformation. However, of land and sea – hence earth and water – the latter notion has come to predominate over the first one: “Driftwood and cloud castle, / expiring lines of froth, / absorbing sand where every / worm-hole is a discovery: / two worlds, earth and air; water, the best of both” 22, and this feature opens new reading perspectives of the poet’s work.

18. Derek Mahon, “Homage to Gaia”, p. 325. 19. Derek Mahon, “Ithaca”, in NCP, p. 329. 20. Ibid. 21. The notional domain of /earth/ is “summarized” by the recurrent wordearth and its compounds (approximately forty to fifty occurrences) and all the lexical items belonging to the semantic field it represents. 22. Derek Mahon, “Sand Studies”, in NCP, p. 270. Derek Mahon’s Geopoetic Horizons 107

New critical perspectives: geopoetic horizons

Hugh Haughton, commenting on Harbour Lights (2005), describes how the col- lection represents:

[…] a new wave in Mahon’s work, showing him at the height of his powers […] inspired by a sense of biological and ecological force, planetary and marine music, that makes him one of the most fully energized “green” poets of the age 23.

Influenced by the poetic approach to the earth as an endangered planet devel- oped by scientist Rachel Carson 24 and, more recently, by his reading of Michael Thompson’s 1979 ground-breaking study,Rubbish Theory, and of British scientist James Lovelock’s autobiography, Homage to Gaia 25, Mahon may be labelled as a “green poet”. However, it can be argued that this is somehow reductive. Mahon is no activist but rather a recorder of “life on earth”, a poet-artist who draws the line between politics and aesthetics, a poet-philosopher acutely aware of time, geological time, history time and life time (in other words, cosmological, chronological, and psychological time), with past and future indefinitely fused as in a Moebius strip. Most of his poetry, in many ways, is a kind of “rumination inconclusive” 26:

You always knew it would come down to a dozy seaside town –

not really in the country, no, but within reach of the countryside, somewhere alive to season, wind and tide, far field and wind farm. […] […] Gaia demands your love, the patient earth your airy sneakers tread expect humility and care.

It’s time now to go back at last beyond irony and slick depreciation, Past hedge and fencing to a clearer vision, time to create a future from the past, tune out the babbling radio waves and listen to the leaves 27.

23. Hugh Haughton, The Poetry of Derek Mahon, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 317. 24. Rachel Carson is the author of Under the Sea-Wind [1941], which celebrates the open sea (London, Penguin Classics, 2007) and Silent Spring [1962], which alerted the world to the dangers of pesticides (London, Penguin Classics, 2000). 25. Michael Thompson, Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value [1979], London, Pluto Press, 2017; James Lovelock, Homage to Gaia: The Life of an Independent Scientist[2000], London, Souvenir Press, 2014. 26. Paul Ricœur, Temps et récit, t. I, L’intrigue et le récit historique, Paris, Seuil (Points Essais), 1983, p. 24. 27. Derek Mahon, “A Quiet Spot”, in NCP, p. 333. 108 Maryvonne Boisseau and Marion Naugrette-Fournier

Alongside this meditation on time, his exploration of the world has come to concentrate on open spaces and the uncertain limits of land and water:

A straight line, wherever the edge may be, confines and also opens up the sea to ancient shipwreck, drowned forest, lost continents and nuclear waste. You hear a different music of the spheres depending where you stand on these quiet shores 28.

From a critical standpoint, Mahon’s work can be studied from various angles involving point of view, frame and horizon (a painter’s stance), and rootedness in a particular spot (“We belong to this” (cf. (1)). This last perspective, which is not exclusive of the other two, suits the more recent poems which result from the elaborate construction of a link between text (reading and writing) and phenomena, phenomena and imagined text, in a to-and-fro movement. The anchoring point – the viewer as “origin of perception” – is mobile and the construction or, in Mahon’s words, the “form of words”, follows the lines of a landscape turned into an act of reading and writing:

Saisir les infimes modifications de son environnement naturel ou urbain et manipuler selon les cas des idées, des mots, des cartes, des savoirs, des artefacts, des images, etc.: voilà ce qui est au cœur de l’aventure poétique 29.

As has been mentioned, the poet’s poetical exploration of the earth and its landscapes is indebted to scientific accounts of biodiversity (Carson and Lovelock) and to social studies (Thompson) but also to other literary works 30. It has gradually, poem after poem, come to focus on water, on the sea and its fringes, and outermost bounds where water and earth meet:

Là où la végétation prolifère de manière fulgurante, là où le rythme de l’eau anime le paysage, là où le minéral impose ses lois, là où le vent souffle à perdre haleine, là où les “phénomènes premiers” retiennent toute l’attention, les confins apparaissent. C’est leur saisie qui déclenche l’écriture 31.

In Mahon’s poetry, Nature cannot be approached otherwise than through strolling, wandering, walking, but most crucially through human experiences; and in this respect, the shore and beaches of Kinsale provide him with a new perspective, as Agnès Derail-Imbert notes: “une autre manière d’enquêter sur la ‘culture humaine’” 32.

28. Derek Mahon, “Horizons”, in Rising Late, Oldcastle, The Gallery Press, 2017, unpaginated. 29. Rachel Bouvet, Rita Olivieri-Godet, “Introduction”, in Géopoétique des confins, Rachel Bouvet, Rita Olivieri-Godet (eds.), Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2018, p. 24. 30. Let us only mention here Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817, 1847 for a second edition). 31. Rachel Bouvet, Rita Olivieri-Godet, “Introduction”, p. 7. 32. Agnès Derail-Imbert, “La philosophie à la plage”, Études anglaises, vol. 59, no. 3, 2006, p. 305. Mahon’s essay, “Rubbish Theory”, is a fine example of his reflections on “the culture of waste”, in Olympia and the Internet, Oldcastle, The Gallery Press, 2017. Derek Mahon’s Geopoetic Horizons 109

The beach from an ecological perspective

Still, we may wonder why Mahon has chosen to focus his poetic attention on the beach (and inevitably on the sea) in particular, and especially from an ecological perspective. He has always been strongly attracted to the sea, which runs in the family, as his male relatives all worked in the Harland & Wolff shipyard in Belfast or in the merchant navy. He called one of his uncles, a sailor, “extraordinarily romantic because he had left Belfast” 33 and the appeal of his uncle’s seafaring life is evoked in an early poem, “My Wicked Uncle” 34. Mahon himself wanted to be a sailor, as he recalls in an interview in 1999:

All the men in the family were concentrated on ships and the sea… I wanted to go to sea myself so I was taken down to the Custom House in Belfast when I was about sixteen, and given a preliminary examination, which involved looking at a chart on the wall. You know: O, X, Z, Q. The doctor said, ‘Read off the chart on the wall’. So I said: ‘What chart?’ And that was the end of my seafaring career 35.

This episode crops up again in a poem entitled “A Curious Ghost”, in which he says “I failed the eyesight test / When I tried for the Merchant Navy / And lapsed into this lyric lunacy” 36, and evokes the ghost of his father-in-law, “a sea captain who died at sea, almost” 37. When his father-in-law died, “They found unfinished poems in your sea-chest [his uncle’s]” 38: to Mahon, the sea is an “invitation au voyage”, to use Baudelaire’s words, but also an invitation to poetry, to this “lyric lunacy” he has lapsed into. Very early on in Mahon’s poetry, the beach is the place of dejecta, where objects discarded by men have been marooned, stranded by the sea and shipwrecks, as in “North Sea” (1979):

The terminal light of beaches, pebbles speckled with oil; old tins at the tide-line where a gull blinks on a pole 39.

The pebbles soiled with oil, the old tins stranded where the tide has left them are mute witnesses of human pollution, as well as the tins in one of Mahon’s most influential poems, “The Apotheosis of Tins” (1975), where the tins awake on the beach, surrounded with detritus and disjecta:

33. Derek Mahon interview in Writing Irish: Selected Interviews with Irish Writers from the Irish Literary Supplement, James P. Myers (ed.), Syracuse, Syracuse University Press, 1999, p. 187. 34. Derek Mahon, “My Wicked Uncle”, in Night-Crossing, London – New York – Toronto, Oxford University Press, 1968, p. 8. 35. Derek Mahon interview, in Writing Irish…, p. 187. 36. Derek Mahon, “A Curious Ghost”, in CP, p. 62. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. Derek Mahon, “North Sea”, in Poems 1962-1978, p. 92. 110 Maryvonne Boisseau and Marion Naugrette-Fournier

Having spent the night in a sewer of precognition consoled in moon-glow, air-chuckle and the retarded pathos of mackerel, we wake among shoelaces and white wood to a raw wind and the cries of gulls. […] This is the terminal democracy of hatbox and crab, of wine and Windolene; it is always rush-hour 40.

In both poems we may notice the use of the same adjective terminal: “the terminal light of beaches” and “the terminal democracy of hatbox and crab” (our emphasis). In both cases, “terminal” refers to the fact that this disposal of daily consumer objects is final, irretrievable. “Terminal” also suggests the notion of ending, like the full stop of a sentence, as if the society of men had to end there, on a beach, the only survivors being tins, shoelaces, white wood, wine bottles and glass cleaning products such as Windolene, almost all of these objects being non-recyclable. This final or “terminal” stage of a society where only waste remains is a leitmotiv in Mahon’s poems, and this even in his early poems, where his discourse is mainly eschatological, with poems such as “Entropy” 41, “What Will Remain” 42, “An Image from Beckett” 43 or also “A Stone Age Figure Far Below” 44. Thus Mahon’s poems from the end of the 1960s to the beginning of the 1970s are impregnated with the fear of catastrophe or even apocalypse, whether ecological or historical, as reflected by the publication of two major works at the time, echoing the fears of the Zeitgeist, such as Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962), and The Sense of an Ending by Frank Kermode (1968) which retraces the eschatological paradigm in literature. As Haughton remarks, Mahon’s poetry echoes the concerns of Carson and Kermode, but also those due to the his- torical events of the late 1960s and early 1970s, such as the Cuba crisis, the Vietnam War, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the awareness of the Holocaust, the “increasingly vocal ecological debate about the effect of industrialization and the survival of the planet” 45, as well as the crisis in Northern Ireland. However, in Mahon’s poems the beach stands out also as a place of redemption, after the sea’s retribution. Indeed, we may observe in his work a two-fold process of justice (if not of a divine order, then of a natural one), where nature punishes the hybris of men by killing them during a natural catastrophe, such as a tsunami, and then by discarding their personal belongings into the sea, after which they are then stranded on beaches. In Mahon’s poem “After the Titanic”, for instance, the former president of the White Star Line, Bruce Ismay, who survived the shipwreck of the Titanic owned by his company, relates his shameful fate:

40. Derek Mahon, “The Apotheosis of Tins”, inCP , p. 69. 41. Derek Mahon, “Entropy”, in Poems 1962-1978, p. 49. 42. Derek Mahon, “What Will Remain”, in Lives, London, Oxford University Press, 1972, p. 26. 43. Derek Mahon, “An Image from Beckett”, in CP, p. 40. 44. Derek Mahon, “A Stone Age Figure Far Below”, in CP, p. 42. 45. Hugh Haughton, The Poetry of Derek Mahon, p. 93. Derek Mahon’s Geopoetic Horizons 111

They said I got away in a boat And humbled me at the inquiry. I tell you I sank as far that night as any Hero. As I sat shivering on the dark water I turned to ice to hear my costly Life go thundering down in a pandemonium of Prams, pianos, sideboards, winches, Boilers bursting and shredded ragtime. Now I hide In a lonely house behind the sea Where the tide leaves broken toys and hatboxes Silently at my door 46.

The world of luxury collapses (“[…] my costly / Life go thundering down in a pandemonium of / Prams, pianos, sideboards, winches, / Boilers bursting and shredded ragtime”), and to the poet the shipwreck of the Titanic almost embodies a process of purification, such as the Flood in the Bible. Through this purifying process, objects of consumer society are engulfed by the ocean and their remains are scattered on the beach near Ismay’s home in Casla (“Costelloe” in English), a small village in Connemara, where he had chosen to live a secluded life. The “broken toys and hatboxes” resurface to haunt him and to remind him of his shameful past (“Silently at my door”), but they have undergone the purifying and deforming force of Nature (“broken”). Once more, the beach is the place where everything ends, where all objects, all vanities, vanitas vanitatum, are levelled by the power of the sea, which reinforces the almost political and economic notion of the beach as a new democracy, which will outlive what the geologists have now called “the Anthropocene”: the future of mankind will be “the terminal democracy of hatbox and crab”. This scenario, where the storm wrecks human artefacts and leaves them aban- doned on the beach or on another tabula rasa, is recurrent throughout Mahon’s œuvre, and may be found again in poems such as “The Great Wave” or “After the Storm”. “The Great Wave”, published in 2010 inAn Autumn Wind, refers to the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia, and depicts how “the swirling mud receded leaving a waste / of bodies, furniture, palm trunks, dereliction / and in the streets the con- tents of an ocean” 47. The description by the poet of this “waste” left by the ocean corresponds to what Lena M. Lencek, in her essay entitled “The Beach as Ruin”, calls “the chronic deposits of catastrophe”:

Of all the stuff that washes up on beaches, the manmade strata are the most telling as inventories of the values and priorities of the cultures that produced them […]. The wreckage left behind in the wake of the tsunami of January 2005 stands as a testament to the First World’s insatiable appetite for leisure in Third World tourists resorts. In the same year, on the opposite side of the globe, Hurricane Katrina ploughed through the

46. Derek Mahon, “After the Titanic”, in CP, p. 30. 47. Derek Mahon, “The Great Wave”, in An Autumn Wind, Oldcastle, The Gallery Press, 2010, p. 77. 112 Maryvonne Boisseau and Marion Naugrette-Fournier

Gulf Coast and the Mississipi River basin, leaving behind a landscape of broken power grids, oil rigs, and ruptured chemical depots in a wash of shingles, cars and corpses. The chronic deposits of catastrophe, man-made or natural, stand as massive “vanitas” installations, reminding us that in the face of time and nature, all that is human is transitory and ephemeral 48.

The hurricane, or the tsunami, act as eye-openers or metaphysical reminders that all that is human is “transitory and ephemeral”, including “manmade strata”, as “inventories of the values and priorities of the cultures that produce[s] them”. In another poem, “After the Storm”, the same pattern of storm and purification by the natural elements is repeated, following a storm in Co. Cork, not far from where Mahon lives, in Kinsale:

Detritus of the years, carpet and car, computers and a wide range of expensive gadgetry went spinning down the river with furniture and linen, crockery, shoes and clothes, until it finally gave over; not everyone had full insurance cover 49.

The storm displaces what belonged inside the home (“carpet and car, / computers and a wide range of expensive / gadgetry”, but also “furniture and linen, crockery, shoes / and clothes”), transforming personal appliances and belongings into waste, thus exposing them as unwanted rubbish. This exposure of rubbish is precisely what may disturb the eye of the flâneur, when taking a stroll near the River Lee for instance, or on the beach, as Thompson in his previously mentioned essay,Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value, emphasizes: “Something which has been discarded, but never threatens to intrude, does not worry us at all. But rubbish in the wrong place is emphatically visible and extremely embarrassing” 50. There is anger in Mahon’s ecopoetic poems, which may also be felt in his own recent essay entitled “Rubbish Theory”, after Thompson’sRubbish Theory. In this essay, Mahon reminds the reader in an outraged tone of the existence of “a sea of rubbish, hundreds of miles wide, in the Pacific” 51, and expresses his concern about “unsalvageable junk”:

What concerns me here is the evidently unsalvageable junk, the forlorn things with no hope of ever being antiques or even relics of contemporary material culture: not the old toys and utensils but the organic stuff, the rags and bones destined for toxic incineration or for tips hazy with methane and loud with screaming gulls 52.

48. Lena M. Lencek, “The Beach as Ruin”, in Andrew Hughes, David Carson, Dominant Wave Theory, London, Booth-Clibborn, 2006, p. 145. 49. Derek Mahon, “After the Storm, p. 344-345. 50. Michael Thompson,Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value, p. 92. 51. Derek Mahon, “Rubbish Theory”, p. 22. 52. Ibid., p. 25. Derek Mahon’s Geopoetic Horizons 113

The term unsalvageable is quite meaningful in this context, as it may help us define Mahon’s poetic and metaphysical quest, that is to say how to select, “salvage” and recycle what may be “salvaged” in terms of poetic interest, which very often goes against the economic and commercial values of consumer society. Hence the fundamental role of the sea as the eternal provider of objects / subjects of poetical value for the poet, as T. S. Eliot in the section entitled “The Dry Salvages” 53 of the Four Quartets reasserts:

The river is within us, the sea is all about us; The sea is the land’s edge, also, the granite Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses Its hints of earlier and other creation: The starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale’s backbone; The pools where it offers to our curiosity The more delicate algae and the sea anemone. It tosses up our losses, the torn seine, The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar And the gear of foreign dead men 54.

In Eliot’s poem, the sea ceaselessly brings to the poet natural and artificial elements worthy of being “salvaged” (the first meaning of “salvage” refers to the fact of saving a ship or its cargo from perils of the sea), which are “hints of earlier and other creation”, whether natural such as “the starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale’s backbone” or man-made, such as “the torn seine 55, / The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar / And the gear of foreign dead men”. Contrary to natural objects, man-made artefacts arrive on the beach “torn”, “shattered” or “broken”, as they have been unable to resist the destructive power of the sea.

The role of the beach in poetry

What then is the role of the beach in poetry? The beach appears as apalette in the artistic sense of the term, or a canvas where elements of a different nature and order have been unwittingly prepared, so to speak, for the poet’s hand to salvage and collect, such as Mahon does in his poems, following in the footsteps of illustrious predecessors, such as Thoreau inCape Cod (1865). In this work, Thoreau assembles the account of three excursions he made in 1849, 1850 and 1855 to Cape Cod, and the first chapter, entitled “The Shipwreck”, opens with

53. A prefatory note says: “The Dry Salvages – presumablyles trois sauvages – is a small group of rocks, with a beacon, off the N. E. coast of Cape Ann, Massachusetts […]” (T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909-1962, London, Faber and Faber, 1963, p. 205). 54. T. S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages”, inFour Quartets [1943], London, Faber and Faber, 2001, p. 23. 55. A fishing net that hangs vertically in the water, having floats at the upper edge and sinkers at the lower. 114 Maryvonne Boisseau and Marion Naugrette-Fournier the description of the relics left by the wreckage of ships on the beach, and in particular the wreckage of an Irish ship, the St. John, bound for America during the Great Famine in Ireland. The families and the relatives, who have come from Boston, look for familiar faces among the bodies of the victims, whereas Thoreau methodically explores the beach with the tip of his umbrella, looking for curiosities among the discarded objects and bodies:

The brig St. John, from Galway, Ireland, laden with emigrants, was wrecked on Sunday morning; it was now Tuesday morning, and the sea was still breaking violently on the rocks. […] I saw many marble feet and matted heads as the cloths were raised, and one livid, swollen, and mangled body of a drowned girl, – who probably had intended to go out to service in some American family –, to which rags still adhered, with a string, half concealed by the flesh, about its swollen neck; the coiled-up wreck of a human hulk, gashed by the rocks or fishes, so that the bone and muscle were exposed, but quite bloodless, – merely red and white, – with wide-open and staring eyes, yet lustreless, dead-lights […] 56.

There is no empathy in Thoreau’s gaze, as he coldly describes the body of the drowned girl as if she were a mere fish, and he prefers to focus his attention on the rubbish left by the wreckage on the beach and on the wreck of the ship itself:

It appeared to us that there was enough rubbish to make the wreck of a large vessel in this cove alone, and that it would take many days to cart it off. It was several feet deep, and here and there was a bonnet or a jacket on it 57.

In her article entitled “La philosophie à la plage”, Agnès Derail-Imbert distinguishes between the “wrecker” and the “writer”:

Le wrecker, comme l’indique la forme déverbative du substantif anglais, c’est celui qui “fait” l’épave, en la sélectionnant, en se l’appropriant. Et tandis qu’il s’affaire à brouetter l’algue, la séparant des chairs inutiles, il échoit au scripteur (writer) de recueillir dans le livre les restes humains pour faire de cette ruine son œuvre 58.

In a way the poet or the intellectual is both wrecker and writer, as he recovers salvage from the wrecked vessels and collects them in his narrative or in his poem, in order to make a work of art out of this ruin. In Cape Cod, Thoreau describes the beach as the place where “the waste and wrecks of human art” 59 are exhibited, as if in an art gallery where the exhibition is always temporary and renewed everyday, according to the will of the curator, that is to say the sea.

56. Henry David Thoreau, “The Shipwreck”, inCape Cod [1865], New York, Library of America, 1985, p. 853. 57. Ibid., p. 854. 58. Agnès Derail-Imbert, “La philosophie à la plage”, p. 311. 59. Henry David Thoreau, “The Beach Again”, inCape Cod, p. 929. Derek Mahon’s Geopoetic Horizons 115

At the same time, the advantage of the beach, both for Thoreau and Mahon, lies in its impartiality: “The sea-shore is a sort of neutral ground, a most advantageous point from which to contemplate this world” 60, to use Thoreau’s words. Mahon, for instance, has always refused to take sides, so to speak, especially during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and right from the beginning preferred to evoke the conflict indirectly, through the carcasses of the “burnt-out / buses” 61 lying on the streets. Therefore it is not surprising that the veryneutrality of the beach particu- larly appealed to him, as a vantage point to contemplate the world without having to take sides, as the objects or rejectamenta are naturally rejected on the sand by the tide, reclaimed by no one except by the poet. The beach constitutes the ideal playground for the poet, as he is able to collect and assemble the toys that interest him the most on the beach: tins, hatboxes, crockery… He even instrumentalizes the ecological perspective on rubbish and waste, as it allows him both to express his concern for Gaia, and also to poetically reclaim the discarded debris lying on the beach. The beach is also the place where renewal is made possible, as Lencek suggests in “The Beach as Ruin”:

The one, saving grace of these landscapes of devastation is the promise of decay and, following hard on its heels, renewal. For all its tragic toll on human lives and suffering, the spectacle of destroyed artefacts on the beach has had its inspiring, hopeful interface. The tsunami, the hurricane, the winter storm, after all, scrub clean the beaches on which Western entrepreneurs have spot welded clones of Western recreational modules […] 62.

To Mahon the beach is a perpetual “building site” 63, where everything may always be transformed at any moment: “The discarded stuff lives on though; there is a dark energy there in the dustbins of history, of potential use in some future ecolog- ical dispensation” 64. As in Andy Hughes’ photographs of rubbish on the Cornwall beaches 65, there is unexpected beauty to be found in the rubbish lying on the beach, and resistance to the erosion of time, as in “The Apotheosis of Tins”: “We shall be with you while there are beaches” 66. The beach, supplied by the creative power of the sea, offers to what Baptiste Monsaingeon names the Homo“ detritus” 67 (poets included), a whole range of possibilities, as Mahon reminds us of in one of his latest poems, “Rising Late”: “The vast sea-breath reminds us, even these days / as even more oil and junk slosh in the waves, / the future remains open to alternatives” 68.

60. Henry David Thoreau, “The Highland Light”,ibid. , p. 979 (our emphasis). 61. Derek Mahon, “Rage for Order”, in CP, p. 47. 62. Lena M. Lencek, “The Beach as Ruin”, p. 146. 63. The expression is borrowed from Derek Mahon’s poem, “A Building Site”, in An Autumn Wind, p. 37. 64. Derek Mahon, “Rubbish Theory”, p. 25 (our emphasis). 65. See Andy Hughes’ beautiful photographs of disjecta on the beaches in Dominant Wave Theory. 66. Derek Mahon, “The Apotheosis of Tins”, p. 69. 67. Baptiste Monsaingeon, Homo detritus: critique de la société du déchet, Paris, Seuil, 2017. 68. Derek Mahon, “Rising Late”, in Rising Late. 116 Maryvonne Boisseau and Marion Naugrette-Fournier

Conclusion

Any reader of Mahon’s poems cannot but be struck by the omnipresence of the sea throughout the poetry. Over the years, the poet’s attitude has evolved from a youthful romantic outlook on nature, land, and water to a more sophisticated understanding of the imprint of time and civilization on the landscapes, at home and abroad. His awareness of ecological stakes goes beyond a superficial concern for our environment and the sea enables him to look out, to embrace distant horizons, and to consider life in the light of constant renewal and regeneration. The drama staged on the beach, while it illustrates man’s vanity and vulnerability, may also express the poet’s realistic hope for a better future: “[…] life always finds // somewhere to whisper, thought a place to grow / […]” 69. Rejectamenta are intrinsically poetic material whose numinous beauty can be converted into words. Thus the poet charts his individual relation to Earth through the poetic medium and through language. His earth is all at once frame (in the archaic or poetic sense of “the universe, or part of it, regarded as an embracing structure” 70), mother, and repository, best apprehended from the liminal space of the shore looking out to the unbounded expanse of the sea:

Et nulle part mieux que sur le rivage, aux limites de la pensée, on peut toucher à l’inachèvement de ses projets. Là on vient voir comme inhabitable le lieu que pourtant on habite, là on vient voir ce qui nous revient, rejeté par la mer, comme ce qui nous regarde et pourtant nous est étranger 71.

Maryvonne Boisseau Université de Strasbourg

Marion Naugrette-Fournier Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3

69. Derek Mahon, “Rising Late”. 70. The New Oxford Dictionary of English, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 727. 71. Agnès Derail-Imbert, “La philosophie à la plage”, p. 309. Our study is especially indebted to Agnès Derail-Imbert’s inspiring article for our reflection on the beach in particular, and to Rachel Bouvet and Rita Olivieri-Godet’s Géopétique des confins for our interpretation of the beach as a liminal space open to creative possibilities. Living Water: Irish Artists and Ecology

Abstract: It is thirty years since the seminal art exhibition, Clean Irish Sea, was displayed at Dublin City Gallery in 1988. This was arguably the first major Irish art show to specifically address ecological issues. This paper focuses on key works by two participating artists, Barrie Cooke (1931-2014) and Gwen O’Dowd (born 1957), placing their contribution to the show both in the context of their environmental interests, but also analysing their work in relation to a particular dilemma facing them as visual artists, but relevant also to cultural communicators in general addressing this vital subject, which is the problem of the aestheticisation of contentious situations. This essay is part of the author’s research project exploring the response of Irish artists to issues of landscape and environment in modern, postmodern and contemporary art. Keywords: contemporary art, landscape, environmental issues, Ireland.

Résumé : En 1988 la City Gallery de Dublin accueille Clean Irish Sea, la première exposition majeure d’art contemporain irlandais consacrée aux questions environnementales. Le présent article examine les travaux de deux artistes ayant participé à l’exposition, Barrie Cooke (1931- 2014) et Gwen O’Dowd (1957-), pour déterminer le contexte dans lequel s’est développé leur intérêt pour l’écologie, et pour analyser leurs œuvres en regard du problème – commun aux artistes peintres et aux acteurs de la culture en général – de l’esthétisation des situations de crise. Cette étude s’inscrit dans un projet de recherche plus large sur la façon dont les artistes irlandais des périodes moderne, postmoderne et contemporaine envisagent les problèmes de paysages et d’environnement. Mots clés : art contemporain, paysage, problèmes environnementaux, Irlande.

The fish that have disappeared from our lives return as public art in the concourse 1.

As the history of Irish art over the last century or so demonstrates, there has been a consistent interest in representing the external physical environment, both in panorama and in detail. Interpretations range from topography to fantasy, from realism to idealism, from cartography to naturalism. As an island nation with a

1. Rem Koolhas, in Rem Koolhas, Hal Foster, Junkspace, with Running Room, London, Notting Hill Editions, 2013, p. 33. Thanks to Professor Christine Casey, Trinity College Dublin, for drawing my attention to this apt quotation.

Études irlandaises, no 44-1, 2019 – p. 117-132 118 Yvonne Scott notoriously damp climate, as might be expected, water features extensively as artists reflect (on) the environmental conditions of sea, lake and river as well as their symbolic, semiotic and philosophical inferences. While a smallish island may be interpreted as a recognisable physical entity given its reasonably defined coastline boundary (notwithstanding political divisions within), the sea represents, on the one hand, the very means of geographic separation but paradoxically, on the other, a conduit connecting the island to landmasses elsewhere, both meta- phorically and literally. A century or so ago, the representation of landscape, especially including imagery of water (salt or fresh or indeterminately boggy), was fundamental to the characterisation of a distinctive national identity in Ireland, as evidenced by a host of examples by Jack Yeats, Paul Henry, Seán Keating and others seeking to demonstrate a quintessential Irish character through visual expression 2. While some images were presented as authentic representations of timeless, if understated, integrity, projecting consoling escapism in a destabilising period of conflict and emigration, as for example Paul Henry’s comforting image of a cluster of cottages beside a lake, near Mount Errigal, Co. Donegal 3, others addressed the consequences of economic decline with unemployment (among local fishermen) and emigration (across the sea), as well as the more positive potential for modernisation through harnessing water at Ardnacrusha as part of the hydroelectric project, as shown for example in Seán Keating’s Night’s Candles are Burnt Out (1928-1929) 4. Such images however gave little indication of the potential destruction to water resources in the future; rather these were generally presented in art as part of the background, essentially contextual, a means to an end, and largely taken for granted as ubiquitous, plentiful, virtually guaranteed. Any distinction between facility and threat in the representation of sea, lake or river was within a relatively narrow range and less about the water itself than the human narrative played out against that backdrop. However, in recent decades, concerns for the environment and recognition of the threats posed to it as resource and environment for various species have emerged in Irish visual imagery. There are some examples of apprehension regarding

2. Numerous paintings during the early decades of the 20th century feature views of the sea, often including locals with currachs, or of the boglands associated with the west of Ireland. For discussions of the relationship between landscape and national identity, see for example Yvonne Scott, The West as Metaphor, Dublin, Royal Hibernian Academy, 2005; Yvonne Scott, “Landscape”, in Art and , t. V, Twentieth Century, Catherine Marshall, Peter Murray (eds.), Dublin – London, Royal Irish Academy – Yale University Press, 2014, p. 257-264. This theme is included in current research for a forthcoming book by Yvonne Scott on agendas in the representation of landscape, space and place in modern and contemporary Irish art. 3. This image by Paul Henry was selected as the frontispiece for Saorstát Eireann, Official Handbook, Dublin, The Talbot Press, 1932. This significant text provides a kind of “state of the nation”, comprising various essays on a range of aspects of Irish economic, social and cultural life, ten years after independence. 4. For an extended discussion, see Éimear O’Connor, “Encouraging Civic Pride: Power, Pageants, Parades and Pavilions, 1926-1939”, in Seán Keating, Art, Politics and Building the Irish Nation, Dublin, Irish Academic Press, 2013, p. 156-197. Living Water: Irish Artists and Ecology 119 nuclear fall-out in Patrick Scott’s Devices series of the 1960s, but these represent his response to international anxiety about the testing of the H-bomb rather than specifically focused on ecological issues. While that series heralded an emerging awareness of actions whose consequences are largely uncontainable and whose effects extend beyond the intended target, it was another couple of decades before a more directed response to environmental disquiet became evident in Irish visual art. Since the 1980s, however, emerging ecological awareness in Ireland has led to a fundamental shift in focus and interpretation of landscape imagery, which, in turn, has presented something of a dilemma in how such imagery should be presented from an aesthetic perspective. In current practice, some artists confront the global realities of contemporary life uncompromisingly in work that is discomfiting to observe, but others present visually seductive imagery, and the ecological issue is inferred rather than explicit. A recent example is an exhilarating painting of the sea by Irish artist Gwen O’Dowd, entitled Tonn I (fig. 1), the Irish word for “wave”. This image by one of the first artists in Ireland to address ecological issues in their work, is especially relevant, not just because it depicts water, but that it is a representative example of the cultural associations of this element; in particular it exemplifies a central, contentious issue in the confrontation of the challenges and dilemmas involved for commentators on art addressing subjects that carry complex political, social, moral and philosophical dimensions, such as the ecological threat to natural resources. This dramatic, sublime image suggests the power of the ocean and, by association, the power of nature – and consequently, it could be argued, conforms to a charac- terisation of nature as both resilient and untamed. While thrilling, therefore, in its inherent magnificent power and threat, there are those who will argue that such representations infer that sublime nature is also beyond the necessity for protection from the impacts of culture. Concepts of wild nature versus humanist culture, as separate, even opposing entities, are understood to have their intellectual origins with the Enlightenment, a distinction which is now understood to be responsible for a separation seen as problematic in a world where humanist interests cannot be pursued unchecked without taking account of ultimately self-destructive consequences. As William Cronon has argued, “[t]o the extent that we celebrate wilderness as the measure with which we judge civilization, we reproduce the dualism that sets humanity and nature at opposite poles” 5. Further, the projection of a landscape as ecologically pure when it is in reality compromised or at least under threat, while advantageous to certain industries such as tourism and food, also carries the danger that there will be limited incentive to amend environmentally destructive behaviours. This dilemma has provoked recent debates across the globe about the projection of nature and the environment through a variety of media, and the extent to which it generates

5. William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature”, Environmental History, vol. 1, no. 1, 1996, p. 17. 120 Yvonne Scott

Fig. 1 – Gwen O’Dowd, Tonn I, oil on canvas, 120 x 150 cm, 2014-2015, private collection. either discouragement or optimism – and in particular how such reactions impact on behaviour towards climate issues, such that activity is seen as either pointlessly too late, or vitally necessary before time runs out 6. The seductive romanticism of Gwen O’Dowd’s painting is enhanced by the poetic use of Irish language, a regular practice in her work, evoking the exoticism and mystery of the less familiar, as well as onomatopoeic qualities and tonal infer- ences in words and phrases, such as glór na mara (“sound of the sea”), cladach (“coastline”), uaimh (“cave”), doimhneacht (“depths”), and tonn (“wave”). It might therefore be tempting to deny such imagery on moral, philosophical or theoretical grounds were it not that such a simplistic dismissal takes no account of the fact that O’Dowd was among the first artists in Ireland, along with Barrie Cooke, to confront the issues of environmental threat and destruction. In 1986, Gwen O’Dowd painted Sellafield (fig. 2) to contribute to a fundraiser for victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster earlier that year. While no particular theme was proposed for the endeavour, O’Dowd opted to produce an image of another nuclear plant closer to home, with the recognisable twin towers associated with that operation 7. Significant

6. This issue was a key element in the debates at a recent research seminar, entitled “Visual Cultures of Water”, at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, convened by Dr Barbara Garrie and Dr Rosie Ibbotson, Department of Art History and Theory, 28 April 2018. 7. Gwen O’Dowd in conversation with Yvonne Scott, 22 September 2017. Living Water: Irish Artists and Ecology 121

Fig. 2 – Gwen O’Dowd, Sellafield, mixed media, 41 x 46 cm, 1986, private collection. environmental concerns published in the media related to the measurements of emissions from the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant in Cumbria, and fears that radioactive waste was being discharged into the Irish sea 8. There was a popular perception in Ireland at the time that, while the country itself was relatively ecolog- ically pure, it was impacted by the imported effects of industrial activity in Britain – and it is remembered that the concept of an independent Irish national identity relied on the perceived distinction between the sophisticated, secular, urbanism of industrialised Britain, and the innocent, pious ruralism of agricultural Ireland. Just a couple of years after O’Dowd’s contribution to the Chernobyl fundraiser, the concerns over Sellafield led to a seminal exhibition in the context of a visual res- ponse among Irish artists to ecological issues: Clean Irish Sea (1988) was conceived as part of a campaign led by Greenpeace, and featured inter alia the work of Gwen O’Dowd, Barrie Cooke and other Irish artists 9, as well as those from the other

8. Clean Irish Sea, exhibition catalogue, Dublin, The City Centre, 1988, unpaginated. See also numerous media articles during the 1980s that reveal concerns for such emissions, for example: Dick Grogan, “Government Reinforces Opposition to Sellafield”,The Irish Times, 26 June 1984, p. 7; Conor O’Clery, “Pollution of Irish Sea To Be Examined”, The Irish Times, 17 May 1985, p. 7; Michael Finian, “Fight Sea Pollution, State Told”, The Irish Times, 25 October 1988, p. 5. 9. The works by other Irish artists included Dermot Seymour,They’ll Be Breathing the Poisoned Wind As Well (1988), and John Kindness, Dublin Bay Prawn (1988), reproduced in Clean Irish Sea, exhibition catalogue. 122 Yvonne Scott countries bordering the Irish Sea (fig. 3). That sea is described in the exhibition catalogue as a “relatively shallow, landlocked sea of only 6 per cent of the volume of the North Sea” 10 the inference being that in such an environment, radioactive pollution could be quite concentrated, difficult to dilute or disperse, and likely to constitute a significant threat both to the environment, and to the inhabitants of the bordering coastlines. The catalogue included an introduction explaining the motivation for the campaign, listing a relatively high radioactivity, an industrial dump in the sea near Cork, levels of zinc, lead, mercury, cadmium, and radioactive caesium, along with other pollutants, argued as high compared with the Atlantic, the danger from consumption of fish in the region, and the absence of Blue Flag certification of beaches regarding sewage discharges and associated health risks 11. Observation of any expanse of water and its representations demonstrates that such conditions may not be visible to the naked eye, particularly when viewed from outside that element. While O’Dowd, at just thirty years of age at the time, was developing familiarity with the issues, Barrie Cooke, then in his late fifties, had been aware and increasingly concerned for some time. His interests in nature of all kinds had been inculcated since childhood, and his education in the natural sciences at Harvard (before turning to art history, and subsequently to the practice of painting) together with a passion for fishing, and a consequent lifelong preference for habitation beside a river or lake 12, ensured his intimacy with various aspects of the condition of local watercourses. His candid observations of devastating leakages of effluent in rivers, of algal infestation suffocating lakes, and of the spread of the invasive didymosphenia geminata in lakes and rivers, all emerged in his work from the 1980s onwards. Cooke informed himself through exposure, observation, and through a pas- sion for reading; his substantial collection of books 13 reveals his obsession to understand and appreciate the natural world of flora and fauna, the geological and aquatic environments they inhabited, as well as the ecological challenges posed by anthropocentric activity. Water in its many guises features extensively in Cooke’s paintings; he responded to the concept that flowing water signified its purity and vitality, and it is well known that his dictum, painted on the gable of his house and studio overlooking Lough Arrow in Sligo, was provided in the words of Heraclitus: “everything flows”. Cooke’s intense interest in nature, particularly involving water, his knowledge of relevant sciences, and his ecological concerns, qualified him as an obvious candidate for inclusion in the 1988 show.

10. Clean Irish Sea, exhibition catalogue. 11. “Why Greenpeace is Campaigning in the Irish Sea”, Clean Irish Sea, exhibition catalogue. The internationally recognised Blue Flag eco-label was introduced first in France in 1985, and in Europe in 1987, in the year before the exhibition. 12. His location at the time of the show in 1988 is identified as Thomastown, Kilkenny, which is on the River Nore, while a subsequent and final home and studio in Ireland overlooked Lough Arrow. He explained to the author, in discussion, that since his arrival in Ireland, he always chose to live near a freshwater river or lake (Barrie Cooke in conversation with Yvonne Scott, 17 August 2002). 13. His extensive collection of books is the subject of research by the author. Living Water: Irish Artists and Ecology 123 , exhibition catalogue, page opening. Green Irish Sea Fig. 3 – 124 Yvonne Scott

According to Brian Fallon, then art critic of the Irish Times, in his review of the Clean Irish Sea exhibition when shown at the City Centre Gallery, Dublin, in 1988, “[t]his Dublin exhibition is well timed not only ecologically, but in the sense that it coincided with the ‘Celtic Vision’ show now at the Bank of Ireland” 14. That the coincidence of cultural representation is given equal prominence with the ecological relevance of the Clean Irish Sea show indicates the modest significance assigned to environmental concerns at that time. It seems extraordinary now that a show whose title seems anachronistic for the 1980s is given some kind of parity with one that is about imminent, vital concerns. However, it is to Fallon’s credit that he reviewed the show at all, as Clean Irish Sea received a relatively limited response in the media. Such modest interest was perhaps to be expected for such a topic given the legacy of the post-war era identified as the “Great Acceleration” of anthropocentric activity. Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer published research in 2000 proposing the term “Anthropocene” to characterise the current geological epoch, to succeed the Holocene 15, and to recognise the unprecedented impact of human activity on the environment to the extent that it represented a discernible layer in geological structures – a key factor in the naming of the successive eons, eras and epochs. While the Anthropocene was reckoned to begin during the 18th century with the invention of the steam engine, this first stage “ended abruptly around 1945, when the most rapid and pervasive shift in the human-environment relationship began” 16. This second phase, or the “Great Acceleration” referred to “the post-World War II worldwide industrialization, techno-scientific development, nuclear arms race, population explosion and rapid economic growth” 17. This phase is therefore characterised by potentially catastrophic levels and types of activity, but not so much by the kind of recognition that might generate the necessary action to curb it. Fallon’s review finishes by noting the location of the show at the gallery, on City Quay, almost opposite the Custom House; he observes that “it is a sign of the times that you have to ring a bell to be admitted”, a reference to the gallery’s security challenges that precluded a more open-door, unmanned, policy of access. He continues:

Cleansing [sic] up the Irish Sea is no doubt a laudable and even a very necessary task, but what about cleaning up Dublin too? It’s not pleasant when so many venues have to live virtually under siege 18.

14. Brian Fallon, “‘Clean Irish Sea’ Show at City Centre”, The Irish Times, 2 December 1988, p. 12. 15. Paul J. Crutzen, Eugene F. Stoermer, “The ‘Anthropocene’”,Global Change Newsletter. IGPB, no. 41, May 2000, p. 17. 16. Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen, John R. McNeill, “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?”, Ambio, vol. 36, no. 8, December 2007, p. 617. 17. Will Steffen, Jacques Grinevald, Paul J. Crutzen, John R. McNeill, “The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives”, Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society, no. 369, 2011, p. 845. 18. Brian Fallon, “‘Clean Irish Sea’ Show at City Centre”, p. 12. Living Water: Irish Artists and Ecology 125

The critic’s comments about the show indicate that he was still somewhat unaware of the mounting ecological crisis; but he was not alone – his perspective seems to have been fairly widespread. Fallon singles out for praise the work of Barrie Cooke and Gwen O’Dowd, each increasingly recognised in Ireland as major landscape painters of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Their examples in that show were each on a large scale (Cooke’s is 165 x 201 cm and O’Dowd’s diptych is 192 x 280 cm in all) and between them addressed two key dimensions of ecological concern and how it was signified; the symbolism of colour in Cooke’s painting, and the layering between surface and depth in O’Dowd’s. Cooke’s painting L’azur, l’azur, l’azur, l’azur, l’azur… (fig. 4) attracted further comment in Fallon’s review: “Barrie Cooke has an impressive work which suggests more the azure of the Mediterranean than the cold and greenish waters of our coasts” 19. This observation however misconstrues the significance of the colour, associating it with literal, local climatic conditions in the era of the package holiday and the typical promotion of sun destinations in Europe at the time, projected in holiday brochures as characterised by relentlessly blue skies, seas and swimming pools, to destinations mainly in southern Europe. In fact, there is little evidence that Cooke intended his image to depict the Irish Sea as such, while the language of the title might have prompted the assumption of a clumsy reference to the côte d’azur. In any case, repeating the word “blue”, rather than azur, might have suggested the somewhat negative psychological connotations of the term, rather than the positive connotations of the colour for him. More relevant however is that Cooke had in any case always been attuned to environmental science not just through his own direct engagement, but also in his interest in the structures and literature addressed to it. He owned, for example, a copy of the text Caring for the Earth, A Strategy for Sustainable Living, published in 1991 by three significant organisations, in partnership: IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature), UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme), and WWF (World Wildlife Fund for Nature) 20. Described as a “User’s guide to Caring for the Earth”, it includes chapters on various kinds of aquatic environment 21. As the text points out,

Life on Earth depends on water. Our planet is the only one where liquid water is known to exist. Falling as precipitation and flowing through the landscape, it is a unique solvent carrying the nutrients essential for life 22.

19. Ibid. 20. Caring for the Earth, A Strategy for Sustainable Living, David A. Munro, Martin W. Holdgate (eds.), Gland, IUCN – UNEP – WWF, 1991. 21. Part I provides “Principles for Sustainable Living”, and Part II outlines “Additional Actions for Sustainable Living” that specify the issues and solutions related to particular types of location, including Chapters 15 and 16, entitled “Fresh Waters” and “Oceans and Coastal Areas” respectively. 22. Caring for the Earth…, p. 137. 126 Yvonne Scott

, exhibition catalogue. …, oil on canvas, 165 x 201 cm, 1986-1988, Green Irish Sea L’azur, l’azur, l’azur private collection; reproduced in Fig. 4 – Barrie Cooke, Living Water: Irish Artists and Ecology 127

Briefly outlining the water cycle, the book relates the distinctions between water flowing through the planet and its vital role embodied within organic nature. To quote:

As it cycles, “blue” water (the water in rivers and other water bodies) becomes “green” water (the water in organisms and the soil), and vice versa. How people use the land and change ecosystems affects the quality, movement and distribution of both “green” and “blue” water. And how people use water affects the quality and quantity of both “blue” and “green” water and hence the integrity of land and aquatic ecosystems 23.

Such designations of water by colour are clearly not literal and optical, but indicative and symbolic of hydrological states, and while the L’azur painting predates this particular publication by three years, Cooke’s long-standing engagement with ecological movements, their theories and policies, as well as his education in the natural sciences, ensured his awareness of such concepts. He was also, however, a keen observer, spending hours in and around rivers, in contemplation of all around him combining his passion for fishing with that for nature and representation. His work demonstrates also that he was less interested in superficial mimesis, seeking instead the underlying nature and texture, the complex experience of the environment rather than an illusionistic, idealised, or superficial response. Among his many books on nature and ecology, Cooke owned a copy of Wilderness and Plenty (published in 1970) by then vice-president of The Conser- vation Foundation, Frank Fraser Darling. Described as “an important contribution to the growing debate on man’s responsibility for his environment”, the essays collectively focus on the contemporaneous impact of that relationship, including the exploitation and conservation of water 24. Cooke also owned a copy of Biology of Freshwater Pollution (1981) by Christopher F. Mason 25, an influential lecturer at the Department of Biology in Essex University, who proposed that while fresh- water pollution was mainly caused by chemical agents the effects were primarily biological. This text argues for biological indicators of such pollution rather than chemical tests of water purity. Cooke’s concerns for the ecological environment and biological impact are reflected in his paintings of the watercourses in Ireland that increasingly reflected his dismay at the emerging issues of devastating pollution as a consequence of industrialising agriculture, growing urbanisation, and the drainage requirements of burgeoning housing estates. Decades earlier, in 1954, the relative purity of the Irish environment had attracted the young Barrie Cooke to live there rather than in Britain, where he was born, or the US where he had lived and received much of his education. But subsequently, the increasing evidence of environmental depletion in Ireland led

23. Caring for the Earth…, p. 137. 24. Frank Fraser Darling, Wilderness and Plenty, London, British Broadcasting Corporation, 1970. This publication comprised the series of six BBC Reith Lectures delivered and broadcast by Darling in 1969. 25. Christopher F. Mason, Biology of Freshwater Pollution, London – New York, Longman, 1981. 128 Yvonne Scott him to seek alternative unspoiled environments, first in Borneo in the 1970s and then in New Zealand, visiting regularly from the late 1980s, around the time he participated in the Clean Irish Sea show. While he had been aware of environmental factors for quite some time, the show seems to have occurred during a turning point for him, in the accumulated recognition of all he had observed. His painting was reproduced in colour in the catalogue, adjacent to his own accompanying text (fig. 4) that charts his growing dismay, over a period of twenty-five years, at the expanding destruction of local aquatic systems, concluding with his devastated observation:

And now, unthinkably, the Sea, the Sea… The North Sea, the Irish Sea are just bigger lakes. Phosphates, nitrates, chemical waste, radioactive waste, it is all so simple: without living water we die 26.

As recent research reveals 27, during his many visits to New Zealand, Cooke spent most of his time on the south island, fishing and painting the environment that he encountered there, in particular the freshwater rivers and lakes in the wider landscape terrain. As these demonstrate, the colour blue had a particular significance for the artist who was drawn to the great expanses of the lakes of the Mackenzie country, including Lakes Tekapo, Pukaki, and Ohau, applying the intense colour he so much admired as in Lake Tekapo Painting I (fig. 5). Unlike the rivers, these subjects tend to be presented as flatter, at times almost abstract, forms, but in a characteristic shade in emulation of the distinctive opaque, blue, glacial water that feeds the lakes 28. It also reflects the intensity of the summer sky during the fishing season from around November to February, when he normally organised his travels there. Other water courses, in particular where they are close to rainforests, and the transpiration associated technically with “green” water, are coloured accordingly, such as the various studies of the Wanganui River or the Ugly River, both on the north western region of the south island of New Zealand. The Ugly River – or at least that part of it visited by Cooke and his friends – was apparently difficult to access due to the encroaching density of forest. It was not unusual that when a particularly fruitful stretch of river was identified, its location would remain a well-kept secret among the fishing enthusiasts who had encountered it. So it was with a relevant section of the Ugly River. Such blue / green theoretical distinctions are not followed rigidly however; Cooke was an artist and his imagery is rarely literal or slavishly descriptive. Rather, allusions to physical appearance tend to be tangential and selective, with interpre- tations largely founded in the artist’s deeply-held convictions and concerns for the

26. Clean Irish Sea, exhibition catalogue. 27. Research by the author on Barrie Cooke’s artwork in New Zealand is the subject of a funded research project under the title: “Cooke’s Explorations in New Zealand; The Paintings of Irish Artist Barrie Cooke in New Zealand”. 28. Confirmed by the present author’s several visits to New Zealand since 2014 to research the environment of Barrie Cooke’s paintings. Living Water: Irish Artists and Ecology 129

Fig. 5 – Barrie Cooke, Lake Tekapo Painting I, oil on canvas, 173 x 173 cm, 1989, private collection.

environment, coupled with his scientific awareness and capacity for observation. He was as interested in knowledge and ideas as he was in patient scrutiny as he stood and contemplated for hours, closely observing his surroundings in his well-worn fishing sandals, up to his knees in flowing water. Thus, a painting of the Ugly River such as Ugly River and Rocks (2001), suggests something of the relationship of water with the stone and verdure of the rainforest environment there. Cooke was attracted to the material and mobility contrasts of liquid and stone that revealed themselves in New Zealand during the fishing season when water levels were lower than during the spring thaw. Stone and water provided, also, varying symbols of the experience of time: the immediacy and dynamism of live water in the present, at a different pace to the glacial sedimenting of historic ages. As indicated, the blue of the painting L’azur, as well as the repetition of that colour in the title, suggests Cooke’s longing for what it promises rather than any literal representation of topography and climatic conditions in either the North Sea or the Mediterranean. It has been proposed that the title of the painting refers to “a quest for a pure, elusive blue, for a landscape of desire” 29. This accords to an extent with the reading proposed here, though without recognising how the artist

29. Karen Sweeney, “Slow Dance on the Forest Floor”, in Barrie Cooke, Dublin, Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2011, p. 15. 130 Yvonne Scott interpreted blue in scientific as well as aesthetic terms. The horizontally-flowing tonal variations in L’azur indicate a river rather than the flat, still, geometries associated with the New Zealand lakes, that were shortly to appear in his work. The watery green trickles in the upper register of that painting suggest a drenched riparian zone, while the more defined red and brown brushstrokes could refer, as in other of his works, to either stone or the dense wood of the undergrowth. Over the succeeding decades, Cooke retained his home in Ireland, but spent substantial periods away in locations that provided the unspoiled wilderness he sought, and his work responded accordingly. Over the next couple of decades, many paintings addressed the devastating effects of pollutants and algae on lakes, depicted with dead fish floating on the surface, as in Lough Arrow Fish and Lough Arrow Algae (both 2002). Both of these are stylised, to the extent that their meaning may be initially obscured, not least by the intense malachite green and blazing pink tones against dark backgrounds. As artworks, these are aesthetically compelling in their glorious abstracted colours. But as the artist has pointed out, terrible things can appear aesthetically pleasing, that beauty as perceived by optics or convention gives little indication of quality or morality. This observation of aesthetic paradox haunts representations of ecocritical imagery.

In his review of the Greenpeace show, Fallon commented positively on Gwen O’Dowd’s painting: “The best picture, I thought, was Gwen O’Dowd’s large, two- piece canvas ‘Underneath the Waves’, which has considerable surface beauty even if the form is a little loose” 30. Again we see how aesthetic, connoisseurial concerns supersede recognition of the ecocritical thematics of the work. O’Dowd’s seminal painting, Underneath the Waves (fig. 6), a diptych on a huge scale, is intended to draw attention not just to the surface of the water, but its depths, and what may be contained there. While described as a landscape painter, a term that has long been expanded to include seascapes 31, O’Dowd’s œuvre often focuses on a single element, such as the sea, a strategy that embodies two key characteristics. First, the work undermines an anthropocentric reading as there is no horizon line, coastline, or any defining structures, so the viewer is deliberately denied the usual spatial co-ordinates that enable their positioning, and is offered limited clues to either scale or depth of field. The infusion of encaustic with oil paint, adopted here, has often been applied in this artist’s work to convey an aqueous environment that has both surface and depth, whose restless agitation and organic (and other) suspensions deny any glass-clear optical access; instead it remains visually ambiguous, at once both intimate and infinite. It is a compelling if somewhat ominous representation; as O’Dowd recently observed, “it is quite a haunting image in some ways” 32.

30. Brian Fallon, “‘Clean Irish Sea’ Show at City Centre”, p. 12. 31. Seascapes became a regular feature of 17th-century artworks often now included under the broad heading of “landscape”. 32. Gwen O’Dowd in conversation with Yvonne Scott, 22 September 2017. Living Water: Irish Artists and Ecology 131

Fig. 6 – Gwen O’Dowd, Underneath the Waves, encaustic on canvas, 192 x 280 cm, 1988, private collection.

Involvement in the show provided the impetus for O’Dowd to continue to develop the theme, and led to a painting entitled Doimhneacht (1987) that evolved eventually into a series as well as to other interpretations of the maritime environment 33. Movement is evidently a key dimension in her work, in both the emotional and the physical sense. She is drawn to spend time swimming in the sea, generating both a somatic and visceral appreciation of its qualities and conditions. Her recognition of the sublime power and potential to overwhelm characterises her interpretations, and she seeks to represent the experience of its proximity and physicality. As her work reveals also, O’Dowd is less interested in evoking specific places than in conveying the direct experience of encounters with natural conditions. She has been described as a painter of “abstract landscapes”, a term that may seem contradictory given the tangibility of the physical landscape. Pure abstraction dispenses with the representation of material objects in preference to emotional or spiritual encounters. However, the term becomes more relevant in the light of her evocative rather than descriptive imagery. In an era of increasing ecological concerns regarding the future of the planet, Gwen O’Dowd’s seascapes are of particular relevance. The twin hazards of climate change and of pollution have been highlighted with ever increasing urgency, though are not recent phenomena. In the year following the Clean Irish Sea show, O’Dowd was awarded a residency in Banff and observed at first hand the impact of global warming on the shrinking glaciers, and found expression in her painting of Ice Fields (1990). This ancient and glacial river of ice drew her in turn to the Grand Canyon

33. Ibid. 132 Yvonne Scott in Arizona, whose deep gorge had been carved out over eons by the relentless erosion of the Colorado River, in a manner that brought to mind selected work by Georgia O’Keeffe 34. In the west of Ireland, O’Dowd found parallels in the process whereby the ocean relentlessly wore away at the sheer cliffs of North Mayo. Her images evoke plumes of surf soaring above the cliff edge on impact 35 as well as the intimate niches of the Uaimh series, a local equivalent to the processes that carved out the Grand Canyon. As a keen observer of the natural environment, particularly the sea, she recognises the intensifying ecological concerns. As she explains, she has never been interested in presenting a “pretty landscape” and, however sublimely romantic her imagery may appear to be, she has remained acutely aware of current issues, both political and ecological; such awareness is “always omnipresent” 36.

Recent widespread recognition of the devastating infestation of plastics in the oceans combines with established anxieties about toxic leakages into the environment, a context subtly represented in the artist’s work which effectively reveals how, while the destruction remains, it is largely indiscernible on the surface. The view of the sea and sky continues to appear unsullied, around Ireland at any rate, whatever about the reality of its components. However significant and potentially irreversible the anthropocentric impact on these environments, they nonetheless embody a physical capacity that may be occasionally harnessed, but remains fundamentally beyond human control, as the spate of cataclysms in recent times has demonstrated. The widespread, disastrous costs at a grassroots level have been effectively com- municated 37. Contemporary artists are often concerned to confront and reveal the catastrophic destruction of environments and the consequences, often interpreted in a hopelessly dystopian and grotesque aesthetic. How then do we evaluate the work of artists preferring to project the sublime romanticism of environments under threat, but whose imagery compels rather than dismays? In addressing the primal force of natural phenomena, albeit subjected to hidden degenerative infiltrations with all the unpredictability of their scope, artists like O’Dowd not only confront what may be irrevocably lost, but more urgently, and constructively, bring to our attention what still remains to be conserved.

Yvonne Scott Trinity College Dublin

34. See Yvonne Scott, “Georgia O’Keeffe’s Landscapes: Modern and American”, inGeorgia O’Keeffe, Nature and Abstraction, Richard D. Marshall, Achille Bonito Oliva, Yvonne Scott (eds.), Milano, Skira, 2007, p. 20. 35. Gwen O’Dowd’s On Inis Mor II (1992) in the collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art was shown in the exhibition The West as Metaphor at the Royal Hibernian Academy, 2005, curated by Yvonne Scott and Royal Hibernian Academy director, Patrick Murphy; exhibition catalogue, Dublin, Royal Hibernian Academy, 2005, p. 96. 36. Gwen O’Dowd in conversation with Yvonne Scott, 22 September 2017. 37. See, for example, Mary Robinson, Climate Justice: Hope, Resilience, and the Fight for a Sustainable Future, New York, Bloomsbury, 2018. Poems

by Mary O’Donnell

Heron and the Women

Quiet and still, those mornings when walkers suddenly pounce, with dogs ripping muscular through the wind on the far side of the canal.

Female voices, he hears their heat as if released. He is a study in grey a match for the silence absent in their words.

When they see him, it’s too late. He has lifted, spread his wings against gravity, above the careless spirals of words.

Sometimes, they witness the grace of wing-tilt and wind, the dangling twig legs.

Ancient symbols appear, as on a page, to remain unread, wet inks of a script dropped from above as he flies, to settle only, when dogs are restrained, and the canal is vellum.

Études irlandaises, no 44-1, 2019 – p. 133-136 134 Mary O’Donnell

Dolphins

We were watching from the shore as he kayaked in the bay, heading for the shallows. His twelve-year shoulders had lately begun to bulk, stretch, and in his eyes no shadows.

It happened suddenly – a pod, first one dolphin arced beside the vessel, and he smiled, kept paddling. Then a noose of them burst from the calm, up and over his head, down the other side, beneath, swept up again to fly at play a circle of salt-spattered light and shattered sea-crystal.

He, startled, went still, then alarmed, cried out to us on shore, though we smiled and waved in excitement. Then a sudden flip and plunge to the depths, the whole pod bearing his secret message to the deeps, beyond the hotel on the cliff, beyond domino rows of beach homes, away from us, his family.

He was growing. So they came, these emissaries, preparing him for sirens on land, the clear eyes of girls who’d try him. One way or another. Poems 135

Crow Knowledge

By All Hallows, the sympathy of crows fills the evening air as light fades, and souls warm thin feet against a screen of blazing birch.

They falter across a field of winter corn, bewildered, on an earth no longer theirs. How they long to lie abed, as tight in flesh as crows are in feather, ruffed together, still bound to life. But the scald crows warn: this day and no further may you roam.

Clearing skies make way for gods of frost, souls shiver at the memory of fires, wines, red meat. They recall smiles too and themselves, once, raucous as the crows that scold them now. These black guardians tilt low, call ‘Time!’ with beak and claw.

As November’s shim-clouds lock beneath the horizon, their dark wings ferry the malingerers to eternity’s twig-dark roost. 136 Mary O’Donnell

Homewards across the Bog of Allen

The same weekly trip, bypassing towns, quick tics of winking windows from a distant village where the sun glints. You’re distracted by etiolated clouds in late afternoon, when sun breaks between one road sculpture and the next:

bog oak and six moon phases, all copper burnish, starkly lit. Your life amounts to segments of waxing and waning, where even decline is growth, and finds dignity. Behind the moons, the lipped bog, hickory brown, then stacked banks

where the sleán cuts deep. You’d stop the car if you could, tumble into a heartland where no village or town can grow, the rapacious wind composing long notes in winter’s fret, the birch, the rowan – here a lament, there a reel.

Further out, the composition of ancient self continues – a blackened slurch of turf, wild to the end. No grief here as some bog-imp digs up, wriggles out, lifts and tucks you to itself, fondles your spirit in the sun’s final flicker, ferries you, almost virgin,

like a gift to the planes of night. COMPTES RENDUS BOOK REVIEWS

W. B. Yeats’s Robartes-Aherne Writings. Featuring the Making of His “Stories of Michael Robartes and His Friends”, Wayne K. Chapman (ed.), London, Bloomsbury Academic (Modernist Archives), 2018, 372 p.

Wayne K. Chapman has published “the first genetically conceived, chronologically arranged edition” of the works Yeats wrote around the characters of Michael Robartes and Owen Aherne (and sometimes, his brother John) “in both published and unpublished states” (introduction, p. xviii). The book forms part of Bloomsbury Academic’s Modernist Archives Series, dedicated to “archival excavation and thick contextualization” of literary modernism. It is certainly a feat of erudition, tracking down manuscript material at the British Library and libraries at the universities of Harvard, Southern Illinois, SUNY Buffalo and Emory, as well as the National Library of Ireland. The study is divided into five sections. The first deals with the early appearance of Robartes and Aherne in the Secret Rose triptych: Rosa Alchemica (1896), The Tables of the Law (1896), The Adoration of the Magi (1897). The second traces the “resurrection” of Robartes and Aherne from 1917-1920 in unpublished manuscript material (“The Discoveries of Michael Robartes”, “Anglo-Ireland: A Conversation”, “Appendix by Michael Robartes”). The third examines an explosion of creative work from 1919-1925 in The Wild Swans at Coole and Michael Robartes and the Dancer, in “notes” for Four Plays for Dancers and in inventions and extracts for the first version of A Vision, giving important insights into “The Gift of Harun-Al-Rashid” along the way. The fourth part is devoted to the drafting ofStories of Michael Robartes and his Friends. The final section edits “Michael Robartes Foretells” (a text that Yeats chose not to publish) and “Denise’s Story”, an inserted addition to Stories of Michael Robartes. By its very nature, this kind of work prioritises the scholarly apparatus, which precedes the published versions of the material. In each section, prefatory matter accompanied by footnotes sketches out the historical context of the preliminary drafts before presenting facsimiles and transcriptions of the manuscripts and type- scripts, also accompanied by notes, and where relevant, the published version. A full appreciation of the scholarship involved requires a constant cross-referencing of the prefatory material with the drafts and the published versions, if not an encyclopaedic knowledge of the primary material in addition to the secondary literature on the subject. A prior and studious rereading of the corresponding published versions would be a handy preparation for the narrative arc Chapman traces. The result of this genetic criticism is a fascinating trajectory of the Robartes- Aherne characters, replete with biographical information on Yeats and commentary

Études irlandaises, no 44-1, 2019 – p. 137-162 138 Études irlandaises, nº 44-1 – 2019 on their relevance for the later poems and both versions of A Vision. A rather “Orientalist” Robartes emerges, to Aherne’s national Catholic foil, giving Chapman the opportunity to illustrate the role of humour and self- in these texts, in their protagonists’ repartee and slagging of the poet himself, and in the wry editorial insertions Yeats made to give credence to his “source” material.

Seán Golden

Marie-Monique Léoutre, Serving France, Ireland and England: Ruvigny, Earl of Galway, 1648-1720, London, Routledge, 2018, 238 p.

Anyone even vaguely familiar with the history of French Protestant exiles to Ireland in the 1600s will identify their settlement at Portarlington, straddling the borders of counties Laois and Offaly, as the second most important outside Dublin. There, French was used in church services until the 1820s, and the area is proud of this Huguenot heritage. But outside scholarly circles, few if any would recognise the name of Henri de Massue, second marquis de Ruvigny (1648-1720), who had established Portarlington but also rose to become the only Lord Justice of Ireland not born a subject of the English monarch. For a time, he was even the acting head of the Irish colonial administration, if not in title, inter alia enacting the anti- Catholic legislation known as the , but because he is mostly referred to as Viscount Galway, his French origins have been somewhat obscured. This is the first full biographical treatment of his career, but also sheds light on inter-state conflict in late 17th and early 18th century Western Europe. The numbers of French Protestants leaving France swelled dramatically after the revocation of the Edict de Nantes in 1685, but within the context of the age’s complex intertwining of religion, politics and economic imperialism, confessional identities were further reinforced and realigned on an international scale. Protestants united behind the messianic figure of William III, the “new David in armour” opposing Louis XIV, and Ruvigny became a leading figure in the Protestant International. His father, who had served both Louis XIII and XIV militarily and diplomatically, had been député général of his co-religionists and thus their representative at court. After several missions he had firmly established himself in the highest spheres of English politics, and by 1685 even been naturalised. Thus prepared for exile, the elder Ruvigny settled permanently in England in 1686, was granted permission to reside at the royal palace in Greenwich, and there established a form of “Huguenot head-quarters”. The family became increasingly prominent as natural leaders of the French refugee community, ensuring their spiritual needs were met but also assisting with employment and “networking”. Ruvigny père had obtained the use of the church at Greenwich for his co-religionists, who worshipped after the regular Anglican service, but using the English liturgy translated into French, an indication they had conformed. Comptes rendus | Book reviews 139

When William III took over the English throne in 1688, the ageing Marquis helped raise Huguenot regiments to serve him, demonstrating his Protestantism “more aggressively” as Léoutre puts it, but also providing employment for refugees. After the death of his father (1689) Henri the younger’s life changed dramatically. Now the 2nd Marquis de Ruvigny, he finally accepted a commission and was made major general of the armies, despite the fact this would lead to the confiscation of estates in France the family had managed to hold on to, and which Louis XIV finally seized in January 1691. Prior military experience before exile had seen him serving in the French army under no less than Schomberg and Turenne. Ruvigny was appointed to serve in Ireland and help end the campaign there against the Franco-Irish Jacobite forces, which was diverting William from his main aim, defeating Louis on the continent. He distinguished himself at some of the most decisive encounters which would complete the Williamite pacification of Ireland, and after the battle of Aughrim (Co. Galway) on 12 July 1691, he was publicly embraced by Ginkel, the Dutch commander of the forces in Ireland. In November, back in London, he took the requisite oaths to be naturalised and in reward for his military services was enrolled in the Irish peerage, receiving the titles of Viscount Galway and later Baron Portarlington, and eventually granted land in 1693. From 1693-1696, Galway played a distinguished role as both a military commander and diplomat in Savoy-Piedmont, a lesser-known front of the war of the Grand Alliance against Louis XIV, which consolidated his position within the Williamite regime. During this time he also championed the cause of the persecuted Vaudois Protestants, despite doctrinal differences. At this point it is apt to stress the originality of Léoutre’s work, that is not only based on the fact that her archival research was ground-breaking and thorough, as evidenced by the staggering abundance of notes gathered in several countries. Galway, somewhat oddly, steadfastly stuck to his mother tongue throughout his career, and the exhaustive study she has produced discusses many facets of it based on “previously untapped” or “hitherto underutilised” sources, because they were – evidently – in French. While it may seem self-evident that translational skills are required for those involved in transnational histories, many of us deplore the increasingly monolingual focus of Irish historical studies, belying the importance of Irish-European interactions. However the book, building on a doctoral thesis completed in an Irish university, may be the product of a fluently bilingual scholar, but clearly conforms to the increasing trend of targetting an anglophone audience: there are virtually no quotations in French. Having demonstrated his total commitment to the Alliance and the English king, Galway was entrusted with the governorship of Ireland, and the main original contribution of the book is its evaluation of his role as an administrator in Dublin Castle, shaping the Irish colonial Government during two phases, from 1697 to 1701 and then 1715 to 1717. As the only non-British or Irish person to serve as a Lord Justice of Ireland, Galway’s point of view as somewhat of an outsider allowed him to adopt a more neutral position towards the complex constitutional relationship and parliamentary politics of Ireland and England in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution; substantial sections of the book may have less interest for scholars of French history. The book’s clear and fluid narrative style, and its precise user-friendly 140 Études irlandaises, nº 44-1 – 2019 chapter summaries will make it an immensely useful resource for undergraduate students. Its focus is firmly on the political, though the author underlines that very little personal correspondence has survived allowing us to gain greater insights into the mindset of this pragmatist who served France, England and Ireland.

Sylvie Kleinman

Hanna Sheehy Skeffington : Suffragette and Sinn Feiner. Her Memoirs and Political Writings, Margaret Ward (éd.), Dublin, University College Dublin Press, 2017, 463 p.

« Hanna Sheehy Skeffington belonged to that rare class, small in any age, whose contemporaries take for granted not only that they cannot but that they should not die like the rest of us. » C’est sans doute l’une des quelques nécrologies figurant dans le dernier chapitre de ce remarquable ouvrage édité par Margaret Ward, qui rend le plus adéquatement justice à la personne que fut Hanna Sheehy Skeffington. Au cours des dix-sept chapitres de ce livre très dense et très riche, nous décou- vrons une femme de conviction, engagée, d’un courage immense, d’une grande générosité, oratrice de talent aux écrits prolifiques, qui a traversé et marqué l’une des périodes les plus agitées de l’histoire de son pays. Après une préface rédigée par sa petite-fille, l’universitaire Micheline Sheehy Skeffington, l’ouvrage s’ouvre sur une reproduction des mémoires inachevés de Hanna, qu’elle n’avait entrepris d’écrire que durant la dernière année de sa vie, sa santé déclinant. Elle ne put malheureusement pas mener à bien cette entreprise que Margaret Ward a reprise à son compte, en publiant de manière structurée et problématisée, les publications, correspondances, discours, pamphlets, et articles de presse existant à ce jour. Chaque chapitre commence par une mise en contexte historique rédigée par l’historienne. Les chapitres II à IX suivent Hanna dans ses quarante années de combats poli- tiques, de son engagement pour l’éducation des femmes à son opposition farouche au traité de partition et à l’État Libre, en passant par sa participation au soulèvement de Pâques 1916 et sa bataille indéfectible pour le suffrage des femmes. La vie d’Hanna Sheehy Skeffington est un témoignage sans concessions de la compatibilité entre un engagement pour la cause des femmes et un nationalisme absolu, qui lui fera d’ailleurs quitter le parti Fianna Fáil pour rejoindre les Républicains du Sinn Féin, à une époque où le nationalisme s’accommodait fort mal des suffragistes. Elle ne cessa d’écrire et de parler, en Irlande et dans le monde, des causes qu’elle défendait et pour lesquelles elle vivait. Elle fut, pendant une période bien trop brève, soutenue et accompagnée dans ses combats, par Francis Sheehy Skeffington, son époux et compagnon, qui fut assassiné au lendemain du soulèvement de Pâques, alors qu’il tentait d’éviter les pillages dans la ville. Comptes rendus | Book reviews 141

Les chapitres X à XVI s’inscrivent davantage dans le registre des mémoires. Dans les années 1930, Hanna continue à se battre pour les droits des femmes dans une Irlande qu’elle avait bien perçue comme désormais aliénée aux enseignements de l’Église catholique. Elle y dénonce le conservatisme des partis politiques, la censure et tout le dispositif législatif discriminatoire mis en place par Cosgrave. Elle revient également sur ses divers séjours en prison. Outre la dimension biographique passionnante de ce livre, c’est une véritable mine de sources primaires pour tout historien de l’Irlande et de cette époque où se sont joués les événements qui allaient déterminer l’avenir du pays. Ses rencontres avec Redmond et Asquith, le président américain Woodrow Wilson et son long entretien avec Henry Ford, son amitié avec Constance Markievicz, ses liens avec les Pankhurst, son admiration pour Jim Connolly et ses rapports complexes avec de Valera, sont autant de moments d’histoire qui illustrent la tourmente dans laquelle l’Irlande était prise et qui rétablissent la place et le rôle des femmes dans la construction du pays. Cet ouvrage – qui se dévore comme un roman, se lit comme une biographie et se consulte comme une archive de sources primaires – est le fruit de la contribution de deux femmes à l’écriture de l’histoire nationale de leur pays.

Nathalie Sebbane

James Joyce’s Silences, Jolanta Wawrzycka, Serenella Zanotti (eds.), London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2018, 255 p.

The topic of silence has long been recognised as an essential feature of the work of but much less so of . The great achievement of this new volume of essays, edited by Jolanta Wawrzycka and Serenella Zanotti, is its success in illustrating to readers of Joyce just how pervasive and complex are the ways in which silence appears in Joyce’s work and its reception. James Joyce’s Silences offers not only the prospect of further appraisals of silence in Joyce’sœuvre , but equally new assessments of its relation to Beckettian silence. It is a volume that also opens the path to new considerations of the legacy of Joyce’s silences in post-War literature, particularly for such important Irish novelists as Edna O’Brien, Elizabeth Bowen, John McGahern and John Banville. The volume gets off to a flying start with a riveting discussion by Fritz Senn on varieties of Joycean silence, attention directed primarily to Ulysses. Senn is especially interested in the silence that appears at moments of social awkwardness in Ulysses and the effective ways through which Joyce conveys silence as anxiety. Most intriguing is Senn’s brief but illuminating comments on the intervention of the milkwoman during the morning conversation between Dedalus, Mulligan and Haines in the opening “Telemachus” episode of Ulysses. In an observation 142 Études irlandaises, nº 44-1 – 2019 relating both to Joyce’s own practices of translation discussed later in the volume by Tim Conley and Serenella Zanotti, Senn describes a treble level of silence in this instance, one that orbits around a misunderstanding of what language is being spoken: English, Irish or French. Senn’s array of insights paves the way for a range of engaging readings of Joyce’s silences in the essays that follow. Moving in poststructuralist fashion towards a textual reading of silence, Laura Pelaschiar makes the astonishing claim that in its revised 1914 version, “The Sisters” – more than any other Joycean text – anticipates Finnegans Wake in its denial of any final semantic closure. The argument is intrigu- ing but would require analysis of the distilled presence of the story in Finnegans Wake. Pelaschiar draws a very telling distinction between what she terms “verbal impotence” and deliberate evasion in Dubliners. Her idea of “Araby” as a story weighted with a silence that is acoustic rather than textual is a seductive one, though such acoustic achievement can only derive from the story’s syntactical arrangement. In their assertion that silence facilitates the creation of sound and language, Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli and Ira Torresi also turn to “The Sisters”, laying further emphasis upon the importance of ellipsis to the narrative. Inadvertently perhaps, Bollettieri Bosinelli and Torresi bring to the surface what may well be the most emphatic anticipation in Joyce’s writing of Beckett’s syntactical strategies for silence in his post-War drama. This is a passage from the seventeenth scene of Joyce’s Epiphanies, not published in his lifetime. The staccato quality of the dialogue between Mr. and Mrs. Joyce in the passage is achieved through rampant ellipses. While obviously an autobiographical recollection of the death of Joyce’s younger brother Georgie, it reads very much like a passage of dialogue between characters in Beckett’s Endgame. Bollettieri Bosinelli and Torresi’s essay is followed by Laurent Milesi’s reflection on the relation between silence and origins in Finnegans Wake. He considers the topic of silence in Finnegans Wake not just as that of a void existing at such a place of origin as the disputed origin of the River Nile, addressed in Joyce’s last work. He also alludes to Joyce’s recognition of language itself being indistinguishable from this void. In this way, Milesi’s chapter points towards the possibility of considering Joyce’s “nil(e)” in terms of Heidegger’s notion of silence as a primary ontological condition of language. Opening Part II, “The Aesthetics of Silence”, John McCourt raises a pertinent question for all literary representations of silence: just how long, exactly, does the silence indicated by ellipsis last? Once again “The Sisters” is taken up as a key text for understanding Joycean silence. McCourt notes the ellipses that break up Eliza’s disclosure concerning the priest having broken the chalice at Church (a broken text as a broken chalice). They indicate silences, the precise lengths of which are unknown. This follows McCourt’s observation of the ways in which particular moments are prolonged in A Portrait by the literary effectiveness through which Joyce conveys their silence. Teresa Caneda Cabrera draws on the postcolonial criticism of Seamus Deane, Kevin Whelan, Anne Fogarty, Declan Kiberd and Vincent Cheng to probe the historical legacies that inform silence in “The Dead”, attending to the significance of the Irish Famine of the 1840s and the gradual Comptes rendus | Book reviews 143 decline of Irish as a living vernacular through the course of the 19th century. Caneda Cabrera’s reflections on the relation between silence and strangeness in this context is illuminating, situating Kiberd and Fogarty’s consciousness of Irish exile and degradation in relation to the primordial estrangement that Julia Kristeva observes within selfhood in her 1991 work,Strangers to Ourselves. Sam Slote moves in a different direction through an original take on Molly Bloom’s persistent repetition of the word “yes” in the “Penelope” episode of Ulysses. Slote proposes that “yes” functions almost like a punctuation mark throughout the monologue, noting how its persistent usage regulates the pace of Molly’s thoughts, devoid as their representation is of any conventional punctuation. On a point of relevance to the whole issue of translation and silence that is dealt with in Part IV of the volume, Slote’s reading is weakened by his mistaken claim that the term used in the Irish-language translation of Ulysses lacks any semantic meaning (p. 109). As a convergence of both words in the phrase “is ea” (it is), the word “seadh” is automatically recognised by Irish speakers as “yes”. Still, his is an intriguing reflection on how “yes” may function as a punctuation mark rather than a word in Molly’s monologue. Morris Beja’s concluding piece for Part II is appropriately brief (for a volume on silence) and takes us back to the unfinished business of the silences left by Joyce’s unfinished sentences in Ulysses to which Caneda Cabrera refers earlier, drawing on Kiberd. The essays contained in the final two sections of the volume, “Writing Silence” and “Translating Silence”, sometimes deepen the reader’s appreciation of silence and its importance to the understanding of Joyce’s work. On other occasions, however, the focus seems rather tangential to the question of silence. Opening Part III, “Writing Silence”, William S. Brockman provides a scrupulously incisive consideration of amanuenses in Joyce’s correspondence at various points from 1917 onwards. However, Brockman’s idea of Joyce being silenced when his voice is overruled by the amanuensis is only valid if it could be demonstrated that there is intentional misrepresentation involved, something extremely difficult to prove conclusively (p. 124). Brockman’s essay is followed by Sara Sullam’s absorbing consideration of what might have become a publishing history of Joyce’s work in Italy alternative to that which actually unfolded, drawing attention to the plans of Italian publisher Enrico Cederna to bring out a volume of Joyce’s essays in trans- lation as early as 1949 along with his Italian translation of Synge’s Riders to the Sea (p. 140). The volume of essays never got into print, however, leaving us with a tantalising sense of how differently the image of Joyce might have developed during the 1960s had it done so, following the publication of the first Italian translation of Ulysses in 1960. As with Brockman, however, this is a matter only tentatively related to the topic of silence. The question of translating silence in Joyce’s writing and the silences that enter the process of translating this writing are dealt with in the final section of the volume. The essays that it contains relate more assuredly than the previous section to the theme of silence. Jolanta Wawrzycka’s essay on translating silences in Chamber Music is the most impressive of these. Examining Polish and Italian translations of Chamber Music, Wawrzycka manages to convey to readers who 144 Études irlandaises, nº 44-1 – 2019 do not understand the Polish language just how successfully her efforts have been in capturing the aura of silence in Chamber Music, as she also includes reference to those of Maciej Słomczyński in addition to Italian translations by Marina Capodilista and Alfredo Giuliani. The essay begs the question as to why no other essay in the volume was given over fully to analysis of Chamber Music in its original English version, a volume of poems for which the boundary between sound and stillness is so delicately yet emphatically poised. Serenella Zanotti’s essay on silent translation in Joyce actually reads more like a consideration of unacknowledged intertextual allusions that Joyce weaves into his work. Cer- tainly important as an essay on translation and intertextuality, the silence within translation processes in Joyce’s writing that Zanotti detects in her essay appears instead to be simply a case of Joyce reworking those influences into the fabric of Joyce’s own style. This is indicative of the shortcoming in the final two sections of the volume. While all of the essays are absorbing in their own right, they are not always attuned to the primary objective of the volume as a whole: the topic of silence. Following the publication of this excellent volume of essays, the field of Joyce Studies would be well served by a full exploration of silence in Joyce in ontological and metaphysical terms.

Michael McAteer

Yeats’s Legacies : Yeats Annual no. 21, A Special issue, Warwick Gould (dir.), Cambridge, Open Book Publishers, 2018, 610 p. (versions PDF et HTML disponibles en ligne : https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/724).

Ce nouvel opus de la revue Yeats Annual est un volume imposant de 610 pages, de très belle facture, précédé d’une longue introduction de 67 pages écrite par Warwick Gould, également responsable éditorial de l’ouvrage. Autant dire que l’on a affaire à une somme extrêmement riche, portée par nombre de chercheurs prestigieux dans le monde de la critique yeatsienne. Son titre, Yeats’s Legacies, donne la tonalité de l’ensemble, puisqu’il y est question d’héritage – et le terme est à prendre à la lettre comme au figuré, puisque cette année 2018 marque le centenaire de l’acquisition par Yeats de sa demeure Thoor Ballylee, tour normande où il ne demeura qu’éphé- mèrement durant quelques années dans la décennie 1920, et dont sont aujourd’hui vendus, par la famille, les meubles et les objets qu’elle abrita. « Yeats’s Legacies », c’est donc d’abord cet héritage matériel, dont Warwick Gould nous rappelle l’histoire dans sa longue introduction. Mais c’est aussi tout ce qui, dans l’histoire du poète, accompagna cette période extrêmement féconde de maturité et de fin de vie. Période de très grande créativité poétique et dramatique, bien sûr, mais aussi période durant laquelle l’homme public Yeats fut sur tous les fronts de la pensée et de l’action politique. Comptes rendus | Book reviews 145

Si l’on tente de cerner une structure générale de ce numéro, on peut dire que son corps principal, le plus long, est composé de dix articles de fond concernant les productions littéraires ou activités publiques de Yeats durant ces deux décen- nies 1920 et 1930. Trois d’entre eux, d’une taille imposante allant jusqu’au format essai, forment la moitié de l’ensemble. Anita Feldman (« The Invisible Hypnotist : Myth and Spectre in Some Post-1916 Poems and Plays by W. B. Yeats », p. 63-121) analyse la façon dont Yeats s’est fait écho du soulèvement de 1916 dans son œuvre, œuvre parcourue des spectres des fusillés de Pâques depuis The Dreaming of the Bones jusqu’à The Man and the Echo à la veille de sa mort. Warwick Gould (« “Satan, Smut and Co” : Yeats and the Suppression of Evil Literature in the Early Years of the Free State », p. 123-212), restitue avec force détails les luttes de Yeats sénateur face à la grande virulence des mouvements religieux dans le nouvel Irish Free State – luttes d’autant plus courageuses que vaines contre les lois de censure finalement votées en 1929, et qui trouvent leur résonance jusqu’à aujourd’hui, puisqu’a encore été votée en 2009 en Irlande une loi pénalisant le blasphème. James Pethica (« “Uttering, Mastering it” ? Yeats’s Tower, Lady Gregory’s Ballylee and the Eviction of 1888 », p. 213-267), évoque l’histoire même du domaine de Thoor Ballylee, notamment lorsqu’il fut propriété de William Gregory, qui à l’heure des évictions se targuait d’être un landlord libéral – si tant est que ce soit possible. Les autres articles, un peu plus brefs, sont autant d’études ciblées sur des aspects particuliers de l’œuvre ou de son contexte. Hannah Sullivan (« How Yeats Learned to Scan », p. 3-37), en revenant sur l’histoire même du concept de vers libre, développe une réflexion documentée et passionnante sur le traitement du vers par Yeats, et l’influence, sur ce point, de Pound et ses théories modernistes. Denis Donoghue (« Easter 1916 », p. 39-61) remet en contexte le soulèvement de Pâques 1916 dans l’histoire des mouvements nationalistes irlandais depuis le XVIIIe siècle, avec une émotion justifiée par l’évocation de sa propre famille, et analyse les postures contradictoires de Yeats, son désarroi lors de l’événement, et sa reconnaissance de la transcendance générée par l’héroïsme du sacrifice des morts de l’insurrection. Lauren Arrington (« Fighting Spirits : W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and the Ghosts of The Winding Stair(1929) », p. 269-293) évoque le duo Yeats / Pound à Rapallo, à l’heure de leur étude du Zen, de l’écriture de The Winding Stair, et de leur fascination passagère pour Mussolini. Catherine E. Paul (« W. B. Yeats and the Problem of Belief », p. 295-316), s’appuyant notamment sur une analyse de Resurrection, s’interroge sur la figure du daimon et sur l’idée exacte que le poète se fait des « esprits », tantôt part intérieure de soi, tantôt figure extérieure. Grevel Lindop (« Charles Williams and W. B. Yeats », p. 317-354) nous donne un aperçu nouveau et aigu du travail de Yeats sur The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, et du rôle précieux que joua dans cette entreprise Charles Williams, lui-même poète, et alors éditeur à Oxford University Press. Stanley van der Ziel (« Shakespeare in Purgatory : “A Scene of Tragic Intensity” », p. 355-390) évoque les traces visibles dans Purgatory de King Lear ou Coriolan – deux pièces vues par Yeats à l’Abbey Theatre dans les années 1930 –, à travers le conflit père / fils ou les figures d’apocalypse, alors qu’il est aussi en train d’écrireOn the Boiler. Enfin, 146 Études irlandaises, nº 44-1 – 2019

William O’Donnell (« The Textual History of Yeats’sOn the Boiler », p. 391-446) analyse précisément l’histoire éditoriale de On the Boiler, ou plutôt la longue histoire de sa non-publication et de l’impatience de Yeats, en conflit avec Higgins, collaborateur de sa sœur à la Cuala Press. On sait que le texte fut finalement édité de façon posthume. Une deuxième partie, plus brève, est composée d’abord de deux passionnants commentaires de chercheurs sur leurs propres études, l’un de John Kelly sur Maud Gonne, l’autre de Warwick Gould sur l’histoire éditoriale des œuvres de Yeats. Avec le premier (« Maud Gonne’s Fictional Affair : “A Life’s Sketch” », p. 449-477), on découvre avec surprise que Maud Gonne, connue plutôt pour sa rhétorique politique, s’est elle-même essayée à la fiction, et même à l’autofiction, à travers un court texte de jeunesse, « A Life’s Sketch », publié dans le Literary and Artistic Magazine – supplément bisannuel du Freeman’s Journal – en 1889. Le second (« Conflicted Legacies : Yeats’s Intentions and Editorial Theory », p. 479-541) est une très brillante réflexion sur la nécessité, pour la compréhension du parcours de l’écrivain, de penser ce parcours non en terme de « bio-bibliographie », mais bien de « biblio-biographie » ! Car on sait comment Yeats, de son vivant, a construit son « grand œuvre » par une stratégie minutieuse de publication, à intervalles réguliers, de ses œuvres complètes. Du reste, Gould poursuit la réflexion en portant un regard surplombant sur l’histoire post-mortem des différentes éditions des œuvres complètes du poète, en s’interrogeant, derrière Barthes ou Foucault, mais aussi Eliot, sur le statut même de « l’auteur » et de son texte. Enfin, ces deux études sont suivies de courtes recensions des publications récentes sur le poète ou ses proches, dont on résumera simplement en une formule les contenus, tout en mentionnant les auteurs des ouvrages. On découvre ainsi deux passionnantes biographies récentes des sœurs Gore-Booth (l’une de Sonja Tiernan sur Eva et l’autre de Lauren Arrington sur Constance), le dernier opus de la série des Cornell Yeats sur On Baile’s Strand (dirigé par Jared Curtis et Declan Kiely), et plusieurs monographies et recueils d’essais : sur Yeats, Eliot et Jones (par David Soud), sur Yeats et l’occultisme (dirigé par Matthew Gibson et Neil Mann), ou Yeats et Kipling (par Alexander Bubb), sur les relations entre Yeats, MacNeice, Bowen et Beckett et le médium radiophonique (par Emily Bloom), sur les Cantos posthumes de Pound (dirigé par Massimo Bacigalupo), et enfin sur l’« affaire » Maud Gonne / Millevoye (par Adrian Frazier). L’ensemble se clôt sur la mention des dernières publications reçues par la revue, et notamment d’une récente mise en musique de l’ensemble de l’œuvre poétique de Yeats par le compositeur Douglas Saum of Reno.

Pierre Longuenesse Comptes rendus | Book reviews 147

Stan E. Gontarski, Revisioning Beckett: Samuel Beckett’s Decadent Turn, foreword by Anthony Uhlmann, New York, Bloomsbury Academic, 2018, 297 p.

I remember, I remember… twenty-plus years ago, at the Tallahassee home of Stan and Marsha Gontarski, listening in fascination as Stan told of Barney Rosset and Grove Press, the vagrancies of that precocious and preposterous publishing house and its aggressive, politically active and reckless policy that led to controversy, bankruptcy, regeneration and social change; a house still synonymous with the publication of Samuel Beckett in North America. Essay 2, “Publishing in America: Sam and Barney”, is a compelling reminder of that evening. That experience, and my collaboration with Stan over the next two decades, endorses the tribute of Anthony Uhlmann in his “Foreword” to these invaluable essays: that criticism in the richest sense is no mere academic pastime, and that Stan’s friendship with the author (the younger man was a catalyst for “Ohio Impromptu”), his tangible engagement with productions and publishing, and his intimate contacts with virtually every Beckett critic of note, position him as one for whom these essays are not a valedictory exercise but rather (in Uhlmann’s words) “an ecosystem of creative activity” (p. xiii), exemplify the vital criticism of their age even as they anticipate perspectives yet to come. Each of these thirteen essays has been delivered or published earlier, but they are now more accessible and, chosen carefully and positioned deftly, they assume a new “narrative” momentum, to illuminate one another unexpectedly. They do not appear in chronological order, nor according to genre; but there is a broad thematic drift from “Samuel Beckett andLace Curtain Irish Modernisms” (how an early essay, “Recent Irish Poetry” (1934), anticipates such themes as “the breakdown of the object” that inform later works); through intriguing accounts of textual “aberrations” in the published drama and equivalent “perversions” in the theatrical world; towards the intersections of the theatrical and the theoretical (the “sense of unending”). One danger in a gathering of earlier essays is eclecticism, that of offering isolated insights which finally do not testify to an integrated argument. Gontarski does not entirely avoid this peril, but the force of that charge is largely deflected by his Introduction: “Demonology, Sade-ism, and Samuel Beckett’s Decadent Turn”. This essay, too, has previous history, for it was delivered as a keynote address at a “Beckett and Vice” conference of 2016, but it was clearly conceived as a prologue for the forthcoming volume, by situating Beckett’s work (and hence Gontarski’s response) within a specific historical context, which might be sum- marised as “Beckett’s interest in and connections to European intellectual cur- rents and avant-gardes” (p. 28). That interest ranges from Decadence (Nordeau, Huysmans, Wilde, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Apollinaire), then back to Sade (art and pornography), before moving forward to Surrealism and the “decadent” works of German expressionism that Beckett in 1936 had striven to see before their desecration by the Nazis. 148 Études irlandaises, nº 44-1 – 2019

This “Introduction” is remarkable, but equally frustrating, for while it is an effective hold-all for the essays to follow (and, to a considerable degree, inte- grates their diversity), by virtue of its brevity it underlines the urgent need for a bigger book, as yet unwritten. The titular “Decadent Turn” alludes to what has been called the “empirical turn”: that rejection in Beckett studies from the mid-1990s of a post-structural hermeticism to promote such aspects of the “grey canon” as biographies, notebooks, letters, genetic criticism and annota- tions. Celebrating Beckett’s attraction to the underbelly of the beast, this essay responds to an aspect of post-Joycean Modernism often neglected, that may be defined as the aesthetic of the shabby: not simply the recognition of the commonplace­ as uncommon, the ordinary extraordinary, with the commensurate appreciation of beauty in mud as much as marble; but further (as in a portrait by Rembrandt, where a wart on the nose of a wealthy patron is drawn with fidelity), with the same loving care and attention devoted to the foul as to the fair. This study may be more important for what it foreshadows than for what it garners. It is not without a few small warts: Watt first appeared (Paris, Olympia, original magenta wrappers series) in 1953, not 1958 (p. 19); “Verhulst Pim” is disordered (p. xvii); a study of European decadence might have mentioned Mario Praz; and more might have been made of Beckett’s early poetry and prose, and his reading of lurid accounts of flagellation and onanism (his notes listed in the “Dream Notebook” between Augustine’s Confessions and the Imitatio Christi of Thomas a Kempis, with no moral inflection of tone or interest). As Gontarski’s recent studies of Bergson have revealed (not, alas, included here, but intimated in the “Introduction”), the eternal challenge to cultural and social expectation, in these essays, defends and defines the decadent as inseparable from the neoteric. This is no small matter.

Chris Ackerley

Irish Women and the Vote : Becoming Citizens [2007], Louise Ryan, Margaret Ward (dir.), Dublin, Irish Academic Press, 2018, 258 p. (édition revue).

L’ouvrage collectif Irish Women and the Vote : Becoming Citizens, dirigé par Louise Ryan et Margaret Ward et publié pour la première fois en 2007, a fait l’objet d’une réédition à l’occasion du centenaire de l’obtention du droit de vote par les femmes britanniques et irlandaises de plus de trente ans. Le vote du Parlement britannique en février 1918 fut l’aboutissement de décennies de luttes pour l’obtention de ce droit, un mouvement déjà relativement bien documenté pour la Grande-Bretagne, mais beaucoup moins pour l’Irlande, ce que les autrices de cet ouvrage (un seul homme parmi elles) se sont attachées à faire. Comptes rendus | Book reviews 149

La préface de chacune des deux éditions (la première par Rosemary Cullen Owens, la seconde par Linda Connolly) et l’introduction de Maria Luddy replacent très utilement le mouvement des suffragettes irlandaises dans différents contextes, celui de l’historiographie irlandaise et de l’histoire des femmes en Irlande, celui de la « décennie des commémorations » pour la période 1912-1922 (cette seconde édition fait en effet partie d’un effort plus large de reconnaissance de la place et de l’importance des femmes dans l’histoire irlandaise de ces années charnières), celui de l’histoire irlandaise et britannique de la période du tournant du XXe siècle (introduction et chapitres donnent ainsi à voir l’imbrication complexe des dif- férents mouvements politiques et sociaux de l’époque en Irlande), et celui de l’évolution des droits des femmes en Irlande au cours du XXe siècle, un sujet repris également dans le dernier chapitre qui porte sur la période 1922-1943 dans l’État libre irlandais. L’ouvrage dans son ensemble représente une contribution significative et précieuse à l’historiographie irlandaise, en ce sens qu’il contribue à rendre visibles des populations minorées ou ignorées de longue date dans le récit historique traditionnel irlandais comme dans les manuels scolaires. Les autrices s’attachent à documenter d’une part l’histoire de mouvements collectifs à Dublin, Galway ou Belfast notamment et d’autre part celle de figures individuelles singulières comme Rosamund Jacob ou Margaret Cousins (qui fut également très active au sein d’organisations féministes indiennes à partir de 1915). Certains chapitres, passionnants, comme « Staging Suffrage : The Events of 1913 Dublin Suffrage Week » de Paige Reynolds ou « Labour and Suffrage : Spinning Threads in Belfast » de Denise Kleinrichert se penchent sur les rapports, souvent compliqués, entre mouvements féministes et syndicaux, entre la question du vote des femmes et celle de leurs conditions de travail (dans un contexte où le mouvement des suf- fragettes restait plutôt dominé par des femmes de la classe moyenne, pas toujours favorables au suffrage universel féminin) ; d’autres étudient la dénonciation des violences sexuelles et domestiques par les suffragettes irlandaises ou encore le rôle de l’humour dans le combat pour ou contre le vote des femmes en Irlande. Il ressort de l’ouvrage une impression de foisonnement d’implications mili- tantes, beaucoup des femmes engagées l’étant en réalité à plusieurs titres, pour le droit de vote mais aussi pour des causes très variées, allant du nationalisme irlandais au végétarisme, mais les différents chapitres mettent également en évidence le poids très fort des contraintes et obstacles auxquels ces femmes faisaient face. De fait, comme le dernier chapitre le souligne, l’obtention du droit de vote n’a pas empêché les femmes irlandaises d’être reléguées aux marges de la vie publique après l’indépendance, le droit de vote étant une condition nécessaire mais non suffisante dans la lutte toujours en cours pour l’égalité des droits.

Karin Fischer 150 Études irlandaises, nº 44-1 – 2019

Erick Falc’her-Poyroux, Histoire sociale de la musique irlandaise : du dadga au DADGAD, Oxford – New York – Vienne, P. Lang, 2018, 580 p.

Cet ouvrage décrit l’évolution de la musique irlandaise dans ses contextes sociaux, politiques, culturels et économiques au fil des siècles. Erick Falc’her-Poyroux atteint avec brio son objectif de présenter « une somme résumée des connaissances actuelles en matière de musique irlandaise » (p. xix). Il expose avec rigueur et souci du détail l’impact des aléas de l’histoire de l’Irlande sur la musique qui y était jouée, soulignant tout au long de l’œuvre le thème de l’adaptation de cette musique. L’ouvrage est organisé en chapitres alliant thématiques communes et chevauchements d’époques (prenons, par exemple, chapitre II : « Les traditions musicales populaires, 1600- 1850 », et chapitre III : « À la recherche d’une musique nationale, 1700-1920 »). Bien que le caractère strictement thématique du dernier chapitre, « Un univers de musiciens et de danseurs », déteigne face aux chapitres précédents, la structure du livre est néanmoins particulièrement bien choisie, puisqu’elle permet un étalement ordonné de connaissances tirées d’un éventail prodigieux de sources en plusieurs langues. L’auteur aborde également avec délicatesse et précision des sujets aussi controversés que le « celticisme » de la musique irlandaise, et les enjeux identitaires se rattachant à cette musique jouée de plus en plus hors que son contexte d’origine : l’Irlande rurale. Dans une œuvre de cette ampleur, il est inévitable que certains sujets soient trai- tés avec plus d’attention que d’autres. Bien que l’auteur aborde la grande cornemuse (Highland bagpipes) à quelques reprises, j’ai trouvé surprenant qu’il n’ait présenté qu’une discussion très sommaire des concours de pipe bands auxquels participent plusieurs groupes irlandais. L’auteur indique effectivement que les All-Ireland Pipe Band Championships (championnats de pipe bands de toute l’Irlande) se tiennent en alternance en Irlande du Nord et en République d’Irlande depuis 1946, mais ne souffle mot sur les concours de grande cornemuse depuis ce temps (p. 277-278). Or, deux pipe bands irlandais – Field Marshal Montgomery, de Lisburn, en Irlande du Nord, et Saint Laurence O’Toole, de Dublin – figurent parmi les meilleurspipe bands de compétition au monde depuis le début des années 2000. Ces groupes incluent d’ailleurs dans leur répertoire plusieurs pièces traditionnelles irlandaises adaptées pour la grande cornemuse. Notons aussi l’apport important de musiciens natifs d’Irlande et d’Irlande du Nord – tels Ryan Canning, Stephen Creighton, et Steven McWhirter – à l’univers de la grande cornemuse et des pipe bands. Outre ce détail, certaines affirmations de passage font sourciller. L’auteur affirme qu’il n’existe pas de somme résumée des connaissances en musique irlandaise en français, ni en anglais (p. xix). Bien que ce livre soit le plus récent – et assurément un des plus exhaustifs – à traiter de la musique irlandaise autant en anglais qu’en français, il existe bel et bien des ouvrages que l’on pourrait considérer de telles sommes résumées. L’auteur cite, entre autres, A Short History of , de Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin, et The Companion to Irish Traditional Music, de Fintan Vallely. Aussi il semble étrange de décrire le XVIIe siècle (avec la venue d’Oliver Cromwell) comme le plus cruel qu’ait connu l’Irlande (p. 69). Vu l’impact Comptes rendus | Book reviews 151 dévastateur de la Grande Famine, le XIXe siècle mériterait peut-être plus cette appellation. Mais il s’agit là d’une pente glissante qu’il vaut mieux éviter. Somme toute, il s’agit ici d’un tour de force de la part d’Erick Falc’her-Poyroux. Ce livre intéressera ceux cherchant autant un ouvrage de référence qu’un récit narratif sur l’adaptation de la musique irlandaise au fil du temps. Il mériterait d’être traduit en anglais et d’atteindre ainsi un plus grand public.

Jérémy Tétrault-Farber

Olivier Coquelin, L’Irlande en révolutions, entre nationalismes et conser- vatismes : une histoire politique et sociale, 18e-20e siècles, Paris, Syllepse, 2018, 542 p.

Dans cet ouvrage, tiré d’une thèse enrichie de multiples travaux entrepris depuis, Olivier Coquelin propose de faire l’étude de ce qui semble être une singularité irlandaise. La décennie révolutionnaire qui s’achève en 1923 a vu émerger les clivages qui dominent encore la vie politique de l’île. Cependant ceux-ci ne se sont pas matérialisés par des différences d’approches sociales ou économiques, cet épisode débouchant sur le renforcement d’une idéologie nationale conservatrice transpartisane. Cette singularité est interrogée au travers d’une histoire politique du temps long qui inscrit sur trois siècles l’étude des desseins socio-économiques de plusieurs générations de nationalistes irlandais. On pourra regretter que ce volume, qui choisit le conservatisme et, en écho, le progressisme comme objets d’étude, ne propose pas d’emblée une mise au point claire sur le cadre donné à ces concepts. L’ouvrage se divise en deux grandes parties. La première reprend, en trois chapitres, les catégories connues de l’histoire du nationalisme irlandais. On y explore les premières expressions patriotiques, le sectarisme religieux des Defenders est étudié, dont l’alliance avec les Irlandais unis jette les bases d’un nationalisme « autochtone » (p. 78) déjà teinté de conservatisme social. Les conceptions politiques, économiques et sociales des nationalistes constitutionnels et révolutionnaires sont ensuite présentées. La deuxième partie de l’ouvrage, la plus stimulante, donne un écho puissant à la première. L’auteur y mène une réflexion approfondie sur les formes les plus progressistes que le nationalisme irlandais ait produites : les mouvements agraire et ouvrier. Au terme de cette lecture croisée, des explications claires émergent qui permettent d’établir l’équilibre des forces entre progressisme et conservatisme chez les nationalistes toutes tendances confondues. En premier lieu, l’importance des acteurs politiques et sociaux qui par leurs actions construisent une pensée conservatrice ou en facilitent l’apparition. Prenons par exemple le choix d’un mouvement syndical qui se coupe des aspirations popu- laires en refusant la violence au cœur de la séquence insurrectionnelle de 1920-1923. Sur ce point, on notera que certaines ruptures chronologiques auraient pu être 152 Études irlandaises, nº 44-1 – 2019 davantage étudiées pour expliquer certains tournants conservateurs, par exemple l’épisode du Parnell split, accélérateur d’une emprise conservatrice imprégnée d’un pessimisme critique à l’égard de la modernité. Est également rappelé que, si la question sociale a pu être un outil de mobi- lisation, notamment au sein de la mouvance républicaine et révolutionnaire, elle a rarement été un but en soi. Les cas de John Mitchel et des fondateurs de l’Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) sont par exemple explorés, des hommes qui ont subordonné à l’aspiration politique indépendantiste toute autre revendication économique ou sociale. Ce constat n’est pas ignoré des historiens, mais l’originalité de l’analyse tient à l’importance donnée aux divisions de la société irlandaise pour expliquer ce biais. Face à des groupes dont les intérêts divergent, l’auteur montre que les acteurs politiques ont souvent cherché le plus petit dénominateur commun. Faire converger vers l’objectif politique et émancipateur plutôt que risquer la division, affaiblir et modérer les ambitions d’une organisation comme la Land League pour ne s’aliéner aucune de ses composantes. Cette réalité a donc aussi obligé les courants nationalistes à inventer une unité nationale. Et Olivier Coquelin montre comment la définition d’un « nous » se nourrit d’arguments particularistes qui font le terreau d’un fort conservatisme culturel, économique et social, à rebours des principes du progressisme. Construire un ordre intérieur, c’est bien d’un nationalisme conservateur dont il est question, l’idéal démocratique chevillé au corps en plus. Cet idéal constitue, assez paradoxalement, le troisième facteur conservateur. Si, dans la lignée de Tom Garvin notamment, Olivier Coquelin ne considère pas que le poids de la paysannerie au sein de la société irlandaise soit un facteur de conser- vatisme, il analyse l’omniprésente revendication d’un accès élargi à la propriété paysanne comme tel. D’abord, l’étude des premières expressions du mouvement agraire confirme l’absence de revendications approchant une forme de lutte des classes « dans la pure tradition du nationalisme irlandais » (p. 281). Ensuite, plus avant dans la chronologie, l’analyse fait apparaître les tensions de classes comme inaudibles dès lors que, à l’instar de Michael Davitt, on affirme que les landlords n’ont aucun droit sur le sol irlandais. La seule tension acceptable devient celle d’une injuste dépossession pour mieux défendre le retour à la terre plutôt que sa mise en commun. On ne peut que souligner la solidité d’un travail de recherche mené sur un corpus varié et la clarté d’une démonstration qui montre, sans aucun biais téléo- logique, combien l’idéalisme autonomiste, indépendantiste ou révolutionnaire des nationalistes irlandais a été avant tout politique, fondé sur une représentation conservatrice de la nation qui valorise l’accession à la propriété et la collaboration de classe. Cet ouvrage alimente l’historiographie du long XIXe siècle irlandais qui interroge les fondements d’une culture politique ferment d’un nationalisme souvent plus fermé qu’ouvert.

Pierre Ranger Comptes rendus | Book reviews 153

Simon Prince, Northern Ireland’s 68 : Civil Rights, Global Revolt and the Origins of the Troubles [2007], 2e éd., Newbridge, Irish Academic Press, 2018, 278 p.

Cette nouvelle édition de Northern Ireland’s 68 : Civil Rights, Global Revolt and the Origins of the Troubles est publiée à l’occasion du cinquantenaire de la manifestation pour les droits civiques du 5 octobre 1968 à Derry en Irlande du Nord, onze ans après la première édition datant de 2007. La thèse au centre de ce livre, et sa principale originalité, est sa volonté de démontrer que les événements de 1968 en Irlande du Nord gagnent à être envisagés sous l’angle international plutôt que local. Il n’est certes rien de nouveau dans le fait de tisser des liens entre le mouvement pour les droits civiques d’Irlande du Nord et des mouvements similaires dans d’autres pays : l’influence du mouvement pour les droits civiques des Africains-Américains aux États-Unis a très souvent été relevée. Toutefois, Simon Prince s’attache ici particulièrement à montrer que des parallèles tout aussi pertinents, sinon plus, se trouvent bien plus près de nous, en Europe : en Angleterre mais aussi en Allemagne, en France, ou en Italie. L’auteur fait un choix de structure surprenant : la manifestation du 5 octobre 1968, qui est le pivot autour duquel s’articule tout l’ouvrage, est traitée uniquement en introduction, tandis que le reste de l’ouvrage s’efforce de la replacer dans son contexte. Les deux premiers chapitres, assez longs, présentent un état des lieux de l’unionisme et du nationalisme avant 1968. Ils brossent un tableau complexe des deux traditions, insistant sur leurs évolutions et leurs divisions internes. Les comparaisons internationales sont déjà présentes, sous la forme de remarques ponctuelles soulignant des parallèles : les soupçons de déloyauté à l’égard des catholiques d’Irlande du Nord sont comparés à ceux pesant sur les communistes en France ; la montée du militantisme loyaliste sous l’égide de et le développement de groupes violents comme l’ (UVF) sont comparés à l’émergence de forces réactionnaires comme Occident en France, le point commun étant une résistance au changement que cherchaient à impulser des mouvements réformistes ; les déclarations de façade des hommes politiques de la République d’Irlande, sans intention réelle d’œuvrer pour la réunification, sont comparées à celles des élites allemandes sur la réunification de l’Allemagne. Le troisième chapitre se penche ensuite sur les liens étroits mais complexes entre la tradition socialiste et la tradition républicaine irlandaise. Il évoque notam- ment l’importance de la , les relations entre le nationalisme et le mouvement ouvrier et les tentatives de lobbying auprès du parti travailliste britannique. La présence d’immigrés irlandais en Angleterre est un point clé dans ces dynamiques. La dimension européenne est également traitée, notamment à travers les débats sur les écrits de Karl Marx, dont la réinterprétation était au cœur de débats dans plusieurs pays d’Europe. Le chapitre V en vient plus précisément au mouvement pour les droits civiques en Irlande du Nord, qui voit converger plusieurs des organisations évoquées dans les 154 Études irlandaises, nº 44-1 – 2019 chapitres précédents. L’auteur s’attarde principalement sur les méthodes utilisées : l’adoption de techniques d’action directe ou de désobéissance civile et les premières « marches » pour les droits civiques. Vient ensuite un chapitre sur le mouvement étudiant, avec une approche soulignant les influences transnationales : l’impact des mouvements pour le désarmement nucléaire, le recours aux techniques non violentes de Gandhi ou encore aux sit-in inspirés des universités américaines. Les trois derniers chapitres basculent de l’autre côté de la manifestation du 5 octobre 1968, pour en arriver à ses répercussions : l’effondrement du maintien de l’ordre à Derry, la réaction des unionistes et celle du mouvement People’s Democracy, le mouvement étudiant qui constituait le groupe le plus virulent au sein de la grande alliance qu’était le mouvement des droits civiques. Ces chapitres soulignent l’impact des violences policières et surtout de leur médiatisation dans la radicalisation des positions. Ceux que l’auteur appelle les « modérés », menés en particulier par John Hume, perdent peu à peu le contrôle du mouvement des droits civiques. De même, de l’autre côté, O’Neill peine à convaincre les membres de son gouvernement que des réformes substantielles doivent absolument être concédées. Simon Prince souligne à plusieurs reprises la nécessité, semble-t-il, pour tout mouvement militant qui souhaite avoir un réel impact, de « provoquer » une confrontation médiatisée avec les représentants du système (souvent les forces de l’ordre). C’est en effet par la médiatisation des images de violences à l’encontre des manifestants que l’auteur explique la proéminence acquise par le 5 octobre 1968 au sein de la mémoire collective. L’auteur jette un regard sans concession sur les différents mouvements politiques et leurs stratégies, en particulier sur ceux qu’il appelle les « Derry radicals » ou les « gauchistes » (leftists) et sur les unionistes les plus intransigeants comme William Craig. Le Premier ministre nord-irlandais Terence O’Neill est finalement plutôt épargné, ses analyses étant considérées comme souvent justes, mais sa position intenable, entre l’intransigeance d’une partie des unionistes et l’impatience des « gauchistes » déterminés à lui refuser le répit qu’il réclamait pour mettre en place ses politiques de réforme. L’impor- tance des idées marxistes et anti-impérialistes au sein du mouvement pour les droits civiques est également soulignée, l’auteur avançant l’hypothèse que les « gauchistes » du mouvement n’ont pas su correctement évaluer l’importance des divisions communautaires entre catholiques et protestants. Ainsi, comme le suggère la conclusion, la vision rêvée d’un soulèvement des travailleurs par-delà les clivages religieux et communautaires a rapidement laissé place à des violences intercommunautaires, qui inauguraient l’ère des Troubles. Northern Ireland’s 68 intéressera tous ceux qui souhaitent acquérir une vision complète et nuancée des très nombreuses forces politiques impliquées, directement ou indirectement, dans le mouvement pour les droits civiques. Le livre offre une mise en contexte particulièrement détaillée des événements de l’année 1968 et permet de dresser une véritable cartographie politique de l’Irlande du Nord de l’époque, où une constellation d’organisations souvent interconnectées occupaient l’espace politique qui allait donner naissance au mouvement pour les droits civiques. Il dresse le portrait de très nombreuses personnalités politiques de l’époque, souvent Comptes rendus | Book reviews 155

à travers leurs propres déclarations dans la presse ou dans leurs mémoires. L’aspect le plus remarquable est sans doute la capacité de l’auteur à souligner la perméabilité entre ces différents mouvements, mais aussi à restituer les nuances et les tensions entre eux, tout en adoptant une perspective internationale qui englobe le contexte politique aux États-Unis, en France ou en Allemagne. Le contenu de cette seconde édition est inchangé par rapport à la première édition de 2007, à l’exception d’une préface de cinq pages ajoutée par l’auteur, qui saisit l’occasion de revenir sur son propre travail avec onze années de recul. Il se livre à une évaluation critique de ses propres conclusions de l’époque, soulignant à la fois celles qui résistent à l’épreuve du temps et celles qui ont quelque peu perdu de leur pertinence, tout en proposant de nouvelles interprétations possibles. Il ne manque pas de revenir également sur quelques controverses nées à la suite de la publication de la première édition, ce qui apporte un éclairage tout à fait intéressant sur l’ouvrage.

Charlotte Barcat

Chris Arthur, Hummingbirds Between the Pages, Columbus, Mad Creek Books – The Ohio State University, 2018, 245 p.

« L’essai, ce n’est pas mon genre. » C’est précisément contre cette petite phrase si souvent entendue que l’essayiste nord-irlandais Chris Arthur part en croisade dans l’un de ses recueils d’essais les plus récents, au titre à la fois poétique et sibyllin, Hummingbirds Between the Pages. Chris Arthur n’en est pas à son coup d’essai en la matière, puisqu’il a déjà publié plusieurs volumes d’essais acclamés par la critique, dont la trilogie Irish Nocturnes (1999), Irish Willow (2002) et Irish Haiku (2005), que viennent ensuite compléter Irish Elegies (2009), On the Shoreline of Knowledge (2012) et Reading Life (2017). Arthur, qui contrairement à beaucoup d’autres écrivains de sa génération écrit exclusivement des essais (à l’exception de certaines échappées poétiques au début de sa carrière), renouvelle et dépoussière le genre, s’insurgeant contre sa réputation parfois peu attrayante, « a form of belles- lettres whose day is done » (p. 237). Chris Arthur, tout au long de ces treize essais, réaffirme avec force et érudition la dimension de l’intime qui est au cœur de ce genre littéraire, en nous livrant ses « colibris métaphoriques » (« my metaphorical hummingbirds », introduction, p. x ; je traduis), qui ont provoqué chez lui l’interrogation et lui ont laissé entrevoir la possibilité de connections inconnues, insoupçonnées, et de strates temporelles vertigineuses. La plupart de ces colibris prennent souvent la forme banale d’objets du quotidien, comme une pendule sans charme, de vieilles photographies, ou bien des traverses de chemin de fer (« sleepers », p. 34), que son père utilisait pour alimenter le feu familial. Comment ces objets ordinaires revêtent-ils alors aux yeux de l’essayiste les attributs chatoyants des colibris, qui avaient tant émerveillé le jeune Chris Arthur lors de sa visite au zoo de Londres lorsqu’il avait huit ans ? 156 Études irlandaises, nº 44-1 – 2019

But all of them are hummingbird-like in the way they offer unexpected challenges to the mundane scales by which we measure things ; they suggest new calibrations in terms of meaning, connection, and significance as surely as the London birds suggested a different scale for color. (introduction, p. x)

Sans pour autant posséder l’iridescence ou la palette chromatique des colibris, ces objets du quotidien ont en commun avec ces oiseaux la qualité d’avoir attiré le regard de l’essayiste, qui, tel le chiffonnier de Baudelaire, ramasse et collectionne dans ses essais les fragments de la réalité ordinaire, lui suggérant un réseau de significations et de ramifications qui vont au-delà de leur simple statut d’objets : « […] they have left me feeling that I’m standing on the frontier of the ordinary being given glimpses of the extraordinary dimensions it contains » (ibid.). La démarche d’Arthur n’est pas sans évoquer celle du naturaliste ou du bio- logiste, qui « presse » (voir ce motif en introduction, p. ix, x, xi…) ses spécimens entre les pages de ses ouvrages, ses « hummingbirds », qu’ils soient londoniens, nord-irlandais, écossais, voire même asiatiques, telle cette statuette de Bouddha achetée en Écosse en 1983, et qui fait l’objet d’un texte fascinant, « The Walking Buddha Beckons » (p. 24-33). Il n’est donc guère surprenant que le premier essai du recueil soit un hommage à Darwin, intitulé « Darwin’s Fox » (p. 1-12), qui est tout à fait représentatif de la méthode d’investigation qu’adopte Chris Arthur face aux échantillons du réel qu’il trouve (mais sélectionne en même temps). Dans ce texte, il relate ainsi comment Darwin tua un renard (Canis fulvipes), lorsqu’il débarqua sur l’île de San Pedro le 6 décembre 1834 lors de son expédition à bord du Beagle. À partir de cet incident, Arthur développe une grille de possibilités qui auraient pu empêcher que cette rencontre fatale entre Darwin et le renard se produise :

If a seabird had faltered from exhaustion, attracting the fox to easy prey ; if Darwin had taken a different route as he explored the island ; if a storm had made it impossible to land ; if the Beagle’s crew had been laid low with dysentery ; if he’d sneezed as he swung his geological hammer, this moment would never have happened. (p. 6-7)

Au fil des essais qui constituentHummingbirds Between the Pages, Chris Arthur choisit avec la curiosité attentive au monde qui l’entoure typique du collectionneur des objets ou des moments, des rencontres parfois (telles que celle de Darwin et du renard), qu’il va ensuite « épingler » entre les pages de son livre, car ils suscitent en lui l’interrogation sur leurs conditions de possibilité : que représentent-ils ? Aurait-il pu en être autrement ? Quelles sont leurs implications, voire leurs répercussions sur le passé et le futur ? Ce questionnement métaphysique occasionné par les incidents du réel cache cependant une angoisse plus profonde chez l’essayiste – la peur de la mort. « Glass » (p. 59-64) évoque la première rencontre de la fille de Chris Arthur avec la mort, sous la forme d’une mésange bleue venant se fracasser mortellement à la fenêtre de la chambre. Cet événement, dans sa simplicité et sa brutalité, incarne aux yeux de l’essayiste de manière métonymique la fatalité de la mort, qui peut survenir à n’importe quel instant – à tout moment la dureté d’une vitre invisible peut venir arrêter la course de la vie. De même, la pendule (p. 72 ; voir l’essai Comptes rendus | Book reviews 157 intitulé « (Un)sentimental Timekeeping », p. 65-74) ayant appartenu à la mère d’Arthur dans les dernières années de sa vie, passées dans une maison de retraite en Irlande du Nord, tandis que son fils faisait les allers-retours depuis l’Écosse en ferry, lui évoque une capsule temporelle qui aurait emmagasiné les derniers jours de sa mère, sa présence et son absence. Cette pendule sert à l’essayiste de vanitas, et lui rappelle l’inexorabilité de la mort et la nécessité de ne pas perdre de temps, « as much an aide-mémoire for finitude as a practical chronometer » (p. 72 ; voir également, concernant le motif isotopique du memento mori, « Death and the Maiden », p. 130 et « The Archaeology of Days », p. 176). À la lecture de ces « colibris métaphoriques », pour reprendre l’expression d’Arthur, on est parfois tenté de lui reprocher une certaine tendance à l’exagération, ou de prendre les choses par le petit bout de la lorgnette, ce qu’il nie d’ailleurs : « I’ve tried to resist the theatrics of exaggeration ; tried not to make mountains out of molehills » (p. 62). L’écriture est parfois précieuse, tant elle vise à l’exactitude et à la minutie du détail, voire à la limite de la pédanterie, tant elle est savante dans ses moindres expressions. Mais, petit à petit, l’œil du lecteur s’habitue à ce constant changement d’échelle entre microcosme et macrocosme, et finit par se délecter du raffinement de l’écriture de l’essayiste, qui prend le temps d’analyser les phénomènes du réel qui nous entoure, dans toute leur infinie diversité. Dans son épilogue intitulé « Thirty-Six Ways of Looking at an Essay » (p. 237-242), d’après les Cent vues du mont Fuji d’Hokusai, Arthur décrit les modalités qui selon lui caractérisent le genre de l’essai. Nous n’en retiendrons ici que la première : « An essay richly complicates the commonplace, revealing mazes of meaning coiled within the mundane » (p. 238).

Marion Naugrette-Fournier

Hedda Friberg-Harnesk, Reading John Banville through Jean Baudrillard, Amherst – New York, Cambria Press, 2018, 222 p.

Hedda Friberg-Harnesk sheds new light on the fiction of John Banville thanks to an original theoretical frame: her perceptive use of Baudrillard’s orders of simu- lacra engages the reader in a stimulating critical conversation with the unstable and uncertain worlds and beings of Banvillean fiction. She explores nine of John Banville’s works published between 1997 and 2015, seven novels (The Untouchable, Eclipse, Shroud, The Sea, The Infinities, Ancient Light, and The Blue Guitar) and two plays (God’s Gift and Love in the Wars), favouring his later works over earlier literary productions, finding there a more acute, more accomplished sense of the “simulation of an absent reality” (p. 7), which to Baudrillard characterises our capitalist society. The author’s eloquent, thought-provoking study grants the reader a deeper insight into Banville’s bewitching “territory of mercurial instability” (p. 1). 158 Études irlandaises, nº 44-1 – 2019

The book includes an introduction, eight chapters exploring one or several of Banville’s works, and a concluding chapter articulating a poetics of creative simula- tion. The author first delineates “Baudrillardean ideas on simulation and the orders of simulacra” (p. 8) and convincingly presents the latter as legitimate and original analytical tools. Indeed, to readers of Banvillean fiction, Baudrillard’s description of images as objects progressively distancing themselves from their original models, from pre-Renaissance symbolic representation to distortion of reality (first order), from artful dissimulation (second order) to outright cancellation of reality (third order), cannot fail to evoke processes at play in a fiction where “meaning is shrouded, shifting, or lacking, and appearances deceive” (p. 1). Other concepts by Nietzsche (eternal recurrence, for one), a major influence on Baudrillard, or Bataille (excesses of the festival), are presented as secondary analytical approaches. The chapters explore Banville’s works chronologically, with rapprochements between the novels featuring the same issues at focus (memory in The Untouchable and The Sea), the same masks and masking strategies (Alexander Cleave and Alex Vander in Eclipse, Shroud and Ancient Light), or the same genre (God’s Gift and Love in the Wars). The application of Baudrillardean concepts to known literary concerns in Banville’s fiction (uncertainty, instability, duplicity, the counterfeit) proves par- ticularly enlightening: the threat of a “cancellation by the double” (p. 93) seems pervasive in Banville’s fiction, locating it on the frontier between Baudrillard’s second and third orders of simulacra. Reality and truth are threatened by cancel- lation through the shifting “play[s] of masks” (p. 42) inThe Untouchable, or the acts of “dys-remember[ance]” (p. 46) in The Sea; similarly, the self is threatened by cancellation through the Nietzschean “delight in simulation” (p. 56) defining the actors in Eclipse, Shroud, and Ancient Light, and through the mischievous gods “copy[ing] appearances and steal[ing] identities” (p. 96) in God’s Gift or The Infinities. Baudrillard’s idea of the “holographic double” serves an engaging analysis of the elusive feminine character Cass, revealing humans’ vain desire to seize the real, and his notions of life-in-death and blurred demarcations between the human and the non-human in the age of simulacra illuminate a compelling reading of The Infinities. Banville’s second play, Love in the Wars, interestingly stands out as firm ground in Banville’s usually mercurial fictive territories: the author locates it outside Baudrillard’s orders of simulacra, as befits its postulated affiliation to a pre-Renaissance, symbolic order characterised by “death, sacrifice, and the rule”, where the random, “a primary source of the radical uncertainty of the contemporary world” (p. 127) so dear to Banvillean fiction, has no say. The eighth chapter exploresThe Blue Guitar in the light of Baudrillard’s notion that in the age of simulacra, “[we are] consigned to an infinite replay” (p. 173): the recurrences and reiterations in characters (actors, clowns, vacant selves) or settings (houses, rooms) that link Banville’s work inter- and intra-textually, might be viewed as signs of a post-real age of simulacra where similar elements, or rather imperfect copies, creatively interact, evidencing a Baudrillardean precession of appearances. The author posits in a thought-provoking concluding chapter that this propensity of the Banvillean narrator to “turn his uniquely registering eye to the materials passing Comptes rendus | Book reviews 159 by in this loop of infinite replay and [reuse] them in an act of creative recycling” (p. 187), rather than indulging in self-pity on the brink of nothingness, should be considered a “strategy for managing the void” (p. 186). This brilliant book, which itself involves creative reiterations, casts light on Banville’s mature treatment of exquisitely recycled literary concerns in his more recent fiction, urging the reader to delve further into his work and again admire its beautifully crafted simulacra.

Julie Lecas

Conor McNamara, War and Revolution in the West of Ireland: Galway, 1913-1922, Dublin, Irish Academic Press, 2018, 243 p.

The history, and historiography, of the Irish revolutionary period is inevitably dom- inated by events in Dublin and Munster. While this is understandable, an overfocus on these two obscures the situation in the other parts of the country. Given that the revolution was driven by an assortment of factors which varied from place to place, regional analysis offers the best way to examine it. Conor McNamara’s book follows the template set by David Fitzpatrick and Marie Coleman and attempts to rebalance the picture by focusing on a specific area, examining both the causes and course of the revolution there. The result is something of a hybrid, bringing together an analysis of long-term underlying trends with the events within the relatively short timeframe of the Rising and war of independence itself. Galway was a microcosm of how local and national factors combined to drive the revolution in Ireland. McNamara devotes a great deal of time to the land issue in Galway, where agrarian agitation fuelled violence long before 1919. The county is depicted as a conservative, poor and divided society, in which people’s lives were dominated by the struggle to survive, and one in which life in the Irish-speaking West was very different from the affluent East. A large number of families attempted to eke out a living on small plots of between one and five acres, meaning that land hunger was widespread and drove intimidation, attacks on animals, arson, assaults and murder against large farmers, landlords, agents and graziers. This context is important because Galway was invariably classified as being a “disturbed” county by the police but, as McNamara suggests, there was good reason for Galway farmers to be dissatisfied. The outbreak of war in 1914 and the Irish Parliamentary Party’s support split the Volunteers across the county as well as the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), with clubs in the south of the county joining the short-lived National GAA from 1915 to 1918. Deep fissures also existed between rural and urban Galway, which was reflected in the spread of attacks on British forces between 1919 and 1921, which were “resolutely rural”. The IRA did not have much support in either Galway city or the larger towns, illustrated by the fact that military officers remained part of the social scene 160 Études irlandaises, nº 44-1 – 2019 throughout the period and the Galway Races went ahead without interference in 1920 and 1921. McNamara is critical of the Volunteers in Galway, describing them as “often disorganised and frequently incompetent” in comparison to the IRA in other parts of the country. However, he does not hold back in his condemnation of the British forces either, accusing them of a campaign of assassination against leading Galway republicans, few of whom actually died in action. A series of killings by the army and police in 1920 and 1921, in which men were bundled out of their homes and later found dead, sometimes after torture, curbed IRA activity, but random murders of civilians turned public opinion against British rule and stimulated further resistance. There is a welcome chapter on the effect of the revolution on Protestants in Galway which correctly rejects Peter Hart’s thesis of ethnic cleansing and instead suggests a mixture of the breakdown of law and order combined with economic resentment inspired boycott, intimidation and violence against Protestants, par- ticularly after the Truce of July 1921. The Protestant population of the county was already in decline well before the revolution, as was the population of the county as a whole, through relentless post-Famine emigration. Also welcome is the effort to illustrate the role played by women in the revolution, both inside and outside Cumann na mBan, although this inevitably suffers from the lack of records left behind and the low regard many contemporaries had for women’s involvement. Relying on lists of Cumann na mBan to gauge female participation is not enough, as McNamara points out. The level of detail on local Volunteer companies is impres- sive, but there are some surprising omissions. For instance, while ’ actions during the Rising are described in detail, once he flees to America in 1916 he largely vanishes from the work, and the longer-term effects of his intensely personal command in Galway are not analysed – an important factor, considering that the Volunteers in Galway idolised him, as the Witness Statements in the Bureau of Military History make clear. The book ends on a pessimistic note, stating that many of the political elite who were pushed aside in 1918, such as Máirtín Mór McDonagh, made a comeback in the 1920s and the people who participated in the revolution were forgotten. Further local examinations of the revolution in Ireland will ensure that they are not.

Bernard Kelly

Agnès Maillot, L’IRA et le conflit nord-irlandais, Caen, Presses universi- taires de Caen, 2018, 346 p.

L’autrice, enseignante-chercheuse à Dublin City University, avait déjà publié un ouvrage sur le même sujet en 2001 (IRA : les républicains irlandais aux Presses universitaires de Caen). Or, depuis cette époque, des changements considérables Comptes rendus | Book reviews 161 sont survenus : l’IRA a officiellement déposé les armes et le processus de paix est entré dans une nouvelle phase. En 2007, les unionistes du parti de Ian Paisley ont accepté de gouverner avec Sinn Féin et les institutions prévues par l’accord de 1998 ont pu fonctionner sans interruption pendant dix ans. Cette page tournée a permis de réinterroger le passé. Des témoignages sont apparus, des révélations ont émergé, des investigations ont été menées, si bien qu’on en sait beaucoup plus aujourd’hui sur cette organisation politique, violente et secrète. Ce deuxième ouvrage sur l’IRA était donc pleinement justifié ; il ne s’agit pas d’une redite du premier. Agnès Maillot retrace l’histoire de l’Irlande en même temps que celle de l’armée républicaine irlandaise. Elle rappelle la longue lignée d’organisations qui l’ont précédée dans la lutte pour une république irlandaise indépendante. L’armée de guérilla fondée en 1919 n’a pas réussi à obtenir cette complète indépendance du gouvernement britannique. Puis elle a perdu la guerre civile mais n’a pas cessé d’exister pour autant. Elle est devenue une armée de l’ombre. L’exposé de l’autrice sur la période allant de la fin de la guerre civile au début de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, notamment sur les relations ambiguës et changeantes entre l’IRA et de Valera, est d’autant plus intéressant que cet épisode est peu connu. L’IRA renaît une première fois de ses cendres après la guerre, lors de la cam- pagne de la frontière de 1956 à 1962. Ces attaques, menées dans le nord à partir du sud, prennent fin dans le désintérêt général et l’absence totale de soutien populaire. L’essentiel de cet ouvrage est surtout consacré aux cinquante dernières années de l’existence de cette organisation, et à la fraction qui est devenue dominante après la scission de 1970 : l’IRA provisoire (PIRA), plus présente dans le nord que dans le sud. On peut peut-être regretter, à ce sujet, le peu de place accordé à l’IRA officielle (OIRA), notamment pendant les deux années riches en événements de 1970 à 1972. Ainsi, il se pourrait que la mention de graffiti «IRA = I Ran Away », soi-disant apparus sur les murs des quartiers catholiques après l’été 1969 (voir p. 65), soit une création des historiographes de l’IRA provisoire pour justifier la scission. De même, l’autrice évoque la trajectoire de fondateurs de la PIRA comme Seán Mac Stíofáin, Ruairí Ó Brádaigh et Dáithí Ó Conaill mais ne mentionne pas des personnages marquants de l’OIRA comme Joe McCann, tué par les parachutistes le 15 avril 1972, dont les funérailles donnèrent lieu à un cortège de 5 000 personnes et dont le souvenir n’est évidemment pas entretenu par l’actuel Sinn Féin. Mais on ne peut faire à cet ouvrage le reproche d’être un plaidoyer pour l’IRA. Il se démarque des récits quasiment hagiographiques que l’on peut lire parfois comme certaines biographies de Bobby Sands ou certains articles d’anciens journalistes français. La façon dont les républicains ont su habilement négocier la fin de leur violence contre une intégration dans l’establishment britannique n’a pas été éludée. Les vingt-cinq dernières années et les controverses qui les ont émaillées – la question des disparus, ces personnes tuées en secret par l’IRA, et la possible implication de Gerry Adams, les expéditions punitives – ne sont pas oubliées. L’avenir semble désormais appartenir à Sinn Féin même si, comme le rappelle l’autrice en introduction, l’IRA existe toujours (de même que toutes les autres 162 Études irlandaises, nº 44-1 – 2019 organisations paramilitaires qui ont alimenté la chronique des Troubles). Le chapitre de la violence armée républicaine irlandaise semble clos mais on ne manquera pas de noter que le chapitre du Brexit semble ouvrir une nouvelle période d’incertitude quant à l’avenir constitutionnel de l’Irlande du Nord.

Michel Savaric NOTES SUR LES AUTEURS NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Maryvonne Boisseau is emeritus professor at the University of Strasbourg, France, and a member of the research group LiLPa (Linguistique, Langues, Parole – EA 1339). Her expertise lies in linguistics, Irish poetry written in English, and translation studies. Her research focuses on the translation of poetry and poets- translators. She is particularly interested in the complex question of rhythm in language, considering that rhythm triggers enunciation understood as a mise en mouvement de la langue. She has written numerous articles on Derek Mahon’s poetry among which these recent papers: –– “(Im)possible coïncidence des textes: l’ordinaire de la création. ‘The Sea in Winter’ (Derek Mahon) / ’La mer hivernale’ (Jacques Chuto)”, Méta, vol. 62, no. 3, december 2017, La traduction littéraire comme création, Laurence Belingard, Maryvonne Boisseau, Maïca Sanconie (eds.), p. 552-564. –– “Étude contrastive anglais-français de noms d’humains dans un corpus contraint”, LINX, no. 76, 2018, Dire l’humain. Les noms généraux dénotant les humains, Catherine Schnedecker (ed.), p. 163-183.

Catherine Conan is associate professor in English language and literature at the University of Western Brittany in Brest, France. Her research focuses on space, place and practices in contemporary Irish prose and poetry, with a special interest in ecocriticism and the new materialisms. She is the author of a number of scholarly articles, particularly on the poetry of Ciarán Carson; she has edited journal issues on Gestures (2016) and Gothic Ireland and Scotland (2017), and is currently completing a monograph on space, environment and materiality in 21st-century Irish literature.

Flore Coulouma is associate professor in English at Université Paris Nanterre, France. Her book Diglossia and the Linguistic Turn: Flann O’Brien’s Philosophy of Language (Champaign, Dalkey Archive Press, 2015) addresses linguistic colonialism in 20th-century Ireland and the “question of language” in Flann O’Brien’s satirical work. She is the editor of New Perspectives on Irish TV Series: Identity and Nostalgia on the Small Screen (Oxford, P. Lang, 2016), and she writes on contemporary Irish and American literature and on American and Irish television series. Her current research focuses on ecocriticism and the representation of social and environmental justice in contemporary discourse and literature.

Tom Herron lectures in English and Irish literature at Leeds Beckett University, UK. He is co-author of After Bloody Sunday: Representation, Ethics, Justice (Cork,

Études irlandaises, no 44-1, 2019 – p. 163-166 164 Études irlandaises, nº 44-1 – 2019

Cork University Press, 2007) and is editor of Louis MacNeice’s I crossed the Minch (Edinburgh, Polygon, 2008), The Harrowing of the Heart: The Poetry of Bloody Sunday (Derry, Guildhall, 2008), and Irish Writing London (London – New York, Bloomsbury, 2013). He is currently completing a monograph entitled The Real Things: Seamus Heaney’s Poetry of Objects (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2020).

Marie Mianowski is professor of anglophone literature and Irish studies at Univer- sité Grenoble Alpes. In 2012, she edited Irish Contemporary Landscapes in Literature and the Arts (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan). She is the author of Post Celtic Tiger Landscapes in Irish Fiction (London, Routledge, 2016). Her research focuses on the representations of place and landscape in Irish contemporary literature, especially representations of the border, of the processes of home-making in contexts of displacement. She also studies the politics and representations of hospitality and homelessness and is interested in the ways in which fiction can foster empathy.

Nolwena Monnier is associate professor at Université Paul Sabatier in Toulouse. Member of the CEMA (Centre d’études médiévales anglaises – Sorbonne Univer- sité) and the Lairdil (Laboratoire inter-universitaire de recherche en didactique Lansad – Université Paul Sabatier) and editor-in-chief of EMA (Études médiévales anglaises, the AMAES – Association des médiévistes anglicistes de l’enseignement supérieur – scientific journal), Nolwena is a specialist of medieval chronicles as well as the Arthurian legend in the Middle Ages. Her research tackles languages for specific purposes in medieval chronicles and she is also a specialist of the Arthurian legend and has a special interest in Gerald of Wales’s books. She recently published Languages for Specific Purposes in History (Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018) and her next paper will be on outlaws and exile.

Marion Naugrette-Fournier is a senior lecturer in translation studies in the Department of English Studies at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. In 2015 she defended her PhD thesis on the recycling of things and objects in the poetry of Derek Mahon at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle under the supervision of Pro- fessor Carle Bonafous-Murat. In 2017 she was awarded the Prix de thèse of the Fondation irlandaise for her PhD thesis. She is the author of several articles on Irish contemporary poetry as well as a translator. She translated several poems from English and Irish into French in the bilingual anthology of poems entitled Femmes d’Irlande en poésie: 1973-2013, published in 2013 by Clíona Ní Ríordáin (Paris, Éditions Caractères). She was also awarded a Translation Prize by the EFACIS (European Federation of Associations and Centres of Irish Studies) for her translations into French of ten major poems by W. B. Yeats, within the context of the EFACIS “Yeats Reborn Project” and its poetry competition. Her translations of Yeats’s poems have been published online on the Yeats Reborn Project website (www.yeatsreborn.eu), and were also published in the book entitled Yeats Reborn in 2015 (Hedwig Schwall (ed.), Leuven, Peeters). In 2010-2011 she was teaching assistant in the French Department of Trinity College Dublin. Notes sur les auteurs | Notes on contributors 165

Mary O’Donnell is one of Ireland’s best known contemporary authors. Her seven poetry collections include Unlegendary Heroes and Those April Fevers (Todmorden, Arc Publications). Four novels include Where They Lie (2014), The Elysium Tes- tament and the best-selling debut novel The Light Makers, reissued last year after twenty-five years by 451 Editions. A volume of essays on her work, Giving Shape to the Moment: The Art of Mary O’Donnell, Poet, Novelist, Short-Story Writer, appeared from Peter Lang in 2018, when Arlen House also published her third collection of stories, Empire. Her new collection Mary of St Médiers will be published in 2020. She is an elected member of Aosdana, has taught creative writing at Maynooth University, Galway University, Carlow University Pittsburgh, and was recently a visiting lecturer on the University of Sao Paolo’s Irish Literature Programme. She has just completed a PhD in creative writing at University College Cork. See her website: www.maryodonnell.com.

Manuela Palacios is profesora titular of English at Universidade de Santiago de Compostela in Spain. She has directed five research projects on contemporary Irish and Galician literature that have been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, and has edited and co-edited several books in relation to this topic: Pluriversos (Santiago de Compostela, Follas Novas, 2003), Palabras extremas (Oleiros, Netbiblo, 2008), Writing Bonds (Oxford – New York, P. Lang, 2009), Creation, Publishing and Criticism (New York, P. Lang, 2010), To the Winds Our Sails (Ennistymon, Salmon Poetry, 2010), Forked Tongues (Bristol, Shearsman Books, 2012), Six Galician Poets (Todmorden, Arc Publications, 2016) and Migrant Shores (Ennistymon, Salmon Poetry, 2017). Her other publications include translations of European and Arabic poetry and fiction, a monograph on Virginia Woolf’s pictorial imagery, Shakespeare’s Richard III, and articles on ecocriticism.

Anna Pilz is Carson fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany. Her research focuses on the relationship between Irish cultural productions and environmental history as well as on Irish women’s literary history. She has published articles in Irish Studies Review and New Hibernia Review, and is co-editor with Whitney Standlee of Irish Women’s Writing, 1878-1922: Advancing the Cause of Liberty (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2016).

Florence Schneider wrote her PhD on Paul Muldoon’s poetry (Quête et absence dans la poésie de Paul Muldoon in 1997, under the supervision of Professor Marie- Christine Lemardeley). She is associate professor in the English Department at Université Paris Nanterre, where she teaches Irish and British literatures and translation. She has written extensively on Irish writers, especially Irish contem- porary poets, such as , Paula Meehan, Paul Muldoon and Sinéad Morrissey. She regularly contributes to international conferences (2013 EFACIS – European Federation of Associations and Centres of Irish Studies – conference in Galway, 2014 Ireland and Ecocriticism conference in Cork, 2019 Canadian Irish 166 Études irlandaises, nº 44-1 – 2019

Studies conference in Montreal). She co-organised a workshop on Irish studies for SOFEIR (Société française d’études irlandaises) during the SAES (Société des anglicistes de l’enseignement supérieur) conference, which was held at Université Paris Nanterre in June 2018.

Yvonne Scott is associate professor in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture, Trinity College Dublin, the University of Dublin, founding director of TRIARC (Trinity College Irish Art Research Centre), and a fellow of the University. Her research focuses particularly on modern and contemporary art, specialising in critical analysis of agendas in the representation of landscape and environment, and she has published extensively in the field. In 2018, she hosted a symposium entitled “In this brief time: art, environment and ecology”, and in June 2019 convened the visual art section of the Art in the Anthropocene conference at Trinity College Dublin. She is currently writing a book on landscape and environment in Irish modern and contemporary art.

Marjan Shokouhi is assistant professor at the College of Arts and Sciences, the University of Tokyo. Her research falls within the fields of Irish studies, world lite- rature, and ecocriticism. Her most recent publications include “Towards a Poetics of Dwelling: Patrick Kavanagh’s Countryside”, which was published in March 2019 in Estudios Irlandeses (p. 146-159) and an upcoming article on J.S. Anna Liddiard to be published in Irish Studies Review. She is an active member of Granada Centre of Irish Studies directed by Dr. Pilar Villar Argáiz (University of Granada) and New Crops, Old Fields Research Forum (Queens University Belfast), which focuses on the theme of folklore in Irish studies. Précédents numéros publiés par les Presses universitaires de Rennes nº 34-1 Varia nº 34-2 Figures de l’intellectuel en Irlande Representations of the intellectual in Ireland nº 35-1 Varia nº 35-2 Traduction : pratique et poétique Translation: praxis and poetics nº 36-1 Trauma et mémoire en Irlande Perspectives on trauma in Irish history, literature and culture nº 36-2 Varia nº 37-1 Varia nº 37-2 Enjeux féministes et féminins dans la société irlandaise contem­poraine Feminist and women’s issues in contemporary Irish society nº 38-1 Varia nº 38-2 L’Ulster-Scots en Irlande du Nord aujourd’hui : langue, culture, communauté Ulster-Scots in Northern Ireland today: language, culture, community nº 39-1 Varia nº 39-2 Les religions en République d’Irlande depuis 1990 Religions in the Republic of Ireland since 1990 nº 40-1 Enjeux contemporains en études irlandaises – In memoriam Paul Brennan Contemporary issues in Irish studies – In memoriam Paul Brennan nº 40-2 Crise ? Quelle crise ? Crisis? What crisis? nº 41-1 Varia nº 41-2 L’Irlande et sa république passée, présente et à venir Ireland’s republic: past, present and future nº 42-1 Incarner / désincarner l’Irlande Embodying / disembodying Ireland nº 42-2 Varia nº 43-1 Irish self-portraits: the artist in curved mirrors nº 43-2 Varia Conditions de vente

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Presses universitaires de Caen Université de Caen Normandie, Presses universitaires de Caen, Bâtiment mrsh, Esplanade de la Paix, CS 14032, 14032 Caen Cedex 5 Téléphone : +33 (0)2 31 56 62 20 Internet : www.unicaen.fr/puc · Courriel : [email protected] Catherine Conan et Flore Coulouma : Introduction. 7

Marjan Shokouhi : Despirited Forests, Deforested Landscapes : 2019

The Historical Loss of Irish Woodlands . 17 | Études Nolwena Monnier : Nommer la nature : toponymie de la nature

dans la Topographia Hibernica de Gerald of Wales. 31 44-1 Marie Mianowski : Digging the Borderland in Brian McGilloway’s The Nameless Dead (2012). 47 irlandaises Florence Schneider : Geomantic de Paula Meehan ou comment lire et dire la nature. 57 2019 | 44-1 Manuela Palacios : Relational Difference in Sinéad Morrissey’s Poetry : An Ecocritical Approach . 73 Tom Herron et Anna Pilz : Cursed to the Trees, Enchanted by the Woods : Sweeney Astray. 87 Maryvonne Boisseau et Marion Naugrette-Fournier : Nature, environnement Derek Mahon’s Geopoetic Horizons . 101

Yvonne Scott : Living Water : Irish Artists and Ecology. 117 et écologie politique en Irlande

Poems by Mary O’Donnell . 133 — irlandaises Comptes rendus | Book reviews . 137 Nature, environment

Notes sur les auteurs | Notes on contributors. 163 and environmentalism in Ireland Études Études

Numéro publié sous la direction de Catherine Conan et Flore Coulouma

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