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Smith, Jos. "The Periphery." the New Nature Writing: Rethinking the Literature of Place

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Smith, Jos. Smith, Jos. "The Periphery." The New Nature Writing: Rethinking the Literature of Place. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. 127–156. Environmental Cultures. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 2 Oct. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781474275040.0010>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 2 October 2021, 04:58 UTC. Copyright © Jos Smith 2017. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 4 Th e Periphery In 1972 a young and successful artist by the name of Timothy Drever moved with his wife from the bustling metropolitan art world of London to the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland, where they would live and work for over ten years. In the early 1980s they moved back to the Irish mainland, to the fi shing village of Roundstone on the coast of Connemara where they still live today, though by that time the artist had become a maker of detailed maps too and, perhaps more importantly, he had become the author Tim Robinson. As the artist Timothy Drever in London, he had been preoccupied with abstract and geometrical forms and with the social and public spaces of exhibition as they were beginning to be picked apart by the land art movement in Britain and the United States. As the author Tim Robinson, he would fi nd that these very preoccupations with space would intensify and unfold through the poetics of writing about place. Since this dramatic move west he has created several editions of new maps of the Aran Islands, the Burren and Connemara (what he calls his ‘ABC of earth-wonders ’ ) (1996: vi). Th e Aran maps in particular were the fi rst to have been made since the Ordnance Survey had attempted to do so as a part of the British government ’ s colonial administration in the mid-nineteenth century. Th e research undertaken for the maps soon led to what he called the ‘ world-hungry art of words ’ and he is now the author of a two-volume study of the Aran Islands, a three-volume study of Connemara, two editions of miscellaneous essays mostly exploring the same places and a volume of short fi ction and experimental writings. Th ese works, as John Elder has suggested, have earned Robinson ‘ a permanent place on the shelf that holds the scientifi cally informed, speculative and at the same time highly personal narratives of such earlier masters as Gilbert White and Henry David Th oreau ’ (2014: 1). 128 Th e New Nature Writing Th anks to recent developments in ‘ regional modernisms ’ , it has become increasingly apparent that the twentieth century saw an abundance of modernist artists and authors turn their backs on the city and the security of mainland life in search of fresh perspectives from the periphery, although most seem to be clustered around the 1920s and 1930s (e.g. see Alexander and Moran 2013). As John Brannigan has shown in Archipelagic Modernism (2014), small islands in particular seem to have worked a magical gravity as authors as various as Michael McLaverty, Peadar O ’ Donnell, Hugh MacDiarmid, W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice all found themselves experimenting with island tropes in diverse ways. For some, islands were ‘ “ hard-edged ” microcosms of continental or mainland life ’ ; for others they were remote ‘ alternative worlds ’ (145). In asking what drove this islomania, Brannigan suggests an historical and cultural tension identifi ed by Pete Hay that appears to run to the heart of the island experience at the time: that between ‘ vulnerability and resilience ’ in which islands are fi gured as either the ‘ victims of change ’ or as ‘ uniquely resourceful ’ (qtd. in Brannigan 2014 : 147). Such a curious and uncertain tension, Brannigan argues, may well have appealed to authors during the 1920s and 1930s, when the very notion of the ‘ wholeness ’ of ‘ Britain ’ , ‘ England ’ , or the ‘ United Kingdom ’ was undermined politically and culturally by the emergent sovereignty of the Irish Free State (1922) and its constitutional claim to the ‘ whole island of Ireland ’ (1937), by the Scottish Renaissance of the 1920s, by the formation of Plaid Cymru (1925) and the Scottish National Party (1934), and by the palpable decline of British imperial power across the globe. (147) Given such political instabilities, a fascination with islands as sites where authors might confront and work out feelings about ‘ insularity ’, ‘ security ’, ‘ remoteness ’ and ‘ rootedness ’ seems quite plausible. Th e literature of islands of this period, he goes on, promised, in various ways, ‘ not just a corrective but an alternative to the dominant conceptions of identity and belonging to the past ’ (148). Robinson ’ s move in 1972 might certainly be seen in this same tradition – and we will explore his particular infl ection of post-imperial space – but there are some important diff erences as well. In fact, it was less this island literature that lured Robinson out west than it was Robert Flaherty ’ s fi lm Man of Aran . Th e Periphery 129 Th ough this was made in the period Brannigan explores (1934), Flaherty was an American fi lm-maker and his interest in life on the islands fi tted a much wider concern with global anthropological fi lm-making that included other well-known features of ‘ docu-fi ction ’ set in the Canadian Arctic ( Nanook of the North 1922), in Samoa ( Moana 1926) and in Polynesia ( Tabu 1931). For Robinson, who had been living and working in Istanbul and Vienna prior to London, drawn away from the UK by what he has called ‘ sheer Romanticism ’ (buoyed by Patrick Leigh Fermor), Man of Aran framed the islands as an exposed and elemental extreme, the edge of a whole continent, comparable aesthetically to the northern remoteness of the Canadian Arctic, and yet relatively close to home as well ( Smith 2013 : 5). Atlantic waves pounded sea caves at the foot of huge, windswept cliff s, diminutive fi gures of women hauled baskets of seaweed, men hunted a basking shark in a canvas currach (though in fact this was a recreation of a tradition long since passed for the purposes of the fi lm). Man of Aran projected a precarious life lived between rough limestone and a thousand miles of ocean on the outer edge of Europe. Such powerful imagery of these Atlantic islands in the 1930s may well have generated another layer of historical meaning about the quality of peripheral exposure when it was seen in a cinema in 1972. It was from 1968 onwards that the fi rst images of the whole planet framed from space were popularized provoking anxieties about precisely the ‘ vulnerability and resilience ’ of not just island life, but the planet as a whole. ‘ Earth Rise ’ and ‘ Blue Planet’ , taken from the Apollo 8 and the Apollo 17 missions, off ered an historic iconography for how fi nite, fragile and endangered people were beginning to feel life on Earth really was. Buckminster Fuller ’ s infl uential concept of ‘ Spaceship Earth ’ (1968) and James Lovelock ’ s ‘ Gaia ’ hypothesis (1972) both responded with urgent and scientifi c forms of system-based ecology that began to conceive of the Earth as a whole in need of careful monitoring and control. Not to mention the fact that the coastal edge of Aran that the fi lm showed the islanders looking out from was one that was nested on the line of the European continental shelf, a geological feature itself visible from space. When Robinson set out for the periphery in 1972 then, the sense that this coastal edge connoted was not only one of a national periphery (i.e. the edge of Ireland), nor of the slightly larger sense of an edge to the Irish and British archipelago, but a sense of periphery 130 Th e New Nature Writing based on a geological edge visible from space, a periphery of vulnerability on a planetary and cosmic scale. A unique opportunity is aff orded by Robinson ’s work to explore the whole oeuvre of a man who moved between visual art, map-making, and writing as if they were points that help to triangulate the elusive nature of place in his career. Th is chapter will do just this, tracing his careful investigation of place as it is braided with scales of spatial register from the cosmic, through the imperial and national, right down to the local, communal and personal. One crucial shaping factor in Robinson ’ s work on place is the idea of the margin or the periphery. What level of detail has escaped the eye looking out from the centre? What sits precariously on the outer edge of perception or cultural memory? What new horizons open when one ’ s periphery becomes centre and what do these do to a sense of place on the periphery? Robinson ’ s sense of scale is challenged by what he comes to call ‘ the view from the horizon ’ but as much as it is enlarged it is, at the same time, miniaturized (1997). Th e horizons of the place multiply internally in curious and exciting ways. Th e idea of regional and national periphery is supplanted by the idea of fractal horizons at the intersection of space and place. For Robinson, place is a secular but nonetheless metaphysical concept through which to contemplate our wider relationship with the spatial cosmos. Imagine that in a few hundred years ’ time humanity has put aside all its misguided supernatural beliefs and turned its religious instincts to the Earth, the true author of our being. Th en a rite will be called for to celebrate this thoroughly realist and romantic-materialist cult of the Earth.
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