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Études irlandaises

43-1 | 2018 Irish self-portraits: the artist in curved mirrors

Christelle Serée-Chaussinand (dir.)

Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/etudesirlandaises/5439 DOI: 10.4000/etudesirlandaises.5439 ISSN: 2259-8863

Publisher Presses universitaires de Caen

Printed version Date of publication: 30 May 2018 ISBN: 978-2-7535-7578-3 ISSN: 0183-973X

Electronic reference Christelle Serée-Chaussinand (dir.), Études irlandaises, 43-1 | 2018, « Irish self-portraits: the artist in curved mirrors » [Online], Online since 30 May 2018, connection on 23 September 2020. URL : http:// journals.openedition.org/etudesirlandaises/5439 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/etudesirlandaises. 5439

This text was automatically generated on 23 September 2020.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction Fintan Cullen

“Miracles Of Frenzied Impotence”. Samuel Beckett’s Letters (1941-1956): Portrait Of ambivalence Ciaran Ross

“Random fragments of autobiography”: Objects of the Self in Derek Mahon’s poetry Marion Naugrette-Fournier

Paul Durcan’s Self-Portraits as Dialogues Cathy Roche-Liger

More than Meets the ‘I’: Paul Muldoon’s Elegy ‘Yarrow’ Alexandra Tauvry

‘Such a fragile Thing as the human Countenance’. Irish Self-portraiture in the Eighteenth- Century Ruth Kenny

A Scot in Ireland: Erskine Nicol’s Mid-19th Century Self-Portraits Amélie Dochy

Costuming in Seán Keating’s self-portraits: theatrical guise or political disguise? Valérie Morisson

Performative Self-Portraiture, Femmage, and Feminist Histories of Irish Art: Amanda Coogan’s Snails, after Alice Maher (2010) Fionna Barber

Incarnating and articulating the female other. Interview with Helena Walsh Christelle Serée-Chaussinand and Helena Walsh

Comptes rendus bibliographiques

John Crowley, Donal Ó Drisceoil and Mike Murphy (eds), Atlas of the Irish Revolution Christophe Gillissen

Patrick Fitzgerald and Anthony Russell (eds), John Mitchel, Ulster and the Great Famine Catherine Conan

Matthew Barlow, Griffintown : Identity and Memory in an Irish Diaspora Neighbourhood Camille Harrigan

John Dorney, The Civil War in Dublin: The Fight for the Irish Capital Olivier Coquelin

Oliver P. Rafferty, S.J., Violence, Politics and Catholicism in Ireland Christophe Gillissen

Richard Murphy, The Kick, A Memoir of the Poet Richard Murphy Florence Schneider

Nicholas Grene. The Theatre of Tom Murphy Playwright Adventure Eibhear Walshe

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Ruben Borg, Paul Fagan, John McCourt (eds), Flann O’Brien Problems with Authority Thierry Robin

Brad Kent (ed.), The Selected Essays of Sean O’Faolain Gustavo A. Rodríguez Martín

Jean Viviès, Revenir/Devenir, Gulliver ou l’autre voyage Claude Fierobe

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Introduction

Fintan Cullen

1 As an art historian, I have always been interested in portraiture. My publications since the 1980s attest to this culminating in The Irish Face. Redefining the Irish Portrait published in 20041. Since the late sixteenth century, portraiture in the visual arts in Ireland has been strongly influenced by English and European traditions and it is only really in the last one hundred years that a more Irish-orientated tradition has evolved. It is the aim of this special issue of Études Irlandaises to explore the role of self- portraiture within the context of Ireland, in terms of both its visual and its literary outputs.

2 In the visual arts in Ireland, self-portraiture probably only conjures up a couple of key names, James Barry (1741–1806) in the late eighteenth century, Robert Ballagh (b. 1943) in our own day. With the former you get an awkward even cantankerous individual in a series of oil paintings all produced abroad in either Rome or London while Ballagh’s witty canvases play games with a range of art historical visual references ranging from Dürer to Duchamp2. The fact that only two artists of Irish origin come immediately to mind is surprising as Ireland boasts one of the few national self-portrait collections in the world. Situated on the campus of the University of Limerick, the collection of images is wide in its range from the traditional to the abstract3. In the field of literature, Ireland has a far better range of autobiographical offerings from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artists as a Young Man (1916), any number of poems by W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) through to the work of the late Seamus Heaney (1939–2013). Those names just mentioned continue to enjoy undeniable world renown, not a feature attributable to their compatriots in the visual arts. It can thus be said that visual self-portraiture is a poor relation in terms of Irish studies to its literary counterpart. The aim of this issue of Études Irlandaises is to lessen that imbalance and offer an insight into the self- portrayal of the creative mind in both words and images.

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James Barry (1741-1806), Self-Portrait as Timanthes, c. 1780-1803

oil on canvas, 76 x 63 cm, Purchased, 1934, NGI. 971, National Gallery of Ireland Collection. Photo © National Gallery of Ireland

3 James Barry’s last self-portrait was completed in 1803 but was started over twenty years earlier. The painting has been in the National Gallery of Ireland since the 1930s4 and in the past half century and more it has become one of the most discussed Irish self-portraits with a literature that extends to well over thirty references5. The most recent discussion of it is by Ruth Kenny in this issue of Études Irlandaises. What has preoccupied much of the analysis of this important picture is the fact that Barry, an autocrat and firm believer in the importance of history painting in the visual arts, painted himself as Timanthes, a late 5th century BC Greek artist. As has been discussed in so much of the literature on Barry, this self-portrait was begun in the early 1780s when the artist was working on his huge series of murals in London’s Society of Arts in which he included himself in one of the wall paintings, the Crowning of the Victors at Olympia6. It is presumed that the oil sketch he made for this mural was left unfinished until two decades later when he was asked to provide a self-portrait for the Society’s Transactions of 1803. Barry returned to that younger representation and painted-in as he said in his own words, ‘the hands, drapery, cyclops, etc’7.

4 If what Barry said in 1803 is to be believed and all of the literature on Barry has accepted his account, what we have in this Dublin self-portrait is the face of a forty- year-old man submitted to the Society of Arts as the self-image of what was in fact a man in his sixty-second or sixty-third year. Barry informed the Society that ‘[N]otwithstanding the wear and tear on such a fragile thing as the human countenance’, he and his friends were of the opinion that it still looked like him8. All of this is very well but it highlights an important point about self-portraiture. It can have elements of falsity or can even be delusional. That is, it should never be accepted as

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pure fact. In self-portraiture, be it in visual or literary form, there is always an element of self-fashioning being transmitted by the artist.

James Barry (1741-1806), Self-Portrait (1802-c.04)

Mezzotint, Sheet: 37.2 x 27 cm, Plate: 35.3 x 25.3 cm, Purchased, 1885. NGI. 10205. National Gallery of Ireland Collection Photo © National Gallery of Ireland

5 A mezzotint that Barry produced about 1802 shows what the doyen of Barry scholarship, William L. Pressly, has referred to as Barry’s ‘crumpled face’ which Pressly goes on to say, “reminds one of Henry Fuseli’s wickedly amusing comment associating Barry’s appearance with that of his decrepit and battered home”9. More recently Nicolas Figgis and Brendan Rooney in their catalogue of the Irish paintings in the National Gallery of Ireland refer to the mezzotint as representing a “haggard and world-weary figure”10. By contrast, the Dublin oil self-portrait shows a vibrant, energetic face. We see a man in his prime, confident in his art whose full-frontal gaze, partially opened mouth and loosely appointed shirt invites us, the viewer, to see him as a creative being. The reality of Barry’s appearance in 1803 and the final production of this oil painting is of course very different. By that year, when the artist returned to the earlier portrait, he was in his sixties, his reputation as a difficult man was well known. A few years earlier in 1799, for a variety of reasons, he had been stripped of his position as Professor of Painting at the London Royal Academy of Arts and expelled from that institution and he was now living in isolation and in poverty11. While the Dublin portrait is frequently seen as a celebration of the Romantic imagination implying freedom of expression, self-determination and the like, such an interpretation only goes so far and is not a very historically useful position to take when viewing the image12. Barry’s final oil self-portrait shies away from a more grim reality. In hiding the artist’s own career disappointments and the banal ravages of time, we need to

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remember that the examination of self-portraits must be done with a suitable degree of scepticism.

6 What an artist offers us in a self-portrait is as much an artificial construct as any other form of art production. It is what the artist wishes us to see, it is their interpretation of themselves and we must work around that offering13. James Barry wishes us to see him as youthful firebrand who is full of energy and creativity, not an ageing and scorned artist. Equipped with such knowledge about Barry’s Dublin self-portrait, we are in a better position to discuss the nature of self-portraiture.

7 A key aspect of this collection of essays is that self-examination be it visually orientated or in words must refer to Irish women as much as to Irish men. This issue of Études Irlandaises thus contains essays on such contemporary artists as Amanda Coogan (b. 1971) and Helena Walsh (b. 1979). While the inclusion of only two out of nine essays on women is a serious imbalance, such a ratio reflects the unfortunate situation that stills affects Irish critical writing where women artists and writers are still underrepresented in published comment.

8 Another aspect of this collection of essays is to expand the focus of Irish Studies beyond its preoccupation with literary production. While four out of the nine essays are about celebrated writers and poets, be they Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) or Paul Muldoon (b. 1951), the remaining five are about the visual arts, both historical and the contemporary. We thus get essays on amongst others, Nathaniel Hone (1718–1784), Seán Keating (1899–1977), and Amanda Coogan.

9 In the nine essays in this special issue on self-portraiture for Études Irlandaises we are offered a range of vehicles for the production of self-reflections by artists over a three- hundred-year period. With the visual artists, we see the traditional canvas as a platform for examining the self. But in more contemporary works, we get physical performance as a testing ground for exploring how to represent woman in self- portraiture. In the realm of writing, the platform can move from the arena of poetry as the seemingly perfect site for autobiographical insight. But we are also offered, in the case of Beckett, the private letter as a form of self-portraiture. As Ciaran Ross suggests, the letter acts “to stake control ‘over’ a work”, as the authorial voice can be ‘present’ or ‘absent’ depending on the mood of the artist.

10 Themes regarding the approach to self-portraiture that appear in the nine essays that follow are also multitudinous. Many of the writers discussed are on the whole negative in their approach to self-portraiture. We see the author as an ambivalent, hesitant commentator (Beckett) or as a self-derisive voice (Duncan). We also get suggestions of dissatisfaction with the process as it can be frustratingly fragmentary (Muldoon and Mahon). The adult self who is writing is endlessly being reminded of the younger self in recollection. Visual artists are seemingly less dissatisfied. Instead, self-assurance, self- aggrandisement and self-satisfaction are dominant positions adopted by artists from James Latham in the early eighteenth century to Seán Keating two hundred years later. At the same time, the artificiality of self-reflection is a bond that connects both writers and visual artists. Paul Muldoon writes about the fictions that the poet can conjure up about himself which chimes with the fictions that has subjected women to centuries of male representation in art. Fionna Barber’s essay on Coogan asks us to consider the

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possibility of femmage as opposed to hommage so that women can voice their own story. It is thus possible that, as Barber’s says, “the lineage of women’s art practice” is legitimately articulated.

11 Self-portraiture, like much artistic production, has been a male preserve for far too long. It is hoped that this issue of Études Irlandaises rectifies to some degree that imbalance just as this issue may go some way to upgrading the role of the visual in Irish Studies while finally showing that self-portraiture should be viewed as an important ingredient in Irish creativity.

NOTES

1. Fintan Cullen, The Irish Face. Redefining the Irish Portrait, London: National Portrait Gallery, 2004. 2. See Ciaran Carty, Robert Ballagh, Dublin: Magill, 1986. 3. See Sarah Finlay, ed., The National Self-Portrait Collection of Ireland, Limerick: University of Limerick Press, 1989) and Ruairí Ó Cuív, ed., Artists’ Century. Irish Self- Portraits and Selected Works, 1900-2000, Oysterhaven, Kinsale: Gandon Editions, 2000. 4. Nicola Figgis and Brendan Rooney, Irish Paintings in the National Gallery of Ireland I, Dublin: National Gallery of Ireland, 2001, p. 78. 5. For recent bibliographies see William L. Pressly, James Barry’s Murals at the Royal Society of Arts: Envisioning a New Public Art, Cork: Cork University Press, 2014, pp. 382-4 and Tom Dunne, ed., James Barry 1741-1806 ‘The Great Historical Painter’, Kinsale: Gandon Editions, 2005, pp. 218-9. 6. See Pressly in Dunne, pp. 61-77 for an account of the Barry self-portraits and for the relevant Society of Artists’ mural, see Pressly, 2014, pp. 63-83. 7. Quoted in Figgis and Rooney, p. 80. 8. Figgis and Rooney, 80. See also, Pressly, 2014, pp. 291-302. 9. William L. Pressly, James Barry. The Artist as Hero, London: The Tate Gallery, 1983, pp. 153-4. 10. Figgis and Rooney, pp. 80-1. 11. See William L. Pressly, The Life and Art of James Barry, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981, pp. 138-141 and Liam Lenihan, The Writings of James Barry and the Genre of History Painting, 1775-1809, Farnham: Ashgate, 2014, pp. 156-60. 12. Most recently by Pressly, 2014, p. 308. 13. For fuller discussions of some of these topics see Shearer West, Portraiture, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, chapter 7 and James Hall, ‘Why Self-Portraits?’ in Facing the World. Self-portraits from Rembrandt to Ai Weiwei, Köln: Snoeck, 2016, pp. 12-21.

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AUTHOR

FINTAN CULLEN University of Nottingham Fintan Cullen is a Professor of the History of Art at the University of Nottingham, UK. His books include Ireland on Show. Art, Union, and Nationhood (2012); The Irish Face. Redefining the Irish Portrait (2004); Sources on Irish Art. A Reader (2000); Visual Politics. The Representation of Ireland 1750-1930 (1997). He is presently working on a study of migration and the Irish in the long nineteenth century. Over the years, he has acted as Deputy Editor of the journal Art History, and in 2005 he co-organised the highly successful National Portrait Gallery, London exhibition ‘Conquering England’. Ireland in Victorian London.

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“Miracles Of Frenzied Impotence”. Samuel Beckett’s Letters (1941-1956): Portrait Of ambivalence

Ciaran Ross

1 Samuel Beckett’s growth as a writer had always been a perilous balancing act between endorsing negation as a principle of composition and fending off destructiveness. Even at the height of his fame, Beckett’s writing—“that bitter folly” 1—always left him with an incurable and irreducible feeling of frustration, disappointment and fundamental failure. As John Pilling outlines: Nor could he ever rid himself of the knowledge that with every achievement (insofar as he could permit himself to think of it as such) went a sense of failure. Even with Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable and Waiting for Godot written, Beckett can be found, in the third of the Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit, saying: ‘There are many ways in which the thing I am trying in vain to say may be tried in vain to be said’2.

2 Beckett’s second volume of letters for the 1941-1956 period, which will be the focus of this article, offers a much more nuanced picture of his vexed relationship with his writing and with himself as writer. While Beckett continues to predict failure and dread success, to doubt the result and purpose of his work, we also see a writer who is unflinchingly certain about the need to write, and who will remain committed to his art throughout. To use a painterly analogy, given Beckett’s well-documented passion for art and the role of “visual thinking” in his narrative and theatrical writings3, he is the reluctant “subject” of his own critical self-portraiture, someone who feels radically ambivalent about his writing practice, an ambivalence that lies between an uncompromising commitment to writing, to success, to expression, albeit to what Beckett will term a “non-expressive” art, and on the other hand, a growing apathy, a revulsion that turns into hatred of the work and of its undoubted success. My contention is that Beckett’s commitment and revulsion are not so much opposed as interdependent4.

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3 The letters under consideration constitute some six hundred pages of correspondence with friends, lovers, publishers, translators, aspiring writers, critics, academics, actors and theatre directors. One obvious reason for their profusion is that Beckett from 1949 spent a lot of his time in his secondary residence, near the village of Ussy sur Marne (East of Paris) and was obliged albeit reluctantly to visit his family in Foxrock—his mother died in 1950 and his brother, Frank, in 19545. They cover the most turbulently creative period during which the Irish author produced his two most famous plays (En attendant Godot, Fin de partie) and his great prose writings (trilogy) that established and secured his reputation in the academy. It is also the period that brought about the most defining transformations in Beckett’s writing career: from the English language writer only known by a narrow group of readers to the writer known best for works first written in French6; from the writer of prose fictions to arguably the most important dramatist of his era admired by a growing international audience. The 1941-1956 period is therefore a time when Beckett was forced to come to terms with success and to publically defend, if not explain, his work.

4 More specifically, from the watershed of Godot’s success (1953), the letter that will be increasingly common is one that is informative and direct rather than exploratory and complex, the ‘post Godot’ letters being a means for Beckett to ‘protect’ his work by orchestrating and controlling the shifting boundaries between professional and private, between Beckett the writer and Beckett the man. Consequently the backbone of the volume in question is provided by a sequence of exploratory letters written between 1946 and 1948 to the art critic Georges Duthuit. This is the crucial period of innovation where Beckett turns to French and writes short stories, a trilogy of novels and the first of the plays Eleutheria.

“Getting oneself in perspective”

5 In an extraordinary moment of lucidity in 1948, Beckett writes to his great friend Thomas MacGreevy: I see a little clearly at last what my writing is about and I feel I have perhaps 10 years courage and energy to get the job done. The feeling of getting oneself in perspective is a strange one, after so many years of expression in blindness. Perhaps it is an illusion7.

6 While it is never clear what Beckett sees “at last” about his writing, the letters show a writer trying to wring sense from his writing, for what he knows cannot make sense in any obvious, formal or rational manner. “Where can one find the terms”, asks Beckett, “the rhythms, the pantings, without leaving the treasure-house of our vulgar nonsense, which does rather show us up”8. Even words such as “poverty” and “bareness” are still redolent of excess: “I feel myself moving away from ideas of poverty and bareness. They are still superlatives”9. Yet Beckett will choose terms, preferring the least superlative ones, to give “expression” to his predicament and to his wider aesthetic concern with inexpressiveness, such as: refusal, no, indigence, impotence, impossibility, passivity, absence of relation, inexpressiveness. These are a clear extension of an earlier aesthetic domain that Beckett had been mapping out since his essay on Proust (1931), his interest in Geulincx when writing Murphy10 and his German letter to Axel Kaun (1937).

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7 In his early Proust essay Beckett assumed that art had to enact a labour of radical negation, the undoing of every (pseudo-) relation, the destruction of every surface11. In the German letter Beckett developed the idea that literary language must negate itself, that is, be self-destructive and that literature must in fact be turned against itself12. This fidelity to negativity was to inspire his views on art and on the role of the artist that will be expounded in Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit, (1949) albeit in a tongue- in-cheek fashion. There in his discussion about Van Velde’s painting, Beckett aphoristically reminds us that “to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world”13. But, despite Beckett’s rhetoric of negatives and nothings, (that “there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express”), the artist’s “fidelity to failure” is anything but negative14. Artistic failure is “an expressive act, even if only of itself, of its impossibility, of its obligation”15.

8 The letters, rooted as they are in Beckett’s personal life, in his relationships and friendships, are much less declamatory and aphoristic than the earlier pronouncements, particularly when it comes to discussing art and the role of the artist. The shift in tone is markedly more humble, even apologetic. “I used to think all this work was an effort, necessarily feeble, to express the nothing”, explains Beckett in his first reply to the then unknown Aidan Higgins: It seems rather to have been a journey, irreversible, in gathering thinglessness, towards it. Or also. Or ergo. And the problem remains entire or at last arising ends. Forgive these personal considerations, about no one16.

9 As Dan Gunn explains, there is always an intimate correlation between what Beckett is living and what he is thinking through in the literary and aesthetic fields17. The letters written from Dublin in 1948 to the art critic and friend, Georges Duthuit, testify to this.

“Beneath an unforgettable sky”

10 The letters Beckett sends to Duthuit are the starting point of what will turn out to be a long passionate debate between writer and critic about what could be loosely called non-expressive art. But while Beckett strives to formulate ideas about inexpressiveness, he is also emotionally coming to terms with what could be described as the pre-mourning of his mother, May Beckett, who will die two years later. So we find Beckett at his most expressive, his most lyrical, even his most intimate when describing his mother: I keep watching my mother’s eyes, never so blue, so stupefied, so heartrending, eyes of an endless childhood, that of old age. (…) I think these are the first eyes that I have seen. I have no wish to see any others, I have all I need for loving and weeping, I know now what is going to close, and open inside me, but without seeing anything, there is no more seeing18.

11 and at his most intellectually passionate when thinking about himself as a writer: You know I really have no wish to be set free, nor to be helped, by art or by anything else (….) Nothing will be sufficiently against for me, not even pain…19 (….) I shall never know clearly enough how far space and time are unutterable, and me caught up somewhere in there. (.…) The mistake, the weakness at any rate, is perhaps to want to know what one is talking about. In defining literature, to one’s satisfaction, even brief, where is the gain, even brief20?

12 Having stated this impossibility he adds: “one must shout, murmur, exult, madly until one can find the no doubt calm language of the no, unqualified, or as little qualified as

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possible”21. Such personal and critical insights are immediately rubbished by the first sentence of the next letter from Dublin: “yesterday I wrote you an unbelievable silly letter” (in French: “une lettre on ne peut plus con”). Notwithstanding, a mood and tone of wistfulness pervades his description of the Dublin mountains as Beckett gets us to feel the almost epiphanic quality about his romantic surroundings: “dripping bracken, in this light from the setting sun, illuminating the storm from below”, before giving expression to the urgent feeling that: we need a motive to blow up all this dismal mixture. It is surely to be sought where everything must be sought now, in the eternally larval, no, something else, in the courage of the imperfection of non-being too, in which we are intermittently assailed by the temptation still to be, a little, and the glory of having been a little, beneath an unforgettable sky. Yes, to be sought in the impossibility of ever being wrong enough, ever being ridiculous and defenceless enough (….) Not to have to express oneself, nor get involved with whatever kind of maximum, in one’s numberless, valueless, achievementless world; that is a game worth trying, all the same, a necessity worth trying, and one which will never work, if that works22.

13 As we can see in the letter’s manner of performance, expressing the non-expressive can only incur disavowals, deflections (“no, something else”) and negatives as if the act of saying can only be subjected to further failure (“a necessity worth trying, and one which will never work”). The letter ends by returning to this epiphanic setting of nature: “a great weariness suddenly, and need for darkness (…) and the slow letting go of things, the trees, the wind, failure of nerve and efforts of will past and to come”23. And, predictably enough, in the next letter we have Beckett undermining his previous missal, and pleading with Duthuit for forgiveness: Forgive me now and always for all my stupidities and blanknesses, I am only a tiny little part of a creature, self-hating vestiges, remains of an old longing, when I was little, for rounding out, even on a small radius. That shuts you in your whole life long. And one drives in vain towards figurelessness24.

‘The avalanche of one’s impossibility at every fragment of a moment’

14 The Duthuit debate continues throughout 1949 giving rise to Beckett’s most lyrical ardent outpourings which form the fiery core of his letters.

15 Duthuit had asked Beckett to write something to promote the artist Bram Van Velde, whose abstract paintings Beckett greatly admired because it is an art made of major and drastic renunciation, “an absence of relations of whatever kind”25. The personal affinity Beckett feels is explicitly expressed when he says: “and I shall tend irresistibly to pull Bram’s case over towards my own, since that is the condition of being in it and talking about it, and then for other reasons less easy to admit”26. Even more directly, in a letter to the painter himself, Beckett admits: “I am searching a way of capitulating without giving up utterance—entirely”27.

16 A debate ensues in the letters as to what Van Velde’s qualities are. The premise for both men is what Beckett calls “the avalanche of one’s impossibility at every fragment of a moment”28, that is, human experience cannot be captured in art, so mimetic art is always a failure, when not complacent and mendacious29. By contrast Van Velde’s art refuses and disallows the very possibility of having any relation with any discernible reality:

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It is not the relation with this or that order of opposite that is refused, but the state of being in relation as such, the state of being in front of. We have waited a long time for an artist who is brave enough (….) to grasp that the break with the outside world entails the break with the inside world, that there are no replacement relations for naïve relations, that what are called outside and inside are one and the same30.

17 However, Beckett is not simply attracted to Van Velde because the latter is the first to repudiate relation in all its forms, the one who “paints the impossibility of painting, the lack of all relation, object, subject”31. In fact Beckett doesn’t deny the fact that Van Velde may even attempt to reconnect the outside with the inside. But, as Beckett claims: What matters is that he does not succeed. His painting is, if you will, the impossibility of reconnecting. There is, if you like, refusal and refusal to accept refusal. That perhaps is what makes this painting possible. For my part, it is the gran rifiuto that interests me, not the heroic wriggling to which we owe this splendid thing. It is awful to have to say so. What interests me is what lies beyond the outside-inside where he does his striving, not the scale of the striving itself32.

18 Such lengthy formulations terminate with the familiar disclaimer “I am no longer capable of writing in any sustained way about Bram or about anything. I am no longer capable of writing about”33. Indeed years later Beckett will dismiss the whole sequence of the art letters with Duthuit as having been a failure: In the end, I think that our preoccupations are of two very different orders as if separated by a zone of shadow where, exiled from each other, we vainly seek a meeting point (…) I am not someone to talk art with, and on that subject I am not likely to utter anything other than my own obsessive concerns34.

‘To write is impossible but not yet impossible enough’

19 The letters from and about Ussy show us a Beckett who needs to find a space that concretely facilitates such “obsessive” or “impossible” concerns with writing: “I am not very sure when I shall go back”, writes Beckett to Jérôme Lindon from Ussy, “I need a thousand years of silence, my own above all”35. If there is no major letter mourning the death of May Beckett, it is perhaps because living out in Ussy creates for Beckett a space where he can mourn, “a space where the sort of dispossession or impossibility— not strictly nameable as such—(…) is the more readily perceived and achieved”, to quote Dan Gunn36. Indeed it is nature’s inarticulateness, its speechlessness in the form of the garden at Ussy that enables Beckett to acknowledge absence and loss (his mother’s and his brother’s): tired, inert and of a stupidity hitherto unequalled even by me and with no other desire than to potter about in my walled field until the black oxen comes home37,

20 and also to symbolise the impossibleness of writing: My little texts are at a standstill… Decidedly I am sick of writing, the way I write. I feel like burying myself, burying ourselves, in this beet-root growing hole... what a spineless creature38. (…) I cannot manage to interest myself in work; past, present and to come. I ask for nothing more than to be able to bury myself in this beetroot-growing hole, scratch the earth and howl at the clouds39.

21 Other times when the work does advance, however slowly, such as L’Innommable: “little fly-splashes against the window”, it is “when hoeing and weeding permit”40. Whenever

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he feels it would be better to give up writing, disgusted as he is by his inability to achieve the goal he has set himself, Beckett at least takes refuge in “digging” holes or what he calls “ground-clearing”41, even if this is not always possible: “impossible to do anything with the earth, half frozen, half muddy. I long to be digging, digging over (in French “labourer”) as they say here”42. When he does dig, the holes he digs are graves of a sort, an objective correlative perhaps of his negative side, of his instinct for mourning and melancholia: “the holes are ready but no trees as yet (…) they’ll all die long before the Spring to judge by the look of the holes”43. Yet for all that, digging “over” or digging “in” provides an antidote to the stress and strain of rehearsals in Paris: I am tired and depressed with all this fuss of rehearsal and the feeling of barking up the wrong monkey-bread and look forward to the moment when I can dig in again here and see are there any bits left of the solitary worth trying to stick together44.

22 Whether sent from Ussy or Paris, letters that comment either the work in progress or the work already published, are accompanied by the same despair and crippling self- disparagement. As always with Beckett the impossibility of writing is paradoxically that which makes writing still possible. So in a letter to Barney Rosset, in 1954, shortly before the death of Frank Beckett, we find Beckett musing over the various ongoing Spanish and German translations of the trilogy wondering if he will return to writing in English before admitting that: “it’s hard to go on with everything loathed and repudiated as soon as formulated, and in the act of formulation and before formulation”. After evoking his Textes pour Rien—“very short abortive texts that express the failure to implement the last words of L’Innommable: ‘il faut continuer, je vais continuer’”, he finishes by alluding to his current writing: At the moment I have a man crawling along a corridor in the rock in the dark, but he’s due to vanish any day… I’m horribly tired and stupefied, but not yet tired and stupefied enough; to write is impossible but not yet impossible enough. That’s how I cod myself these days45.

23 Unsurprisingly, in the letters he sends from Foxrock around the time of the death of his brother, Frank, Beckett sees his own life and indeed his literary career entering into some fantasised terminal stage. Writing from Dublin to Jacoba Van Velde, in 1954, he notes: “My life here— nothing; better not mentioned. It will end like everything else, and the way will again be free that goes towards the only end that counts”46. On completing L’Innommable he laments to Barney Rosset: “You know, Barney, I think my writing days are over. L’Innommable finished me or expressed my finishedness (…) my only interest in life at the moment is to keep on my feet until it is over”47.

24 At times the voice we hear in these letters becomes uncannily close to that of Beckett’s fabled incapacitated narrator-characters where there is no longer any distinction between “living” and “writing”. “Forgive all these details about my work”, Beckett tells his old friend MacGreevy in January 1948, “my life seems to be little else”48. Like Molloy, Beckett feels he is in “a ditch somewhere near the last stretch and would like to crawl up on it”49. The reader familiar with the postures of impotence and self- deprecation that characterize the trilogy, will easily identify the author of the following self-descriptions: That there are superior minds (no irony) which know and are able to. I can readily grant. But when one is not gifted, really stupid and clumsy, what is one to go in for? Cunning, Art? Keeping quiet? Silence will come soon enough, not from pride, but

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from weariness of speech50. (…) On paper all I’m good for now is going on into silliness, ignorance, impotence, and silence51.

Commitment and revulsion: Beckett’s public posture of authorial diminishment

25 However “deficient in the professional outlook”52, Beckett unavoidably becomes a public figure, and will be irremediably “damned to fame”, to quote the title of James Knowlson’s authorized biography. However, this will not prevent him from showing his gratitude, as he does, to those who support him and will continue to support him in his writing career such as Roger Blin: “if I ever get there, it will be thanks to you. I’ve never been able to put into words how fond I am of you, or show it”53 and Jérôme Lindon with whom he was to develop a life-long friendship: “Lindon in the great kindness of his heart is dealing with everything himself and I must say I am grateful to him”54.

26 When fame comes, as it does, almost overnight, such recognition is something from which Beckett constantly distances himself by putting it down to “misunderstandings”: I am really very tired of Godot and the endless misunderstanding it seems to provoke everywhere. How can anything so skeleton simple be complicated as it has been is beyond me 55 (…) I cannot help feeling that the success of Godot has been very largely the result of a misunderstanding, or of various misunderstandings56.

27 Yet disparagement and disgust quickly kick in: on Godot’s instant box-office popularity, Beckett writes to his friend cum mistress Pamela Mitchell: “how I dislike that play now. Full house every night, it’s a disease”57. Indeed the more successful Beckett becomes and the brighter his international aura shines, the more vicious the self-revulsion seems to become. “My God how I hate my own work. Have started the impossible job of translating L’Innommable and gave it up the other day in loathing”, Beckett writes confidentially to his mistress, before ending with: “forgive wretched letter. At least it’s a sign of life”58. Similarly, in the midst of his supervision of the German and Spanish translations of the trilogy (1954), Beckett is: “sick of all this old vomit and despair(s) more and more of ever being able to puke again”59. Similarly, while working on the proofs of Malone meurt, he finds that “the work is profoundly distressing, now that it is too late to bury it”60.

28 Notwithstanding, the letters have us hear the public voice of a recognised author who remains adamantly attached to his work, to protecting its integrity or its “wretchedness”, to quote Beckett from a rare letter of indignation he sends to one Simone de Beauvoir who decides not to publish the second part of Beckett’s story “Suite”: I am not asking you to go back on your decision. But it is quite impossible for me to evade the duty I feel towards a creature of mine. Forgive these grand words. If I were afraid of ridicule I would keep quiet. I have sufficient trust in you, in the end, simply to tell you what my feelings are. They are as follows: you are giving me the chance to speak only to retract it before the words have had time to mean anything. You are immobilizing an existence at the very moment at which it is about to take its definitive form. There is something nightmarish about that … It is simply that there exists a wretchedness which must be defended to the very end, in one’s work and outside it61.

29 The strong authorial stance Beckett takes here contrasts dramatically with what will become his familiar public posture, examples of which we have already seen, that is to

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say someone who projects “for himself instead an image of authorial impoverishment, indigence and impotence, a diminished author-ity”, to quote Gontarski62. While Beckett’s legendary resistance to explication and interpretation, “a resistance to and incapacity for self-reflection”63, might also be seen as an aspect of the care he takes to protect his “creatures”64, it must also be seen as Beckett’s resistance to the supposed privilege of authorship.

30 An example of how Beckett uses a public posture of diminished authority as a means of deflection for him, can be seen in his response to Michel Polac who had written asking Beckett for ideas about En attendant Godot. Recoiling from the role of omniscient author, Beckett undermines having any knowledge of what the play is about, his defense consisting of disentangling himself completely from his characters and stories, as if he no longer “knows” them. The Polac letter is a peculiar letter in that Beckett takes a new paragraph for each statement as if responding to a criminal indictment, so we have four paragraphs beginning with protests of ignorance (in French, “je ne sais pas”). For example, as regards his ideas about theatre, Beckett replies: “I have no ideas about theatre. I know nothing about it. I do not go to it. That is allowable”. As to the play, he explains that he wrote it, “having no ideas about it either”: I know no more about this play than anyone who manages to read it attentively. I do not know in what spirit I wrote it. I know no more of the characters than what they say, what they do and what happens to them.

31 As regards his four illustrious characters, Beckett can only manage: “I have only been able to know a little about them by staying very far away from the need to understand; they owe you an explanation perhaps. Let them get on with it. Without me. They and I have settled our accounts”65.

32 Fortunately, Beckett’s legendary resistance to explication is as frequently resisted as it is asserted and one finds Beckett actually extending his authority, often insisting on the primacy of the playwright in the process of performance, and, so projecting an authorial presence into the theatrical process. In certain letters Beckett takes up the role of “advisor” on productions of his work offering insights, even inviting discussion and questions from friends like Roger Blin, Alan Schneider, Georges Duthuit or Barney Rosset and also from his translators (Jacoba Van Velde, Elmar Tophoven) with whom he starts lifelong key collaborations. “Don’t think of me as a nietman”, he explains to Barney Rosset in a discussion about symbols in Godot, “The idea is all right. But I think the variety of symbols is a bad mistake”66. Particularly bothered by the way Estragon’s trousers don’t fall down properly, Beckett explains to Roger Blin, the first director of En attendant Godot, that “the spirit of the play, in so far as it has one, is that nothing is more grotesque than the tragic, and that must be put across right to the end, and particularly at the end”67. To Alan Schneider who requests some technical indications as to how to play Pozzo, Beckett’s reply comes as an instruction: “he is a hypomaniac and the only way to play him it to play him mad”68. Yet when contacted by the actor who plays Pozzo, Sir Ralph Richardson, Beckett is disinclined to oblige: Too tired to give satisfaction I told him that all I knew about Pozzo was in the text, that if I had known more I would have put it in the text, and that this was true also of the other characters. Which I trust puts an end to that star69.

33 Paradoxically when he is saying no to Edouard Coester who approaches him with a view to producing a musical accompaniment to Godot, Beckett’s no turns out to be a generative starting-point for would be adaptations of the play. After reiterating his

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position to Coester: “that would be a great mistake (…) you speak as a musician, I as a writer, I fear that our two positions are irreconcilable”70, Beckett remains open to the idea of musical interpretation reminding Coester that the wider musical issue in Godot is no other than that of silence: For what is at issue is a speaking whose function is not so much that of having a meaning as of putting up a struggle, poor I hope, against silence, and leading back to it. I find it hard to see it as an integral part of a sound-world. But this drama which you seem to have felt so keenly, if you thought fit to translate it, however freely into pure music, that would interest me a great deal and give me great pleasure. And then what about silence itself, is it not still waiting for its musician71?

34 Inevitably, it is to Georges Duthuit that Beckett will outline his most explicit theatrical credo of art as non-expression, this coming as a response to Duthuit’s request for directorial details concerning the stage set of En attendant Godot: In Godot it is a sky that is sky only in name, a tree that makes them wonder whether it is one, tiny and shrivelled. I should like to see it set up any old how, sordidly abstract as nature is, for the Estragons and Vladimirs, a place of suffering, sweaty and fishy... Nothing, it expresses nothing, it is an opaque no one bothers to question anymore. Any formal specificity becomes impossible. If it really is essential to know where they are (and in my view the text makes it clear enough), let the words look after that (…) Indigence, we can never say it often enough, and, decidedly, painting is incapable of that. Please do not mind my unloading all this: it must irritate you. I am spilling my guts out (…) I do not believe in collaboration between the arts, I want a theatre reduced to its own means, speech and acting, without painting, without music, without embellishments. That is Protestantism if you like, we are what we are. The setting has to come out of the text, without adding to it72.

35 Similarly, to Carlheinz Caspari who is staging the German première of Godot, Beckett gives a magisterial explanation of why the play is not, and never can be expressionist: Nor is it for me a symbolist play, I cannot stress that too much. First and foremost, it is a question of something that happens, almost a routine, and it is this dailiness and this materiality, in my view, that need to be brought out …. In any event there is nothing to be gained by giving them clear form. The characters are living creatures, only just living perhaps, they are not emblems73.

36 As to the identity of Godot, Beckett contents himself with the tantalising comment: I myself know him less well than anyone, having never known even vaguely what I needed. If his name suggests the heavens, it is only to the extent that a product for promoting hair growth can seem heavenly. Each person is free to put a face on him74.

Conclusion

37 The letters portray Beckett as a writer who invariably performs a perilous balancing act between writing and living75, and those uneasy compromises between love and hate, attachment and revulsion, commitment and despair. Replete with disavowals, apologies, contradictions, and denials, the epistles are as irreconcilable, paradoxical and self-effacing as the work and the life they allude to.

38 If we choose to read them as having a dialogic relation to the work, the letters function, at least rhetorically, to extend the work, to repeat its voices and mirror back its postures of impotence. Despite the revulsion and aversion they express, they also serve

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to defend and protect the work by being paradoxically open and closed to “dialogue”, encouraging and discouraging explication and interpretation. They are ultimately a means for Beckett to stake control “over” a work in relation to which he can choose to be “present” (as authoritative omniscient author) or “absent” as “diminished authority” or maybe both.

39 Above all, the epistles are ambivalent about themselves, about their very possibility as “letters” and about the relations that they establish albeit reluctantly. They are, in the final instance, creative miracles, “miracles of frenzied impotence”, to quote Beckett’s description of one of Van Velde’s paintings76. It is not that they always say “No”, for if they do, this is Beckett’s way of paradoxically saying “Yes” to the necessity to write, even if that means, as it must, saying yes to the impossibility and hopelessness that underlie “that bitter folly”77. “never again can I admit anything but the act without hope, calm in its damnedness”78.

NOTES

1. Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, in The Beckett Trilogy, London: Picador, 1979, p. 276. 2. John Pilling, Beckett before Godot, Cambridge U.P.1997, p. 2. 3. I am referring here to Lois Oppenheim’s fine study: The Painted Word: Samuel Beckett’s Dialogue with Art, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2000. On the question of Beckett’s visual thinking, see: pp. 157-161. For Beckett’s interest in artist’s self-portraits and self-portraiture, see Mark Nixon’s study, Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries, 1936-1937, London: Bloomsbury, 2011, pp. 152-160. Reading the letters in terms of a painterly genre is all the more apt given the fact that painters through the ages have endeavoured to probe into the mysteries of their own selves by painting themselves (one thinks of Rembrandt and Van Gogh). See Nixon on this point, p. 153. Beckett’s letters therefore lend themselves to be read as ambivalent “self-interpretations” rather than conventional self-representations, the writer writing about himself and his writing. 4. Freud characterized ambivalence in terms of the simultaneous stress on contradictory aspects: contradiction, opposite, negation. In general, the term refers to the co-existence of love and hate in someone but differs from mixed feelings in that the two halves of the ambivalent feeling are interdependent. See, Ross Skelton (ed.), The Edinburgh International Encyclopedia of Psychoanalysis, Edinburgh, Edinburgh UP, 2006, p. 20. 5. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1941-1956, eds George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dans Gunn and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge and New-York: Cambridge UP, 2011, p. lxxiv. See, by the same editors and publisher, the other three volumes of Beckett’s correspondence: The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929-1940 (2009), The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1957-1965 (2014), The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1966-1989 (2016).

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6. “It is perhaps the fact of writing directly in English which is knotting me up. Horrible language, which I still know too well”, SB to Georges Duthuit, 28 June 1949, p. 170. 7. SB to Thomas MacGreevy, 18 March, 1948, p. 75. 8. SB to Georges Duthuit, 12 August 1948, p. 102. 9. SB to Georges Duthuit, 30 March or 6 April 1950, p. 195. 10. Commenting upon the irrationality and negativity of his first novels for Sighle Kennedy, Beckett explained that the real point of departure of any investigation into Murphy should be the concept of “nothing”, a “nothing” that appears in Democritus’s famous “Nothing is more than nothing”, (and later in Malone Dies) and in Guelincx’s statement, Ubi nihil vales, nihil veli [you will not want anything where you are worth nothing] (Disjecta. Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment by Samuel Beckett, ed. Ruby Cohn, New York: Grove Press, 1984, p. 113). 11. Shane Weller, A Taste for the Negative: Beckett and Nihilism, Oxford: Legenda, 2005, p. 45. 12. In that letter, Beckett had abstractly opposed a literature of the Unwort—“Unword” —to Joyce’s “apotheosis of the word” Beckett likening (his own) language to “a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it”. SB to Axel Kaun, 9 July 1937, The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929-1940, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, and Lois More Overbeck, (eds), Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009, p. 518. 13. Samuel Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit, London: Calder, 1970, p. 125. 14. Ibid., p. 103. 15. Ibid. Another important moment or stage in Beckett’s via negativa was the self- acclaimed vision he had in his mother’s room, towards the end of the war. There he realized the importance of accepting the dark side he had struggled to repress and use it as a source of creativity. In other terms, we could say he had formally decided not to conquer the negative, but to use it. 16. SB to Aidan Higgins, 8 February, 1952, The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1941-1959, p. 319. 17. Ibid., p. lxxiv. 18. Ibid., SB to Georges Duthuit, 2 August, 1948, p. 92. 19. SB to Georges Duthuit, 11 August, 1948, p. 97. 20. Ibid., p. 98. 21. Ibid. 22. SB to Georges Duthuit, 12 August 1948, pp. 102-103, (my emphasis). 23. Ibid., p. 103. 24. SB to Georges Duthuit, 13 August 1948, p. 104. 25. SB to Georges Duthuit, 9 March, 1949, p. 139. 26. Ibid. 27. SB to Bram Van Velde, 14 January 1949, p. 114. 28. SB to Georges Duthuit, 12 August 1948, p. 103. 29. In the course of one discussion, Beckett reminds Duthuit of an earlier “angry article” he had written criticizing modern Irish poets for their unawareness of “the vanished object”, “the only terrain accessible to the poet, (being) the no man’s land

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that he projects round himself, rather as the flame projects its zone of evaporation” (SB to Georges Duthuit, 2 March 1949, p. 131). 30. SB to Georges Duthuit, 9 March 1949, p. 140. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. (Beckett’s emphasis). The intertext here is Dante’s Inferno: in Canto 3, Dante describes the neutrals as people who failed to choose either good or evil in their lifetimes and so are condemned to exist in a kind of ante Inferno or a pre-Hell of a sort both Heaven and Hell having denied them entry. 33. Ibid., p. 141 (Beckett’s emphasis). 34. SB to Georges Duthuit, 2 March 1954, p. 473. 35. SB to Jérôme Lindon, 19 August 1952, p. 338. 36. Ibid., p. lxxii. 37. SB to Barney Rosset, 18 October 1954, p. 507. 38. SB to Mania Péron, 18 September 1951, p. 298. 39. SB to Georges Belmont, 28 September 1951, p. 298. 40. SB to Georges Duthuit, 10 September 1951, p. 295. 41. “Beautiful weather for the past few days. Orgy of digging, ground clearing rather” (SB to Georges Duthuit, 10 January, 1951, p. 224). 42. SB to Georges Duthuit, 3 January 1951, p. 217. 43. SB to Pamela Mitchel, 25 November 1953, p. 420. 44. SB to Barney Rosset, 1 December 1956, p. 681. 45. SB to Barney Rosset, 11 February 1954, p. 457. 46. SB to Jacoba Van Velde, 20 August 1954, p. 495. 47. SB to Barney Rosset, 21 August 1954, p. 497. Around this time, Beckett frequently quotes Leopardi’s: “can’t manage anything at the moment, not just the hope but the desire is dead” (SB to Patrick Waldberg, 29 June 1955, p. 536 (Beckett’s emphasis). 48. SB to Thomas MacGreevy, 4 January 1948, p. 71. 49. SB to Alan Schneider, 21 June 1956, p. 628. 50. SB to Georges Duthuit, 30 March 1950, p. 196. 51. SB to Georges Belmont, 8 August 1951, p. 279. 52. SB to Aidan Higgins, 8 February 1952, p. 319. 53. SB to Roger Blin, 29 January 1955, p. 518. 54. SB to Barney Rosset, 21 August 1954, p. 497. 55. SB to Pamela Mitchell, 18 August 1955, p. 540. 56. SB to Alan Schneider, 11 January 1956, p. 594. 57. SB to Pamela Mitchell, 31 October 1953, p. 413. 58. SB to Pamela Mitchell, 12 March 1956, p. 606 and p. 607. 59. SB to Barney Rosset, 23 January 1954, p. 448. 60. SB to Maria Péron, 18 September 1951, p. 298. 61. SB to Simone de Beauvoir, 25 September 1946, pp. 41-42, (my emphasis).

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62. S.E. Gontarski and Anthony Uhlmann (eds), Beckett after Beckett, Gainesville, University Press of Florida, 2006, pp. 142-143. 63. Ibid., p. 141. 64. Such resistance “can be viewed either as an aspect of the revulsion or as an aspect of the care and defence—or even perhaps of both”, writes Dan Gunn, The Letters of Samuel Beckett, p. lxxxii. 65. SB to Michel Polac, 23 January 1952, p. 316. 66. SB to Barney and Loly Rosset, 14 December 1953, p. 431. 67. SB to Roger Blin, 9 January 1953, p. 350. 68. SB to Alan Schneider, 27 December 1955. 69. SB to Barney Rosset, 18 October 1954, p. 507. 70. SB to Edouard Coester, 23 March 1954, p. 477. 71. SB to Edouard Coester, 11 March 1954, p. 476. Even if Coester will be finally turned down, we find Beckett, two years later, approving Goddard Lieberson’s gramophone recording of Godot which he considers to have been “done with success and discretion” (SB to Goddar Lieberson, 23 September 1956, p. 655). 72. SB to Georges Duthuit, 3 January 1951, pp. 218-219 (my emphasis). 73. SB to Carlheinz Caspari, 25 July 1953, p. 391. 74. Ibid. 75. “My weakness for the limping and my fear of the achieving” (SB to George Belmont, 8 August 1951, p. 279). 76. SB to Georges Duthuit, 10 September, 1951, p. 294. (In French: “miracles d’impuissance forcenée”). 77. Ibid. 78. SB to Georges Duthuit, 9 June 1949, p. 166.

ABSTRACTS

In this article devoted to Samuel Beckett’s second volume of letters (1941-1956), I trace the development of a highly ambivalent relationship between Beckett and his own work, of his growing commitment to a non-expressive art, and question Beckett’s use of his public posture of “diminished author-ity”.

Dans cet article consacré au deuxième volume de la correspondance de Samuel Beckett (1941-1956), j’explore l’évolution du rapport qu’entretient Beckett avec lui-même et avec son écriture, un rapport fortement marqué par l’ambivalence et par l’intérêt croissant qu’il montre pour une esthétique ancrée sur la non-relation. J’interroge également le fonctionnement de sa posture publique en tant qu’auteur dit ‘impotent’ ou ‘diminué’.

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INDEX

Keywords: Samuel Beckett, writing, letters, theater, art, literature, Dublin, Paris, Ussy, Godot, ambivalence, commitment, success, failure, revulsion, non-expression, inexpressiveness, posture, author Mots-clés: Samuel Beckett, écriture, lettres, théâtre, art, littérature, Dublin, Paris, Ussy, Godot, ambivalence, engagement, succès, échec, révulsion, non-expression, posture, auteur

AUTHOR

CIARAN ROSS Université de Strasbourg Ciaran Ross has been Professor of English Literature at the University of Strasbourg since 1999. He holds a BA degree from National University of Ireland Maynooth and an M.Litt. degree from Trinity College Dublin. His doctoral thesis was devoted to the work of Samuel Beckett and he is the author of two books on Beckett: Aux frontières du vide : Beckett - Une écriture sans mémoire ni désir (Rodopi, 2004) and Beckett’s Art of Absence: Rethinking the Void (Palgrave, 2011). He is also the editor of Sub-Versions: Trans-National Readings of Modern Irish Literature (Rodopi, 2010).

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“Random fragments of autobiography”: Objects of the Self in Derek Mahon’s poetry

Marion Naugrette-Fournier

1 Given the somewhat discreet and secretive nature of the Northern Irish contemporary poet Derek Mahon, the mere notion of self-portrait, or even of autobiography, might seem indeed remote, or at least very much out of tune with his poetic preoccupations. “Looking for Derek Mahon”, even in his own poems, is no small task, all the more so as he notoriously “maintains an almost Beckettian silence in relation to his work”, as Gerald Dawe has ironically pointed out in his article entitled “Derek Mahon: Keeping the Language Efficient”1 in 2006. Dawe even goes further in comparing the “shadowy presence” of Mahon in a photograph to the elusive profile of film director Alfred Hitchcock2. If Hitchcock was dubbed “the great director of filmic suspense”, likewise could not Derek Mahon be dubbed “the great director of poetic suspense”3? However, in 2012 Mahon published a body of selected prose essays, some of them being book reviews in the same vein as his other prose work, Journalism, previously published in 19964, but with a significant change indicated at the very beginning, in the Author’s Note: “It could even be read as random fragments of autobiography. As it took shape I realized it was starting to look like a book of memoirs.”5 This, to our knowledge, is the first time that the word “autobiography” has ever been mentioned by Mahon6, and even more so the unprecedented phrase “a book of memoirs”: is Selected Prose Mahon’s long-awaited autobiographical magnum opus? However, we may notice that these “random fragments of autobiography” are prose fragments, and not fragments written in verse, which is typical of the autobiographical genre itself, which tends to be mainly written in prose, as Philippe Lejeune defines it in his seminal work entitled L’Autobiographie en France: “ Récit rétrospectif en prose qu'une personne réelle fait de sa propre existence, lorsqu'elle met l'accent sur sa vie individuelle, en particulier sur l'histoire de sa personnalité”7. If we take a closer look at Selected Prose, and see if it matches Lejeune’s criteria for the autobiography as a genre, we might indeed concur with Mahon’s own words and infer from our study that we are indeed dealing with “fragments of autobiography”8 only, and

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not with a “proper” autobiography per se, that is according to Lejeune’s definition of autobiography with a “retrospective (…) narrative”, implying a certain length and continuity that are to be found in early examples of autobiography such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions in 1782.

“The Poetry Nonsense: A Docudrama”

2 However, this retrospective type of narrative is not to be found in the essays or book reviews making up the bulk of Mahon’s Selected Prose, except perhaps in the essay entitled “The Poetry Nonsense: A Docudrama”9, which is a kind of guidebook, or rather a literary voice-over commenting on the making-of of Derek Mahon: The Poetry Nonsense10, a documentary on Derek Mahon himself, which was fairly recently made in 2010 by producer and director Roger Greene. In this essay, Mahon plays the autobiographical game by the rules, casting a retrospective outlook on his life as he reviews the different places the team actually went to in order to shoot the documentary landmarks that have all played a crucial role in his life, such as Portrush, Co. Antrim, a famous seaside resort in Northern Ireland where Mahon lived at one point, and where he wrote several poems such as “The Chinese Restaurant in Portrush”, “North Wind: Portrush”, or “Craigvara House”11. The team also shoots in his hometown of Belfast and selects Mahonian key-spots such as Salisbury Avenue off the Antrim Road where he grew up, or the Harland & Wolff shipyard where his father used to work, and also where the Titanic was built, a place of both historical and symbolic significance for Mahon. What is interesting in this essay is the subtle merging of several autobiographical layers: the narrator explains the reason why certain locations were chosen and what they mean to him in terms of personal and intellectual development, but by doing so in the course of his narrative he also re-visits these very spots, as they appear not only in the documentary but also in his own memory, prompting him to ponder on more metaphysical reflections on old age and death, “chirpy thoughts” as he ironically calls them: These chirpy thoughts are prompted by certain reminiscential12 scenes in the docudrama: the West Strand in Portrush, where as a boy I found the skeleton of a seagull and understood, or thought I did, mortality; the Trinity cobbles where I knew so many beautiful people; the London places where for a few years Doreen [his ex-wife] and I, in a folie à deux, were hectic and thought ourselves happy13.

3 But, if this essay may be considered as the closest attempt at autobiographical writing that Mahon has ever produced, let us not forget that it is the film Derek Mahon: The Poetry Nonsense that is the pretext for these autobiographical considerations, and not the reverse, and autobiographical as it may be, the film remains what Mahon calls a “ docudrama”, that is a film based on true events, nonetheless presented in a dramatized form, thus implying that there might be gaps in the historical record, as Mahon himself acknowledges in his own essay: I’ve often considered, like many another, trying to write some kind of an autobiography; but we remember selectively, and there’s too much to be ashamed of. This film is the nearest I’ve got and, as I say, it’s only a fraction of the whole: a cover- up job, even. Nothing about parents, really; nothing about children; nothing about the bad times, of which there were many. I spent five years in New York: nothing, or almost nothing, about New York14.

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4 What is most striking in this sentence is Mahon’s obstinate emphasis on the fact that this only attempt at autobiographical writing is a failure, since “it’s only a fraction of the whole: a cover-up job, even”. In pointing to the partial and deceitful nature of autobiography (“some kind of an autobiography”), as well as of memory (“we remember selectively”), Mahon underlines the unreliability inherent to the autobiographical genre, which is also true of the memoir genre, as André Gide puts it in his own autobiography Si le grain ne meurt: “Les Mémoires ne sont jamais qu’à demi sincères, si grand que soit le souci de vérité: tout est toujours plus compliqué qu’on ne le dit. Peut-être approche-t-on de plus près la vérité dans le roman”15. What Gide suggests about the novel, i.e. that we come closer to the truth in a novel, might also be said of poetry, especially in Mahon’s case. If Mahon in Selected Prose and in the docudrama The Poetry Nonsense has failed to abide by the rules of the autobiographical pact Lejeune has described in Le Pacte Autobiographique16, he may have succeeded better in his poetry, shifting to what Lejeune calls “le pacte fantasmatique”, which is an indirect form of the autobiographical pact, inviting the reader to read novels not only as fictions relating to some truth of “human nature”, but also as fantasies revealing individual features 17. Considering this, we claim that Mahon reveals much more about himself in his poems than in the apparently more “realistic” docudrama and “autobiographical” essay mentioned earlier.

Self-portrait vs. autobiography: the prism of objects/ subjects

5 The “random fragments of autobiography” Mahon was alluding to in his Author’s Note in Selected Prose could in fact be much more adequately applied to the fragmentary nature of poetry, where autobiographical details might be hidden at random, that is without any chronological or pre-arranged order as in a proper autobiography.

6 Moreover, as Lejeune remarks in Le Pacte Autobiographique, one should be very careful when reading such seemingly lucid allegations on one’s own failures as an autobiographer:

Ces déclarations sont donc des ruses peut-être involontaires mais très efficaces: on échappe aux accusations de vanité et d’égocentrisme quand on se montre si lucide sur les limites et les insuffisances de son autobiographie; et personne ne s’aperçoit que, par le même mouvement, on étend au contraire le pacte autobiographique, sous une forme indirecte, à l’ensemble de ce qu’on a écrit18.

7 Mahon, by criticizing his own shortcomings as a prose autobiographer, implicitly invites us to give renewed scrutiny to his verse writings, which incidentally constitute the main bulk of his oeuvre, and to look for autobiographical symptoms hidden in the fragments of his poems, which, fragmentary though they are, can nevertheless be seen as part and parcel of Derek Mahon’s poetic self-portrait, rather than autobiography. This application of the term “self-portrait” to a body of poems, that is to say to a non- narrative structure, is also in keeping with Michel Beaujour’s influential definition of the self-portrait in his work entitled Miroirs d’encre: Rhétorique de l’autoportrait: “ L’autoportrait se distingue de l’autobiographie par l’absence d’un récit suivi”19. According to

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Beaujour, one of the main criteria for distinguishing between an autobiography and a self-portrait is precisely the distinction between what belongs to narration on the one side—that is autobiography—and what belongs to the realm of analogy, metaphor or even poetry on the other side 20, a distinction best exemplified in Michael Riffaterre’s definition apropos of Malraux’s Antimémoires:

Des mémoires peuvent suivre la chronologie ou la logique des évènements; ils sont alors narratifs. Les Antimémoires reposent sur l’analogie (la méthode de surimposition est en elle-même identique à la métaphore); ils sont donc poésie21.

8 Riffaterre’s definition also works perfectly well for poetry, in which analogy and metaphor are key components of the poetic writing process, so we might say that a self-portrait is perhaps best at home when written in verse, as it so heavily relies on analogy and metaphor, two devices essential to poetry.

9 If analogy plays such an important part in the elaboration of a self-portrait, we might then cast a new look on Derek Mahon’s poems, and especially on the objects that abound in his poetic world, objects that in light of Riffatterre’s definition we might consider as projected analogies of Mahon’s own self, as he seems to imply in his poem aptly entitled “The Peace of Objects”22: “Defined by objects made in our own image, / through them we live our lives”. Indeed, there seems to be a kind of mirror effect in the defining power linking objects to the self in Mahon’s poetry, where objects are man- made, “in our own image” as he puts it, but where at the same time objects hold a control over one’s own lives and mirror one’s own selves when they are made, as if there had been some sort of Faustian pact agreed between objects and their human makers. Thus objects would be endowed with the power of retracing the story and evolution of the self at different times, bearing the physical, intellectual, emotional and cultural imprint of the self that created them at that very moment, thus acquiring a privileged status as intimate witnesses to our inner stories, as Mahon describes it in “The Peace of Objects”: “They alone watch over our doubtful hours, / our lonely nights and days, / taking the grim colours / of our old dolours, / our unadventurous ways”23. “Taking the grim colours / of our old dolours”: these beautifully-crafted rhyming lines exemplify the exchange, and even more so the identification at work between objects and the poetic self. The identification is made audible to the reader’s ear with the triple end-of-the-line /ours/ rhyme “hours/colours/dolours” and the use of assonance /our/, as if the coloured patina of the endoloured self detached itself from its main body to impregnate objects with the corresponding colour, or mood.

The defining power of objects or objects shaping the Self/-ves

10 The object defines the self as much as the self defines the object, as Mahon implies in his poem entitled “A Bangor Requiem”, in which Mahon returns to the Northern Irish cottage of his mother after her death, making a list of her possessions, an inventory of her objects. The mother figure is associated with a consumerist society obsessed with the domination of objects, a society that might be termed as an “object-world” (un

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“monde-objet”), to use Roland Barthes’s own words in his article precisely entitled “Le monde-objet” 24, an “object-world” in which Mahon’s mother lived: […] for yours was an anxious time of nylon and bakelite, market-driven hysteria on every radio, your frantic kitsch decor designed for you by thick industrialists and twisted ministers […]25.

11 We do not choose our own objects, they are chosen for us. In this line Mahon criticizes the mass production of domestic artefacts which occurred in the twentieth century, those artefacts giving the impression of reality, but more deeply being just the props of a typical decor of the 1950s, hence the mention of “nylon” and “bakelite”. These objects corresponded to the preconceived image that “thick industrialists” (and perhaps also “twisted ministers”) had of the typical housewife at that time, and to the cultural horizon d’attente of those women, this cultural horizon being actually pre-manufactured for them. Thus we may see how Mahon casts a deprecatory glance on his own mother as an individual, who fitted perfectly into the consumerist expectations of her time, buying objects deprived of any singular “aura”, as Walter Benjamin26 would have it, so that those “kitsch” objects defined her socially and personally in a way that she was not aware of.

12 However, the choice remained hers and also set her apart: […] and yet with your wise monkeys and ‘Dresden’ figurines, your junk chinoiserie and coy pastoral scenes, you too were an artist, a rage-for-order freak setting against a man’s aesthetic of cars and golf your ornaments and other breakable stuff 27.

13 In a way, Mahon’s mother is an artist of sorts, even if the objects that define her are “junk”, “coy” and “breakable”: in purchasing these items she tried to order her domestic space as she saw it fit and proper, for it matched her own perceptions of, not a “Dutch interior”28 as Mahon terms it, but of a modest, Northern Irish Protestant interior of the fifties, displaying in its arrangement a typically Mahonian obsession: the “rage-for-order”, which also applies to him, and is a leitmotiv throughout his poetic work, and even the title of a poem, “Rage for Order”29. Through the lens of his mother’s portrait, through the description of her belongings, we may have a glimpse of Mahon’s own self-portrait hidden in this Dutch-Northern Irish interior which constitutes his matrix as a person and as a poet. Indeed, he sought to escape this maternal matrix, as he indicates in his 2000 interview with Eamon Grennan in the Paris Review: My mother stopped working when she got married. That’s what they did then. She became a housewife. She had only her husband and an infant to look after, but she became a housewife and very house-proud in the obsessive way that a woman in that position is. It’s almost a question of what else she had to do? She’d keep dusting and keep everything as bright as a new penny. Of course, this was a bit of a strain on the child, an irritant. In fact, with my mother, no harm to her, I think it was pathological. But since little boys are usually rougher than house-proud mothers, there were times I would deliberately do things to be infuriating—knock over a cup or something30.

14 Mahon’s Oedipus complex with his mother focuses on objects and the way to handle them, either to take care of them in an obsessive manner, or to destroy them in as obsessive a manner as the mother’s.

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15 “House-proud”: the term rings a bell, and reminds us of another Oedipian poem by Mahon, “Courtyards in Delft”31, influenced by Pieter de Hooch’s famous painting The Courtyard of a House in Delft (1658): Oblique light on the trite, on brick and tile— Immaculate masonry, and everywhere that Water tap, that broom and wooden pail To keep it so. House-proud, the wives Of artisans pursue their thrifty lives Among scrubbed yards, modest but adequate32.

16 In these opening lines, what catches the eye of the reader (or spectator, as it is an ekphrastic poem) is the spate of adjectives or nouns denoting cleanliness: “immaculate”, “water tap”, “that broom and wooden pail”. This cleanliness is also meant as a moral cleanliness, as the phrase goes: “cleanliness is next to godliness”, incarnating what Tzvetan Todorov calls “la valeur attachée à la vie-dans-le-monde (“intramondaine”), la vie séculière”33, which is characteristic of the 17th century protestant Dutch society and is consequently embodied in 17th century Dutch paintings, such as Pieter de Hooch’s painting The Courtyard of a House in Delft.

17 In the final stanza of the poem, Mahon discloses himself when the lyrical “I” introduced in the painting claims his memory of the very special light radiating in the room, superimposing the scene in the painting and the vivid memory of another interior, craftily confusing the two. This is indeed the most faithful—if fragmentary—self- portrait Mahon has probably ever written: I lived there as a boy and know the coal Glittering in its shed, late-afternoon Lambency informing the deal table, The ceiling cradled in a radiant spoon. I must be lying low in a room there, A strange child with a taste for verse […]34.

18 Indeed, we might well surmise that the little child the woman holds by the hand in De Hooch’s painting is Mahon as a boy, although it rather looks like a little girl. Moreover, the speaker in the poem locates himself inside the house (“I must be lying low in a room there”), which we cannot see in the painting but can only imagine—this interior might as well be in another Dutch painting for all we know, as certain details like “the deal table” seem to indicate. Objects overwhelm the self-portraitical space, and help picturing Mahon’s own image in lieu of having a more conventional, physical or intellectual depiction of himself, since Mahon’s ekphrastic and self-portraitical poem refers to a painting from which he is absent, since he is inside “the” house (it might be the house we see in this painting or another, it is an archetype of a house). It is almost as if his own identity were absorbed in/by the objects that surrounded him, as he remarks in the Paris Review interview: I think it was important that I was an only child, an only child whose best friends were the objects I’ve been talking about. […]. Since there wasn’t any hurly-burly of siblings, I had time for the eye to dwell on things, for the brain to dream about things. I could spend an afternoon happily staring. […]. I’d see other things besides, like a coal delivery, the sort of pictorial qualities of coal. That kind of thing—the running of cold water from a kitchen tap, the light. I had time to dwell on these things35.

19 The objects present in De Hooch’s painting and in Mahon’s poem are the true “objects of the self”, the self’s “best friends” but also his poetic “alter egos”, acting as the

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synecdoches of the primordial maternal house, the “alma mater” in the old sense of the word, which in “A Bangor Requiem” he compares to the cavern in Plato’s Republic: The figure in the Republic returns to the cave, a Dutch interior where cloud-shadows move, to examine the intimate spaces, chest and drawer, the lavender in the linen, the savings book, the kitchen table silent with nobody there36.

20 “To examine the intimate spaces, chest and drawer”: the poet has come back to examine, to penetrate the maternal space embodied by the “chest and drawer”, which are emblematic of what Gaston Bachelard in La Poétique de l’espace calls “de véritables organes de la vie psychologique secrète”:

L’armoire et ses rayons, le secrétaire et ses tiroirs, le coffre et son double fond sont de véritables organes de la vie psychologique secrète. Sans ces “objets” et quelques autres aussi valorisés, notre vie intime manquerait de modèle d’intimité. Ce sont des objets mixtes, des objets-sujets. Ils ont, comme nous, par nous, pour nous, une intimité37.

21 These objects define our inner mental space and participate to what Michel Beaujour with Jacques Borel (speaking of Du Bellay) names “the function of the house as a system for the places of memory”, being also “a global metaphor likely to structure a self-portrait” 38.

22 Thus we might conclude that, although Mahon returns to the maternal “cave” to deal with his own self, having in between realized the deceitful nature of the maternal cave as the prisoner who has escaped from the cave in Plato’s Republic did, he remains unable to detach himself from the shaping power that objects seem to hold on him in terms of identity, even if these objects may be only the “shapes” of real things, as in Plato’s allegory of the cave. When Mahon seeks to draw a portrait of himself, he somehow feels compelled to do so through the prism of objects, as the poem “The Bicycle” in his series of poems entitled “Autobiographies” (which actually bear more resemblance to miniature self-portraits) would seem to prove, where the lyrical “I” becomes “half / human, half bike, my life / A series of dips and ridges”39. Of course, if the reader looks for a proper autobiography and not for these fragmentary object portraits of the self, he might agree with Derek Mahon’s father who kept asking him the following question: “When are you going to give up the poetry nonsense?”40 An embarrassing question to which Mahon finally answered in Selected Prose in 2012: “I can answer him now, in my seventieth year, by saying I’ve finally put it behind me or very nearly. The task is done, and now I can turn to prose with an easy mind. An easy mind? ”41. As usual, one needs to be very careful with this kind of typically Mahonian allegations, especially when his attempt to write “random fragments of autobiography” in prose turns out to be unreliable. If we want to look for a more faithful self-portrait of both the poet and person Derek Mahon, we need on the contrary to go back to the “poetry nonsense”, look behind appearances and see what or who lies hidden behind the objects of the self, behind that “epiphanic bike”42.

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NOTES

1. Gerald Dawe, “Derek Mahon: Keeping the Language Efficient”, Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 21 (2006), p. 16. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Derek Mahon, Journalism, Oldcastle, The Gallery Press, 1996. 5. Derek Mahon, Selected Prose, Oldcastle, The Gallery Press, 2012, p. 11. 6. Except for his series of poems entitled “Autobiographies” (Collected Poems, Oldcastle, The Gallery Press, 1999, pp. 91-94). 7. Philippe Lejeune, L’Autobiographie en France (1971), Paris, Armand Colin, 1998, p. 14. 8. Italics mine. 9. Derek Mahon, “The Poetry Nonsense: A Docudrama”, in Derek Mahon, Selected Prose, Oldcastle, The Gallery Press, 2012, pp. 24-33. 10. “Derek Mahon: the Poetry Nonsense” (2009) was funded by the Irish Film Board and the Arts Council under the ‘Documenting the Art’ series. It was produced and directed by Roger Greene of Caranna Productions, and Donald Taylor Black was the production’s Executive Producer. 11. These three poems are to be found in Mahon’s Collected Poems (Oldcastle, The Gallery Press, 1999), p. 97, p. 100 and p. 134. One could also add another crucial poem featuring the same spots, such as Portrush, Portstewart, or Portballintrae: “The Sea in Winter”, a poem that evinces different strategies at work as far as self-portrayal is concerned (Collected Poems, Oldcastle, The Gallery Press, 1999, pp. 115-117). 12. Italics mine. 13. Derek Mahon, “The Poetry Nonsense: A Docudrama”, in Derek Mahon, Selected Prose, Oldcastle, The Gallery Press, 2012, pp. 30-31. 14. Ibid., p. 31. Italics mine. 15. André Gide, Si le grain ne meurt, Paris, Gallimard, coll. « Folio », 1972, p. 278. 16. Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique, Paris, Seuil, Poétique, 1975, 1996. 17. Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique, Paris, Seuil, Poétique, 1975, 1996, p. 42. 18. Ibid. 19. Michel Beaujour, Miroirs d’encre : Rhétorique de l’autoportrait, Paris, Seuil, Poétique, 1980, p. 8. 20. Ibid., p. 9. 21. Michael Riffaterre, Essais de stylistique structurale, Paris, Flammarion, 1971, p. 296. 22. Derek Mahon, “The Peace of Objects”, in Derek Mahon, Raw Material, Oldcastle, The Gallery Press, 2011, p. 64. 23. Ibid. 24. Roland Barthes, “Le monde-objet”, in Essais Critiques, Paris, Editions du Seuil, coll. Tel Quel, 1964, pp. 19-28.

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25. Derek Mahon, “A Bangor Requiem”, in Derek Mahon, Collected Poems, Oldcastle, The Gallery Press, 1999, p. 260. 26. Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility (1936). 27. Derek Mahon, “A Bangor Requiem”, op. cit., p. 260. Italics mine. 28. Ibid. 29. Derek Mahon, “Rage for Order”, New Collected Poems, Oldcastle, The Gallery Press, 2011, p. 47. 30. Interview with Eamon Grennan, “Derek Mahon: The Art of Poetry No. 82”, Paris Review (Spring 2000), p. 151. Italics mine. 31. Derek Mahon, “Courtyards in Delft”, in Derek Mahon, New Collected Poems, Oldcastle, The Gallery Press, 2011, pp. 96-97. 32. Ibid., p. 96. Italics mine. 33. Tzvetan Todorov, Eloge du quotidien : Essai sur la peinture hollandaise du XVIIe siècle, Paris, Editions Adam Biro, 1993 ; Editions du Seuil, 1997, p. 29. 34. Derek Mahon, “Courtyards in Delft”, op. cit., pp. 96-97. Italics mine. 35. Interview with Eamon Grennan, “Derek Mahon: The Art of Poetry No. 82”, Paris Review (Spring 2000), p. 151. Italics mine. 36. Derek Mahon, “A Bangor Requiem”, in Derek Mahon, Collected Poems, op. cit., p. 260. 37. Gaston Bachelard, La Poétique de l’espace, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1957, p. 83. Italics mine. 38. Michel Beaujour, Miroirs d’encre : Rhétorique de l’autoportrait, Paris, Seuil, Poétique, 1980, p. 106. Italics mine. 39. Derek Mahon, “The Bicycle” (in “Autobiographies”), in Derek Mahon, Collected Poems, Oldcastle, The Gallery Press, 1999, p. 94. 40. Derek Mahon, “The Poetry Nonsense: A Docudrama”, in Selected Prose, Oldcastle, The Gallery Press, 2012, p. 24. Italics mine. 41. Ibid. Italics mine. 42. Interview with Eamon Grennan, “Derek Mahon: The Art of Poetry No. 82”, Paris Review (Spring 2000), p. 151.

ABSTRACTS

Mahon, as a poet and as a person, has always been reluctant to play the autobiographical game, maybe due to the reticence emblematic of Northern Irish poets wishing their poetry not to be identified with a ‘poetry of the Troubles’. Indeed, even when Mahon refers to the Troubles in his poetry, it is often through the prism of objects, as if his own opinions on the conflict were better voiced by the silent eloquence of objects. Is it due to the fact that one can project oneself into objects quite easily, objects providing thus the possibility of new identities and at the same time acting as smokescreens for one’s own self?

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We might even go further and ask ourselves whether Mahon the poet sees himself as an object too, and whether in the end the multiple objects littering his poetry might not be considered as the poetic paraphernalia of the Self/-ves?

Mahon, en tant que poète mais aussi en tant que personne, s’est toujours montré réticent à l’idée de s’essayer au « jeu autobiographique », peut-être en raison de cette réticence caractéristique de certains poètes nord-irlandais qui ne souhaitent pas que leur poésie soit rangée dans la catégorie de « poésie des Troubles ». En effet, même lorsque Mahon fait allusion aux Troubles dans sa poésie, il passe de préférence par le prisme des objets, comme si ses propres opinions sur le conflit s’exprimaient d’autant mieux à travers la silencieuse éloquence des objets. Serait-ce parce qu’il est somme toute assez facile de se projeter soi-même à travers les objets, qui permettraient alors d’endosser une nouvelle identité (voire plusieurs), et ainsi de dissimuler son propre Moi, à l’instar de paravents ? Nous pourrions alors pousser la question un peu plus loin, et émettre l’hypothèse suivante : Mahon le poète ne se considérerait-il pas lui-même comme un objet, et dans ce cas pourrait-on admettre que les multiples objets qui jonchent sa poésie ne seraient autres que la panoplie poétique du Je lyrique et de ses avatars ?

INDEX

Mots-clés: autobiographie, autoportrait, objets, sujets, alter egos Keywords: autobiography, self-portrait, objects, subjects, alter egos

AUTHOR

MARION NAUGRETTE-FOURNIER Université Paris 3 – Sorbonne. Marion Naugrette-Fournier est une ancienne élève de l’Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris (Ulm).Depuis 2016, elle est maître de conférences en traduction et traductologie dans le département d’études anglophones de l’Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3.En 2015 elle a soutenu sa thèse en études irlandaises à l’Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3 sous la direction de Carle Bonafous-Murat, sur le sujet suivant : « Pour une Nouvelle Histoire des Objets : Réévaluation, Classement et Recyclage dans l’œuvre poétique de Derek Mahon ».En 2017 elle a obtenu le prix de thèse de la Fondation Irlandaise pour son travail de doctorat. Auteur de plusieurs articles sur la poésie irlandaise contemporaine, elle est également traductrice et a traduit de nombreux poèmes de langue anglaise et gaélique, notamment dans l’anthologie bilingue Femmes d'Irlande en poésie: 1973-2013 (éditions Caractères, 2013). En 2015 elle a reçu le prix de traduction de l’EFACIS (European Federation of Associations and Centres of Irish Studies) pour ses traductions de poèmes de Yeats, dans le cadre du « Yeats Reborn Project » lancé par l’EFACIS. Ses traductions des poèmes de Yeats ont été publiées en 2015 dans l’ouvrage intitulé Yeats Reborn aux éditions Peeters de Leuven, mais également sur le le site du Yeats Reborn Project (www.yeatsreborn.eu). En 2010-2011 elle a également enseigné à Trinity College, Dublin en tant que lectrice dans le département de français.

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Paul Durcan’s Self-Portraits as Dialogues

Cathy Roche-Liger

1 One of the hallmarks of Paul Durcan’s aesthetics is hybridity. This contemporary Irish poet refuses categories between the different forms of art and writes an intermedial poetry in which the pictorial dimension is prominent. His love for painting is visible in his very first poem (unpublished), a poem about Vincent Van Gogh, triggered by a revelation during a stay in France when he was a teenager, in 1960. Referring to his discovery of la Pointe du Raz, and indicating a pictorial way of looking at the world, he later declared: “I felt that all I was looking at had been created by Vincent Van Gogh”1. In the preface to his 1991 ekphrastic book inspired by the collection of the National Gallery of Ireland, Crazy About Women (below-mentioned CAW), he wrote: An artist such as myself with the two spouses of poetry and picture-making is not looked upon favourably by the chaperones of art. […] Art is not a prison with poetry in one cell, picture-making in another cell and so on. […] The challenge of art is to be inclusive and Crazy About Women, born out of a lifetime’s romance with the National Gallery of Ireland, is my attempt to be so inclusive as to make the intercourse between what is painted and what is written as reciprocal as it is inevitable2.

2 Such words indicate both his passion and an intimate conception of ekphrasis as a dialogue, a real exchange and interaction between the verbal and the visual. The majority of the many ekphraseis present throughout his work have been inspired by portraits and self-portraits, thus revealing a special interest in this genre traditionally centred on the “(re)presentation” of a human person, and in particular of his face3. The poet has also transformed the still-life and landscapes into portraits and/or self- portraits4. He has created a large and varied gallery of portraits – of strangers, friends and loved ones – and has depicted himself repeatedly. What kind of mirrors does he use to look at himself and create self-portraits? How does he both magnify himself and expose his imperfections and frailty in his self-portraits while playing with the genre itself? How does he create a dialogue between word and image, between portraits and self-portraits, between his representations and those of others or other paintings, and how does he generate new visions through self-portrayal? To answer these questions,

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this essay will first analyze the double paradoxical movement of magnification and self- exposure. It will then examine how self-portrayal is conceived as a dialogue, further blurring the line between portrait and self-portrait.

Paul Durcan’s self-portraits between whimsical magnification and exposure

3 Throughout his work, Durcan has represented himself many times. His self-portraits are either presented as such as in “Self-Portrait, Nude with Steering Wheel”, or as part of poems as in “The Lamb in the Oven”, or superimposed upon portraits of others and upon pictorial works of art as in ekphraseis such as “The Vision of Saint Hubert (after Brueghel)”5. Though not all his self-depictions may be considered as pictorial, it is often the case. Most are both textual and pictorial, even if the degree of their pictorial saturation can vary, ranging from mere pictorial references or fleeting “painterly effects”—via his framing by the structure of a door or to his reflection in a mirror for instance as in “A Day in the Cave” or “October Early Morning Haircut”6—to minimal and full ekphraseis of invented or transformed works of art or of photographs7. In “Self- Portrait ’95”8 for example, the only pictorial element is the title itself, through the reference to the painting genre. Here, the poet expresses his sense of alienation: Paul Durcan would try the patience of the Queen of Tonga When he was in Copacabana he was homesick for Annaghmakerrig; When he got back to Annaghmakerrig He was homesick for Copacabana.

4 He plays with the reference both to the song by Edmundo Ros and to the historical event it relates, through which the Queen of Tonga (1900–1965) brought her country to international attention when she attended the 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in London. The poet gives voice to his own paradoxical feelings towards Ireland, while indirectly describing himself as the Irish version of this queen. Moreover, Tonga’s Queen Sälote wrote poetry and songs, contributing to the preservation and creative use of the Tongan language. By playing with the multiple pictorial, musical or historical references suggested through this four-line condensed poem, the apparently self- deprecating self-portrait turns out to be a way to put into relief his own creative whimsical abilities. Finally, while underlining his complex feelings towards his native land, he reasserts his Irishness9. This deceptively simple and straightforward poem turns out to be a multilayered self-portrait exemplifying the complexity both of the poet and of the genre along with the games on visions implied and at stake when the artist represents himself. Perceiving this complexity requires close scrutiny, reminiscent of such that is necessary to the task of self-portrayal itself. It reminds us that it is not a truth in which one may place blind trust, but the way the poet wishes to stage himself; it reminds us too that (self-)portrayal is an intimate process and act which may work as a (public) statement as well as a shared intimacy.

5 For Jean-Luc Nancy, each portrait is a self-portrait inasmuch as it involves and fulfils a relation to a self, to oneself10. But for him, the adage attributed to Cosimo de Medici “ ogni pittore dipinge sè” (“every painter paints himself”) cannot be separated from its opposite: “every self-portrait is first of all a portrait”. It “is not the representation of a self: each time it is the enactment of the subjectivity or of the being-oneself in itself […] It is the implementation of exposure, that is to say of our exposure” 11. Moreover, to him,

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showing the outside aspect of someone and diving inside someone are both opposite and complementary sides in portraits12. He goes further and indicates that “in his portrait […] the other retreats. He retreats while showing himself”13. Though this paradox cannot be resolved, and a part of irrepresentability will always remain, to some extent, a painted portrait shows the inner self in a way that cannot be shown in another way. The aim of the portrait or of the self-portrait is an “unveiling” that would “bring the self out of the painting” on the condition that it would “bring to light” the core, “the structure of the subject”; “painting or representing is therefore no longer reproducing, not even revealing, but producing the exposed-subject”14. Durcan plays with this idea of portrayal in particular, or pictorial representation in general as an “unveiling” enabling the viewer to discover the true self of the persons represented. He whimsically expresses this idea in his ekphraseis of both “Sleeping Nude, after Sarah Longley” and “A Portrait of the Artist’s Wife / A Self-Portrait”, after William Leech, where the viewer could, but does not, discover this reality: “If you were to glance up now / […] You would see me as I am”15. Though Durcan plays with that notion, he is also aware of how powerful the act of (self-)portrayal can be. Nonetheless, he does not choose mimesis to show himself as he is but transforms himself to better disclose an inner truth that would or could otherwise stay hidden. The movement implied by these transformations is also a way of exemplifying this unveiling through self- representation as a process and enabling the reader to witness it.

6 To do so, he can metamorphose himself, for example turning himself into an animal to expose his shortcomings16. In “The Lamb in the Oven” for instance, he describes Cita nursing a lamb and his resulting feelings of “jealousy” by depicting himself as an insect through a painterly effect created by his framing by a window: At the kitchen window my charcoal jowls Peeping in, grinding their molars; […] At the windowpane of jealousy I woo you […]17

7 The mirror he uses – here a window – is not mimetic, reflecting external features resembling his outer appearance, but one displaying an image corresponding to an inner feeling or truth – here jealousy – and bringing it to light. He does not look at himself in it, but the metamorphosed self through which he unveils himself appears when he is looking through it, “Peeping in”, looking inside the room and into himself. As a consequence, the mirror itself is transformed; it is no longer a mere “kitchen window” but becomes “the windowpane of jealousy” as if it had been contaminated by the poet’s feeling.

8 The mirror he uses for self-examinatory purposes and to bring out an inner truth can also be that of painting. His ekphrasis “The Holy Family With St John”18 opens with the poet admiring the painting attributed to Granacci, and “[reveling]” in it19. This vision of the quintessential family reveals, by way of contrast, his own loneliness. It triggers the depiction of himself as a man “without a family”, and leads to his transformation into a leaf to highlight this loneliness. He becomes “– a leaf in driftwood –“20. This condensed self-portrait of the lonely poet as a leaf appears as a painterly effect framed by the dashes which separate it from the rest of the stanza.

9 Furthermore, the images of others (re)presented in paintings can work as mirrors in which he can recognize (a part of) himself. In consequence, he can superimpose himself onto the representations of other people. This appropriation of the painting can lead to a reversal or a change of the meaning of the painting. In his ekphrasis entitled “The Vision of Saint Hubert”, he becomes the stag of the painting by Brueghel and Rubens to

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represent his physical and mental urge to possess his former wife again. Moreover, the hunting hounds of the painting become the symbol of the poet’s self-pity: “I gathered round me all my Dogs of Self-Pity, / Long, lean, Bloodhounds of Self-Pity”21. He plays with the process of identification with the painting, abolishes the distance separating him from the work of art, projects himself onto it, and transforms the sense of the vision conveyed by the painting. The “intercourse”22, the dialogue with the work of art, and the ekphrastic process of interaction bring forth his own revelation: that he must leave Nessa alone and love her forever but yet from a distance.

10 In addition, the mirror he uses to look at and into himself can be the eyes of other people, the way they look at him, how they describe and consider him. In confronting his own self-portrayal with the perceptions of others, both positive and negative points of view can coexist, and create a double paradoxical movement in poems such as “Self- Portrait, Nude with Steering Wheel” and “Exterior with Plant, Reflection Listening, after Lucian Freud”, an ekphrasis of Interior with Plant, Reflection Listening (Self-Portrait)23.

11 In “Self-Portrait, Nude with Steering Wheel”, the general movement is one of self- exposure and self-deprivation. This movement is built through the contrast between the mirror offered by the reported words of the poet’s lover, and the mirror in which he looks at himself to depict himself. Here, Durcan plays with the idea according to which we become the reflection sent back to us by others. With self-derision, he systematically takes the counterpart of his lover’s positive point of view: I am forty-five and do not Know how to drive a car – And you tell me I am cultured. […] Forty-five years sitting in the passenger seat With my hands folded primly in my lap – And you think I am liberated. Forty-five years getting in and out of cars And I do not know where the dipstick is – And you tell me that I am a superb lover24.

12 He eroticizes the car, playing with sexual innuendo, to further imply he is a clumsy inhibited lover. The process of self-deprivation leads him to depict himself naked through the minimal ekphrasis that concludes the poem and echoes its title: “Nude, with a steering wheel in my hands25”. Durcan symbolically and literally discloses himself through the poetical dialogue with his lover, as if this dialogue were sexual foreplay leading to his undressing. His nudity echoes and mimics the process of disclosure which self-portrayal implies, or can be perceived as the “the implementation of exposure”, to put it in Nancy’s words26. Though he be naked, he is nonetheless holding a wheel, which symbolizes what remains of his manliness, as well as of his ability to direct and control his life. Moreover, although he takes the counterpart of his lover’s positive view, such a representation still appears on the page.

13 In “Exterior with Plant, Reflection Listening, after Lucian Freud”27, the poet plays with expressions of admiration. His choice of setting his poem “Across the street from Oisín Kelly sculpture of Larkin” is a way of introducing a sculptural element of homage and elegy that foreshows his ekphrasis of “the most elegiac photograph ever taken of my mother”. This also helps him turn his poem into a monument to her memory28. In contrast with these artistic forms of appraisal, the poet introduces a meeting in the street with a man ironically described as “self-righteous”. The latter’s direct speech enables the poet to present himself in both a positive and a negative way that makes him different from the figures deserving only admiration: “‘My wife and daughters are admirers of yours / But I have to tell you that I am not / An admirer of yours.’” In that sense, it makes him a mixture of people comprising people like his mother but also

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people considered or portrayed in a negative, critical way, like his father who is satirically associated with Mussolini and Fascism through his mother’s supposedly reported speech: “Telling me how Daddy played in 1938 / A game of golf with Mussolini in Milan / In the Garden of Fascism Golf Club.” Nevertheless, the double perspective offered by the passer-by is replaced with the final vision of the poet’s image reflected in the “passenger window” of a car, even if the self-portrait is not the central element which is the ekphrasis of the photographic portrait glorifying his mother: I take out my pocket camera and snap her And when I get back the print from the camera shop It is the most elegiac photograph ever taken of my mother, A face on the wind, all epic and ephemera, And over her shoulder you can see a man with a pocket camera, His reflection, In the passenger window of a passing Nissan Bluebird29.

14 This self-portrayal is presented as the unintentional result of chance since the mirror in which his image appears is not an intended device but the “passenger window”, not even the windscreen, of a “passing” car (my italics). Through this reflection echoing that of Lucian Freud in his self-portrait, Durcan associates himself with the painter, but also with his “glamorous”30 mother since he includes himself in her photographic portrait. The fact that he does not state that it is his reflection but that of “a man with a pocket camera” contributes to further the merging in L. Freud’s image. What could first appear as a reflection in a sort of concave mirror, giving more importance to everything but him, transpires to be a way of magnifying himself. Isolated on a line, the element “His reflection” is put into relief, which indicates how important this “reflection” really is. But whimsically, the poet chooses to delay the discovery of this other version of himself by belatedly noticing his own presence in the photograph.

15 Therefore, in “Exterior with Plant, Reflection Listening, after Lucian Freud31”, the poet turns the ekphrasis of L. Freud’s self-portrait into a succession of portraits like that of his mother or of people in the street, before finally including his own self-portrait in the description of his mother’s photographic portrait. L. Freud’s self-portrait is deconstructed and reconstructed in an indirect manner in this non-mimetic ekphrasis through “a bunch of flowers” echoing the ubiquitous plant in the painting at the beginning of the poem, through the man heard in the street by the poet, and through the poet’s reflection in the window of the car at the end. This intertwining of portraits and self-portraits corresponds to a tendency in Durcan’s work where he frequently blurs the already unclear line separating portraits and self-portraits. In consequence, he plays with the notion of vision and with the (re)presentation of a self. He establishes a dialogue between himself and others: between his own perception and that of others, between his own representation, characteristics and features, and those painted by others. To better highlight the importance of such a tendency, this article will now analyze further this blurring of the distinction between portraits and self-portraits. It will mainly focus on the intertwining of ekphrasis and self-portrayal to note how Durcan creates a playful, fruitful dialogue through words and between words and image. It will argue that such a process can be considered as a form of connection sought by the poet.

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Self-portrayal as a dialogue further blurring the line between portrait and self-portrait

16 In line with his rejection of the separation between the different forms of art32, Durcan generates generic indeterminacy and voluntarily blurs the already thin and permeable frontier between portraits and self-portraits. He entitles poems which are portraits “self-portraits” as “Self-Portrait as an Irish Jew”33 which is the poet’s portrait of Thomas Joyce, the father of the painter Mark Joyce, Durcan’s son-in-law. Conversely, he transforms portraits or self-portraits of other people into a self-portrait by superimposing his image onto the portraits or self-portraits of others. In “The Repentant Peter, after Francisco de Goya”34, Durcan transposes the representation of the saint into a self-portrait through which he depicts himself in a slightly grotesque manner, underlining his vulnerability: Last thing I do before getting into bed Is kneel down beside bed In my Marks & Spencer’s women’s pyjamas, Which I purchased thinking they were men’s pyjamas, A womanless man on a shopping spree35.

17 This foreshadows the final vision in which his frailty is emphasized by the repetitions: You taught me that like you I am destitute animal, Frailer Than plump lamb under candlelit chestnut, Frailer Than mother cat wheezing in cartwheel, Frailer Than galaxies of geese, And that behind all my sanctimonious lechery, Behind all my petty pleading, Behind all my hysterical beseeching, It is all night, with only daylight above it36.

18 The dialogue he creates with the work of art through the ekphrastic poem is complexified by other forms of exchange: an argument with Nessa, his former wife, but most of all former relationships and a new dialogue through poetry with his dead father37. This dialogue also has a decidedly accusatory ring to it38 and can be considered as the way Durcan recognizes past trauma, present consequences, and tries to come to terms with it through writing. Durcan intertwines here different visions and perspectives: Nessa and his Dad’s points of view, the way he perceives himself, his father, and the representation of Saint Peter by Goya. He blurs the frontiers between the pictorial representation of another self, self-portrayal, and the perception of himself by other people.

19 In some cases, it is even impossible to draw a distinction between portrait and self- portrait, the representation of another being or of himself. In “Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, after Rembrandt”39 for instance, in the first stanza, it is impossible to determine whether the poet makes Rembrandt’s representation of Aristotle talk or if he talks to Homer in identifying with the Aristotle of the painting. Afterwards, nonetheless, the identification appears more clearly, when he touches the bust of Homer and seems to become Aristotle. This identification and dialogue with the work of art lead to an introspection that causes him to flee and fall. Because Durcan offers the reader his personal view of the works of art, this can lead to such an interaction that the line between ekphrasis of the work of art and self-portrayal is blurred. The painting has a strong impact on the poet that he makes the reader witness through his poem, but his words consequently also modifies the reader’s perception of the work of art. This is an exemplification of the dialogue wished by the poet and expressed in the preface of CAW, that is to say of his “attempt to be so inclusive as to make the

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intercourse between what is painted and what is written as reciprocal as it is inevitable”40.

20 Likewise, in “The Orientalist, after Kitaj”41, the ekphrasis of R. B. Kitaj’s self-portrait as an expatriate42, the line between ekphrasis of a self-portrait and self-portrayal is totally blurred. Here, Durcan’s conception of both self-portrayal and ekphrasis as dialogues is expressed by the form of the poem itself. In it, two voices echoing, questioning and answering one another can be heard. The second voice, transcribed in italics in each distich, appears as a thought or a deformed echo of the first. This mimics the act of self- portrayal as a process of self-contemplation through which one questions and explores oneself. This process also enables the poet to symbolize his dialogue with R. B. Kitaj, a painter he admires and whose exhibition “The Artist’s Eye” was the inspiration behind his three ekphrastic collections CAW, GMYH, and WWE43. The Ringsend Hermit44. The Ringsend Hermit? And Orientalist. And what? The Orientalist. The Orientalist45.

21 Here, the poet includes his self-portrait through the minimal ekphrasis composed by the title-effect “The Ringsend Hermit”. Through these words, the reader can picture the poet in front of “The Orientalist” by Kitaj, progressively merging through words in this painting to become “The Orientalist”, just as Kitaj did through his painting. But he can also imagine Durcan recognizing Kitaj as himself, “The Ringsend Hermit”, as another self-portrait he could have painted of himself, before depicting him again as “The Orientalist”. With the echo effects, Durcan creates a questioning that generates multiple visions but in every case, he magnifies himself by associating himself with R.B. Kitaj.

22 This conception of self-portrayal as a dialogue both with oneself and with others also appears in the ekphrasis of a painting by Moyra Barry entitled “Self-Portrait in the Artist Studio”46 where the artist mentally connects with an old Master, namely Vincent Van Gogh, while painting her self-portrait. It is presented as a “ritual” leading both to self-knowledge and exposure, but also as an offering when she invites the figure of the Father, that of the Creator, and the viewer along with Him, to share her essence. […] I […] Sat to myself To perform the ritual of the self-portrait Calling to mind Vincent in Provence, I performed it as a chanson to my studio […] But also as a chanson to my head, Not evading my cowlike eyes, my rosebud mouth, Plucking the fragility of my skull. Father, what you must do Is to cup my skull in your hands, In your three hands, And drink from it, Drink from my skull Until you have drunk me To the dregs Of my cerebral juices. You will know, Consumed by my grief, By my humour, The angostura bitters of daughterdom47.

23 Self-portraits in general can often be a way for artists to state something about what creation is and to show the process of creation, as the painter painting himself. Durcan chooses to do so here but through the ekphrasis of the self-portrait of another person. He underlines the violence of such an act too by the sacrificial dimension he confers on this ritual. Similarly, in “Casa Mariana Trauma”, Durcan voices how traumatic the process of creation can be through the portrayal of a woman who symbolises the Artist. As a fusion between a painter and a poet, this artist could be seen as an indirect way for Durcan to represent himself: She is wringing locutions, wringing shrunken, Faded, threadbare words To squeeze oil paint out of tubes of language: The trauma of the painter as the poet.48

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24 The poet also expresses the mythopoeic vision of art as a source of isolation for artists in “Portrait of the Artist49” or in ekphraseis of works of art representing other artists such as “Supper Time” or “Thomas Moore In His Study At Sloperton Cottage”50. This aspect is seen too in “St Galganus” when he describes the lack of connection between himself and the teenager, the distance separating them being the result of the former’s status as artist: the space between you and I - The space of a table - the work of a lifetime: The work of an artist51

25 Throughout his work, Durcan has repeatedly depicted himself as lonely and alienated, while giving voice to his need for connection or his nostalgia towards lost forms of connection and a lost sense of belonging. In “A Day in the Cave” for instance, he writes: “I suffer from an affliction / Labelled inconsolable loneliness”52. In “‘Windfall’, 8 Parnell Hill, Cork”, he depicts his alienation, anguish and utter loneliness while contrasting it with former representations of himself as a family man, a “Daddy” first in a description flooded with pictorial elements and then in the minimal ekphraseis of the series of photographs in albums: At home I used sit in a winged chair by the window Overlooking the river and the factory chimneys, […] The river a reflection of itself in its own waters, Goya sketching Goya among the smoky mirrors. The industrial vista was my Mont Saint- Victoire; While my children sat on my knees watching TV Their mother, my wife, reclined on the couch Knitting a bright-coloured scarf, drinking a cup of black coffee, Smoking a cigarette – one of her own roll-ups. […] Pastels and etchings on the four walls, and over the mantelpiece Van Gogh’s Grave and Lovers in Water;53 A room wallpapered in books and family photograph albums Chronicling the adventures and metamorphoses of family life […] Mammy and Daddy holding hands on the Normandy Beaches; Mammy and Daddy at the wedding of Jeremiah and Margot; Mammy and Daddy queueing up for Last Tango in Paris; Boating on the Shannon, climbing mountains in Kerry; Building sandcastles in Killala, camping in Barley Cove; Picnicking in Moone, hide-and-go-seek in Clonmacnoise; Riding horses, cantering, jumping fences; Pushing out toy yachts in the pond in the Tuileries; The Irish College revisited in the Rue des Irlandais; Sipping an orange pressée through a straw on the roof of the Beaubourg; Dancing in Père Lachaise, weeping at Auvers54.

26 Durcan does not choose to depict himself as a single uniquely self-examining entity. He prefers to stage himself in a wider context, surrounded by loved ones and art – books, pastels, etchings. He highlights his links and relations with others, connecting himself both with his (lost) family and with other artists. Art and writing are here the only way to reach back and enjoy anew a form of lost felicity. One might speak of substitution. Furthermore, by indirectly associating himself with Goya, Cézanne or Van Gogh, he magnifies himself55.

27 In his 2015 collection, The Days of Surprise, which has a strong autobiographical dimension and in which he represents himself repeatedly while recollecting memories, self-portrayal is also a moment of meditation upon life and death, love and estrangement. In “Il Bambino Dormiente” for instance56, an ekphrasis of Giovanni Bellini’s tempera Madonna in trono che adora il Bambino dormiente57, he first describes himself as alienated and alone in front of the painting in an empty room. He then merges with it, superimposing himself and his mother on the Christ and the Virgin in this “sacred family portrait” to make peace with his life and death, to reconnect with memories and

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the original, primordial form of connection he experienced – the shared bond with his mother – and, as a result, with humanity. Writing appears again as a dialogue, namely here between his present and his past, himself and a work of art. Art is where he seeks and finds “HUMAN RESOURCES”58.

28 In “The Hammock”59, the last poem of the 2016 collection WWE, a volume through which he expresses his love for and faith in art, ekphrasis and self-portrayal are intertwined once again. Durcan depicts himself alone in a museum space: reclining on a sculpture, enjoying art, remembering and re-experiencing his delightful visits to the Toledo Museum of Art. This moment is presented as out of time, as a peaceful, enchanted rest he wishes to prolong and succeeds in prolonging through writing: Like any self-respecting, horizontal hobo Or upright, vertical citizen of the Union I am a connoisseur of public seating […] Here I am reposing like a stag tilting in full flight, Swaying in the breeze under oak tree and maple, My carefree dangled fingers wine-tasting uncut grass In urban parkland, watching the auto-traffic […] And across Monroe Street the façade of the Toledo Museum of Art – That scintillating flight of steps, the Ionic Columns, Alexander Calder’s scarlet Stegosaurus stalking the red brick terrace. I closed my eyes and smiled! O Memory! O Robert Henri, O Kitaj, O Sherwood Anderson, O hart Crane, O Ohio! This hammock is a thing of perfect balance and, therefore beauty. “I balance all, bring all to mind.” “O commemorate me where there is water”. I opened my eyes and smiled. I crossed my feet and played with my prayer beads With my hands in my pockets. Once I was a minor Football star… O yes! And later… well… later… later… I had appointments for this morning but I’m going nowhere. LIBRA OK. I’m gonna snooze in my hammock all morning – in my glass Hammock on Monroe. For an hour or two, know, live and inhale, exhale Peace60.

29 Here it is not his loneliness but a moment of blissful solitude that is presented. This humorous self-depiction is again a way of magnifying himself by associating himself with all the great artists whose works he enjoyed and wrote about. These include not only those exhibited in the museum, but two great Irish poets as well: W. B. Yeats and his mentor, Patrick Kavanagh, with the two quotations respectively from “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” and “Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin”61. By quoting these lines, he plays with the way he wants to be remembered after his death. He also presents himself as a sort of new Romantic, electing to bear the Wordsworthian mantle62. He finally underlines how, through words and imagination, he can be whoever he wants, and how he can reinvent himself endlessly.

30 Thus, the poet constantly depicts himself through his work, “[c]hronicling [his] adventures and metamorphoses”, to put it in his words63. Through self-portrayal, to paraphrase Nancy’s thought, Durcan both retreats within his portraits while unveiling himself and producing himself64. In so doing, he questions himself, explores himself, exposes his weaknesses, but also reinvents himself and enters into dialogue with people who made him what he is, i.e. loved ones and admired artists. He glorifies himself and art by associating himself with them but he also brings to light and makes light of his

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shortcomings and of his frailty. Self-portrayal does not only appear as a self-centered process but as a whimsical, playful process too. It is a way to show interactions through art, and to find the forms of connection the poet is seeking, a sort of dialogue not only between the verbal and the visual, a dialogue which corresponds to his conception of art as a form of “intercourse”65.

NOTES

1. Private interview with Paul Durcan, Dublin, August 2010. 2. Paul Durcan, Crazy About Women (below-mentioned CAW), Dublin, The National Gallery of Ireland, 1991, p. xi. 3. Cf. Jean-Luc Nancy, L’autre portrait, Paris, Éditions Galilée, 2014, p. 14, 16. 4. Cf. for instance “Dawn, Connemara” in Durcan, CAW, p. 107; “The Mantelpiece” in Durcan, Give Me Your Hand (below-mentioned GMYH), London, Macmillan, National Gallery Publications, 1994, p. 148; or “Still Life with Grapes, Chestnuts, Melons, and a Marble Cube” in Durcan, Wild, Wild Erie, Poems Inspired by Works of Art in the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio (below-mentioned WWE), Toledo, Ohio, Toledo Museum of Art, 2016, pp. 41-42, which ends with the line: “For only a Still Life is never still!”. These three collections can be described as a trilogy or a tryptic, and are composed of ekphraseis respectively inspired by works from The National Gallery of Ireland, The National Gallery in London and the TMA in Ohio. 5. Respectively in Durcan, Daddy, Daddy, (below-mentioned DD), Belfast, The Blackstaff Press, 1990, pp. 17-18; Durcan, Cries of an Irish Caveman (below-mentioned CIC), London, The Harvill Press, 2001, p. 101; and Durcan, The Berlin Wall Café, Belfast, The Blackstaff Press, 1985, p. 69. 6. Durcan, CIC, op. cit., p. 160: “Paul – in the door of his cave pawing air”, here he humorously presents himself after his expectations have been disappointed; Durcan, Praise in which I live and Move and Have my Being, London, Harvill Secker, 2012, p. 17: “I stared into the long looking glass at his dark face / Wide-eyed over my white head” – here he briefly presents a double portrait and vision, that of the barber cutting his hair and of himself. Through this poem, which plays on the notions of vision, (mis)representation and perception, Durcan seems to advocate playfulness and unexpected behaviour, while portraying himself via his hair, that is to say as “white- haired”, yet deceptively “hoary” and truly “overgrown”. 7. In using this gradation, we refer here to Liliane Louvel according to whom ekphrasis is the higher level of pictorial saturation in a text, whereas the “painterly effect [effet- tableau]” (my translation), is the lower level. Cf. Liliane Louvel, Texte/Image, Images à lire, textes à voir, Rennes, PUR, 2002, pp. 34-42. 8. Durcan, Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil, One Hundred Poems (below-mentioned Greetings), London, The Harvill Press, 1999, p. 119.

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9. Likewise he expresses his Irishness when he describes himself as an “Irish poet” (Cf. Durcan, Greetings, “Waiting for a Toothbrush to Fall out of the Sky”, p. 221), but also similar feelings of dislocation in “Beatrice Monti della Corte von Rezzori” (Durcan, The Art of Life, London, The Harvill Press, 2004, pp. 82-83) or in “Ireland 1977”, a portrait of Ireland through which he conveys his feelings of perpetual exile and alienation: “‘I’ve become so lonely, I could die’, he writes, / The native who is in exile is his native land” (Durcan, Sam’s Cross, Dublin, Profile poetry, 1978, p. 42). 10. All the translations of Jean-Luc Nancy’s words is this article are mine. 11. Jean-Luc Nancy, Le regard du portrait, Paris, Éditions Galilée, 2000, 2006, pp. 33-35: “ tout autoportrait est d’abord un portrait”; “Celui-ci [le portrait] n’est pas la représentation d’un sujet: il est chaque fois l’exécution de la subjectivité ou de l’être-soi en tant que tel. […] Il est la mise en œuvre de l’exposition, c’est-à-dire de notre exposition […]”. 12. Jean-Luc Nancy, L’autre portrait, op. cit., pp. 17-18: “Manifester au dehors et plonger au- dedans sont dans le portrait à la fois contraires et complémentaires”. 13. Jean-Luc Nancy, L’autre portrait, op. cit., p. 18: “dans son portrait […] l’autre se retire. Il se retire en se montrant […].” 14. Jean-Luc Nancy, Le regard du portrait, op. cit., p. 16: “un dévoilement, qui ferait sortir le moi du tableau […] peindre ou figurer n’est plus alors reproduire, même pas révéler, mais produire l’exposé-sujet”. 15. Durcan, CAW, op. cit., p. 121, l. 11-13. Cf. also Durcan, The Art of Life, op. cit., p. 48, l. 1: “If you could see me as I am”. 16. For further information about the use of animal metamorphosis in P. Durcan’s work, as a way both of exposing his shortcomings and frailty and of glorifying himself in self-portraits and portraits of other artists, cf. Cathy Roche-Liger, “The Animal Metamorphoses of the Artist in Paul Durcan’s Intermedial Poetry” in Daragh O’Connel, Michael G. Kelly, Comparative Becomings, Studies in Transition , Peter Lang, 2016, pp. 157-175. 17. Durcan, CIC, op. cit., p. 101. 18. Durcan, CAW, op. cit., p. 11. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Durcan, The Berlin Wall Café, op. cit., p. 69. 22. Durcan, CAW, op. cit., p. xi. 23. Lucian Freud, Interior with Plant, Reflection Listening (self-portrait), 1967-1968, oil on canvas, 121.8 x 121.8 cm, private collection. 24. Durcan, DD, op. cit., p. 17, l. 1-3 and 10-15. Let us note that Durcan added a word in line 11 (“With my gloved hands folded primly in my lap”, my italics) and withdrew the eighth stanza in Durcan, Life is a Dream, 40 Years Reading Poems, 1967-2007, London, Harvill Secker, 2009, pp. 218-219: “45 years of hovering on street kerbs and clinging to lamp posts / Terrified to cross the street / – And you whisper into my ear in the middle of the night that I am a Divine Creature.” 25. Durcan, DD, op. cit., p. 18. 26. Jean-Luc Nancy, Le regard du portrait, op. cit., p. 34: “la mise en œuvre de l’exposition”. 27. Durcan, DD, op. cit., pp. 177-78.

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28. As it is often the case in Durcan’s homage and elegies: cf. for instance his eight elegies to P. Kavanagh in Greetings, op.cit., pp. 127-142. 29. Durcan, DD, op. cit., p. 178. 30. Ibid., p. 177. 31. Ibid., pp. 177-78. 32. To Durcan a perfect poem would include as many forms of art as possible, as he declared in a letter to Kathleen McCracken: “I see no ultimate distinction between the different ‘arts’ and I feel most at home in those moments, times, experiences when several or all of them come together or work together”. Cf. Kathleen McCracken, “Canvas and Camera Translated: Paul Durcan and the Visual Arts”, The Irish Review, n° 7, Cork, Cork University Press, autumn 1989, p. 18. 33. Durcan, At the Edge of the Edge of Mark Joyce, Dublin, The Green On Red Gallery, 1998, pp. 33-35. 34. Durcan, DD, op. cit., pp. 179-180. Francisco de Goya, Saint Peter Repentant, 1823-1825, oil on canvas, 29 x 25.5 cm, The Philips Collection, Washington. 35. Ibid., p. 179. 36. Ibid., pp. 179-180. 37. His father to whom he refers as “You” and who can be identified via the phrase “You are two years dead”. 38. As opposed to other poems through which Durcan tries to reach again dead people in appeased, loved memory. 39. Durcan, Praise in which I live and Move and Have my Being, op. cit., pp. 141-42. 40. Durcan, CAW, op. cit., p. xi. 41. Durcan, Going Home to Russia, Belfast and Wolfeboro, The Blackstaff Press, 1987, “The Orientalist, after Kitaj”, op. cit., pp. 49-50. 42. R. B. Kitaj, The Orientalist, 1976-1977, oil on canvas, 243.8 x 76.8 cm, Tate, London. Cf. the painting and its description on the Tate website http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ ViewWork?workid=8134]: “‘The Orientalist’ belongs to Kitaj’s portraits, including ‘The Jew’ and ‘The Greek’ that relate to the theme of the expatriate. Kitaj is himself an expatriate. He was born in Ohio and has spent most of his life living between America and Britain, caught between two cultures. His stepfather, a Viennese research chemist, was a refugee from Nazi Europe. ‘The Orientalist’ was an invention, but for Kitaj he represents a real character, evoking the expatriate’s sense of displacement.” Though Durcan is not an expatriate, he repeatedly expresses a feeling similar to this “sense of displacement” by underlining his sense of alienation and his paradoxical relation towards Ireland as we have seen with “Self-Portrait ’95” or “Ireland 1977” for instance (cf. supra footnote 9). 43. The Orientalist by Kitaj was in this exhibition and is reproduced in the catalogue, The Artist’s Eye, An Exhibition Selected by R B Kitaj at the National Gallery, London, 21 May-21 July 1980, London, The National Gallery Publications Department, 1980. Concerning the importance of this exhibition, cf. Brian Kennedy, “Crazy About Women: Poems About Paintings”, in Colm Tόibín, The Kilfenora Teaboy, A Study of Paul Durcan, Dublin, New Island Books, 1996, p. 161: “I knew this passionate poet was interested in the project [writing CAW] when he told me that, daily for three weeks in 1980, he had visited R B Kitaj’s Artist’s Eye exhibition at the National Gallery, London.” Cf. also Durcan, CAW, p.

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x: “In 1980 I visited […] R. B. Kitaj’s “The Artist’s Eye” exhibition in the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. I visited it daily for three weeks. The Kitaj show changed my attitude to art –expanded it and revolutionized it and gave me back the authority of my own eyes.” In WWE, Durcan once again pays tribute to Kitaj in his ekphraseis “Notes Toward a Definition of Nobody – a Reverie” and “The Hammock” (pp. 159-162, 196). He also confirmed Kitaj was “much of [his] mind – he [Kitaj] being from Ohio” when the poet wrote his 2016 collection (Private email communication, 27 October 2016). 44. Durcan describes himself as a hermit and he partly lives in Ringsend, Dublin. 45. Durcan, Going Home to Russia, op. cit., p. 49. 46. Durcan, CAW, op. cit., p. 113. Moyra Barry, Self-Portrait In The Artist’s Studio, 1920, oil on canvas, 30.4 x 25.5 cm, The National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. 47. Durcan, CAW, op. cit., p. 113. 48. Durcan, Greetings, op. cit., p. 25. 49. Durcan, CIC, op. cit., p. 37. 50. Durcan, CAW, op. cit., pp. 109-111, 84-85. 51. Durcan, CAW, op. cit., p. 3. 52. Durcan, CIC, op. cit., p. 159. 53. These are two pastels by Brian Lalor that Durcan bought at The Lavitt’s Quay Gallery, Cork, at the end of the 1970s, and that Nessa kept after their separation (Durcan, Private email communication, 2 September 2011). 54. Durcan, The Berlin Wall Café, op. cit., pp 45-47. 55. Associating himself with other artists, or people he admires with other admired people to create magnifying effects is a process which is present is many poems by Durcan. In “Hommage à Cézanne” for instance (Durcan, DD, pp. 28-29), which is an ekphrasis of the 1873 version of Une moderne Olympia, he turns the man on the sofa, who has been seen as a representation of the painter wearing horse-riding clothes, into a horse, and himself into a horse to associate himself with Cézanne and glorify himself in the process. In “Self-Portrait in the Artist Studio” (Durcan, CAW, p. 113) Moyra Barry is associated with Van Gogh, and therefore glorified. The poet immediately mentally made this connection between M. Barry in this painting and Van Gogh, describing her as “Marie Foley as Van Gogh” in one of his notebooks for the preparation of CAW. Cf. notebooks in The National Library of Ireland, Dublin; references: MS 45, 771/2). 56. Durcan, The Days of Surprise. London, Harvill Secker, 2015, pp. 26-28. 57. 1473, tempera on canvas, 120 x 63 cm, Gallerie dell’Academia, Venice. 58. Durcan, The Days of Surprise, op. cit., p. 28. About this poem and the first of the collection as self-portraits enabling the poet to reach back to a lost form of connection, cf. Cathy Roche-Liger, “À la recherche du lien et du moment perdus : ‘57 Dartmouth Square’ et ‘Il Bambino Dormiente’ de Paul Durcan”, in Gadoin, Isabelle, Tollance, Pascale (dir.), Polysèmes n° 18, L’Immobilité Vive, autumn 2017 (accessible on line at http:// journals.openedition.org/polysemes/2289 – Accessed February 2018). 59. Durcan, WWE, op. cit., pp. 195-196. 60. Durcan, WWE, op. cit., pp. 195-196.

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61. W. B. Yeats, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, Ed. Richard J. Finneran, Rev 2nd ed., New York, Scribner, 1996, p. 135; Patrick Kavanagh, Collected Poems, Ed. Antoinette Quinn, London, Penguin Books Ltd, 2005, p. 227. 62. Durcan declared that he would like to be able to achieve what was for Wordsworth at the source of poetry itself: “emotion recollected in tranquility”, Private interview, Dublin, 11 August 2011. Cf. William Wordsworth, Selections from William Wordsworth. Poetry and Prose, London, Methuen & co Ltd, 1966, p. 12. 63. Durcan, The Berlin Wall Café, op. cit., p. 46. 64. Cf. Jean-Luc Nancy, Le regard du portrait, op. cit., p. 16 and L’autre portrait, op. cit., pp. 17-18. 65. Durcan, CAW, op. cit., p. xi.

ABSTRACTS

Paul Durcan has written many intermedial self-portraits, mainly both textual and visual, which blur the already permeable frontier separating portraits and self-portraits. Though he focuses on himself to describe specific details, he generally chooses to represent himself in a wider context, using both concave and convex mirrors to do so. Through self-portrayal conceived as a dialogue, he creates a double paradoxical movement, first by exposing himself and his frailty while magnifying himself, then by highlighting his utter loneliness and alienation while creating multiple artistic forms of connections.

Paul Durcan a peint de nombreux autoportraits intermédiaux, majoritairement à la fois textuels et picturaux, qui brouillent la frontière déjà perméable entre portraits et autoportraits. S’il peut faire des gros plans sur lui-même pour se décrire, il choisit de ne pas se focaliser uniquement sur lui-même et de se représenter dans un contexte plus large, en utilisant à la fois des miroirs concaves et convexes. À travers l’art de l’autoportrait conçu comme un dialogue, il crée un double mouvement paradoxal, se mettant à nu et exposant ses fragilités tout en se glorifiant, mais aussi soulignant sa solitude et son aliénation tout en créant de multiples formes de connections.

INDEX

Mots-clés: autoportrait, portrait, miroir, intermédialité, dialogue Keywords: self-portrait, portrait, mirror, intermediality, dialogue

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AUTHOR

CATHY ROCHE-LIGER FoReLL B1, Université de Poitiers. Cathy Roche-Liger wrote the first French doctoral dissertation on the Irish poet Paul Durcan. It studies his pictorial poetics. She has written several articles about Paul Durcan, and other contemporary Irish poets such as Michael Longley, John Montague, Harry Clifton, Trevor Joyce or Geoffrey Squires. She is particularly interested both in poetry and in the interactions between the visual and the verbal. She is a member of FoReLL, University of Poitiers (France).

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More than Meets the ‘I’: Paul Muldoon’s Elegy ‘Yarrow’

Alexandra Tauvry

1 This article focuses on the relationship between poetic form and autobiographical drive in the elegy entitled ‘Yarrow’ by Northern Irish poet Paul Muldoon. This study engages with the debate regarding the place of poetry in autobiographical writing, which has been a very contentious issue and has claimed great critical attention over the past few decades. These recent theories on the relationship between poetry and autobiography make a clear break from Philippe Lejeune’s notions of authenticity, unity, and faithfulness, which characterised autobiographical writing in the past. Jean-Michel Maulpoix argues, for instance, that autobiography tends to centre the subject, whereas poetry scatters and disfigures it1. Similarly, the combination of autobiography and verse affects Muldoon’s poetic self-portrayal(s) in ‘Yarrow’, the long concluding poem written in memory of his mother, Brigid Regan, in The Annals of Chile (1994).

2 ‘Yarrow’ is a rather challenging epic poem, which is made up of a hundred and fifty lyrics or “twelve intercut, exploded sestinas”, as Muldoon puts it himself2. This monumental elegy highlights the commemorative design of the collection as a whole. The dedication to Brigid Regan illustrates how central the mother figure is and, by extension, the extent to which female characters pervade The Annals of Chile. Clair Wills argues that The Annals is a

3 more open, lyric [collection] than Muldoon has produced for some time, and it is tempting to connect this with the powerful feminine presence in the books, and to the fact that these are, among other things, narratives of birth and death3.

4 According to critics, this volume is one of the most personal works Muldoon has ever written. Tim Kendall considers for instance that the collection is Muldoon’s “most candidly autobiographical volume”4. ‘Yarrow’ is in fact one of the rare poems that discloses some autobiographical elements (or biographèmes5) enabling the reader to reconstruct the poet’s own self-portrait.

5 However, despite this strong autobiographical dimension, Muldoon plays with and subverts the autobiographical pact by creating not just one self-portrait, but a mosaic

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of self-portraits6. These multiple representations result from the fragmentation of the lyric “I”, which characterizes the association of autobiography and verse. The poetic “I” is not singular but multiple. Furthermore, the multiplicity of first person voices in this poetic narrative creates not only a series of fragmented self-portraits but also fictional ones.

6 After analysing the coexistence and overlapping of two autobiographical self-portraits in this elegy (that of the poet-narrator and that of the poet as a young boy), this study focuses on the origins of the fragmentation of the remembered self. This article concludes on an analysis of the endless series of fictional self-portraits that offset the autobiographical dimension of ‘Yarrow’.

The overlapping of autobiographical self-portraits

The recollection of the childhood place often goes together with the theme of exile and uprooting. The character tries to find his self through this constant back and forth movement7

7 ‘Yarrow’ was written after Muldoon’s 1992 visit to his parents’ grave and to the family home in the village of The Moy in County Armagh, Northern Ireland. This was his first visit to the family home since his departure for the United States in 1987. In ‘Yarrow’, the 1992 speaker tries to recollect his 1963 younger self years after his “exile”8.

8 Muldoon once said in an interview that he can recall the past “almost at will”, without even travelling physically to the place of his childhood: INTERVIEWER: Are your childhood memories still vivid? MULDOON: Absolutely. I do feel very much that I can be in that moment, almost at will. It takes almost nothing to get me back there, certainly to the house I was brought up in, after the age of four, near a village called the Moy. The room I had there was a bedroom-cum-workroom looking on to a little backyard with a house, that my father had built, used mostly for pigs9.

9 In ‘Yarrow’, the poet-narrator looks back on the past and even travels back in time. The poem oscillates between stories narrated by the 1992 speaker and stories narrated by the 1963 speaker. There are therefore two different types of focalization, two coexisting narrative voices: instead of having a single speaker reminiscing his 1963 younger self, the narrative is alternatively told by the “I” of the middle-aged Muldoon and that of the young Muldoon aged eleven or twelve. As a result, the reader is given various perspectives on the past through two different “I” or eyes: in some vignettes we witness the progressive disappearance of the family farm through the eyes of the 1992 speaker who is inspecting what remains of the now-gone family farm and in other vignettes we time-travel to the year 1963 and revisit the farm through the eyes of the young Muldoon10.

10 Not only are there temporal shifts, but also spatial ones. The elegy starts with the 1992 speaker who seems to be constantly fiddling with an imaginary remote control, fast- forwarding and rewinding between 1963 and 1992. The reader is therefore constantly jostled by the change in setting since we are in perpetual transit between the location of the 1963 speaker (who is on the family farm in Co. Armagh) and several locations in 1992 (the speaker is either on the family farm thirty years on, or back in America after his visit). In one of the early vignettes, this incessant to-and-fro movement in time and

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in space is made obvious when the remembered image of the parents in 1963 is directly followed by the image of the 1992 speaker: For the moment, though, she thumbs through a seed-catalogue she’s borrowed from Tohill’s of the Moy while, quiet, almost craven,

he studies the grain in the shaft of a rake: there are two palm-prints in blue stone on the bib of his overalls

where he’s absentmindedly put his hands to his heart; in a den in St John’s, Newfoundland, I browse on a sprig of Achillea millefolium, as it’s classed11.

11 By way of a simple semi-colon in the penultimate line, the author marks the transition from past to present. As in this vignette, memories from 1963 are often narrated in the present tense as if they were called from the past and relived in the present time of 1992. As a result, the narrative alternates between two presents—that of the old days or the recent past, and that of today—making it difficult for the reader to differentiate between the 1963 “I” and the 1992 “I”. Emmanuel Laugier argues that when poetry and autobiography are combined, the “I” does not look back towards the past—towards what “was”—but reactualises what “was”12. These 1963 memories read as if they were reactualised in the present time of 1992. The reader is constantly navigating between 1963 and 1992, and the succession of vignettes reads as a spatiotemporal pell-mell: it is almost impossible to keep track of the progression of each past and contemporary event. In order to reconstruct these memories, which would enable us to grasp the 1992 and 1963 speakers’ identities separately and restore the chronological order, we have to isolate these mnemonic fragments to recreate a sense of linearity.

12 According to French writer Julien Gracq in Carnets du grand chemin, an autobiographical writer is like a traveller who carries several pieces of luggage, each containing a skeleton. He further argues that each skeleton is one of the writer’s own doubles that has been preserved—even mummified—at different stages of his or her life13. In ‘Yarrow’, the narrative alternates between vignettes of the middle-aged writer and vignettes of this younger double. However, this self-portrait of the young Muldoon has neither been fully “preserved” nor “mummified”, the image that is given of the younger speaker is not a full-blown portrait. It has been almost literally scattered and it is up to the reader to reassemble the fragments of this portrait in order to reconstruct the image of the young Muldoon.

Splinters of memories: fragmented vignettes of the remembered self

13 If we set out to reconstruct the portrait of the 1963 “I”, it is clear from the first few lines of the elegy that this is made more complex not only by the fact that the narrative runs over 150 pages but especially by the fact that we are dealing with poetry.

14 The poetic form visually mirrors the fragmentation of the author’s multiple self- portraits, more so than any other literary genre. Just like any poem, the presence of a blank between each stanza—sometimes coupled with the use of an asterisk— emphasises this fragmentation. Furthermore, the treatment of temporality in

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autobiographical poetry differs from autobiography in prose in so far as the linearity of the time sequence is often disrupted. Contrary to the general view that there is a sense of temporal continuity in some autobiographical works, the resonance between events and associative digressions takes precedence over the chronological sequence when it comes to autobiographical poetry. As a result, the process of recollection is from the start thwarted by the formal fragmentation of poetry that inevitably leads to temporal discontinuities. This lack of chronological order is one of the factors that accounts for the fragmentation of the 1963 self-portrait.

15 This is particularly the case when it comes to the episode in which the young Muldoon is asked to buy seeds at the local grocer’s. If we set out to reconstruct this central memory in ‘Yarrow’, we soon come to realise that this memory-event is literally scattered (just like seeds) throughout the elegy: on page 43, the mother thumbs through a seed-catalogue; on page 70, she ticks off a list of seeds; finally, on page 103, she gives the carbon-slip to her son. This memory from 1963 is consequently disseminated throughout the poem. Some of the memories read as puzzles, which the reader must reassemble in order to reconstruct the chronology and form a full image of the younger speaker. The fact that these three vignettes do not follow each other in linear fashion (particularly in longer poetic pieces) is often due to the author’s use of lines of association induced by the speaker’s mental wanderings or stream of consciousness. The formal fragmentation previously discussed is coupled with, and amplified by, the associative process: on page 43, the word “seed” (in “seed-catalogue”) triggers the image of the yarrow plant, which prevents the development of the speaker’s recollection of his mother; and on page 70, the local grocer’s name (“Tohill”) drives the narrative away from this specific memory (“Tohill, from tuathal, / meaning ‘withershins”’). ‘Yarrow’ follows an associative logic rather than a linear and chronological one, which accentuates the formal / spatiotemporal discontinuities and contributes to the fragmentation of the subject and his memories. Although this associative logic is a present tense continuity of the remembered thoughts and events, this continuity differs from historical linearity (the continuity of the historical events that are being remembered). In other words, this present tense continuity is a rearranged continuity of the original historical sequence.

16 Lines of association may be present in any literary genre, but they are all the more obvious in poetry: line breaks, stanza breaks, envois, internal rhymes, rhyming patterns, caesuras, enjambments, etc., all feature among the diverse formal aspects of poetry that favour lines of association over the chronological order and participate in the fragmentation of memories. The process of association does not develop full-blown memories; rather, it offers fragments of memories. Instead of charting a memory throughout a poem and favouring the linearity of the time sequence, memories are “atomised” and the reader has to find mnemonic splinters among diverse poems and collections in order to recreate the unity of the memory (as with the seeds episode).

17 Moreover, not only are memories splintered because of these constant temporal shifts, but their autobiographical dimension is also undermined by their fictionalisation. In fact, some vignettes create the appearance of fiction because characters are partly fictionalised, as exemplified by the composite image of Muldoon’s mother and King Lear. In one of the vignettes, the mother delivers some of the king’s lines from the Shakespearean play: “my ma hands me the carbon-slip; ‘But to the girdle do the gods’, / she repeats, ‘but to the girdle do the gods inherit’”14. Although the mother is only

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repeating these lines, just as an actor on stage would, one might think, for an instant, that she has been transformed into Shakespeare’s character. The fictionalisation of the mother figure could be due to the fact that the poet is trying to come to terms with her death: the mother’s journey from life to death is in a way mirrored by the movement from the real to the fictional.

18 The mother figure is not the only family member who is fictionalised to a great extent in this elegy, the 1963 “I” also undergoes a process of fictionalisation. The poet plays with his former boyhood fantasies inspired by his childhood readings and stages his own self. The 1963 “I” is therefore travestied and a series of fictional self-portraits unravels throughout the elegy, overlapping with the author’s referential self-portraits.

Paul Muldoon’s Fictionalised Self-Portraits

‘Yarrow’ was written over a period of about eighteen months to two years. […]. The poem is set in contemporary Newfoundland but goes back and forth to that period of my childhood and has to do with all sorts of adventure stories—the imaginative life, I suppose, of a child of ten, or eleven. [...] It’s the background of a poet’s mind, or whatever […] a child’s mind, but written with somewhat loopy style.15

19 Historical battles and discoveries, in particular, had a profound impact on the young Muldoon’s imagination, so much so that the young speaker either imagines himself and his entourage in the company of literary figures (fictionalisation by association) or imagines that he and his family have become one of these fictional characters (fictionalisation by substitution). It could therefore be argued that Muldoon has staged his childhood memories according to his boyhood fantasies. As Jacques Lacan argues, “every autobiography is a fiction of oneself, a later reconstruction”16. Thus there is a distance between the adult Muldoon (who is writing) and the young Muldoon (who is being remembered): not only does the author reconstruct his childhood memories in retrospect, but, by doing so, he also reinvents his former self through the prism of his imagination. Since most of these stories are coming-of-age stories, the overlaying of adventure stories on childhood events not only creates the appearance of fiction, but it also charts the young Muldoon’s progressive coming of age.

20 In some vignettes, the “I” is either in the company of historical and fictional figures or has become one of them: I would grit my teeth and brace myself against the plunge into Owl Creek17.

I grit my teeth. I brace myself. It’s 1:43 by the clock on the V.C.R.: with one bound

Peyton Farquhar and I will break free and swim across to Librium with a leisurely crawl and flutter-kick18.

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21 In these two vignettes, the “I” does not refer to a single referent. The poet aligns an event that took place in his imagination with a similar lived event, contemporary with the time of writing: while there are two identical images of a speaker gritting his teeth and bracing himself, one refers to the young Muldoon fantasizing that he is Peyton Farquhar’s companion and one refers to the adult Muldoon who has slept through a film (possibly William Wellman’s 1943 The Ox-Bow Incident, mentioned in the next stanza). The stanza breaks after “Owl Creek” and “one bound” mark, respectively, the transition from the fantasy to the lived event and then the shift from the lived event back to the fantasy. There are two possible explanations of this shift of first person voices. The 1992 “I” may have just slept through the film and dreams that he is one of the fictional characters of either Ambrose Bierce’s short story or Wellman’s film: An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, The Ox-Bow Incident I’ve never been able to separate “occurrence” from “incident”, “owl” from “ox”19

22 Or, we could equally argue that this “I” is not the 1992 “I” dreaming, but the young Muldoon, the 1963 “I” imagining himself on adventure trips.

23 Another bewildering sequence describes the speaker’s journey with American writer Sylvia Plath and fictional character Jim Hawkins from Treasure Island. They are then joined by Morgan, an ex-pirate from Captain Flint’s former crew in Stevenson’s adventure story, and the 17th and 18th century real pirate, Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard: While Jim and I were plundering the Spanish Main from the Grenadines to Grand Cayman she knew that even amidst fierce

flames she might yet plant centaury: while Jim and I were sailing with Teach and Morgan she was fixing the rubber ring

on a Mason jar; even amidst fierce flames, the expiapiaratory rush of poppies in July, October poppies20.

24 The speaker and Hawkins are re-united later on when they crouch in “the apple-butt on the Marie Celeste”, which could either refer to the real ship or to the one used in fiction by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In another passage, the speaker is “hunkering” with American frontiersmen Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickok who in reality met in 1871 in Kansas City. However, in the stanza that follows, the three men are on the unlikely “ramparts of Troy” with Hickok talking to Priam about the etymology of “saboteur”: as I head up a straggling caravan of ragamuffins and rapparees my rocking-horse’s halter fast-forwards through my hands.

To the time I hunkered with Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickok on the ramparts of Troy as Wild Bill tried to explain to Priam

how “saboteur” derives from sabot, a clog21.

25 In this vignette, the presence of the childhood toy—the rocking horse—indicates that these fictional journeys are more likely referring to the boyhood fantasies of the young Muldoon. The association of the young Muldoon with these literary heroes throughout

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the elegy thus creates the appearance of fiction. This illusion is further increased when the “I” is not merely in their company, but embodies one of them. This is the case when the young Muldoon fancies himself as the young Arthur “tug[ging] at the rusted blade of Excalibur”22. ‘Yarrow’ is thus not only about the elegised mother, it is also about the author’s whimsical and fictional journeys leading to the reinvention of the ‘I’23.

26 Although Linda Anderson argues that autobiography “offers an unmediated […] yet stabilizing wholeness for the self” and “the possibility of alleviating the dangers and anxieties of fragmentation”25, I would argue that this could not be more different in Muldoon’s poem ‘Yarrow’, in which the poet explores the fragmentation of the self. The origins of this instability are mostly due to the mediation of autobiography through poetry, to spatiotemporal dislocations, and to the poet’s playful experimentations with the fictionalisation of the self.

27 Muldoon’s poetry, particularly his elegy ‘Yarrow’, exemplifies the “fracturing of identity” that characterises contemporary Irish writing26. Although the poet magnifies his own self by using extensively the first-person voice, this self-centeredness does not guarantee the wholeness of the self nor the unity of the autobiographical self-portrait, which characterised some autobiographical writings and autobiographical analyses in the past. In fact, contrary to Lejeune’s 1971 definition of autobiography that is strictly predicated on an avowal of sincerity and truthfulness, what is at stake in ‘Yarrow’ is the fragmentation and fictionalisation of the autobiographical self. Muldoon disrupts the traditional straightforward identification between speaker, author, and character by juggling with several first-person voices often making it complex for the reader to identify the real referent. Because of the constant overlapping of multiple autobiographical portraits and the physical and mental journeys leading to the recollection and recreation of his multiple selves, this elegy may be read as a palimpsest of Paul Muldoon’s self-portraits and an illustration of the poet’s experimentation with the fictionalisation of the self, namely autofiction.

NOTES

1. Jean-Michel Maulpoix, « Table ronde I. La part de l’autobiographie dans la poésie contemporaine : un renouvellement », in Éric Audinet & Dominique Rabaté (eds.), Poésie et autobiographie, Tours, Farrago, 2004, pp. 19-50. Originally: « Là où l’autobiographie tend à centrer la figure, la poésie l’émiette, la disperse et la dé-figure ». 2. Qtd. in Earl G. Ingersoll & Stan Sanvel Rubin, “The Invention of the I: A Conversation with Paul Muldoon”, Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol. 37(1), 1998, n. pag. 3. Clair Wills, Reading Paul Muldoon, Newcastle Upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1998, p. 158. 4. Tim Kendall, Paul Muldoon, Bridgend, Seren, 1996, p. 209. 5. This term was first used by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida: “I like certain biographical features which, in a writer’s life, delight me as much as certain photographs; I have called these features ‘biographèmes’”. Roland Barthes, Camera

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Lucida: Reflections on Photography [1980], Richard Howard (trans.), London, Vintage, 2000, p. 30. 6. In L’Autobiographie en France (1971), Philippe Lejeune defines the pragmatic dimension of autobiographical writing by introducing his now famous autobiographical pact (or contract), which is a corner-stone of his theory. This contract revolves around notions of authenticity and faithfulness. 7. Philippe Gasparini, Est-il je ? Roman autobiographique et autofiction, Paris, Seuil, 2004, p. 49. The original reads: « Cette remémoration du lieu de l’enfance va souvent de pair avec une thématique de l’exil et du déracinement. Le personnage se cherche alors dans un va-et-vient incessant ». 8. Irish writer and critic Seamus Deane said that Muldoon was “in exile” in Princeton. In The Prince of the Quotidian, the poet replies: “To Deane I say, ‘I’m not “in exile”, / though I can’t deny that I’ve been twice in Fintona’”. Muldoon, The Prince of the Quotidian, Oldcastle, Gallery Press, 1994, p. 36. As for the year 1963, Muldoon decided to focus on memories of his younger self dating back to that “winter of 1962-63, [a] very bitterly cold winter, the winter Sylvia Plath died in London”. Paul Muldoon, qtd. in Ingersoll & Rubin, op. cit. 9. In James S. F. Wilson, “Paul Muldoon: The Art of Poetry”, The Paris Review No. 87, Vol. 45 No. 169, 2004, n. pag. 10. By “vignette” I mean a textual fragment that is isolated from prior and succeeding text by the blank space surrounding it (the way an illustration or picture would be) and by a page break. A vignette does not always necessarily correspond to a single stanza and more often corresponds to a series of consecutive stanzas (generally two or three) that are thematically related (their combination offers the reader a “snapshot”). I choose to use the word “vignette” for reading clarity. The entire elegy is composed of 150 short poems, each printed on a separate page. I therefore refer to each of these 150 poems as a “vignette”. Muldoon acknowledges that this formal arrangement on the page necessarily changes the reading experience: “I remember someone saying about ‘Madoc’ that Muldoon has written a very long poem and then somebody else saying, yes, but there’s an awful lot of white space in it. What we’re talking about is a typographical convention. The poem would change if it were printed in a different way —in numbered sections, for example. I guess ‘Yarrow’ would change too. The shape it makes on the page does make an impact, sure it does’. Qtd. in John Redmond, “Interview with Paul Muldoon”, Thumbscrew, Vol. 4, 1996, p. 16. 11. Paul Muldoon, The Annals of Chile, London, Faber, 1994 p. 43. 12. Emmanuel Laugier, “Table ronde I. La part de l’autobiographie dans la poésie contemporaine : un renouvellement”, in Audinet and Rabaté, op. cit., p. 40. 13. « Selon Julien Gracq, l’écrit autobiographique fait de son auteur ‘un voyageur avec bagages, bagages scabreux à déclarer parce qu’en chacun d’eux il transporte un squelette, un pimpant squelette habillé, maquillé et fleuri comme ceux des reliquaires romains : ce squelette, c’est lui- même, ce sont autant de doubles de lui-même, arrêtés, conservés, momifiés aux différents âges de sa vie.’ » Julien Gracq, Carnets du grand chemin, Œuvres complètes, Vol. 2, Liège, Gallimard, 1995, p. 1086, qtd. in Fabienne Gaspari, « Jeux de mémoire: Confessions of a Young Man et Hail and Farewell de George Moore », in Robert Ferrieux (ed.), La Littérature autobiographique en Grande-Bretagne et en Irlande, Paris, Ellipses, 2001, p. 306. 14. Muldoon, op. cit., p. 103.

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15. Ingersoll & Rubin, op. cit.. 16. Qtd. in Arnaud Schmitt, “Making the Case for Self-Narration Against Autofiction”, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, Vol. 25(1), 2010, p. 127, my emphasis. 17. Muldoon, op. cit., p. 52. 18. Muldoon, op. cit., p. 53. 19. Muldoon, op. cit., p. 54. 20. Muldoon, op. cit., p. 58. 21. Muldoon, op. cit., pp. 70-71. 22. Muldoon, op. cit., p. 66. 23. Psychoanalyst and writer Frantz Fanon’s statement in Black Skin, White Masks bears strong echoes with this fictionalisation of the self in ‘Yarrow’: “In the world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself”. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, Charles Lam Markmann (trans.), London, Pluto Press, 1967, p. 229. 25. Linda Anderson, Autobiography, London, Routledge, 2011, p. 3. 26. Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, qtd. in Fran Brearton & Eamonn Hughes, Last Before America: Irish and American Writing, Belfast, Blackstaff, 2001, p. xiii.

ABSTRACTS

Paul Muldoon’s elegy ‘Yarrow’ illustrates the instability of the poetic “I”, the ‘doubling’ of this first-person voice, and the fracturing of identity that are characteristic of the poet’s personal poems. In fact, even Muldoon’s most autobiographical poem does not offer an unmediated and unified representation of the “I”. On the contrary, the poet presents the reader with multiple fragmented—even fictionalised—self-portraits, which unravel as soon as they are woven.

L’élégie ‘Yarrow’ de Paul Muldoon illustre l’instabilité du « je » poétique, le dédoublement de cette première personne, et la fragmentation de l’identité qui caractérisent les poèmes intimes du poète. En effet, même le poème le plus personnel et autobiographique de Muldoon n’offre pas une représentation du « je » poétique unifiée et immédiate. Au contraire, le poète offre au lecteur de multiples autoportraits fragmentés, voire romancés, qui se défont à mesure qu’ils se créent.

INDEX

Mots-clés: poésie, autobiographie, mémoire, fiction Keywords: poetry, autobiography, memory, fiction

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AUTHOR

ALEXANDRA TAUVRY Lycée Chateaubriand, Rennes. Alexandra Tauvry received an Irish Research Council scholarship in 2011 and completed her PhD thesis on Northern Irish writer Paul Muldoon in Trinity College Dublin in 2014. The aim of her research was to position Paul Muldoon's poetry within the frameworks of autobiography and autofiction. She is currently teaching English in Classes Préparatoires aux Grandes Ecoles in Lycée Chateaubriand, Rennes (France).

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‘Such a fragile Thing as the human Countenance’. Irish Self-portraiture in the Eighteenth-Century

Ruth Kenny

The self-portrait is a very special kind of work, a miraculous fusion of author and theme, of subject and object, always extremely rich in significance both hidden and manifest, in which every element has a precise reason for being1.

1 In an age2 characterised by the deliberate blurring of boundaries between the public and private spheres and a growing pre-occupation with the artistic process, it is perhaps not surprising that in eighteenth-century Europe it became almost obligatory for any artist of ambition to record their countenance for posterity3. While ostensibly the most personal form of artistic production —“the one form of easel painting that resists being owned”4—self-portraiture in the eighteenth century became a public showcase and, as such, a cipher for a whole range of artistic aspirations and concerns. While Ireland is often seen as behindhand in terms of its engagement with the visual arts in this period—a viewpoint expressed as late as 1738 by patron of the arts and co- founder of the Dublin Society Dr Samuel Madden: “the utter Neglect [of painting and sculpture] which prevails in Ireland, will ever be a proof against us of Barbarism and Gothick ignorance”5—the enthusiastic participation of Irish painters in the European trend for self-representation appears to buck this assumption in an interesting manner. From the swagger of James Latham’s authoritative image to Hugh Douglas Hamilton’s tentative entry into the famed Uffizi collection; from Nathaniel Hone’s self- conscious posturing to Thomas Frye’s meditative self-scrutiny, this paper will examine how different eighteenth-century Irish artists approached the task of painting themselves. In doing so it will also consider the roles these images played within the different and evolving contexts of Dublin and London, to where so many Irish painters migrated.

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James Latham, Self-Portrait , c.1730, oil on canvas.

Photo © National Gallery of Ireland.

2 The earliest known example, produced and displayed in Ireland, of what could confidently be called the eighteenth century’s defining genre, was James Latham’s commanding self-portrait, painted c.17306. As a first foray, it was a bold statement of intent. Arms crossed and chin raised, Latham gazes imperiously at the viewer. Evidently well-fed and tending towards stoutness, with a phalanx of gold buttons catching the light and extravagant ruffles of lace escaping his sleeve-ends, he displays a supreme, almost antagonistic self-assurance. This is an impression borne out by what we know of his practice. For Latham, it appears, the artist’s vision rather than the sitter’s preference was of paramount importance. Renowned for his dogged pursuit of veracity, the unflattering realism of a painting such as Group Portrait with Mother and Child (Robert Wood Collection, Fota House) provides only one example of many; the slick of grease down a long nose, a stubborn double chin and a less than bonny baby all carefully noted. A well-known anecdote, courtesy of the pseudonymous contemporary commentator Anthony Pasquin (and thus probably embroidered), appears to confirm Latham’s contemporary take on customer service: A lady of distinction, with coarse lineaments, sat to him for her portrait which he drew faithfully; but she was so disgusted with the performance that she abused the painter, who immediately tore it from the frame and had it nailed to the floor of his hall as a piece of oilcloth. The consequence was that every person who came in knew the likeness, and the anecdote became so general that the mortified nymph repented her vain indiscretion and offered to buy the picture at any terms, which the artist peremptorily refused7.

3 Latham’s self-portrait does not show us the artist at work. It does not reveal any part of the act of creation or give the viewer any kind of privileged access. The artist’s firmly crossed arms keep us at a defensive distance, while his hands—the tools of his craft—

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are tucked securely into his sleeves and completely covered from view. This act of concealment is made all the more striking by the fact that Latham is now lauded for his facility in painting hands. As art historian Anne Crookshank noted, “hands are Latham’s great achievement8” and one has only to consider the intimate interlacing of fingers in Pole Cosby and his daughter Sarah or the elegant lassitude of Earl Stannard’s elongated digits for confirmation of this fact. This is the artist as an equal to his clients, echoing in format the portraits of many of his eminent customers with the same three- quarter length half-turn and feigned oval.

4 Art historians Marcia Pointon and Kate Retford have variously demonstrated the importance of considering the particular location of artworks in any attempt to reconstruct their meaning in contemporary terms9. In this instance, we are fortunate enough to know that Latham’s portrait came into the hands of fellow Dublin painter and admirer Philip Hussey, who displayed it in his Earl Street home from around the time of Latham’s death in 1747, when Hussey probably acquired it, to the time of Hussey’s own death, which occurred at his home in 1783. Said to have been “exceedingly valued by the possessor”, Latham’s portrait was presumably hung in a prominent place, for it is reported—again by Pasquin—that, from his lofty vantage point he presided in absentia over Dublin’s mid-eighteenth century artistic gatherings for many years10. Every Sunday morning, under his watchful eye, “the literati and painters of Dublin… sat in judgement upon the relative occurrences of the week”11. Though, as previously noted, Pasquin’s reputation often casts a doubt on the veracity of his observations, it seems fair to infer from them, in this instance, the powerful talismanic function of images such as Latham’s12.

5 It is a self-portrait which demonstrates the assurance of a man whose career was burgeoning. Latham had only set up shop in Dublin in 1725, approximately five years before this canvas was executed. Yet with little in the way of artistic competition, he soon dominated portrait production in the city in a way that was not possible for his London counterparts. Called rather flatteringly the ‘Irish Van Dyck’ (presumably in terms of his pre-eminence rather than his style)13, contemporaries who could rival Latham’s skill were thin on the ground. Anthony Lee (active 1724–67) was also based in Dublin and attracted some high profile business. Equally, Hugh Howard (1675–1737), though living in London, accepted a number of important portrait commissions in Ireland in the 1720s. However, he eventually turned to dealing and collecting amid rumours that he could not establish a sufficient reputation to support a viable studio14. Perhaps significantly, in terms of their artistic aspirations and engagement with the European mainstream, neither of them appear to have produced self-portraits. Francis Bindon (c. 1690–1765) “a gentleman amateur”, better known for his architecture, produced paintings which were deemed “stiff, awkward and too inferior in quality to be included” in the pioneering 1969 ‘Irish Portraits’ exhibition15. A very tentatively attributed self-portrait of Bindon, dating from c. 1720, may be held by the National Gallery of Ireland. Whether or not this identification stands, its thin paint surface and hesitant style is a poor match for Latham’s poised example.

6 While the English artist Stephen Slaughter’s frequent trips to Dublin in the 1730s provided some competition in Latham’s final years, his only serious rival for much of his career, in terms of clientele and in the field of self-portraiture, was Charles Jervas. Though firmly settled in London, Jervas often returned to Ireland for lengthy visits and could readily match Latham in terms of ambition and style. His 1725 self-portrait,

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produced in England at around the age of fifty, is a solid, bombastic image; the artist reclining comfortably against a backdrop of lustrous fabric, an indulgent smile playing on his lips. It reveals—much like Latham’s self-portrait—a prosperous man who has reached the peak of his profession; not long appointed Principal Painter to the King and firmly established as the portraitist of preference for almost every person of consequence in the incumbent Whig government.

7 Known as a consummate self-promoter, it is curious to note that this is the only time Jervas appears to have turned the mirror on himself. The only caveat to the singularity of this portrait is a depiction of Elizabeth, Countess of Bridgewater, c. 1710–1720 in which the Countess stands beside a clavicytherium, or upright harpsichord. Jervas may have borrowed its appearance from a 1640 portrait of Marc’Antonio Pasqualini by Andrea Sacchi but in Jervas’s version the carved bust of Apollo which decorates the side has been replaced by a man in an eighteenth century wig, who bears a strong resemblance to Jervas himself. His adulatory inclusion is said to reflect his well-known admiration for the Countess16.

8 These two examples may perhaps qualify Jervas in Latham’s place as the first Irish self- portraitist, though both were produced in Jervas’s London studio and the earlier of the two is highly elliptical. Leaving that particular jostle for primacy aside, both Latham and Jervas’s depictions of themselves can be seen to function on a number of levels simultaneously; as a public statement of artistic intent, a spur to emulation and a wider reflection on the state of the arts in mid-eighteenth-century Ireland, at a time when they were generally understood to be at a low ebb. They deliberately concealed as much as they revealed, presenting to the viewer a mask-like façade of the artist as success-story.

9 Latham and Jervas’s natural heirs were arguably Nathaniel Hone and James Barry who bestrode Irish self-portraiture in the second half of the eighteenth century like twin (though definitely non-identical) colossi. Both were prolific recorders of their own faces; Hone producing a succession of at least nine self-portraits and Barry at least six. Executed at fairly regular intervals and at key stages in their lives, no other Irish artists engaged in such extensive self-scrutiny. Within the context of an increasing diversification of the self-portrait genre, they retained the intense preoccupation with the role and status of the artist that flavoured the work of Latham and Jervas. However, they developed it through elaborate role-playing; Hone self-consciously trying out comparatively more prosaic parts—usually those of his social superiors —while Barry’s fragile heroics encompassed more ambitious mythological characters.

10 Though Hone was born and trained in Dublin, he moved to England as a young man, in the early 1740s, where he found work as an itinerant portraitist, firstly in the form of enamels and miniatures, and subsequently as an oil-painter. While his early self- portraits are relatively straightforward—the artist as a young man with an easel or holding a portfolio—his predilection for posing in fancy clothing was soon evident. A 1747 self-portrait finds the young Hone resplendent in a large fur hat and fur-trimmed coat.

11 As his reputation and status grew, Hone’s conception of himself became more complex. In a 1768 self-portrait (Royal Academy London) he depicts himself in Van Dyck dress, conferring, by association, some of the lustre of his seventeenth-century artistic predecessor and the high social status of those who sat to him. A glimpse of blue sky and vine leaves behind him suggest a European setting, further lending the artist an

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international, cosmopolitan air. It is no coincidence that the year in which this portrait was painted was also the year in which Hone became one of the founding members of the newly established Royal Academy; a sure sign that he was now at the very centre of London’s artistic world and undoubtedly a cause for commemorative celebration for this inveterate social-climber.

12 Seven years later, Hone’s position had changed quite dramatically; a change that naturally inspired another self-portrait (National Gallery of Ireland). It depicts him c. 1775 as affluent and well-dressed, his walking stick planted firmly in the ground, which unfurls behind him to reveal a rolling Italianate landscape, complete with a classical temple. An unashamed exercise in self-aggrandisement, Hone had in fact never been to Italy (a situation which would have marked him out unfavourably from most of his artistic contemporaries). Yet 1775 was a year in which Hone needed to bolster his professional standing more than ever. Caught in the crossfire of a scandal of his own— undoubtedly calculated—making, Hone had blatantly attacked the president of the Royal Academy, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and was subsequently forced to battle for his own reputation. Having accused Reynolds of plagiarism by means of his now infamous painting The Conjuror, Hone was on the defensive. It is tempting to imagine that just as Reynolds was carefully preparing his own puff-piece self-portrait—wearing his Oxford doctoral robes, clutching a roll of paper invoking the name of Michelangelo—in his Leicester Fields studio, to send to the celebrated collection of self-portraits at the Uffizi, Hone was painting this self-portrait in nearby Pall Mall in riposte17. Indeed it may have been one of those included in his pioneering one-man show; a career retrospective which Hone mounted in rented rooms after removing his paintings from the Royal Academy’s annual exhibition. Hone’s rival display attracted large crowds and much press attention, thus providing an ideal platform for some of the posturing of which Hone was so fond18.

13 Hone’s The Conjuror represents the culmination of a career-long rivalry with Reynolds and in fact constituted only one element in an entire nexus of practice which grew around and in opposition to the Royal Academy’s opinionated president, the most prolific producer of self-portraits at this time (his tally numbered twenty-seven by the time of his death in 1792)19. In a brief detour, it is interesting to note here the curious work of another artist Strickland Lowry. An Englishman who settled in Ireland in his twenties, Lowry specialised in complex trompe l’œil paintings, all of which are undated though probably executed in the 1760s and 1770s. One of these depicted an engraving of Hone’s painting The Spartan Boy pinned to a wooden board while another purported to show an engraving of a self-portrait by Reynolds, displayed in the same manner (both now in the National Gallery of Ireland collection)20. The fact that the ‘engraving’ in the latter does not correspond to any of Reynold’s known self-portrait output complicates matters interestingly; it appears rather to be a ‘self-portrait’ of Reynolds which, though instantly recognisable, is of Lowry’s own invention.

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Strickland Lowry, Trompe L'Oeil (Self Portrait), oil on canvas.

Photo © National Gallery of Ireland.

14 Lowry then appears to have used the same conceit in a portrait of himself, but again no engraving or original self-portrait can be traced. In an elaborate play on ideas of originality and reproduction, in such works Lowry skewers the very foundations of self- portraiture as the accurate depiction of an individual by his own hand; interrogating its representational function and in the process raising important philosophic questions about the nature of selfhood. It seems entirely appropriate that he should appropriate the face of the consummate self-promoter Reynolds as part of this innovative and strikingly modern endeavour.

15 Despite their evident differences, James Barry also shared Hone (and perhaps Lowry’s?) antagonism towards Reynolds and increasingly, since his arrival from Ireland in 1764, he too found himself on the periphery of the London art world. Like Hone, he used self- portraiture to explore his position, though for very different reasons and with very different results. Far from trying to carve out a position for himself within the artistic elite, Barry’s deliberate alienation from the establishment was a central tenet of his belief in the artist as suffering hero, willing to dispense with social norms and sacrifice material comforts in pursuit of artistic truth. Compositionally complex, multi-layered and didactic, Barry’s self-portraits have many of the qualities of history paintings, as befitting an artist who scorned the contemporary predominance of unimaginative portrait painters—who “generally [had] no ideas of looking further than the likeness”— and primarily saw himself as a history painter21. For Barry, recording his own image for posterity was less a means of personal promotion and more a method of publicising his theories and stating an artistic creed.

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James Barry, Portrait of Burke and Barry in the Characters of Ulysses and a Companion fleeing from the Cave of Polyphemus, 1776, Oil on canvas

127 x 102 cm. Collection: Crawford Art Gallery, Cork. Donated by the Friends of the National Collections of Ireland, 1956

16 His painting Ulysses and Polyphemus, executed in 1776, is a case in point; an allegorical work which skilfully combined classical mythology, autobiography and contemporary history. On one level it shows the classical hero Ulysses and a companion, who disguised themselves as sheep in order to escape from the cave of the blind giant Polyphemus. On a second level it is a friendship portrait of Barry with his patron and confidant, the statesman Edmund Burke. As such, it inserts itself into a long and august lineage of works, including portraits by artists such as Raphael, Annibale Carracci, Peter Lely and another self-portrait by Barry with his friends James Paine and Dominique Lefèvre (National Portrait Gallery, London). Perhaps as a demonstration of their intimacy, Barry’s depiction of both himself and Burke is startlingly honest; the artist with puffy eyes and slack mouth; Burke in need of a shave with straggly hair and an exposed neck (a far cry from the decorous, buttoned-up stylings of Barry’s formal portrait of Burke, executed five years previously). In a gesture suggesting a certain protectiveness towards his younger, fiery-tempered friend, Burke stretches out his arm to steady Barry’s forward propulsion while holding a cautionary finger to his lips. In this respect, the danger represented by Polyphemus may be symbolic of the risk posed by Burkes’ and Barry’s joint opposition to what they perceived as the British government’s mishandling of the American War of Independence. The Barry scholar, William Pressly also draws attention to a possible third reading of this complex picture by pointing out the beads of sweat on Barry’s brow. As Pressly rightly points out, perspiring figures are far from common in art, with the important exception of Jesus on the cross. If Barry was equating his own sacrifices in the name of art to those of

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Jesus, it was certainly a bold claim, though he was undoubtedly committed to the idea of the artist as prophet and teacher22.

17 Such ideas were further explored in Barry’s Self-portrait as Timanthes, which he started c.1780 and completed towards the end of his life in 1803. Taking an abandoned image of himself as a young man, the artist transformed it twenty years later into an autobiographical homage to the ancient Greek painter Timanthes, whose lost painting of a sleeping Cyclops, Barry reimagines and clutches tightly in his own canvas. By identifying himself with an artist described by Pliny as “highly gifted with genius… the only one among the artists in whose works there is always something more implied by the pencil than is expressed”, Barry positioned himself as the true and faithful inheritor of the ideals of the classical world. This was in deliberate and provocative contrast to his artistic contemporaries, such as Reynolds, who had largely turned their backs on the increasingly unfashionable genre of history painting to pursue more commercial and lucrative avenues23. A stark illustration of the isolation and frustration of his final years, it is perhaps the most moving of all Barry’s self-revelations; the last in a line of self-portraits which surely went far beyond those of any of his contemporaries to explore and exploit the possibilities of the human countenance.

18 In the hands of different practitioners, operating around the same time as Reynolds and Barry, a self-portrait could also be a mode of personal interrogation as much as a means of status affirmation or an expression of artistic principle. As producing a self- portrait became a more routine task, artists began to explore the possibilities of the genre more thoroughly. Rather than performing, some portraits in the second half of the century sought to disclose24. The dominant note of both Thomas Frye and Robert Healy’s remarkable self-portraits, dating from 1760, 1765 and 1766 respectively, is contemplative and self-revelatory.

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Thomas Frye, Self-Portrait, 1760

Mezzotint, 50.5 × 35.0 cm (plate). ©Trustees of the British Museum.

19 Restrained to a black and white palette they eschew Reynolds’ and Barry’s rich colours for soft, tonal effects; Frye’s those of mezzotint and Healy’s those of grisaille chalk. Frye, the elder of the two and an undoubted influence on the younger Healy, produced his head as part of a series of “Twelve Mezzotinto Prints… drawn from nature and as large as life”, which were sold by subscription through the Public Advertiser25. Born in County Offaly, but leaving Ireland for London at an early age, Frye has been described as “one of the most original and least standardised portrait painters of his generation” 26. Yet he was perhaps better known among contemporaries as a successful entrepreneur, having established the innovative Bow Porcelain Factory in 1747. He thus easily rivalled Latham’s or Hone’s material success. Yet in choosing to record his own countenance after his retirement from the factory in 1759 on grounds of ill-health, he invokes a far more complex persona than that of a wealthy businessman. Employing an unusually large mezzotint plate to render his visage life-size, he faces the viewer pressed close to the picture-plane, with a direct, inquisitive gaze. Utilizing his considerable skills as an engraver, he displays a keen awareness of his own physicality; carefully rendering the fine, care-worn lines that furrow his brow and the network of veins that criss-cross the hand which supports his head, in a gesture somewhere between frank appraisal and resignation.

20 In contrast, Healy’s pair of self-portraits show an artist at the very start of his career; similarly enquiring, but with a youthful, nervous energy lacking from Frye’s example. Not long graduated, Healy turned to himself and his brother William as models, perhaps for want of a steady stream of clients. The earlier of the two drawings, executed when Healy was only 22 years of age, demonstrates his talent for creative

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draughtsmanship as he approaches the mirror at a sideways angle, as if unsure of what he will find. Yet to begin his exhibiting career (his first entry to the Society of Artists annual shows came the following year) and still awaiting a sizeable commission (he did not enter the employ of Thomas Conolly of Castletown, his first major patron until 1767) Healy was a man on the make; possessed of considerable gifts which had not yet taken full flight27. His second foray into self-scrutiny came the following year and displays a more direct confrontation with himself. Though he shows himself at work—a portfolio of drawings and a chalk-holder clutched in his hand—the inclusion of a classical bust deliberately emphasizes his education and cultured status; its blank marble-eyed gaze forming a clever contrast with his bright, forward-looking stare.

21 Here we are offered a key to the difference between Healy’s generation of young Dublin artists and their professional forebears. Healy was launching himself into an artistic milieu that had changed considerably since Latham and Jervas’s time, and even Hone’s. Perhaps most significantly for Healy, a year prior to his first self-portrait, a group of enterprising men had come together to establish the Society of Artists in Ireland; the first organization of its kind for Irish artists. Previously grouped with cutlers and stationers under the Guild of St Luke, this was a bold statement of intent on the part of twelve Dublin painters, who sought to raise their own status and promote fine art production in the city. Inspired by the success of the Society of Artists in London, founded four years previously, they placed an advertisement in the popular Dublin circular Faulkner’s Journal in February 1764, calling for contributions to an annual exhibition—the first of its kind in Ireland—which it was hoped would “excite emulation” amongst themselves and “bring forth latent merit to public view”. Healy’s self-conscious attempt to ally himself with the Society’s image of the artist—at one remove from other craftsmen—is played out in his studied allusion to classical sources and he undoubtedly benefited from the exciting and unprecedented opportunities created by these men. Combined with improved training facilities, in the form of the recently established Dublin Society Schools, which Healy (and Barry) had attended, it seems fair to say that Healy and his contemporaries had less need of the bombast and arrogance that Latham, in particular, had required to forge his career. As the Society of Artists exhibition catalogues reveal, late eighteenth-century Dublin was now a relative hive of creativity, with portraitists working alongside landscape artists, history painters, sculptors, printers and draughtsmen in a wide range of media, including oil paint, pastel, marble, wood, glass, wax and hair, to create an increasingly self-confident national school of Irish art.

22 Yet, rather surprisingly, it was not until 1805 that an Irish artist’s self-portrait finally joined Reynolds in the hallowed hang of the Corridoio Vasariano at the Uffizi; the ultimate accolade for any artist in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A small pastel portrait by Hugh Douglas Hamilton was at this time presented to the collection by Maria Louisa Bourbon, Queen Regent of Tuscany where it joined “the most eminent painters who have flourished in Europe during the last three centuries”28. In writing to thank her for the donation, Tomasso Puccini, then Director of the Uffizi, spoke of Hamilton as “The English [sic] painter… who has not been equalled in the last century in the art of pastels. I knew the artist in Rome, where he was most distinguished”29.

23 Hanging alongside more than two hundred self-portraits by luminaries such as Rubens, Vandyke and Rembrandt and those of eminent contemporaries such as Reynolds,

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Raphael Mengs and Angelica Kauffmann, it is hard not to feel that Hamilton’s contribution, executed c. 1785-90, is a rather timid foray, which must surely have been overshadowed by their more robust productions30. This is a problem implicit in mixing pastel works with oil paintings in a hang, yet Hamilton’s portrait suffers somewhat even in comparison to works by other pastellists represented in the collection. Measuring only 22 x 20 cm Hamilton depicts himself elegantly but inconspicuously, slight of feature, in a palette of muted colours against a plain backdrop. Though superbly executed, as were all Hamilton’s best pastels, with particular attention paid to the fine coating of powder in his hair and the frothy lace at his throat, the overall effect is one of polite restraint and a certain, impermanent fragility. Turning his head to one side, he appears to survey his neighbours, among them Rosalba Carriera’s contribution, Self-Portrait with a Portrait of her Sister; a much more elaborate pastel characterised by sensitive detailing and measuring 71 x 57 cm. It shows Carriera half-length and at work, sticks of pastel heaped in front of a nearly finished drawing, a rose in her hair, dressed in lustrous silks and lace and with a hint of drapery in the bottom right hand corner. Hamilton also kept company with Jean-Étienne Liotard, whose pastel portrait was specially commissioned by Grand Duke Francis Stephen of Lorraine upon the artist’s return from Constantinople in 1744. Also larger in scale, at 61 x 49 cm, it depicts Liotard resplendent in eastern dress, the almost tangible softness of his tall fur hat and the fine grey-streaked tangle of his beard demonstrating pastel technique at its very finest.

24 Of course, Hamilton was not to know the final destination of his work (it was, after all, not a specially commissioned portrait as so many of the others were) yet it is interesting to note that it was during the very period of its execution—the mid to late 1780s—that Hamilton was attempting to expand the limits of pastel beyond its small- scale, domestic and quickly-executed origins. In pursuit of a more elevated conception and finish, he produced a magnificent series of larger pastel full-length portraits of English and Irish Grand Tourists, which included exquisite topographical backgrounds and carefully studied contrasts in texture. This run of work culminated in his tour-de- force Antonio Canova in his Studio with Henry Tresham and a Plaster Model of the Cupid and Psyche Sculpture, c. 1788 (Victoria and Albert Museum), which is now considered “one of the finest works ever executed in the medium”31.

25 Hamilton’s modesty in the face of such achievements was perhaps merely a product of his measured temperament (the Irish sculptor Christopher Hewetson, who lived in Rome at the same time as Hamilton, noted that Hamilton and fellow artist Jacob More were the only ones to keep a distance from the constant factioning and politicking of the different artistic groups in residence)32. Yet, as this essay has sought to demonstrate, his self-portrait does not seem representative of the growing sense of assertion among his Irish contemporaries, whose artistic productions were successfully moving out from under the shadow of their British and French contemporaries at this time. Confidently taking their place on the international stage, they seemed keen to disprove notions of eighteenth-century Ireland as a derivative cultural backwater. However, while a range of Irish self-portraitists can be seen to have engaged in an original and meaningful way with a Europe-wide discourse of artistic self-examination during this period, it is perhaps telling that many of the fascinating images included in this brief survey are not already better and more widely known.

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NOTES

1. Silvia Meloni, ‘The Collection of Painters’ Self-Portraits’ in Paintings in the Uffizi and Pitti Galleries, ed. Mina Gregori, Boston, New York, Toronto, London, Bullfinch Press, 1994, p. 596. 2. Title quote is taken from a Letter from James Barry to the Society of Arts, 2 May 1804. Royal Society of Arts, London. MS AD/MA/104/10/403. 3. For more on the characteristic and quite intentional confusion between the private / public spheres fostered in the second half of the eighteenth century see Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 49-50 and Roger Chartier (ed.), A History of Private Life Volume III: Passions of the Renaissance, Harvard and London, Harvard University Press, 1989, pp. 161-397. 4. Philip Fisher quoted in James Hall, The Self-Portrait. A Cultural History, London, Thames and Hudson, 2014, p. 9. 5. Samuel Madden, Reflections and Resolutions proper for the Gentlemen of Ireland as to their Conduct for the Service of this Country, Dublin, 1738, p. 231. 6. While the identification of this portrait as Latham has only been in circulation since 1983, it is now widely accepted as such, not least by the National Gallery of Ireland, where it resides. Nicola Figgis and Brendan Rooney, Irish Paintings in the National Gallery of Ireland, Vol. 1, Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland, 2001, p. 255. 7. Anthony Pasquin [John Williams], Memoirs of the Royal Academicians and an Authentic History of the Arts in Ireland, London, H. D. Symonds, P. McQueen and T. Bellamy, 1796, p. 29. Pasquin’s reputation as an arch satirist makes him a complex and fraught observer. Nonetheless, he remains the main source of information on Latham and indeed many other Irish artists of this period. 8. Anne Crookshank, ‘James Latham 1696-1747’, GPA Irish Arts Review Yearbook, Dublin, Eton Enterprises, vol. 5, 1988, p. 68. 9. Marcia Pointon, Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1993, p. 13. Kate Retford, ‘Patrilineal Portraiture? Gender and Genealogy in the Eighteenth-Century English Country House’ in John Styles and Amanda Vickery (eds.), Gender, Taste and Material Culture in Britain and North America 1700-1830, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2006, p. 315. 10. Anthony Pasquin, Memoirs, p. 10-11. 11. As a well-known figure in the Dublin arts scene for the extent of his stay—1780–84— Pasquin most likely took part in Hussey’s gatherings in Earl Street and Latham’s continuing posthumous status was perhaps due, in no small part, to the constant reminder of his skills and pre-eminence that the prominent display of his self-portrait offered. 12. Of course, the portrait under discussion here may, in fact, be only one of several self-portraits Latham produced and thus not the painting in Hussey’s possession (Latham’s total output was probably far higher than his extant paintings would

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suggest). Yet, as the only known survivor, it must – at least for the moment – stand for them all. 13. Anthony Pasquin, Memoirs, p. 29. Anne Crookshank and The Knight of Glin, The Painters of Ireland, c. 1660-1920, London, Barrie and Jenkins, 1978, p. 42. 14. George Vertue, The Note Books of George Vertue Relating to Artists and Collections in England, 6 vols, Oxford, The Walpole Society, 1930-5, vol. 3, p. 83. 15. Anne Crookshank and the Knight of Glin, Irish Portraits 1660-1860, London, Paul Mellon Foundation for British Art, 1969, p. 14. 16. With many thanks to Brendan Rooney for drawing the Countess of Bridgewater’s portrait to my attention in this context. 17. Reynolds self-portrait was executed at the invitation of the Grand Duke of Tuscany. On the whole, Reynolds’ self-portraits are not said to have detained him for long but he spent more time over this work, unusually rejecting his first effort. Hall, op. cit., p. 165. 18. For more on Hone’s fascinating career see Nicola Figgis (ed.), Art and Architecture of Ireland. Vol. III Painting 1600-1900, Dublin, New Haven and London, RIA, Paul Mellon Centre, Yale University Press, 2014, pp. 309-312. 19. David Mannings, Sir Joshua Reynolds: A Complete Catalogue of his Paintings, 2 vols, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2000. 20. See Nicola Figgis and Brendan Rooney, Irish Paintings in the National Gallery of Ireland, Vol 1, p. 356 for more details of Lowry’s self-portrait. 21. James Barry, An Account of a Series of Pictures in the Great Room at the Adelphi, London, 1783, vol. 2, p. 248 quoted in Liam Lenihan, The Writings of James Barry and the Genre of History Painting 1775-1809, Surrey, Ashgate, 2014, p. 40. 22. William Pressly, ‘Barry’s Self-Portraits: Who’s Afraid of the Ancients?’ in James Barry, 1741-1806: ‘The Great Historical Painter’, Kinsale, Gandon Editions for the Crawford Art Gallery, 2005, p. 67. 23. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Book XXXV, p. 317. www.loebclassics.com, accessed January 2018. 24. Xanthe Brooke, Face to Face: Three Centuries of Artist’s Self-Portraiture, Liverpool, National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside, 1994, p. 28. 25. Public Advertiser, 28 April 1760. 26. Ellis Waterhouse, The Dictionary of British 18th Century Painters in Oils and Crayons, Woodbridge, Antique Collectors Club, 1981, p. 131. 27. Nicola Figgis (ed.), Art and Architecture of Ireland, pp. 293-4. 28. John Moore, A View of Society and Manners in Italy: with Anecdotes Relating to Some Eminent Characters, 3 vols, Dublin, Messrs Price, W. Watson, W. and H. Whitestone, Chamberlaine, Williams [and 17 others], 1781, vol. 2, p. 368. 29. Letter from Tomaso Puccini to Maria Luisa Bourbon, 21 Sept 1805, Archivio Soprintendenza alle Gallerie, Florence, MS 196 Fila 32, 49. Reproduced in Wolfram Prinz, Die Sammlung der Selbstbildnisse in der Uffizien Berlin, Gebrüder Mann, 1971, p. 222. 30. John Moore, in A View of Society, numbers the collection as such in 1781, with presumably a few more additions between that date and Hamilton’s entry in 1805. It now numbers more than 2,000 works.

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31. Katie Coombs, manuscript acquisition notes in the Canova and Tresham file at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, where the pastel now hangs as a centrepiece of the British Galleries display. 32. Letter from Christopher Hewetson to George Cumberland, 4 May 1792, Cumberland Papers, British Library Add MS 31496, f. 333.

ABSTRACTS

Through the works of James Latham, Charles Jervas, Thomas Frye, Robert Healy, Nathaniel Hone, James Barry, Strickland Lowry and Hugh Douglas Hamilton, this essay seeks to explore how Irish self-portraits keyed into a wider, international vogue for artistic self-examination during the eighteenth century. Necessarily touching on practical questions of display, dissemination and reception, it will also examine the polarities of disclosure and performance, friendship and alienation, temporality and permanence, emulation and originality which the genre generously encompassed. In doing so, parallels will be drawn with other contemporary self-portrait practitioners, with particular attention drawn to the work of Joshua Reynolds, the most prolific producer of self-portraits at this time.

En s’appuyant sur l’œuvre de James Latham, Charles Jervas, Thomas Frye, Robert Healy, Nathaniel Hone, James Barry, Strickland Lowry and Hugh Douglas Hamilton, cet article vise à démontrer que les autoportraits réalisés par les peintres irlandais du 18è siècle s’inscrivent dans un mouvement plus large qui atteste de l’engouement de l’époque pour l’étude de soi à travers l’art. Prenant nécessairement en compte des aspects pratiques liés à l’exposition des œuvres, à leur dissémination et à leur réception, nous étudierons aussi des oppositions binaires entre dévoilement et mise en scène, amitié et désunion, temporalité et permanence, émulation et originalité que ce genre pictural embrasse généreusement. Au fil de l’analyse, des parallèles seront effectués avec d’autres autoportraitistes contemporains, au premier rang desquels Joshua Reynolds, qui réalisa le plus d’autoportraits à l’époque.

INDEX

Keywords: eighteenth Century, Dublin, London, oil painting, pastel Mots-clés: dix-huitième siècle, Dublin, Londres, peinture à l’huile, pastel

AUTHOR

RUTH KENNY University College Dublin. Dr Ruth Kenny is a curator and art historian who has worked at Tate Britain and the National Portrait Gallery. She is currently curator of an exhibition on the Society of Artists in Ireland for the Irish Georgian Society and teaches at the School of Art History and Cultural Policy, University College Dublin.

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A Scot in Ireland: Erskine Nicol’s Mid-19th Century Self-Portraits

Amélie Dochy

Erskine Nicol, Two Figures in an Interio

1 Many young men challenge the view of their parents when they become teenagers, and this was the case of the Scottish artist Erskine Nicol. Born in Leith in 1825, he was the son of a cooper1 who dreamed of a commercial career for his eldest child2. However, at

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the early age of 12, Erskine Nicol entered the Trustees’ Academy in Edinburgh to receive an artistic education, and he was soon followed by his cousin, Peter Cleland (1818-1902) in the 1840s3. Together, they decided to leave Scotland in order to set up a school in Dublin so that in 1846, Erskine Nicol resigned from his job as a drawing teacher at Leith High School4. The cousins arrived in the Irish capital the same year, but their plan failed and Peter went back to Scotland while Erskine decided to settle on Fleet Street (n°49) and to work in Ireland.

2 Nicol roamed the countryside drawing and painting the landscape or the peasantry in watercolour. He travelled the region of Dublin as well as the area of the Claddagh around Galway and in 1847, he exhibited five works at the Royal Hibernian Academy in the Irish capital: the first was entitled Highland Boys, Bird Nesting, the second, A Rustic Angler, the third, Flowers from Nature whilst the other two were portraits5. Nicol continued to live and work in Ireland until 1850, but even when he settled back in Scotland and later on in London, he continued to visit the country at least once a year, as long as his health allowed. These stays inspired many other paintings devoted to Ireland, in which he sometimes represented himself.

3 But why should a Scottish artist choose to paint self-portraits in Ireland rather than in his home country? Can these unusual examples of self-representation be considered the heirs to a long tradition of self-portraits? A self-portrait can be defined as a work of art in which the artist represents himself or consigns his image to posterity, so it supposedly mirrors the identity of an artist. One of the key elements of identity is nationality. So it may be surprising that the Scottish aspect of his identity should be erased by the Irish settings or landscapes that are recognisable in his paintings. To further explore these questions, this article analyses three works. The first, Self-Portrait with a Rustic Companion6 (1855), was painted in the mid- 1850s, when Nicol’s career started to take off. The second, Donnybrook Fair7, was painted four years later, in 1859, whereas the third reflects a much later phase of the painter’s production as it is a watercolour done in 1863 and called Two Figures in an Interior8. I will first examine how the three pictures may be regarded as typical examples of the genre, before highlighting the unexpected features which differentiate them from the long tradition of self-portraits derived from Rembrandt’s work in the seventeenth century (1606-1669). Finally, these self-portraits are key works to the understanding of Erskine Nicol’s artistic relationship with Ireland.

4 A self-portrait is generally considered to represent an artist’s identity, which is best reflected by the act of painting itself. The genre is an assertion of a human being who is willing to insist on his artistic skills9. This is the reason why it is very frequent to see an artist portrayed with brushes, palette and paint, as in Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait with Two Circles (1665-1669)10. Two centuries later, Nicol used the same objects to epitomise his identity as an artist, both in Two Figures in an Interior and in Self-Portrait with a Rustic Companion. Whereas the latter title clearly indicates that the picture is indeed a self- portrait, the former is not so explicit. In fact, the original title of Two Figures in an Interior has probably been lost and this was the name given to the work by the auction house which offered it for sale in 201011. It was only when I examined the painting that I realised it was a self-portrait.

5 First, the painter’s face can be identified, which is of course at the heart of the self- portrait. This identification is possible thanks to a portrait of Erskine Nicol painted by

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one of his friends, William Fettes Douglas, a Scottish artist who lived between 1822 and 1891.

William Fettes Douglas, Portrait of Erskine Nicol

Oil on canvas laid on panel, 14.5 x 10.2 cm, Royal Scottish Academy. Public domain ().

6 This oil on canvas entitled Portrait of Erskine Nicol12 was exhibited in Edinburgh at the Royal Scottish Academy in 1862, a year before Nicol painted the so-called Two Figures in an Interior, so that the painter was the same age in both pictures and can easily be recognised. Thus, the fact that Nicol painted a self-portrait in Two Figures became obvious and it shows that he represented himself with enough verisimilitude to be identified by a person who had already seen him or a representation of him, even in the twenty-first century.

7 This is relevant to another dimension of self-portraits: in such pictures, artists construct an image of themselves which will survive them; and this is how they will be remembered by the public, art lovers and even by their own family. So self-portraiture has a memorial function. Artists create images of themselves that they are willing to transmit; they emphasise the aspects of their personality that they deem worthy of remembrance. In Two Figures, Nicol illustrates specifically the performance of painting. The artist has carefully represented his pen and the wood panel on which he is drawing. Furthermore, the background recalls the structure of many other pictures, noticeably of Interior with Stairs13, a watercolour which must have been painted the same year. The reappearance of such a setting evokes the reality of the studio where paintings are carefully constructed, so that, following the tradition of self-portraits, the artist turns the self into a spectacle of artistic creation.

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Erskine Nicol, Donnybrook Fair

Oil on canvas, 107 x 211 cm, 1859, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. Public domain ()

8 This “self-as-spectacle”14 is also visible in Donnybrook Fair, an oil on canvas in which Erskine Nicol depicts himself and his wife amidst a hundred visitors walking from one stall to another. To the right of the middle ground, Nicol and his wife are lost in the crowd and yet, their posture among a group of middle-class characters gives them a social standing. In particular, one may note the dress of Nicol’s wife, which reflects the contemporary fashion for crinoline. For Rachel Weathers, in the 1850s, the crinoline was “the costume of the angel in the house”15. Weathers claims that this dress was perfect for middle-class women as it allowed them to feel protected and to convey an image of “passivity” — one could hardly move in such dresses —, “fragility” or “chastity”16.

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Erskine Nicol, Donnybrook Fair, detail

9 Despite its popularity, the crinoline was criticised in newspapers like Punch for its frivolity: it was said to be inspired by French fashion — Empress Eugénie was particularly fond of crinolines — and was considered by some as a waste of money. Being made of several layers of cloth and implying the use of a corset, a crinoline cage as well as a petticoat, it was an expensive outfit. By painting his wife wearing such a costume, Nicol implies that in spite of the extravagant cost of crinoline he could afford it, and it is therefore a proclamation of his success. It is true that by the end of the 1850s, Nicol had become famous and he regularly exhibited his paintings in the most important galleries of the UK such as the Royal Academy in London or the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh. His own costume is also that of a middle-class gentleman, complete with white shirt, creamy beige waistcoat and raincoat, dark necktie and top hat. The painter looks ahead, gives his arm to his wife while a friend of his or a relative is pointing at something in the distance. It is the perfect image of a middle-class family on a day off, and their social status is made even more conspicuous thanks to the contrast offered by the characters in the foreground, who mainly belong to the working class or the peasantry.

10 In Donnybrook Fair, the painter’s self-portrait corresponds to a “celebration of self”, to repeat the words of David C. Ward17, who identifies this feature as a characteristic of the genre. This is also true of the earlier watercolour entitled Self-Portrait with a Rustic Companion (1855), in which the painter’s social status is enhanced by the contrast produced by the peasant sitting behind him. This character is painted in a particularly derogatory manner: not only his clothes and his worn-out hat, but his unkempt hair, his wrinkled face, his attitude bending forwards and especially his protruding teeth give him an air of silliness, as opposed to the painter who looks neat, with clean clothes, sleek hair and a well-groomed beard.

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Erskine Nicol, Self-Portrait with a Rustic Companion

Watercolour heightened with white, 23 x 21 cm, 1855, private collection. Image courtesy of whytes.com18.

11 In this painting, Nicol fashions his identity in opposition to that of his Irish sitter. The painting is an invitation to follow the painter’s gaze and to observe the sitter with attention; in other words it entices us to discover his artistic production which, as the ugly peasant indicates, is no mere reflection of reality but a reconstruction to the Irish peasant’s detriment. Indeed, as noted by Pascal Bonafoux, a self-portrait can also be a fable: “Face, features, portrait... [...], ‘Let’s sketch it out’... Invitation to dream, to tell a tale, to embroider a story [...] the self-portrait is not only a face, an image or a portrait” 19.

12 It is in that sense that Nicol’s self-portrait is original: because of the caricature of the Irish peasant that is offered to the viewer, it is not a conventional representation of a painter in his studio. The painting invites the viewer to share a deprecating vision of the Irish peasant, based on a series of British clichés which, until the 1860s, had constructed the stereotype of Paddy as an idiotic but happy and harmless peasant who tended to be dirty, awkward and alcoholic20. A nineteenth-century spectator could immediately discern the sitter’s Irish identity thanks to the clay pipe that would symbolize his status21. Such a depiction of Irish identity was likely to please Nicol’s customers in Great Britain, and in particular in Scotland, where anti-Irish prejudices were virulent, as was noted by Perry Curtis:

13 The [Scottish] Lowlands in general and Edinburgh in particular proved a fertile breeding ground for various shades of Hibernophobia and anti-Celtic sentiment. Although born in London, James Gillray was the son of a Lanark man […]. Similarly,

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George Cruikshank was the son of the Scottish illustrator and cartoonist, Isaac, who had emigrated to London in the 1780s22.

14 Some famous caricaturists such as James Gillray (1756-1815) or George Cruikshank (1792-1878) had participated in the cultural construction of the Irish “other”, marked with negative traits in, for instance, United Irishmen upon Duty (Gillray, 1798), depicting Irish Republicans as criminals23, or the pair of lithographs by Cruikshank called Irish Decency!!! N°1 and Irish Decency!!! N°2 (1819), showing ragged or almost naked Irishmen in the office of a clerk. Anti-Irish prejudice was deeply ingrained in Scottish mentalities as such stereotypes dated back to the eighteenth century and were developed by other nineteenth-century artists of Scottish origin like John Proctor (1836-1914) or Harry Furniss (1854-1925) who both drew anti-Irish caricatures for the widely-circulated magazine Punch24. In addition, it was in Edinburgh that several theories in phrenology were developed to prove that ‘Celts’ were inferior to ‘Anglo-Saxons’25.

15 Curtis’s analysis is confirmed by the historian Martin J. Mitchell who writes:

16 In nineteenth-century Scotland […] the Catholic Irish were despised by the bulk of the native population on account of their race and religion, and because they were employed mainly as strike-breakers or as low-wage labour26.

17 It is true that Irish workers were used to break the strikes which occurred between the 1820s and the 1850s in the Scottish coal and iron industries27 and as a result, they were hated by the local labour force and despised by the middle classes. Erskine Nicol’s caricature strengthens the prejudices of the time, and flatters viewers by assuring them of their own superiority compared with the ridiculous Irishman. As a Scotsman, Nicol claims a dominant position in relation to the Irishman. Consequently, this self-portrait corresponds to the definition of caricatures, which are “texts laden with clues to the social and political dynamics of any given time and culture”28. In Self-Portrait with a Rustic Companion, the Irish background seems to emphasise the distance that the painter puts between himself and his subject.

18 Yet, in Donnybrook Fair, Nicol, his wife and their two companions are not major elements in the composition which is dominated by the setting. Because of the profusion of characters, the central feature of the painting is clearly the Irish event, the fair at Donnybrook. The painter being depicted as a minor character, other elements compete for the viewer’s attention29. Moreover, such a posture deprives the painted artist of the “gaze out of the picture” which, according to Galligan, gives the impression that the painter is looking at himself in a mirror30. The absence of this “reflexive” gaze, to use Galligan’s words, shows that the painting is not a conventional portrait.

19 On the contrary, in terms of genre, Donnybrook Fair is better qualified as a narrative painting, in the tradition established in Scotland by the artist David Wilkie (1785–1841) with his picture called Pitlessie Fair31 (1804). Wilkie and Nicol had much in common: both were Scottish, interested in Ireland and specialists in narrative painting. Wilkie’s tour of Ireland in 1835 had inspired him to paint The Peep-O-Day Boys’ Cabin (1835-6) and The Irish Whiskey Still (1840), two canvasses telling stories of families involved in illegal activities. As noted by James Caw, Wilkie had a considerable influence on the next generation of Scottish painters:

20 [Wilkie’s] example was so potent, not only as regards choice and treatment of subject, but technically, that there were comparatively few Scottish genre-painters of his or the

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immediately succeeding generation who did not work in a more or less Wilkie-like manner32.

21 Unsurprisingly, Nicol’s manner was Wilkie-like, but his vision of Ireland was less picturesque than that of Wilkie, who tended to paint romanticised Irish peasants, especially in The Peep-O-Day Boys’ Cabin, in which the female protagonist looks like a Madonna while her husband is pictured as an exhausted hero33. Nicol chose to develop a less idealised iconography of Ireland, closer to the way in which Wilkie represented Scotland with Pitlessie Fair. This work of art was meant to be “a portrait of a village with its people”, including elements of the artist’s own biography, given that Wilkie’s father is represented in the painting34.

22 Narrative paintings based on the portraits of real individuals encompassing all layers of Victorian society were also made highly fashionable in the mid-century by other artists such as the English painter William Powell Frith (1819-1909), whose picture entitled The Derby Day35 — exhibited in London at the Royal Academy in 1858 — required a guard rail to protect it from the enthusiastic public36. As remarked by Brendan Rooney, Nicol may have heard about the success of this painting in the capital37 because two years later, he offered the visitors of the Royal Scottish Academy his own depiction of a popular fair: Donnybrook Fair, exhibited as number 32538. This large canvas, more than a meter high and two meters long, shares numerous characteristics with A Derby Day. Both are vast pictures with a “panoramic39” quality examining a famous event: the former illustrates the carnival taking place every year at the end of August in a suburb of Dublin40, while the latter represents the horse race at Epsom in England, which gathered members from all social classes.

23 Donnybrook Fair is not so much a portrait of the painter as a sample of Irish society in Nicol’s days. For Thomas, this is characteristic of narrative paintings like the one by Frith, which “glorifies” Victorian society and British values41. In Donnybrook Fair, Nicol’s contemporary society is also commemorated, as many distinctive social groups can be observed. As Thomas writes, such pictures aim at “show[ing] contemporary subjects” and offering “a truthful view of the world based on a scrupulous representation of modern-day life”42. Actually, Nicol has included peasants dressed up to the nines and having lunch in the foreground, but also middle-class visitors in the middle background, where acrobats and musicians such as a drummer can also be seen. On the right, soldiers can be recognised by their bright red jackets, just as four police officers standing in front of the queue below the swingboat can be identified by their dark blue flat caps tied under the chin.

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Erskine Nicol, Donnybrook Fair, detail

24 It is true that both Derby Day and Donnybrook Fair show carefully painted characters who are involved in different actions or scenes: “narrative pictures are primarily stories […] and they aim for dramatic effect”43. To better understand the little dramas unfolding under their eyes, viewers need to examine the tiniest details. As noted by the owner of The Derby Day in 1858, “the nature of the picture requires a close inspection to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest it”44. This leads us to another characteristic of the genre: the viewer has an “active role”, which turns him into a “detective, whose job is to interpret the symbols, expressions and actions, in order to reconstruct the story”45.

Erskine Nicol, Donnybrook Fair, detail

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25 For example, in Donnybrook Fair, a thorough examination of the right foreground allows us to distinguish a group of gamblers, with a man seen from the rear extending both his hands, in which something is hidden, towards a peasant. The latter rummages through his pocket for a coin, while a third character with a white top hat whispers some words of advice. One may guess that the adviser is an accomplice of the old man stretching his arms towards the smiling peasant, for he tightly holds his shillelagh (a stick which was used in Ireland for walking and fighting), in case things go wrong46. So narrative paintings require “reading”47 to highlight their dramatic aspect and provide insight into their “Christian dimension”48. Of course, such a scene was perceived by nineteenth century visitors as morally incorrect, given that the peasant will probably be swindled by the persuasive partners49.

26 Being placed in the foreground, such crafty characters are given more importance than the figures of the painter and his wife who are placed behind them. Such a placement demonstrates that Nicol’s self-portrait is only a minor element of this painting whose features correspond to the then-fashionable narrative genre. Obviously Nicol wanted to leave a trace of his identity within the painting without departing from the characteristics of this successful trend. More than the signature, the presence of the couple is an expression of the painter’s experiences in Ireland and of his fondness for the country, which had become a part of his identity by the end of the 1850s.

27 The presence of the artist is also quite discreet in Two Figures in an Interior, in which, although painted in the foreground, Nicol does not seem to be the main figure. The peasant in the middle ground appears to be as important as the painter, so that the artist and his subject are merged in this self-portrait. This suggests that Nicol’s identity could not be separated from his Irish representations. Besides, the Irish setting is also illustrated with meticulous details, like the stone floor, the wooden hooks on the left, or the wood beams. To Nicol, the inside of an Irish cottage like this one was interesting in itself, and he spent some time painting studies of such interiors, as confirmed by another of his watercolours, entitled Interior with Stairs. It features the same floor and stairs, but the door above the stairs is opened so that one can distinguish a basin and a jug. Both characters have disappeared but some hens are pecking in the foreground, which alludes to the Irish tradition of keeping them inside during the winter, so that they could continue to lay eggs50. In Two Figures in an Interior, the fowl have been replaced by a broom which seems to be the attribute of the Irishwoman sitting on the left, while the painter has his brushes. However, both of them appear in what looks like their natural environment — the Irish cottage —, depicted so carefully that it is more than a setting: it gives identity to both characters.

28 Consequently, Self-Portrait with a Rustic Companion, Donnybrook Fair and Two Figures in an Interior illustrate various aspects of Nicol’s identity: in the caricature of the Irish peasant, he appears as a foreigner whose nationality should not be confused with that of his subjects51. Yet, in the second, the painter and his wife are part of a narrative painting whose goal is to describe the visitors to Donnybrook Fair, so that the couple is associated with the Irish and their customs. Finally, the watercolour underlines the importance of the setting in Nicol’s self-representation, as the painter can be observed in an environment which inspired his artistic production throughout his life.

29 What these three self-portraits have in common is their illustration of Nicol’s production and their hints as to the reasons for his success from the 1850s onwards. Self-Portrait with a Rustic Companion and Donnybrook Fair show that the Scottish artist

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excelled at painting details, and in particular the faces of his characters. This talent allowed him to invent crude caricatures but also to represent various emotions like anger, surprise, disappointment, interest, satisfaction, perplexity or affection. All these feelings are experienced by different characters painted in Donnybrook Fair, a picture which is also noteworthy for its scrupulous representation of a multitude of stalls, identified by Brendan Rooney as reliable depictions of the entertainers of the time such as, to the left, “Bells American Circus” or the nearby wagon, identified with a sign reading “Living Wonders & Paddy Maguires Learned Pig Toby who can tell the hours of the day & discourse like a Christian”. Further on the right is a Temperance Society tent with a medallion above its blue sign, probably representing Father Mathew, the founder of this movement. To Rooney, “Nicol’s Donnybrook Fair represents the most elaborate and ambitious of many representations of the fair by successive artists from the eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century”52. The atmosphere of this typically Irish fair is perfectly rendered by the lively visitors painted by Nicol.

30 Interestingly, the 1863 watercolour is not so precise when it comes to both characters, so the viewer understands that the painter’s attention is rather focused on the setting and its perspective. Actually, Two Figures in an Interior creates the illusion of several planes: the entrance with its stone floor, the stairs, the upper floor and the room revealed by the open door at the back, which is itself closed by another door. So the setting here plays a game with frames: the first corresponds to the frame of the canvas, the second, to the open door, and the third, at the back, leads the eye of the viewer further inside the house. Another frame is also suggested by the door over the stairs, which hints at Nicol’s capacity to create three-dimensional interiors in the tradition of Dutch painters like Adrian Brouwer (1605/6-1638), who was also famous for his caricatures of smokers inside dark taverns.

31 In these self-portraits, Nicol depicts himself as the heir to this tradition that allows painters to poke fun at the rest of the world in order to gain fame. According to Galligan, “the painter ultimately include[s] his own image […] within the tableau to indicate his status as proprietor, the integral participant in a continuum of visual perception53”. With his caricatures, Nicol participated in the elaboration of the anti- Irish prejudices that had already been developed by other artists who had paved the way for his own iconography of Ireland. But Nicol’s perspective was original because he merged elements of British caricatures with the techniques of narrative painting and the genre of self-portraiture, which made his representations distinct from those of other painters belonging to the Scottish school of art54. Although such caricatures can be shocking to today’s viewers, it should be noted that Nicol’s self-portrait with a boorish Irishman was part of a fabricated vision whose goal was to please Nicol’s public and, as a consequence, to make him successful. Self-Portrait with a Rustic Companion does not necessarily reflect his own opinion of Irish peasants as, to use Galligan’s words again, a self-portrait “is to be recognised as a fabricated construct, standing not one but two steps away from the ostensible model or object”55.

32 The verisimilitude of Nicol’s paintings should not lead us to conclude that his art was the perfect mirror of his thoughts or even national identity. In these three pictures, he presents himself as an artist who became famous thanks to his Irish caricatures, who is able to paint large canvasses or expressive characters, and who pays attention to the details of rural life. In Two Figures in an Interior, Nicol paints himself as the discreet witness of Irish peasant life, which proves that it is a portrait of himself as an artist but

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not as an individual personality and even less as a Scotsman. The three pictures allude to Nicol’s production and its characteristics, and they imply that the painter is nothing without his art.

33 The paintings by Nicol explored in this article have inherited many features from the genre of the self-portrait. Self Portrait with a Rustic Companion and Two Figures in an Interior both illustrate the artist while he is painting or drawing, and this performative dimension is reinforced by the presence of a character that the beholder of the nineteenth century would immediately identify as Irish, whereas the second is conspicuously placed in an Irish interior. Similarly, Donnybrook Fair is an invitation to discover a typically Irish celebration, which confirms Nicol’s interest in the country and its inhabitants. Even if he was a Scotsman, most of his artistic production was devoted to Ireland so that today, he is considered as an “Irish painter”—in the sense that he was a painter of Ireland. These self-portraits offer a compendium of Nicol’s art, illustrating most of its characteristics: they reveal his prodigious capacity to paint pictures in perspective, his sincere passion for Ireland and its rural life, his talent at painting emotions as well as detailed characters, whether in a flattering or derogatory manner, and his careful observation of everyday life. More than a portrait of himself, these three pictures draw a portrait of his art, asserting that the artist’s identity cannot be separated from his production.

NOTES

1. Erskine Nicol’s father, James Main Nicol, worked for wine merchants called Wanchope, Moodie & Hope. 2. Joyce M. Wallace, “Artists”, Further Traditions of Trinity and Leith, Edinburgh, John Donald Publishers, 1990, p. 65-78, p. 65. Philip Gilbert Hamerton, The Portfolio, An Artistic Periodical, London, Seeley, Jackson & Halliday, 1879, vol. 10, pp. 60-62, p. 60. 3. Anonymous, “The Late Mr. Peter Cleland, artist”, The Scotsman, Edinburgh, 7 March 1902, p. 4. 4. Ibid. 5. Unfortunately, the titles of these portraits were not recorded. Ann M. Stewart, Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts: Index of Exhibitors 1826-1987, Dublin, Manton Publishing, 1985-1987, 3 vols, 1987, vol. 3, p. 14. 6. Erskine Nicol, Self-Portrait with a Rustic Companion, watercolour heightened with white, 23 x 21 cm, 1855, private collection. 7. Erskine Nicol, Donnybrook Fair, oil on canvas, 107 x 211 cm, 1859, Tate Gallery, London. 8. Erskine Nicol, Two Figures in an Interior, bodycolour and graphite on paperboard, 16 x 11 cm, 1863, private collection. Note that bodycolour was used to obtain dense colours for highlights. It is a mixture of watercolour pigments with fish or animal gelatine but without white pigment. In Nicol’s days, the white tint was obtained thanks to zinc

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oxide, known as Chinese white. So bodycolour is different from gouache (which consists in mixing watercolours with an opaque white pigment and Arabic gum). See http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/g/gouache and http:// goldenagepaintings.blogspot.fr/2008/05/bodycolour.html [Both accessed January 2018]. 9. Gregory Galligan, “The Self Pictured: Manet, the Mirror, and the Occupation of Realist Painting”, The Art Bulletin, vol. 80, n° 1 (March 1998), pp. 138-171, p. 165. 10. Rembrandt, Self-Portrait with Two Circles, oil on canvas, 114 x 94 cm, 1665-1669, Kenwood House, London. 11. The watercolour was sold on the first of October 2010 at Skinner’s in Boston (lot 400A) under the title Two Figures in an Interior. 12. William Fettes Douglas, Portrait of Erskine Nicol, oil on canvas laid on panel, 14.5 x 10.2 cm, Royal Scottish Academy (RSA). 13. Erskine Nicol, Interior with Stairs, watercolour, size unknown, 1863, private collection. 14. A nice phrase used by Gregory Galligan, op. cit., p. 138. 15. Rachel Weathers, “The Pre-Raphaelite Movement and Nineteenth-Century Ladies’ Dress: A Study in Victorian Views of the Female Body”, in Margareta Frederick Watson, ed., Collecting the Pre-Raphaelites, Aldershot, Ashgate, 1997, pp. 95-108, rephrased by Julia Thomas, Pictorial Victorians: The Inscription of Values in Word and Image, Athens (Ohio), Ohio University Press, 2004, p. 80. 16. Ibid. 17. David C. Ward, “Celebration of Self: The Portraiture of Charles Wilson Peale & Rembrandt Peale, 1822-7”, American Journal, vol. 7, n° 1 (winter 1993), pp. 8-27. 18. I would like to thank Ian Whyte who kindly sent me his picture of the painting in November 2016. 19. My translation of Pascal Bonafoux’s sentence: “Visage, figure, portrait... [...] ‘figurez-vous’... Invitation au songe, à la fable, au conte […] l’autoportrait n’est pas qu’un visage, une image ou un portrait”. Pascal Bonafoux, Autoportrait, Or tout paraît, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2014, p. 10. 20. The stereotype is analysed in further detail in Edward Hirsch, “The Imaginary Irish Peasant”, PMLA, vol. 106, n° 5 (October 1991), pp. 1116-1133. To Hirsh, this was mainly a British invention but a different perspective is given by the revisionist historian Sheridan Gilley, in “English Attitudes to the Irish in England, 1780-1900”, in Colin Holmes, ed., Immigrants and Minorities in British Society, London, George Allen & Unwin, 1978, pp. 81-110. 21. Lewis Perry Curtis writes that: “to enhance the recognizability of […] national types, artists added such appropriate accessories as knee breeches, trousers, pantaloons, shillelaghs, scimitars, clay pipes, hats, caps, and beer mugs”. Lewis Perry Curtis, Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature, Washington, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997, p. XIX. Interestingly, in the case of Self-Portrait with a Rustic Companion, Nicol uses symbols of Irish identity to depict his sitter, but the artist himself is not painted with any recognisable Scottish prop. 22. Curtis, op. cit., p. 96.

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23. Cruikshank provided a similarly brutal imagery of the 1798 rebellion led by the United Irishmen with his 1845 illustration entitled Murder of George Crawford and his Granddaughter, portraying a desperate young woman in white surrounded by cruel rebels who have already slain her grandfather and dog with pikes. 24. Ibid., p. 45, 96. 25. Ibid., p. 12. 26. Martin J. Mitchell, “Irish Catholics in the West of Scotland in the Nineteenth Century: Despised by Scottish workers and controlled by the Church?”, in Martin J. Mitchell, ed., New Perspectives on the Irish in Scotland, Edinburgh, Birlinn, 2008, pp. 1-19, p. 1. 27. Ibid, p. 3. 28. Curtis, op. cit., p. XI. 29. This recalls the crowd scenes by Brueghel the Elder, such as Peasant Wedding (1566– 69), in which the artist might have painted himself as the man with a sword sitting on the far right. Alexander Wied, Brueghel, transl. F. Moulinat & L. Pericolo, Paris, Gallimard & Electa, 1997, p. 140. Brueghel was said to take part in such peasant festivities, see Desmond Shawe-Taylor & Jennifer Scott, De Brueghel à Rubens, The British Royal Collection, transl. Johan-Frederik Hel Guedj, Bruxelles, Actes Sud, 2008, p. 29. Similarly, Hubert and Jan van Eyck could have painted themselves as the third and fourth judges on horseback in The Mystic Lamb (1420–1432). Since the Renaissance, artists have included representations of themselves as minor characters in pictures which do not belong to the genre of self-portraits. This practice allowed them to leave a trace of their existence in their masterpieces. 30. Galligan, op. cit., p. 159. 31. Even before Wilkie, another Scottish artist, Alexander Carse (c. 1770–1843), had depicted a village fair in 1796 with Oldham Stock Fair. David Wilkie, Pitlessie Fair, oil on canvas, 61.5 x 110.5 cm, 1804, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh. 32. James L. Caw, Scottish Painting, Past and Present, 1620-1908, Bath, Kingsmead, reprint 1975, p. 103. 33. Fintan Cullen, Visual Politics, The Representation of Ireland, 1750-1930, Cork, Cork UP, pp. 117-125. 34. Nicholas Tromans believes that it could be one of the characters discussing below the main trees on the right. See Nicholas Tromans, David Wilkie, Painter of Every Day Life, Dulwich, Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2002, p. 50. 35. William Powell Frith, The Derby Day, oil on canvas, 101.5 x 223.5 cm, 1856-8, Tate Gallery, London. 36. Julia Thomas, Victorian Narrative Painting, London, Tate Publishing, 2000, p. 27. 37. Brendan Rooney, “Donnybrook Fair; Erskine Nicol”, in Brendan Rooney (ed.), A Time and a Place, Two Centuries of Irish Social Life, Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland, 2006, pp. 141-144, p. 143. 38. Royal Scottish Academy (ed.), Catalogue of the Exhibition of the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, Royal Scottish Academy, 1860, p. 20. 39. Thomas, op. cit., p. 35.

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40. Séamas Ó Maitiú, “Donnybrook Fair, Carnival versus Lent”, History Ireland, vol. 4, n° 1 (Spring 1996), pp. 21-26, p. 22. 41. Thomas, op. cit., p. 36. 42. Ibid., p. 33. 43. Ibid., p. 33. 44. Jacob Bell in a letter to Frith, quoted by Thomas, op. cit., pp. 27-28. 45. Ibid., p. 30. 46. However, it should be mentioned that “the symbolism used in such images could only be understood by an informed minority”, to repeat the words of Julia Thomas (Victorian Narrative Paintings, op. cit., p. 30) who explains that art critics became more important thanks to narrative paintings: “the growth of narrative painting paralleled the growth of art criticism. The critic came to prominence as one who could correctly interpret the image and teach the public how to do so”. Ibid., p. 31. 47. Julia Thomas, Victorian Narrative Painting, op. cit., p. 28. 48. Ibid., p. 33. 49. It should also be said that Thomas identifies a last feature of narrative pictures, their “problematic documentary evidence” as such paintings leave out some aspects of their contemporary society (ibid., p. 33). Nicol’s picture is no exception to the rule as it represents a fair that had been banned four years before the painting’s exhibition, in 1855. 50. Claudia Kinmonth, Irish Rural Interiors in Art, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 2006, p. 114. 51. Although he can be considered as the heir of Wilkie given his artistic choices, Nicol does not insist on his Scottish origins in the self-portraits that I have found. Rather than showing his nationality, these pictures are made to demonstrate his skills. 52. Brendan Rooney, ed., A Time and a Place, Two Centuries of Irish Social Life, Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland, 2006, p. 142. 53. Galligan, op. cit., p. 164. 54. For more details on Erskine Nicol and the Scottish school of art, see Amélie Dochy, “A Scottish Art and Heart: The Transparent Influence of the Scottish School of Art on Erskine Nicol’s Depictions of Ireland”, Études écossaises, Grenoble, ELLUG, 2013, vol. 16, pp. 119-140. 55. Galligan, op. cit., p. 164.

ABSTRACTS

This article explores three self-portraits by Erskine Nicol (1825–1904) entitled Self-Portrait with a Rustic Companion (1855), Donnybrook Fair (1859) and Two Figures in an Interior (1863), in which the artist is, paradoxically for a Scottish painter, represented in an Irish environment. The setting effectively erases his nationality. These paintings question the genre of self-portrait even if they

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bear some of its typical characteristics, since their elements of caricature or their inclusion of other characters indicate a will to go beyond a self-image. In fact, these paintings are invitations to discover the painter’s talent and his artistic vision of the world.

Cet article étudie trois autoportraits d’Erskine Nicol (1825–1904) intitulés Self-Portrait with a Rustic Companion (1855), Donnybrook Fair (1859) et Two Figures in an Interior (1863), dans lesquels l’artiste s’est représenté dans un environnement irlandais, ce qui est paradoxal pour un peintre d’origine écossaise. En effet, son identité nationale s’efface au profit d’un tel décor. Marquées par certaines caractéristiques typiques du genre, ces images mettent toutefois en question le genre même de l’autoportrait en incluant des éléments de caricature ou la présence d’autres personnages qui signalent une volonté de dépasser l’image de soi. Ces tableaux constituent en fait une invitation à découvrir le talent du peintre et sa vision artistique du monde.

INDEX

Mots-clés: Erskine Nicol, autoportrait, identité, écossais, Irlande Keywords: Erskine Nicol, self-portrait, identity, Scottish, Ireland

AUTHOR

AMÉLIE DOCHY Université de Toulouse II. Amélie Dochy taught at the National University of Ireland (Maynooth) before sitting the French civil service exam for a tenured English teaching position (“Agrégation d’Anglais”) in 2009. She then became a Research Assistant at the University of Toulouse II (France) and her PhD in Irish studies focused on the topic of “Cliché, Compassion or Commerce? The Representations of the Irish by the Scottish Painter Erskine Nicol (1850-1904)”. She adopted a post-colonial approach in analysing the portrayal of the Irish through the iconography of Nicol’s prolific depictions. She was awarded the Sydney Forado Prize by the “Académie des Sciences et Belles Lettres” (Toulouse) in recognition of her choice of an historical approach. She is currently a Senior Lecturer at the University of Toulouse II and her research interests include visual representations of the Irish in the second half of the nineteenth century.

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Costuming in Seán Keating’s self- portraits: theatrical guise or political disguise?

Valérie Morisson

1 In her two volumes on Irish painter Seán Keating (1889–1977), Seán Keating, Art Politics and the Building of the Irish Nation and Seán Keating in Context: Responses to Culture and Politics in Post-War Ireland, Éimear O’Connor shows that while Keating “has been written in Irish history as the bulwark against modernism in Irish art”1, it is worth reevaluating his career and artistic output. Keating is easily defined as a traditional academic painter whose works unreservedly celebrate the Irish nation. The beginning of his training and career as a painter in Dublin coincided with a period of intense political trouble: the Easter Rising (1916), the War of Independence (1919–1921) and the Civil War (1922–1923). The Dublin Metropolitan School of Art “provided an invigorating visual and literal embodiment of politics in general, and nationalism in particular”2. Keating’s figurative scenes emblematize visual nationalism and have contributed to founding nationhood3. He was also earnestly committed to establishing an Irish school of painting.

2 Trained by William Orpen, who always remained a mentor4, he devoted much of his time to portraiture. But it is his self-portraits that this paper intends to scrutinize and, more specifically, the role played by dress in these compositions. As a matter of fact, Seán Keating repeatedly staged himself in costume. O’Connor describes the artist as a secretive person unwilling to talk much about his family life and political stance5: “Keating was very private. He did not talk much about his past, and if he did, the information was frequently confused”6. His numerous self-portraits seem to fill in some blanks as if costuming freed him from such secretiveness.

3 In a self-portrait, Pascal Bonafoux observes, “the costume, the written words, the pose, everything is meaningful, no detail is incidental. Every thing is a sign, bearing the stamp of identity; all that surfaces in the portrait is to be deciphered”7. Such deciphering, he adds, is a matter of tentative hypothesis as we never stand on firm

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grounds. Keating’s self-portrayals may have offered him the opportunity of a daily routine of works, as Éimear O’Connor suggests: It was for this reason too, and not for the purposes of vanity or conceit, that Keating made so many self-portraits throughout his career. He was following Orpen’s directive about the necessity of a daily routine of work. As a result of his seven-day-a-week dedication to perfect his skill as an artist, Keating produced a record of his emerging sense of personal and national identity analogous to the ever-changing socio-political contexts8.

4 Focusing on the role of dress and costume in self-portraiture, we purport to view Keating’s self-images from a different perspective. Self-portraits in costume are indeed not merely staged images of the self but also performative acts since costuming induces impersonation. Identity is therefore performed as well as staged and pictured. Starting from costume and dress as identity markers or shifters, we argue that self-portraits may, in the case of Keating and in the specific context of Irish nationalism, be a form of political embodiment.

Playing with identities: the costumed painter

5 In the painter’s Early Self-portrait, a three-quarter-length portrait painted around 1907– 11 (private collection)9, Keating stands on the side of the composition, clad in a black suit which bespeaks his modesty. The shy gaze, the hazy outlines of the face and the softness of the brushstrokes betray the artist’s secretive personality. Featuring a female model in the middleground, this composition hints at the practice of drawing from life which was usual at the academy and testifies to Keating’s classical approach to painting: “Keating then is a traditional painter whose work is based on pure draughtsmanship”10. The plainness of the suit, blending in the brown background, suggests that the garb is hardly a dress or a costume. Keating was aware of the conventions of self-portraiture. In a much later, though not dated work, Self-portrait with palette11, he follows a well-established tradition dating back to Holbein (Self-portrait, 1542, Uffizi, Florence) and Rembrandt (Self-portrait with Beret and Turned-up collar, 1659, National Gallery of Art, Washington) consisting in painting oneself in the act of painting. Contrary to the early likeness, the canvas is imbued with a sense of determination and commitment. The dark clothes of the painter, almost merging into the plain background, reveal his taste for frugality and simplicity consistent with his sympathies with the socialist movement and his tendency to “proletarianize his childhood”12. These two self-portraits conform with the rules of a genre in which “being human, artists may wish to present the image they want us to have of them, or indeed to create the ideal to which they aspire13.” However, in most of his other self- portraits, Keating explores the decorative and theatrical potentialities of costume in an original manner.

6 Maybe out of necessity, during the early years of his career, the painter regularly staged himself and his relatives14 in photographic tableaux which he then copied into paintings15. Some great masters inserted their likenesses into narrative scenes either as a signature or as a form of impersonation, using costumes and accessories playfully16. Philippe Lejeune notes that the line between reality and fiction may be very thin in some autobiographical projects or projections17. This applies to self-portraits as well: painters may portray themselves in costume either because the garb, as a material

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artefact, fascinates them, or to indulge in role-playing, using dress as a form of sartorial escapism, or to reveal something about their own personality surrepticiously.

7 Between 1916 and 1919, Keating painted Self-Portrait in a Bear Skin18 matching a similar portrait of his sister. In the two works, the disproportionately large fur cloak—which is painted very convincingly—is the main focus, as the title suggests. The garment was either borrowed from the National Museum of Ireland, or brought back from Russia by one of Keating’s brothers. The D.M.S.A., which was situated nearby museums, provided “a colourful wardrobe of costumes and props”19. While Mary Frances Keating, who modelled for the portrait, shyly disappears under the bulky garment, her brother, holding a spear as a primitive hunter would, stares at the viewer in a self-confident manner, visibly relishing the role-playing. The painter’s interest in the rendering of materials and fabrics will have been encouraged by Orpen while the attention that is paid to the decorative elements on the coat foreshadows the ethnographic accuracy of some later paintings. Keating portrays himself as a confident man as if emboldened by the attire. It is interesting to note that the painting was subsequently featured in an exhibition at the Aonach Tailteann under the title Ligimte Stoc, I Declare Leadership20. Such a shift in the title reinforces the wavering between identity and persona which is constant in these costumed stagings as the clothing leads to fictitious embodiments and identity plays.

8 A few years later, Keating painted himself in a less outlandish costume in Fear Sorrdha (Man at Ease)21. In this three-quarter portrait, he is dressed in a white shirt and wrapped in an elegant striped shawl. A black hat is elaborately tilted on his head, topping a chequered headscarf. The sophiscated and eccentric attire reflects Keating’s—real or fantasized—bohemian lifestyle at that time even though the portrait is visibly contrived. The painter, or the painter’s persona, or the fictitious character impersonated by Keating, gazes at the viewer in a self-assured manner. The work is not identified as a self-portrait so that Keating plays with the indeterminacy specific to the genre. Is Keating offering the viewer a parody of himself as ‘the painter in his gown’ after Rembrandt or Hogarth? Or is the painter venting his own eccentricity through costuming? If these questions are difficult to answer, Keating’s taste for playful costuming seems obvious. Another self-portrait, probably from the same period, shows the artist in an Arab costume22. The emphasis is placed on the folds and patterns of the clothes foreshadowing his later interest in exotic dress. As James Hall notices, “even when an artist’s self-portrait seems to be the result of a genuine moment of self-regard or self-interrogation, it is invariably a kind of performance. In many cases […] the role- playing is overt; […] what appears to be a literal representation of the artist is in reality a complicated and conscious fabrication: it is virtually impossible not to self- consciously construct your own image”23. These self-portraits in costumes must therefore be viewed as performative practices through which the painter explores alternative selves and derides social or artistic conventions. The viewers’s eagerness to be given a glimpse at the artist’s true self is flouted as it is impossible to disentangle earnestness from fantasy. In that respect, Hall notes that “one of the wonders of self- portraits is their capacity to induce unique levels of uncertainty in the viewer24.”

Costume as ethnographic document

9 Along the self-portraits resulting from theatrical impersonations, Keating painted likenesses of himself in traditional Irish costume. As early as 1915, in Men of The West25,

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Keating, who included himself in the composition, dressed the characters in traditional clothing, an “exotic dress26.” The costumes, from the Connacht region, are not meant to be realistic although the painter represents them with ample detail and enhances the crios (traditional woven belts) and patterned scarves. Many of his compositions in oil, pastel or watercolor foreground Irish clothes with elaborate patterns, embroidered shawls or traditional knitware. Even in his religious canvases, Keating clothed the characters in differentiated garments enhancing the colours and the intricacy of the patterns27. The artistic interest in regional costume was initiated by many Irish painters who depicted Irish folks in brightly coloured dress: Aloysius O’Kelly (1853–1936), Walter Osborne (1859–1903), Harry Jones Thaddeus (1859–1929), Paul Henry (1877–1958), as well as the English painter Charles Lamb (1893-1964) studied regional attire. Yet Keating did not contend himself with painting costumes but actually wore them therefore adding embodied performance to representation.

10 In 1909, William Orpen, who also painted several self-portraits in costume, portrayed himself in Aran garb. The Anglo-Irish painter wanted to “engage with, satirize, mask, elaborate and fantasize his identities”28. His self-portraits in costume may therefore be dismissed as masquerade. His Aran outfit, to be derided maybe as a “camp Celtic revival fantasy”29, is all the more puzzling as Orpen was of Protestant origin and considered himself as an Englishman. Though Keating may owe his interest in dress to his master, his use of costume is far from illustrating the modernist indeterminacy of the self which may find an echo in Orpen’s output. As a matter of fact, while Keating happened to give into costuming as a simple theatrical performance, the consistency in his choice of attire suggests a deeper commitment.

11 As early as the mid-19th century, throughout Europe, painters showed an interest in vernacular culture and folklore30. Such cross-European ethnographic curiosity, tinged with romanticism, was tied to political and cultural discourses on nationhood31. Artists turned to their ethno-cultural heritage as well as to peasant communities epitomizing national ideals as a source of inspiration32. The exhibition in academies and Salons of paintings portraying folks in regional costumes, performing traditional tasks and surrounded by ethnographic objects played a role in the dissemination of nationalist ideals so that folklore was interpreted as national tradition and “rustic popular culture was canonized into the very essence and bedrock of national identity”33. Marie Bourke showed that “by using imagery associated with the west in a new and inventive manner, [Irish artists] were able to develop a body of work that looked distinctively Irish”34.

12 Departing from the romantic or impressionist styles characterizing depictions of the West of Ireland, Keating forged an idiosyncratic manner. The blatant theatricality of his compositions enables him to eschew the issue of authenticity tied to Western exoticism and offer a symbolical approach to costume. As a matter of fact, it is difficult to know whether the Aran costume that Keating painted with much care was still worn on a daily basis at the time. Anthropologists, focusing on Robert Flaherty’s 1934 film, Man of Aran, have questioned the realism of his depictions and argued that the Araners’ outfit was a reconstructed reality35. The colour photographs which French scholar Marguerite Mespoulet shot in 1913 in the West of Ireland for the Khan Archives are rare testimonial documents. Struck by the poverty and dignity of the Irish people she met, she photographed people both in ragged clothes and in bright red garments36. Compared to these images, Keating’s depictions seem idealized. Although several of his

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canvases draw attention to the plight of the Connacht people, his representation of costumes is never meant to trigger compassion.

13 In ethnographic descriptions, regional dress is a preeminent badge of identity. Similarly, in regionalist painting, traditional costumes become signifiers of identity. “Clothing is a palpable, immediate, and intimate form of material culture”, professor of folklore Pravina Shulka notes. “Sending meaningful messages through dress is one way people engage in a daily artful endeavor, participating in what folklorists call ‘creativity in everyday life’ or ‘artistic communication in small groups’”37. An outlet for cultural expression, the colourful costume of the West counties emblematized cultural distinctiveness but was also the symbol of rusticity38. Keating painted himself—and his wife at times—in traditional Irish costume in works whose titles evoke types rather than individuals. Good Evenin’ Miss, 192139, a double full-length portrait based on a photograph of the couple dressed as country folks, was painted in studio but is supposed to be set in the Aran Islands. “The style and atmosphere of the work had more to do with Irish theatre at the time than with the reality of life on the islands”40. Painted in 1921, in the context of intense political turmoil, the painting conjures up Synge’s literary representations of the Aran Islands and exemplifies the ethnographic genre scene which thrived at the academy41. The couple, in colourful costume, is merrily dancing on the road as if performing on stage. Folk dance stands for the primitive sociability of country folks and the idea of community bonding which delighted many travelers from urban areas. In Trevor Thomas Fowler’s Children Dancing at Crossroads (c. 1830) or Charles Lamb’s Dancing at a Northern Crossroads (1920) country people are also dancing happily. However, whereas in Fowler’s scene the young dancers are in rags, which brings forth images of poverty, in Lamb’s and Keating’s compositions the garments are colourful and exotic42. Besides, in Keating’s self-portraits, the process of impersonation strengthens the scope of the sartorial depiction: when worn, “costume […] allows us to transcend the here and now, allowing for a deeper communication of meaning43.” As a matter of fact, Keating’s fascination with vernacular dress and ethnographic costume does not solely spring from a taste for folklore. The garb conveys specific values and ideals.

14 In 1915, William Orpen portrayed Keating in Aran costume in a work bearing a telling double title: Man of Aran. Sean Keating44. While in his self-portrait in Aran dress Orpen looked elegant, Keating seems humble, somber and stern. Orpen “created an iconic visual identity for his former student” as “the painting embodies everything that Keating must have expressed to Orpen about his nationalist sympathies and about his attitude to the Aran Islands45.” Keating also features in Orpen’s The Holy Well (1915): he is dressed in typical Aran costume (hat, pampooties, crios and woollen waistcoat). Standing on a hillock, he dominates the scene of blind piety and embodies the future of the nation. Just behind him, an old tree is burgeoning, a symbol of rebirth through the revival of roots.

15 Although Keating’s self-portraits in Aran gear bear titles which draw attention to the costume —Self-portrait Wearing a Hat (1930s, private collection 46) or Self-portrait in a Bainín Hat (c. 1937–40, private collection47)—the clothing is more than an object of ethnographic curiosity: it is a visual means to express faith in values and ideals.

16 Keating painted himself in the role of Christy Mahon’s father in John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World48. The playwright claimed that his depiction was rooted in his direct observations of Araners compiled in The Aran Islands (a text straddling

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ethnographic realism and romantic invention) and accompanied by a portfolio of photographs. Keating’s compositions are visibly contrived and, as Éimear O’Connor suggests, his impersonation of Christy Mahon’s father “suggests a wide range of symbolic implications allied to Synge’s metaphorical vision49.”

17 While costume is generally construed as a means to conceal oneself or to be someone we are not, Pravina Shukla notes that it is “the clothing of who we are but […] it signals a different self, one other than that expressed through daily dress”50. Of the Aran Islands, Keating wrote: “One of the advantages of a place like Aran is that you have to look into yourself and perhaps discover that you haven’t got a self, a discovery that cannot be made too soon in the case of a painter…51” By dressing as a man of Aran, Keating transposes his life to a region and a time period which he saw as the epitome of Irishness. Given that self-portraits are visual statements, the clothing of the artist is “deliberately used to project an elected identity specific to the time, place, and audience”52. Self-portraying himself in such gear enabled Keating to convey a message: through painting, the impersonation is made permanent and assertive. The artist becomes and shows himself as the one he wished to be, a simple Aran man. As Shukla notes, costume may be used to construct a self-conscious presentation of oneself and “functions to help individuals elect, embrace, and display special identities.” “Special dress, she claims, enables the expression of extraordinary identity in exceptional circumstances”53.By portraying himself in Aran dress, Keating voices his endorsement of the nationalist ideal premised on an idealized West. In these self-portraits, the artist’s body is allegorized. From one self-portrait to another, Keating’s face ages but hardly varies as he intends to embody a generic type rather than an individual. The sharpness of his features, his vivid blue eyes and wrinkles stand for the dignity of the Aran people. As Brian Graham writes, Keating “complemented the literary Wests of Pearse and de Valera, his paintings portraying a heroic society inhabiting its wild landscapes”54. To a certain extent, the face of the artist as an Araner becomes a mask and brings to mind Oscar Wilde’s quip that “man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth”55.

Political embodiment

18 “In every self-portrait we discover individuals who wish to portray not just likenesses or even inner worlds, but concrete facts about who they were, what they could achieve and how they fitted in to the world around them”56. While he did not paint straightforward historical scenes, Keating clearly voiced his political opinions through his paintings. As James White observes, during the years of revolution and those which followed the foundation of our state [Keating] has painted pictures which assert primary values and decry the attitude of the ephemeral and the less-than-honest opportunists who were quick to exploit the new situation. […] He was creating a new type of Irish man57.

19 Because “nations are conceptual, emotional, abstract entities which may be associated with a state, but can only be grasped through their representations, [and] symbols58” artworks do play a role in nation-building. In the context of Irish nationalist struggle, “literary and visual artists were attracted to the West of Ireland in their search for a new means or language to express a positively empowered cultural Irish identity in art”59. Men of the West is indeed “a personal, visionary response to developing events” and a “romanticized image of the Irish fighting men of the time”60. By costuming as a

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nationalist fighter and placing his own figure just in front of the tricolour symbolising the emerging nation, next to his brother Joe Hannan (a member of the IRB), Keating devises a pictural call to arms. More than creating a national type, he embodies the new independent Irish man and we may construe the performative nature of his self- portraits as empowerment. One could interpret a watercolour entitled Spanish Arch (c. 1916)61 as a similar statement since Keating, dressed in full Aran costume, is reclining on a stone wall turning his gaze away from a rifle as if to suggest that he has chosen a non-violent way to fight. Painted just one year before the Easter Rising, Men of the West became iconic and Keating edited prints of the work in 1919 to raise funds for families affected by the national struggle. The prints were subsequently banned as the image was considered dissident. Keating remained “as close as the Irish national movement would come to an official artist”62. He was affected by the ban of the poster and he “may have been concerned about attracting further unwarranted attention”63. Men of the South, which harps on the same subject, was exhibited only in 1922 after the Treaty of Independence was signed and Keating is absent from the composition. Even though he never took the arms, the artist used his paintings to promote the new independent nation.

20 All through his life, Keating’s art followed the development of the nation. In 1924, the painter portrayed himself, powerless and exhausted, in An Allegory64 (National Gallery). The painting testifies to Keating’s disillusionment after the Civil War: the ruined mansion in the background, the coffin covered with the tricolour, the distance between the politician and the people burying their friends represent the failure of the Republican project that Keating had supported. In 1929, Keating pictured himself, his wife and two sons in Night’s Candles are Burnt Out (Gallery Oldham). In the painting, Keating is showing the young boy, the dam under construction and his gesture leads the viewers’ gaze to this symbol of modernity. The Ardnacrusha scheme was indeed tightly keyed to the emergence of the modern nation. The artist stands on a par with the workers and is dressed like them, considering himself as an artisan of national modernity. He used the same family group for the frontispiece of the Nationalist Ideal in 1931; he and his wife point at the hammer and sickle as well as the cross, the symbol of Russian socialism and Christianity. Keating’s status here is multiple: a painter, a father and head of family as well as a citizen of the nation.

21 The omnispresence of the painter adopting various though consistent identities demonstrates that the artist, in his view, must bear witness to the historical developments of his country. To do so, the painter adopts a visual language that can aptly transcend reality to put across ideals and values. As James Hall argues, self- portraits are not passive reflections of their own societies but influence their own society’s sense of identity and selfhood65. The embedded self-portraits enable the painter to make a statement about the role of artists in society. Keating’s self- allegoricisation, both as an artist and as a citizen, fulfills his commitment to national socialism in that his self serves the ideal of the nation and he represents himself as fully involved in his society.

Conclusion

22 Seán Keating used dress and costume in a particularly rich and complex way confirming that “costume is […] extraordinary in its semantic elaboration; it makes

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explicit references, whether political, social, historical, religious, aesthetic, or psychological”66. With a penchant for disguise, he explored dress and clothing as visually efficient signifiers of identity. Self-portrayal and the impersonation it induces are to be understood as political embodiment: Keating fought artistic and political battles in his compositions using his own image and costume as allegories. Although a couple of years separate their self-portraits, one cannot help thinking of Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits in costume and the way she also used her physical body and her painted image as epitomes of an oppressed regional identity. Scrutinizing Keating’s multiple usages of dress and costume may therefore incite us to consider his commitment differently. Although his impersonations served the nationalist and national causes, they did so in an inventive and empowering way. His use of photography, his taste for performance as well as his exploration of the potentialities of costuming were indeed singular.

NOTES

1. Éimear O’Connor, Seán Keating, Art, Politics and Building the Irish Nation, Irish Academic Press, Dublin, 2013, p. 14. 2. Ibid., p. 45. 3. Keating occupies a central place in XXth century Irish art: in 1919 he was appointed associate teacher at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art (D.M.S.A); in 1923 he became Professor of Painting and was elected a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy (R.H.A); in 1934 he was appointed Professor of the National College of Art in Dublin (N.C.A.D.); he was President of the R.H.A. (where he exhibited around 300 works) from 1948 until 1962. 4. “He continued to follow Orpen’s principles and practices for commissioned portraits” though he seldom gave into flattering or idealized portraits. O’Connor, op. cit., pp. 54-55. 5. Ibid., p. 26. 6. Ibid., p. 14. 7. « Costume, texte écrit, attitude, rien n’appartient au hazard; nul detail n’est accessoire. Tout est chiffre, marqué du sceau de l’identité; tout ce dont le portrait est empreint est à déchiffrer ». Pascal Bonafoux, Les Peintres et l’autoportrait, Genève, Skira, 1984, p. 14. 8. Ibid., p. 52. 9. Ibid., p. 31, pl. 6. The painting bears a striking resemblance with a self-portrait by William Orpen dated 1911, Myself and Venus (1910, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg), the year when Keating met him in Dublin. http://www.cmoa.org/CollectionDetail.aspx? item=1000442&retPrompt=Back+to+Results&retUrl=CollectionSearch.aspx%3Fsrch%3DOrpen%252c%2BWilliam (Accessed January 2018). 10. James White, Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts, Dublin, Exhibition catalogue, 1989, unpaginated.

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11. http://themodel.ie/the-niland-collection/collection/123 (Accessed January 2018), 49 × 59.25cm, oil on canvas, Niland Collection. The canvas is redolent of Frédéric Bazille’s self-portrait (1865, Art Institute Chicago), both painters sitting against a plain grey background and holding their palettes almost defiantly. 12. O’Connor, op. cit., pp. 26-27. 13. Anthony Bond, “Performing the Self”, http://anthonybond.com.au/wp/wpcontent/uploads/2015/03/performing-the-self.pdf, p. 1. (Accessed January 2018). 14. His brother Joseph Keating, who was a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (O’Connor, op. cit., p. 34) is featured in several canvases (Men of the West, 1915; Ar a gCoimead, 1919; On the Run, War of Independence, 1922). His sister, Vera, is portrayed is less political works (The Bear Skin, 1915; Girl in a Black Fur Coat, 1916; The Feast of St Brigid, 1918). His wife, May, modelled for a considerable number of paintings. 15. The painter had a great interest in photography and owned a cine-camera as well as an epidiascope, used to project images onto the canvas. He photographed himself and other actors in costume and used the photographs, traced with grids, as a guide for the positioning of the figures. O’Connor, op. cit., p. 49. 16. Already in his Vite, 1598, Vasari registered 80 painters who featured in their own narrative scenes (Bonafoux, op. cit., p. 15). Gustave Courbet’s self-portraits for instance show him in a variety of costumes playing roles in a most dramatic manner. 17. Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1975, p. 25. 18. 92 x 76 cm, private collection, http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/ 2016/irish-art-l16134/lot.20.html (Accessed January 2018). 19. O’Connor, op. cit., p. 49. 20. See http://www.invaluable.com/auction-lot/sean-keating,-p.r.h.a.-31-c-a56a6e3e58 (Accessed January 2018). 21. Private collection. O’Connor, op. cit., p. 78, pl. 2. and http://www.sothebys.com/en/ auctions/ecatalogue/2012/british-and-irish-art/lot.149.html (Accessed January 2018). 22. Private collection, formerly owned by the Victor Waddington Gallery, Dublin. 23. Bond, op. cit., p. 12. 24. James Hall, The Self-portrait, a Cultural History, London, Thames and Hudson, 2014, p. 9. 25. 91 x 125cm, Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane. 26. Fintan Cullen, The Irish Face, Redefining the Irish Portrait, London, National Portrait Gallery, 2004, p. 220. 27. In the Stations he painted for Conglowes Wood College (1919-22) the costumes are highly detailed. From 1955 to 1958, Keating worked on a set of Stations of the Cross for St John’s Church in Tralee, County Kerry. The paintings are based on photographic tableaux in which the painter embodies Christ. 28. Angeria Rigamonti di Cutò, “Staging the Modernist Self: The Self-Portraits of William Orpen”, Visual Culture in Britain, 14 November 2012, http:// www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14714787.2012.716980? src=recsys&journalCode=rvcb20 (Accessed January 2018). 29. Ibid.

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30. See Valérie Morisson, “The Guise of Irishness: Irish Ethnographic and Folkloric Paintings from a European Perspective, 1880–1930”, Revue Miroirs, n° 2, 2015, Irlande: Identité et interculturalité / Ireland: Identity and Interculturality (dir. Bairbre Ní Chiosáin et Charlotte Rault) – http://www.revuemiroirs.fr/larevue.html (Accessed January 2018). 31. T. Baycroft and D. Hopkins (ed), Folklore and Nationalism in Europe during the Long 19th Century, Brill Academic Pub Baycroft and Hopkins, 2012, pp. 2-3. 32. See Athena S. Leoussi, “The Etno-cultural Roots of National Art”, in Guibernau, G. and Hutchinson, J., History and National Destiny: Ethnosymbolism and its Critics, Oxford, Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2004, pp. 143-160. 33. J. Leerssen, National Thought in Europe, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2006, p. 195. 34. Marie Bourke, “A Growing Sense of National Identity: Charles Lamb (1893-1964) and the West of Ireland”, History Ireland, Vol. 8, no. 1, 2000, p. 30. 35. See Valérie Morisson, “Men of Aran: Strangers on the Fringe of Europe”, in C. Dubois et V. Alayric (dir.) The Foreignness of Foreigners, Cambridge Scholars, 2015, pp. 125-147 and Cally Blackman, “Colouring the Claddagh: A Distorted View?”, Costume, vol. 48, no. 2, pp. 213-235. 36. David Okuefuna, Albert Khan, Le Monde en couleurs, Autochromes 1908-1931, Paris, Chêne, 2008, pp. 42-51. 37. Pravina Shukla, Costume: Performing Identities through Dress, Indiana University Press, 2015. 38. Morisson, 2015, op. cit. 39. Private collection. The work was exhibited at the R.H.A. and purchased by a friend of the artist. O’Connor, op. cit., p. 128, pl. 10. 40. Ibid., p. 127. 41. Ethnographic painting had come to fame in Paris, and at the Académie des Beaux- Arts, thanks to Théodore Valerio and Jean-Léon Gérôme. On this European genre see Morisson, 2015, op. cit. 42. Many parallels were drawn between the Western counties and southern or oriental countries in ethnographic or pseudo-ethnographic writings. See Morisson, 2015, op. cit. 43. Shukla, op. cit., p. 15. 44. Limerick City Gallery. Image available at http://www.estudiosirlandeses.org/ wpcontent/uploads/2013/05/Orpen-Man-of-the-West.jpg (Accessed January 2018). 45. Orpen never empathized with the islanders and failed to share his pupil’s nationalist ideas. O’Connor, op. cit., p. 58. 46. Ibid., p. 53, pl. 7. 47. Ibid., p. 54, pl. 8. 48. Private collection. A set of ten paintings was commissioned by Synge’s executors for a deluxe edition of the play. Keating used the Abbey Theater actors as models for the illustrations except in two images. See O’Connor, op.cit., pp. 119-121. 49. Ibid., p. 119. 50. Shukla, op. cit., p. 4. 51. O’Connor, op. cit., p. 113.

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52. Shukla, op. cit., p. 15. 53. Ibid., p. 4. 54. Brian Graham (ed.), In Search of Ireland: a Cultural Geography, London, Routledge, 1997, p. 47. 55. The Critic as Artist, quoted in Brian Graham (ed.), In Search of Ireland: a Cultural Geography, London, Routledge, 1997, p. 238. 56. Bond, op. cit., p. 12. 57. White, op. cit. 58. Baycroft, op. cit., p. 3. 59. E. F. Martin, “Painting the Irish West: Nationalism and the Representation of Women”, New Hibernia Review, vol. 7, n° 1, Spring 2003, pp. 31-44, p. 31. 60. Sighle Bhrethnach-Lynch, “Framing Ireland’s History, Art, Politics, and Representation, 1914-1929” in J.C. Steward, When Time Began to Rant and Rage, Figurative Painting from Twentieth Century Ireland, London, Merrell Holberton, 1999, p. 43. 61. Leicester Galleries, http://www.leicestergalleries.com/19th-20th-century- paintings/d/sean-keating/13222 (Accessed January 2018). 62. Catherine Marshall, Fintan O’Toole, “Modern Ireland in 100 Artworks: 1917 – Men of the West, by Seán Keating”, http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/modern-ireland- in-100-artworks-1917-men-of-the-west-by-se%C3%A1n-keating-1.1999687 (Accessed January 2018). 63. O’Connor, op. cit., p. 66. 64. For a detailed analysis of this work see Síghle Bhreathnach-Lynch, “Crossing the Rubicon: Sean Keating’s An Allegory,” New Hibernia Review (https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/ 141), Volume 12, n° 2, Summer 2008 (https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/12860), pp. 120-126. 65. Hall, op. cit., p. 11. 66. Shukla, op. cit., p. 14.

ABSTRACTS

The paintings of Irish artist Seán Keating (1889–1977) have admittedly contributed to asserting an Irish identity blending tradition and modernity. Seen from this perspective, his numerous self-portraits may be viewed as a means to embody a political ideal. His self-portraits in costume deserve more attention than they have received so far. As a matter of fact, Keating revisits a long tradition consisting in playfully painting oneself in disguise. However, he also resorts to costuming to serve a political cause. By dressing up as an Araner or by portraying himself in traditional attire in nationalist canvases, Keating embodies his political ideas and states that the place of the artist is in the midst of the nation and society.

L’œuvre du peintre irlandais Seán Keating (1889–1977) a accompagné l’affirmation d’une irlandité mêlant tradition et modernité. Dans cette perspective, les nombreux autoportraits de

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l’artiste peuvent être considérés comme un moyen d’incarner un idéal politique. Le recours au costume dans ses autoportraits mérite attention. En effet, Keating reprend une tradition picturale bien établie en se représentant de manière ludique en costume mais utilise le dispositif de manière plus politique. En revêtant le costume traditionnel des habitants des îles d’Aran ou bien en se portraiturant en habit traditionnel dans des compositions aux accents nationalistes, Keating incarne des idées politiques et affirme que la place de l’artiste est au cœur de la nation et de la société.

INDEX

Keywords: Aran Islands, body, cultural nationalism, ethnography, folklore, visual arts, Keating, Seán, painting, costume Mots-clés: Iles d’Aran, corps, nationalisme culturel, ethnographie, folklore, arts visuels, Keating, Seán, peinture, costume

AUTHOR

VALÉRIE MORISSON Université de Bourgogne Franche-Comté, TIL EA 4182. Valérie Morisson is a lecturer in English at the University of Burgundy, Dijon, France. Her research is on Irish contemporary art and its relation with post-nationalist culture. She investigates how political, social, and cultural evolutions in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland are reflected in visual culture (painting, sculpture, installation, performance, video, photography). Her articles focus on a wide range of subjects ranging from feminist art, the issue of memory and the commemoration of history, to post-nationalist revisionism and the Northern-Irish situation as reflected in art. Several of her articles tackle photography and performance art in both an Irish and a European perspective. Her recent research addresses wider artistic issues in both the Irish and the English domains such as the role of archives and field work in the creation process or the use of discarded materials and the reemergence of materiality in contemporary art.

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Performative Self-Portraiture, Femmage, and Feminist Histories of Irish Art: Amanda Coogan’s Snails, after Alice Maher (2010)

Fionna Barber

1 In 2010 Amanda Coogan’s Snails, after Alice Maher was performed in front of an audience at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) in Dublin1.

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Amanda Coogan, Snails, after Alice Maher, performance still, Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) Dublin 16 June 2010

2 For two hours the artist stood motionless behind a screen within which a window had been cut to reveal her upper torso and head, deliberately framing the artist’s body in the manner of a self-portrait. Throughout the long duration of the performance, Coogan’s skin and hair became the ground on which the snails left trails of slime, glistening even more where they had picked up traces of the gold paint across her upper chest.

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Alice Maher, Double Drawing from The Snail Chronicles, 2005

Intaglio print 53 x 49.5 cm. Collection South Tipperary County Council.

3 Displayed on the opposite wall of the gallery, however, were two intaglio prints by Alice Maher, Double Drawing and Fever Bush from a series entitled The Snail Chronicles (2005). These images combined drawings by Maher with trails left by live snails, their coloured slime resulting from the diet of vegetable dyes with which they had previously been fed. The relationship of these prints to the performance is integral to its meaning, and not just in the acknowledgement made in the work’s title; Maher’s work provided a focus for Coogan’s gaze during a piece that, despite her familiarity with themes of spectacle and the abject, still proved challenging to perform2. However it is the implications of this performance and the wider context of its meanings that this essay investigates, in relation to the issues raised by women’s self-portraiture, the construction of gendered artistic canons and the politics of the female body.

Snails and femmage

4 Writing about live events such as Amanda Coogan’s Snails, after Alice Maher in relation to self-portraiture means engaging with a performance that took place some years ago, and at which I was not present. This means a reliance on other sources, primarily the photographic documentation of the performance. However, as Amelia Jones has said of her own experience in writing about performances which she could not have observed personally, although the live event has its own “specificity”, this should also “not be privileged over the specificity of knowledges that develop in relation to the documentary traces of such an event”3. It is often only retrospectively that the significance of the live performance can be situated within a variety of cultural contexts which will help to further expand its meaning. And photographs or video do

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not just passively record the ephemerality of the live event – they are also active agents of the construction of its significance. These are observations that can also apply to the relationship between the use of the body in performance art and the role of self- portraiture. Snails, after Alice Maher makes this relationship explicit equally through aspects of the mise en scène of the performance and its accompanying documentation, both of which borrow the conventions of the portrait to frame the representation of the artist contained within.

5 Coogan’s use of her body in performance has in the past involved a direct critique of the gendering of canons of radical art practice through reference to Duchamp, Nauman or Manzoni. In its titling, however, Snails explicitly acknowledges two projects by another Irish woman artist: both the Snail Chronicles, and Maher’s earlier Portraits (2003). There are affinities between the work of both Coogan and Maher in their committed deconstruction of representations of femininity in addition to related concerns not just with issues of abjection and identity. However a further feature of the practice of both artists is a critical engagement with the art historical canon as the prime means of ordering and giving selective value to art practice in historical terms. In its recognition of the formative role of Maher’s work in relation to her own, Coogan’s Snails on one level can be read as an act of femmage, a term that I use here to identify the acknowledgement of precedent, and active celebration of the work of one woman artist by another4. This process of paying tribute in turn opens onto questions around the role of gender within the artistic canon – and ultimately the role of self-portraiture within canon formation. Yet there is also the issue of how we might acknowledge patterns of a commonality of interest. And although we can substitute “art” for “writing” in her account, how does the attempt to position women artists in a temporal relation to each other resonate with the configuration identified by Teresa de Lauretis in her discussion of the formation of a “genealogy of women” as “a scattered, fragmented and yet historically embodied lineage of female thought and writing”5?

Performance, self-portraiture and abjection

6 Snails: after Alice Maher engages with themes of spectacle, abjection and female identity now familiar from the practice that Amanda Coogan has developed since her training with Marina Abramović, one of the key figures in the development of performance art since the 1970s6. Yet Coogan is also identified as being part of a generation of Irish feminist practitioners of live art whose work builds on the earlier examples of women’s art practice as it emerged in Ireland during the 1980s7. Although their practice took different forms, fundamental concerns with female identity and the politics of the female body in the work of artists such as Dorothy Cross, Alice Maher, Alanna O’Kelly or Louise Walsh were shaped within a context of feminist outrage and activism around the suppression of female sexuality through the collusion of state and church, highlighted in events such as the death of Ann Lovett in 19848. Yet in a post-millennial context many of the same issues surrounding the Irish female body still remain unresolved, with the survival of archaic and punitive legislation outlawing abortion and a continued moral stigma attached to female sexuality. Within the space of the feminist performance art that has evolved since the 1970s the body becomes denaturalised through ritual, gesture or a violation of cultural taboos. As Valérie Morisson suggests, the intention is to “shake the audience’s perceptions of femininity,

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whether it is perceived as womanhood, femalehood, or motherhood”. As such the body in performance has become a “locus of resistance” to repressive practices that secure the regulation of femininity within a patriarchal culture9. Coogan’s Snails: After Alice Maher on the surface of it may appear to be less directly engaged with the politics of the Irish female body than some of her other performances. Yet Coogan’s act of femmage embodied through performative self-portraiture in Snails does not take place outside of history – in this case the still only partially visible history of Irish women’s struggles to control their own sexuality and identity that also informed the development of Maher’s own practice.

7 In performance, the body becomes an active source of the production of meaning in the work, a fundamentally different premise from representational conventions associated with self-portraiture. This, by comparison, is a genre that continues to maintain a canonical value in a culture that celebrates the achievements of the individual, just as, historically, it has also worked to secure gender difference. Hence any relationship between performance and self-portraiture is likely to be problematic, as Coogan acknowledged in a presentation in 2011 at a seminar on Irish portraiture at the National Gallery of Ireland. Accompanied at this point by an image from the documentation of Snails she stated that: for Performance Art the question of works as Self-Portraits is a complicated one. For my practice I do not make self-portraits but I do use the body, my body, as the central axis of the work, exploring the body – its limits and its place in our investigation of living10.

8 The realm of personal experience and autobiography still maintain an important role in generating meanings for the work, yet in Coogan’s practice these become mediated through the work of her body in order to reach out to a wider audience: a starting point is often from a place of knowing (a personal history) and then expands that seed and takes on a myriad of influences, the final piece of work is ready or finished when it can stand alone, it becomes universal, and be read in a myriad of ways by the audience/viewer11.

9 The staging of the body through gesture, spectacle, and the generation of affect are all strategies shaping the reception of the work by its viewers. Coogan’s performances are both haptic and visual rather than verbal, which has its roots in her own personal circumstances. Born as a hearing child to deaf parents, she first learnt to communicate through Irish Sign Language, “a manual/visual one that demands live encounter”12. Rather than being verbally articulated this is an embodied language, communicating through the visual perception of performative gesture. In addition, an awareness of the marginalisation of deaf people within a hearing society also became a catalyst for the development of a knowledge of other areas of discrimination and oppression highlighted within many of Coogan’s performances13.

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Amanda Coogan, Medea, performance still, IMMA 2001

10 This nuanced relationship between autobiography, performance and self-portraiture in Amanda Coogan’s practice becomes apparent in a work such as Medea performed in 2001 at IMMA as part of the Marking the Territory event curated by Marina Abramović (19-21 October 2001). A photograph shows Coogan wearing a sumptuous blue evening dress and reclining on a chaise longue, the suggested decadence of her pose conflicting with her confrontational gaze towards the viewer. The performance itself used Irish Sign Language to detail instances of institutionalised abuse and oppression experienced by members of the deaf community in Ireland. Revelations of the destroyed childhoods of deaf victims of abuse in the institutions run by the church on behalf of the Irish state were beginning to emerge shortly before the performance of Medea14. Yet Medea’s story itself derives from Greek mythology. A strong and beautiful woman who suffers a terrible fate, the reputation of her intelligence and resourcefulness are superseded by the “unnatural” murder of her own children in revenge for betrayal by her husband Jason.

11 In the photograph of Medea, her idealised beauty is undermined by the visible presence of a dark transgressive stain spreading from her crotch across the blue satin of her dress. This is a recurring theme in Coogan’s practice: the undoing of constructions of feminine beauty through the workings of the abject. Deriving mainly from Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror (1980) the interpretation of abjection in art practice is as something transgressive, frequently involving the presence of bodily functions that usually remain hidden, and as such has proved to be particularly valuable for feminist artists engaged with the deconstruction of the idealised female body15. Yet in Coogan’s Medea the terrifying power of the murderous mother takes on a further significance in relation to the long history of the personification of Ireland as female16. In the further context of the revelations around institutionalised abuse, Medea makes visible Mother Ireland’s devastating destruction of her own children. Significantly it is a photograph

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of this performance, the trace that remains within the materials of documentation, that represents Coogan in Ireland’s National Self-Portrait Collection in Limerick, signifying her role not just as an artist, but in identification with, and advocacy for, the deaf community in Ireland.

The Self-Portrait as Critique of the Canon

12 Self-portraiture has additionally figured within Coogan’s work as a means of subversion of the artistic canon’s incorporation and perpetuation of normative gender roles.

Amanda Coogan, Self-Portrait as David, photograph 2003.

13 The photograph Self-Portrait as David (2003) parodies Michelangelo’s iconic sculpture; instead of the idealised marble body on its elevated plinth in the Uffizi, Coogan stands on a concrete slab in her back garden in Dublin wearing a plastic apron imprinted with the statue’s torso. In not only appropriating a tourist souvenir but superimposing Michelangelo’s embodiment of idealised masculinity on her own individual female body, Coogan’s photograph transgresses the border between high and low culture, deflating the canonical assumption of male genius that has also historically relegated women to the domestic sphere of the kitchen rather than the artist’s studio. This is an irreverence compounded both by the work’s title, and her own role in controlling the camera’s shutter release, and thus the means of representation itself.

14 The subversive implications signified by this photograph become more apparent with a consideration of the historical role of self-portraiture within the formation of the artistic canon. Self-portraiture has been a feature of artistic practice since classical times and also features in surviving art of the medieval period, however it is generally acknowledged as becoming increasingly prevalent during the Renaissance. A new

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emphasis on naturalism was supported by technological developments that included advances in the production of mirrors capable of providing an accurate reflection. This encouraged artists to demonstrate their ability to produce a true likeness, but the growth of self-portraiture was also bound up with other factors. At a time of increased secular patronage in addition to that of the church it could represent a demonstration of the artist’s social standing as an independent producer. During the patronage of such key figures as Lorenzo de Medici in late fifteenth century Florence, the focus on the unique achievements of the individual developed into a celebration of heroism, both in commissioned portraiture and in artists’ representations of themselves. In the second edition of Vasari’s Lives of the Artists in 1568 the artistic biographies were accompanied by engraved self-portraits, some of which were distinctly speculative. Their inclusion was one factor that, in conjunction with Vasari’s insistence on the artist as unique creative genius, also helped to secure the status of those artists whose biographies were included within the formation of a highly selective yet authoritative canon of great art.

15 Self-portraiture subsequently took on other areas of significance, such as a symbolic or allegorical function, or the later Romantic fascination with the misunderstood artist as set apart from society that fed into the development of Bohemianism in the early nineteenth century. Yet it is during the Renaissance that a central, enduring contradiction of self-portraiture becomes visible for the first time: the tension between the belief that what we see on the canvas reveals something of the artist’s true self, and an awareness of the processes of representation – line and colour, the moulding of form, that make this possible. As Laura Cumming observes, this is a “sense of coming face to face with another person before that person reverts to an image”17.

16 Yet there is a further complication to this model in terms of gender. The sixteenth century Italian painter Sophonisba Anguissola was renowned for the number of self- portraits that she painted throughout her career, yet, historically, women’s engagement with this mode of representation has been on different terms to their male counterparts, even though they may have similar concerns in the demonstration of skill, or representation of professional status. The containment of women’s lives largely to the domestic sphere and a focus on their reproductive capabilities rather than the production of cultural artefacts has meant that a woman artist was perceived as going against her “natural” function, and, as a result her abilities and achievements could only be regarded as derivative from male artists. This was a view promoted by Vasari when discussing the four women he actually included in his Lives, and which has helped to secure women’s exclusion from and marginalisation within the canons of art history18.

17 A self-portrait by a woman artist, then, meant that the assertion of her skill and professionalism was being made in the face of her exceptionality, her status as an anomaly within the wider artistic world where conditions of patronage, consumption and display were, on the whole, determined by men. As Frances Borzello points out, painting self-portraits “meant reconciling the conflict between what society expected of women and what they expected of artists”, expectations that were “diametrically opposed”19. Women artists adopted a range of different strategies in their negotiation of these contradictions, which were in any case further mediated not only by contemporary constructions and expectations of femininity but also through current modes of representation.

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Helen Mabel Trevor, Self-Portrait, 1890s

Oil on Canvas, 66 x 55 cm, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, Miss R. Trevor Gift 1900.

18 In the Irish artist Helen Mabel Trevor’s Self-Portrait with Cap, Smock and Palette, painted right at the end of the nineteenth century when she was in her sixties, her professional identity, rather than adherence to cultural conventions of femininity, is in no doubt. The solidity of her body is contained with a practical painting smock, yet she also wears a blue cap tied loosely beneath her chin. This feminised version of the male bohemian artist’s beret and cravat, combined with the large palette at the foreground of the painting, unequivocally states her identity as a painter – although one who has to modify the normative signifiers of artistic dress in her own self-representation in order to highlight the importance of her gender as part of this identification. Trevor painted this self-portrait at some point in the 1890s when she was living in Paris; that she was regularly exhibiting in the annual Salon and sending work to the Royal Academy in London is evidence of her degree of professional recognition20. Both the directness of her gaze, and the unflinching assertion that this is the face of an older woman, are also marks of Trevor’s engagement with an informal painterly naturalism that she had learnt in the studio of Carolus-Duran and which she applied to a range of subjects from her extended visits to Brittany and Normandy, including numerous paintings of peasant women.

19 One of the features of Helen Mabel Trevor’s self-portrait, with its close attention to details of her appearance, is an invitation to read this image as a depiction of her as both artist but also as a person, in that manner that Cummin suggests. This is far removed from the effect of either Snails or Medea, but what it does do is to identify a historical precedent of an Irish painter intervening in the conventions of self- portraiture and subtly altering them in order to depict herself as both woman and artist. It also serves as a reminder that these nuanced engagements with self- portraiture are aligned with a fragmentary and partial history of women artists’

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continuing efforts to modify this form of representation in order to articulate something of their own interests, the shifting circumstances of their own lives.

The unknowable self and the politics of the female body

20 In particular, Amanda Coogan’s work can be linked to strategies used in women artists’ intervention in the genre of self-portraiture initially apparent in early to mid- twentieth century avant-gardes and still continuing to play a role in more recent art practice. The features of parody, fragmentation and montage in Claude Cahun’s photographic self-portraits in the 1920s or, slightly later, the relentless staging of her own identity in the paintings of Frida Kahlo, are in different ways symptomatic of modernist concerns with the formation of the self. Yet in the work of both artists a persistent interrogation of femininity means that the female self, far from being revealed by these processes, actually becomes unknowable. These are tendencies re- emerging in aspects of feminist art practice during the 1970s, notably the work of American artists Cindy Sherman and Hannah Wilke who was also an important figure in the development of feminist performance at the time – a form of practice additionally unrecognised within the canons of ‘high art’ from which women were largely excluded.

21 In Coogan’s practice there is a clear lineage from the work of Marina Abramović since its inception in the 1970s in her involvement with long durational performances that place considerable demands on both performer and viewer, in addition to a concern with the confrontational strategies of the abject. Yet the memorable imagery of Snails, with Coogan’s face dotted by molluscs as they made their slow transit across her skin and into her hair evokes a further precedent in Hannah Wilke’s SOS – Starification Object Series (1974). This was a series of performances also commemorated in photographs in which pieces of gum chewed by her audience were moulded by the artist into tiny vulvas, which she then attached to the surface of her face and body. The parodic nature of the pinup poses adopted by Wilke during these performances was seen as deeply problematic in relation to paramount feminist concerns in the 1970s with a resistance to the objectification of the female body by the male gaze21. In the light of Coogan’s Snails, however, the Starification Object Series becomes increasingly legible as an earlier attempt to deconstruct female identity through the conflicting factors of spectacle and abjection.

22 The snails’ unhurried journey across Coogan’s skin also suggests the possibility of further readings for the piece with a pressing contemporary significance that are in turn triggered by their suggestion of another earlier precedent within women’s self- representation. In 1932 the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo had accompanied her husband the muralist Diego Rivera to Detroit where he was working on a commission. While she was there she began to suffer a miscarriage and was taken to Henry Ford Hospital where she eventually lost the baby. This devastating event, during which Kahlo nearly bled to death, also followed a failed abortion and is commemorated in the painting Henry Ford Hospital (1932).

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Frida Kahlo, Henry Ford Hospital, 1932

Coll. Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City.

23 Kahlo depicts her own nude body lying on a hospital bed in a pool of uterine blood, in one hand holding cords that link to several iconic images derived from medical textbooks22. These include both a foetus and a cross-section of the female reproductive system, yet there is also a snail that symbolises the slow progress of the miscarriage. In common with Kahlo’s practice in Henry Ford Hospital, Amanda Coogan’s engagement with the abject frequently makes visible materials and fluids more usually concealed within the female body; her earlier performance Fountain, involved the artist urinating in public in front of an audience at IMMA, yet it was also directly informed by her knowledge of the case of Ann Lovett, dying with her baby after giving birth alone in a public place. Reading Snails through Kahlo’s Henry Ford Hospital situates Coogan’s practice in relation to earlier precedents of transgressive self-portraiture by women, but this connection also serves as reminder of the continuing debates around the politics of reproduction in Ireland, with the continued illegality of abortion – even in cases of miscarriage when the mother’s life is at risk23.

Women’s Time and Irish Women Artists

24 An increasingly fragmentary and contingent notion of the self as articulated through a critical engagement with self-representation is one that also figures prominently in contemporary feminism. This is most notable in Judith Butler’s theories of gender performativity, in which a sense of the self is enacted by individuals in relation to a shifting range of cultural “frameworks of intelligibility” that provide a coherent sense of gender identity24. Within this context a feminist performative self-portraiture, such as that found in Coogan’s work, thus becomes less about the expression of a stable,

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unified identity, and more about the articulation of a fluid, changing sense of being, enacted through female embodiment and in relation to a range of earlier representations. Yet the dominant mode of communicating transitions between past and present within art history relies upon the hierarchical value system of the canon, from which women are generally excluded, or, on the occasions where they are included, their achievements neutralised and contained. A further feature of canonicity is a focus on progressive development, where the achievements of earlier artists are either to be mined for their influence, or else surpassed by the work of their successors. Feminist art historians such as Griselda Pollock have argued for the necessity to create new configurations that indicate a relationship between past and present without merely inserting women into a canon which does not represent their interests25. Unlike her two other projects engaged with self-portraiture – Medea or David – Coogan’s performance Snails explicitly acknowledges a relationship with the work of another Irish woman artist. If this is the type of relationship that cannot be accommodated within canonical art history, how else might we conceptualise the factors of influence and affirmation between women as producers of culture?

25 In her essay “Women’s Time”, Julia Kristeva began to explore generational relationships between different moments of feminist activity through an investigation initially of different modes of the representation of time26. Yet what is particularly notable is that these relationships figure not so much as sequential developments but in spatial terms: for Kristeva the “use of the word ‘generation’ implies less a chronology than a signifying space, a both corporeal and desiring mental space”27. To conceptualise the relationships of commonality, difference and acknowledgement between women artists in spatial terms opens up new ways of productively visualising the links between them. Yet despite the exciting possibilities of this approach the authority of the canon cannot also be dismissed; to do so is to relegate women to the margins of history once more. There is scope for an Irish feminist art history that acknowledges a more complex and nuanced relationship between both the role of the canon as a discursive formation of cultural value and productive signifying spaces in which other relationships between women artists can be made visible. This also returns to the question of how we negotiate Teresa de Lauretis’ identification of the discontinuous and fragmentary lineage of women’s thought that I raised earlier.

Alice Maher – Snail Chronicles and Portraits

26 So what was it that Coogan’s Snails performance responded to in Maher’s work, and how might this encounter be framed in terms of wider questions of the role of self- portraiture in feminist histories and creative relationships between women? On the other side of the gallery where Snails was performed were two prints by Alice Maher – Double Drawing and Fever Bush. Although both were part of Maher’s Snail Chronicles collection it is the former that has the most significance for a reading of Amanda Coogan’s performative self-portraiture in this instance. In Double Drawing two figures of indeterminate sex are shown facing each other, their upper torsos and faces outlined in brown ink, although the lower part of their bodies are obscured by an abstract cloudlike shape, the residue of the snails’ transit across the surface. Each figure reaches out towards the other with a pencil or stick that appears to be delineating the hair that covers their faces28.

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27 In Maher’s Double Drawing the bodies of the two figures not only transgress the borders between human and animal in figurative terms; their apparent androgyny also echoes the hermaphroditism of the snails, whose trace is left in billowing forms and abstract marks. This is the product of a collaborative process that goes beyond human agency alone – Maher has talked about wanting to ‘work with the snails’ in the making of these images29. A similar collaboration is involved in Coogan’s performance, created through the interaction of static human performer and the active progress of the snails moving across her skin, picking up smears of gold pigment as they go, a process she has described as “painterly”30.

Amanda Coogan, Snails, after Alice Maher, performance still, 2009

28 Yet there are further points of reference in Maher’s earlier work for Coogan’s use of the abject within her performative self-portraiture, specifically in a further photograph associated with the IMMA performance which shows Coogan’s head and shoulders in strict profile once more covered by the snails that explore her face and hair. In her series Portraits (2003), Maher staged her own representation in a series of photographs that used a range of found natural materials as accessories to destabilise any sense of the knowable self. Some of these are distinctly abject, such as the necklace of lambs’ hearts against her bare skin in Collar.

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Alice Maher, Helmet, 2003

Lambda Print, 61 x 61cm.

29 A further image, Helmet, depicts the artist in profile, her face buried in a mask of snail shells that, although supported by her hands, appears to extrude from the surface of her skin. An elision of boundaries between human and non-human that also precedes Double Drawing, the perverse hybridity of this representation is indicated in Carol Mavor’s description of “a beautiful-woman slug who has built her fantastic face- fortress from the saliva that oozes from her monster-girl mouth”31.

30 The static profile pose of Helmet is directly appropriated from Renaissance Italian portraiture, where in turn it derived from the celebration of individual heroism on commemorative medals. Maher was particularly struck by its use in portraits of women and also that these were predominantly painted and commissioned by men, frequently to commemorate a wedding or betrothal. Given the relative lack of such portraits by female artists, one of Maher’s aims was to address this discontinuous history of representations of women by making her own images – with herself as subject in the finished series. The original mise en scène of the finished Portraits, however, emerged through a process of play and experimentation between both Maher and the actor Olwen Fouéré, while the photographs themselves were shot in the studio of Kate Horgan, a professional portrait photographer. Behind the surface of these photographs, then, is a hidden set of productive relationships between women, actively shaping the meanings of images at an earlier stage through processes of reciprocity and exchange.

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Conclusion: the space between then and now

31 In Amanda Coogan’s Snails, after Alice Maher, self-portraiture and performance combine to create a signifying space within which relationships of acknowledgement and celebration between women artists are enacted. A distinctive feature of signifying spaces is to open up a gap where meaning is constructed, which in turn helps to reconfigure processes of temporal change. The titling of the piece itself acknowledges this temporal dimension and also preserves the activity of each artist as discrete, despite the aspects that they have in common. Looking at the associations between these works by both Amanda Coogan and Alice Maher is a process that brings into visibility not only the relationship between self-portraiture and women’s (art) history, but the lineage of women’s art practice in relation to the politics of the Irish female body. And it is also through the operation of a further signifying space, the discursive domain of writing about the engagement between the work of these two artists, that new productive interactions can be explored. And this, in turn, can lead into new ways of thinking – and articulating – the temporal configurations of creative relationships between Irish women artists, in the writing of new histories.

NOTES

1. Snails, After Alice Maher was performed at IMMA on 16 June 2010 as part of the opening event for the Altered Images exhibition 17 June – 15 August 2010. 2. Conversation with Amanda Coogan, 7 February 2013; email from Coogan to the author 17 August 2016. 3. Amelia Jones, “‘Presence’ in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation”, Art Journal, Vol. 56:4, Winter 1997, p. 12. 4. The term “femmage” was first used by American feminist artist Miriam Schapiro in the 1970s to apply to artworks made by women that used materials associated with the historically female-associated area of the home, combined through a process of collage. However Schapiro’s notion of femmage also involved an explicit acknowledgement of the role of earlier women practitioners as influential precedents, and it is in this sense that I use the term here. See Norma Broude, “Miriam Schapiro and “Femmage”: Reflections on the Conflict between Decoration and Abstraction in Twentieth-Century Art,” Arts Magazine, February 1980, pp. 83-87. 5. Teresa de Lauretis, “Feminist Genealogies: A Personal Itinerary” Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol. 16, No. 4, 1993, p. 402. 6. Coogan initially studied with Abramović on the Masters programme at the Hochschule für Bildende Kunst, Braunschweig, Germany 1999-2001 and has worked with her on several projects subsequently including The Life and Death of Marina Abramović, Manchester International Festival, 9-16 July 2011.

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7. Helena Walsh, “Developing Dialogues: Live Art and Femininity in Post-Conflict Ireland”, in Áine Phillips ed. Performance Art in Ireland: a History, Live Art Development Agency, London and Intellect, Bristol, 2015, pp. 208-243. 8. Ann Lovett was a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl who died giving birth to a child (who also died) in a grotto to the Virgin Mary in Granard, Co. Longford on 31 January 1984. People in Granard claimed to have no knowledge of the girl’s condition, and her death came only four months after the adoption of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, enshrining the right to life of the unborn child over that of the mother, was approved in a controversial referendum. 9. Valérie Morisson, “Women’s Art in Ireland and Poland 1970-2010: Experiencing and Experimenting on the Female Body”, Etudes Irlandaises, Vol. 37:2, 2012, p. 82. 10. Amanda Coogan, The Role of the Subject and the Artist in the Context of a Self-Portrait, Portraits of the Irish Face – National Gallery of Ireland, unpublished seminar notes26/2/2011, non pag. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. See for example Kate Antosik Parsons’ discussion of Coogan’s performance Yellow in the context of the Magdalen Laundries in “Bodily Remembrances: The Performance of Memory in Recent Works by Amanda Coogan”, Artefact: the Journal of the Irish Association of Art Historians, Issue 3, 2009, pp. 7-19. 14. Although its findings were not published until 2009 in the Ryan Report, the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse set up in 2000 uncovered evidence of sexual abuse at St. Joseph’s School for Deaf Boys, Cabra, and severe emotional abuse at the girls’ school St. Mary’s Cabra. 15. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, New York, Columbia University Press, 1982. 16. Belinda Loftus, Mother Ireland and William III, Dundrum, Picture Press, 1990. 17. Laura Cumming, A Face to the World: on Self-Portraits, London, Harper Press, 2010, p. 6. 18. Vasari included discussion of Sophonisba Anguissola, Madonna Lucrezia and Plautila Nelli in addition to the sculptor Properzia di Rossi. 19. Frances Borzello, Seeing Ourselves: Women’s Self-Portraits, London, Thames and Hudson, 2nd edition, 2016, p. 35. 20. Julian Campbell ‘Helen Mabel Trevor’, in Nicola Figgis (ed.), Painting 1600-1900, Dublin, The Royal Irish Academy, 2014, pp. 477-478. 21. Feminist critic Lucy Lippard accused Wilke of a “confusion of her roles as beautiful woman and artist, as flirt and feminist”. L. Lippard, “European and American Women’s Body Art”, in From the Centre: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art, New York, E.P. Dutton, 1976, p. 126. 22. Gannit Ankori, “Frida Kahlo: the Fabric of her Art” in Emma Dexter and Tanya Barson (eds.), Frida Kahlo, London, Tate Publishing, 2005, pp. 32-34. 23. As in the death of Savita Halappanavar, who died of a septic miscarriage in University College Hospital Galway on 28 October 2012 after she was denied an abortion that would have saved her life.

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24. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York, Routledge, 1990. 25. Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories, London and New York, Routledge, 1999. 26. Julia Kristeva, “Women’s Time” (1979), trans. Alice Jardine and Harry Blake, in Toril Moi (ed.), The Julia Kristeva Reader, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1986, pp. 187-213. 27. Ibid., p. 209. 28. In keeping with Maher’s interest in both art historical reference and the fluidity of boundaries between animal and human these figures are reminiscent of Renaissance portraits of sufferers of hypertrichosis, such as the family of Pedro Gonzales, the so- called “Wolf Man”, whose daughters Antonietta and Madeleine also suffered from the same condition. 29. Alice Maher, audio guide to the Snails Chronicles: Double Image. Available from the Altered Images website: http://www.alteredimages.ie/downloads.html (Accessed 30 August 2016, en erreur mai 2018). See also: https://www.stoneyroadpress.com/assets/ PDFs/SRPAliceMaher.pdf (Accessed January 2018). 30. Amanda Coogan, conversation with the author, 7 February 2013. 31. Carol Mavor, “A Dream of a House”, Alice Maher: Portraits, Portadown, Millennium Court Arts Centre, 2003, non pag.

ABSTRACTS

In 2010 Amanda Coogan’s Snails: after Alice Maher was performed in front of an audience at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. The two-hour performance, during which the artist stood motionless as a number of snails explored her face, body and hair, engaged with concerns of spectacle, abjection and female identity now familiar from Coogan’s practice. The artist has also explicitly acknowledged the relationship between self-portraiture and the use of the body in performance art; Snails investigates this territory through aspects of both the staging of the performance and its subsequent documentation. However a further significant aspect of this piece is its acknowledgement of the earlier work of Alice Maher, whether in terms of similar concerns with abjection and identity or the role of both the art historical canon and the representation of the self. In this paper the acknowledgement of feminist precedent is investigated through the notion of femmage, a term here appropriated to signify the recognition of the influential role of earlier women practitioners, yet here identified also as situated within a history of the politics of the Irish female body since the 1980s. This frames a discussion of the significance of self-portraiture within Coogan’s performative practice through in two earlier works Medea (2001) and Self-Portrait as David (2003). Her practice is subsequently situated in relation to a gendered critique of the role of self-portraiture within the development of art historical canons, returning to a reading of Snails in relation to further precedents for feminist deconstructions of the idealised female body through self-representation in the work of Frida Kahlo and Hannah Wilke. Finally the discussion engages with Kristeva’s notion of “women’s time” to propose a means of reconceptualising factors of influence and affirmation between

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women artists that cannot be recognised within the canon, concluding with discussion of works by Alice Maher as precedent for Coogan’s performative self-portraiture, and which also operate within the kind of signifying space proposed by Kristeva, an investigative process that suggests further possibilities for the writing of Irish feminist art histories.

En 2010, l’œuvre Snails: After Alice Maher d’Amanda Coogan a été présentée au public dans une des salles du Musée irlandais d’Art Moderne. Cette performance d’une durée de deux heures, durant lesquelles une série d’escargots explorent le visage, le corps et les cheveux de l’artiste qui demeure imperturbablement figée, aborde un ensemble de thématiques familières chez Coogan : le spectaculaire, l’abjection et l’identité féminine. L’artiste a explicitement reconnu l’existence d’un lien entre autoportrait et usage du corps dans les arts performatifs ; Snails balise ce territoire selon deux dimensions : d’une part la mise en scène de la performance ; d’autre part, la documentation qui vient à l’appui de l’œuvre. Toutefois, une autre dimension signifiante de cette performance tient à sa filiation assumée avec le travail d’Alice Maher, que ce soit en termes de thématique (l’abjection, la question de l’identité) ou d’influence (notamment celle du canon artistique et celle de la tradition de la représentation de soi). Dans cet article, nous étudierons la référence à un précédent féministe à travers la notion de femmage, utilisé ici au sens de reconnaissance de l’influence de plusieurs générations de performeuses, mais aussi identifié comme appartenant à l’histoire de la politique du corps féminin irlandais depuis les années 1980. Ces éléments cadrent la discussion sur la signification de l’autoportrait dans toute la pratique performative de Coogan, y compris pour deux œuvres antérieures : Medea (2001) et Self-Portrait as David (2003). Sa pratique est ensuite envisagée en relation avec une critique féministe du rôle de l’art de l’autoportrait dans le développement du canon artistique pour revenir à une lecture de Snails en lien avec d’autres pratiques artistiques antérieures, notamment celles de Frida Kahlo et Hannah Wilke qui ont l’une et l’autre procédé à une déconstruction féministe du corps féminin idéalisé dans leurs autoportraits. Enfin, notre propos renvoie à la notion de « temps des femmes » décrit par Julia Kristeva et propose une redéfinition des facteurs d’affirmation et d’influence entre les artistes féminines, facteurs qui ne peuvent être reconnus dans le cadre du canon artistique traditionnel. Nous concluons enfin sur une analyse des œuvres d’Alice Maher comme « précédents » aux autoportraits performatifs de Coogan, opérant dans un espace de signification tel que défini par Kristeva. Une telle approche suggère des perspectives nouvelles pour l’écriture des histoires de l’art féministe irlandais.

INDEX

Mots-clés: autoportrait, performance, femmage, art féministe irlandais, canonicité, politique du corps féministe Keywords: self-portraiture, performance, femmage, Irish feminist art, canonicity, feminist body politics

AUTHOR

FIONNA BARBER Manchester School of Art. Fionna Barber is Reader in Art History and Art Research Hub Leader in the Manchester School of Art. She is the author of Art in Ireland since 1910 (Reaktion 2013), co- curator with Laura McAtackney and Katherine O’Donnell of the touring exhibition Con and Eva: Gendering Revolution produced for the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland (2016 onwards)

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and editor in chief of the forthcoming collection Ireland and the North (Peter Lang 2017). In addition to a focus on the role of women artists in Irish art history she has been writing about women’s art practice and the politics of the Irish female body since the 1980s, and is currently researching a monograph on Irish women artists after 1916.

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Incarnating and articulating the female other. Interview with Helena Walsh

Christelle Serée-Chaussinand and Helena Walsh

You are Irish you say lightly, and allocated to you are the tendencies to be wild, wanton, drunk, superstitious, unreliable, backward, toadying and prone to fits, whereas you know that in fact a whole entourage of ghosts resides in you, ghosts with whom the inner rapport is as frequent, as perplexing, as defiant as with any of the living1. Edna O’Brien, Mother Ireland, 1976. I need to bear witness to an uncertain event. I feel it roaring inside of me – this thing that may not have taken place. I don’t even know what name to put on it. I think you might call it a crime of the flesh, but the flesh is long fallen away and I am not sure what hurt may linger in my bones2. Anne Enright, The Gathering, 2007. Christelle Serée-Chaussinand (CSC) – Your practice as a live artist for ﬁfteen years has had the female body as its central motif. From “Passageway” or “Invisible Stains” to “Tricolour” or “Body Mist”, the female body is staged in relation to history, societal expectations and gendered norms to explore identity, motherhood, domesticity, sexuality, etc. What do you aim to expose exactly? Helena Walsh (HW) – My aim is to expose gender constructs as central to Irish national identity, to interrogate and subvert the ideals of femininity and nationhood as reflected in the symbolic appropriation of the female body within Irish nationalist iconography. Live Art is a particularly valid medium for countering the ways in which patriarchal ideologies negate the actualities of female experience and limit women’s political agency. Lois Keidan, Director of the Live Art Development Agency, London outlines the importance of Live Art practices in constructing ‘new strategies

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for the expression of identities’, and making the ‘disenfranchised and disembodied’ visible3. In using my body and self, I try to open up the possibilities for developing more empowered expressions of identity that might usefully contribute to emergent feminist discourses across the field of performance in Ireland. O’Brien and Enright cited above present Irish culture as endlessly haunted by the ceaseless chattering of ‘ghosts’ or the ‘roaring’ of uncertain, unnameable memories. In my practice, I hope to ground the spectral or the unknowable in the body, to incarnate that which is at once vague and ethereal, yet loudly persistent.

CSC – Do you think that this attempt to lodge the spectral and the unnamed inside the body is emblematic of Live Art? HW – Yes, I certainly do think that Live Art and performance can be usefully deployed to express that which is unnamed, for example, the impact of unspoken societal norms on the body or those experiences negated from dominant discourse. In her book Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (2011), Rebecca Schneider notes that ‘performance plays the “sedimented acts” and spectral meanings that haunt material in constant collective interaction, in constellation, in transmutation’4. She suggests: As theories of trauma and repetition might also instruct us, it is not presence that appears in performance in the syncopated time of citational performance but precisely (again) the missed encounter – the reverberations of the overlooked, the missed, the repressed, the seemingly forgotten5. In using their bodies to interrogate women’s histories live artists retrieve ‘the overlooked, the missed, the repressed, the seemingly forgotten’6. Importantly, Schneider locates the body, or more specifically flesh, as the place of performance’s remains and as that which enables a questioning of the logic of the archive. She asserts that ‘the place of residue is arguably flesh in a network of body-to-body transmission of affect and enactment – evidence, across generations, of impact’7. As Schneider observes, ‘flesh, that slippery feminine subcutaneousness, is the tyrannical and oily, invisible-inked signature of the living. Flesh of my flesh of my flesh repeats, even as flesh is that which the archive presumes does not remain’8. In using their bodies to retrieve and activate that which is concealed by ‘the logic of the archive’ female live artists contribute to contemporary feminist discourse. Likewise, they challenge ongoing gender oppressions by “digging” role models from the past. In doing so, they operate against the silencing of women’s histories and establishing new roles for women today and in the future.

CSC – Is the female body still an alienated body? Would you say there is still a long way to go before women re-appropriate their bodies? HW – Despite progressive shifts – decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1993, lifting of restrictions on the availability of contraception in 1994 and legalisation of divorce in the Republic of Ireland in 1995, alongside the recent legalising of same-sex marriage by popular vote in 2015 – women’s bodies remain constrained by a set of restrictive laws and considerably outdated patriarchal norms. As the remaining ban on abortion in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland make clear, motherhood is overtly essentialised across the island of Ireland. While England, Scotland and Wales clarified the circumstances in which abortion is permissible under the Abortion Act 1967, Northern Ireland remained exempt from this legislation. The 1861 Offences Against the Persons Act, which carries a sentence of life imprisonment for those who have an abortion illegally, is still in place there.

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Whereas, in the Republic of Ireland the 1983 8th Amendment to the Irish constitution legislated that the fetus from conception has the same equal rights to life as the mother. This restricts abortion unless there is a risk to the life of the mother. As Ruth Fletcher asserts, this demonstrates that ‘the control of women’s fertility is symbolically and materially important to several different species of nationalism in the region: Irish postcolonial conservatism, Irish anti-colonial republicanism and British unionism’9. However, a large and vocal pro-choice movement has developed an increasing presence across the island in recent years, paving the way for a referendum on the 8th Amendment in the Republic of Ireland in 2018.

CSC – Which of your works does particularly address this control of women’s sexuality and fertility? HW – My work Invisible Stains (2010) addressed the containment of women’s sexuality and the control of fertility. It was performed in Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin, the historic prison in which leaders of the 1916 Rising were executed that now operates as a museum of nationalist history. This performance explored the injustices experienced by the women that were incarcerated in Magdalen Laundries, state-sanctioned Catholic convents, which ran for-profit industrial laundries. Women, deemed to have upset societal norms of moral purity, such as unmarried mothers, or women unwanted by society, were detained in these punitive institutions and forced to work unwaged in the laundries. The last Magdalen Laundry closed in 1996. My actions and the materials I used in the performance referenced the labours and losses experienced by the women of the Magdalen Laundries, in an effort to countering the disavowal of their experiences and the punitive patriarchal systems that seek to contain female sexuality. At the time I made this performance the women incarcerated in these institutions were battling for state redress. In 2013, following the publication of the McAleese Report, the Irish government apologised for its complicity in sustaining the Laundries. However, this report omitted 796 pages of testimonies by women who were detained in Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries, gathered by the campaign group Justice for Magdalenes and downplayed the human rights abuses suffered. Equally the Catholic orders that ran the laundries refused to contribute to the redress scheme. During the performance my breasts were bound tightly with bandage, a reference to use of breast binding in the Laundries to maintain modesty. I wore a long skirt made up of blue and white baby-gro suits (all-in-one baby suits). This was held together by clothes pegs with a band of blue pegs spiked around my waist, while my hands were gloved with ‘Madonna’ blue marigolds. Throughout the four-hour performance I repetitiously performed a number of tasks. For instance, I poured laundry powder onto the floor of a prison cell and on un-pegging one of the baby-gros from my skirt, I scooped the washing powder into the baby-gro until it resembled human form, becoming a pretend ‘baby.’ The constructing of a ‘baby’ from washing power references the loss experienced by some women of the Magdalen Laundries who were forcibly separated from their children. Writing of witnessing this action Magdalena Maria Wieckiewicz, noted that ‘in this epitome of motherly love and tenderness, there is also a tincture of sadness and pain. As [Walsh] fills up the playsuit with washing powder, the obscure gesture becomes difficult to watch’10. Her observations demonstrate, perhaps, the ways in which performance can make the, often silenced, actualities of women’s experience felt.

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Walking around the prison, with great care I cradled, rocked and stroked each of the fake babies I constructed over the course of the performance. However, my pretence was eventually dropped as each ‘baby’ was repeatedly dipped into a large blue bucket of water, causing the washing powder inside the baby-gro to foam up and fizz in the water. This action evoked not only the labours of the women in the Magdalen Laundries but also the designation of women to the role of endless reproduction and domestic duties. After each ‘baby’ was dunked in the bucket, the fabric was then stretched out so that all the washing powder became squeezed into two ball shapes, from which two white streams of watery washing powder ran, similar to milk from breasts, which contrasted with my bound breasts. When it ran dry the fabric was reshaped to resemble a penis. Through the top of each cloth phallus an S-hook was pierced. Over the course of the four-hour performance ten of these phallic shapes were hung on the central staircase in Kilmainham, dialoguing with the commemoration of the 1916 martyrs on this site, while offering a retort to patriarchal systems of containment that seek to enslave women and restrict their reproductive agency.

Helena Walsh, Invisible Stains, 2010, in “Right Here, Right Now”, Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin

Photo Joseph Carr.

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Helena Walsh, Invisible Stains, 2010, in “Right Here, Right Now”, Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin

Photo Joseph Carr.

CSC – Do you believe that nationalist iconography similarly contributes to trivialise and potentially erase women’s contribution to national independence? HW – In fact we need to be mindful of the deep entanglements that stem from the representation of women’s bodies as symbolic of the nation within nationalist iconography. As Kathleen M. Gough observes, nationalist iconography enables women visibility only within the confines of patriarchal ideologies: ‘Cathleen Ní Houlihan works by way of discrete disappearances. In other words, when the call to Cathleen (nationalism) is heralded, “real” women seem to vanish’11. Exemplifying this, Margaret Kelleher highlights that Gonne’s ‘famine writings display the actions of a pragmatic and politically astute woman’ and ‘this is an aspect of her personality frequently obscured by the more mythical dimension of Gonne as Cathleen’12. Similarly, in an article that calls for a feminist analysis of the functioning of male martyrdom within the Irish insurrection, Mary Condren highlights ‘the establishment of patrilineal structures, which are a social rather than a biological achievement’13. Such ‘patrilineal structures’ enabled the ‘discrete’ erasure of the women who participated in the 1916 Rising from dominant historical narratives throughout the twentieth century. However, women were very active, participating in the fighting as members of both Cumann na mBan and the Citizen Army, or acting as couriers, fund-raisers, gun-runners, cooks and tending to the wounded14. As well as their commitment to national independence, many revolutionary women were committed socialists and feminists who championed gender equality and women’s involvement in politics. If the women revolutionaries who participated in the Rising transcended the gender norms of the time, the state authorities, which emerged following the partition of

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Ireland and an embittered Civil War (1922-1923), wasted no time in returning women to a primary role within the home and were it not for the work of feminist historians women’s involvement in the Rising would be all but forgotten. With the Catholic Church’s grasping of power over social policy, women’s rights were eroded at a steady pace as the southern state trundled towards becoming a Republic in 1949. Referring to the Civil Service Act (1956), commonly known as the ‘marriage bar,’ which required that women working in the Civil Service resigned on marriage, Frances Gardiner observes ‘almost four decades of increasingly authoritarian legislation, which curbed women’s self-determination to the extent that political involvement was severely curtailed, if not actually impossible, for most women, save as political wife, sister or mother’15. The resignation of women to the duties of motherhood and the home remains inscribed in Article 41.2 of the 1937 Irish constitution, which states that ‘in particular, the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved’16. The combined submissive serenity of the self-sacrificing and nurturing Mother Ireland and the passive sexuality of the virginal Catholic Madonna spearheaded the state’s legislative efforts to limit women to the duties of reproduction and domesticity. As Fintan Walsh notes, ‘while Irish manhood may have been cursed by impotency within a colonial imaginary, Irish womanhood was shaped by restrictive norms measured against the Virgin Mary, Mother Ireland and Eamon de Valera’s fantasy of happy maidens’17.

CSC – In “Autonomy”18, the durational and site-responsive performance you made in Kilmainham Gaol for ‘Future Histories’ in 2016, your body is the meeting point of the military and the domestic, the political and the bucolic and is turned into a tool of political expression. On which material did you draw and how did you invest yourself in the performance? HW – The performance drew inspiration from accounts of the activities of revolutionary women retrieved by feminist scholars, including the political writings of revolutionary women themselves in such publications as Bean na h-Éireann (1908-1911) and the suffrage publication, The Irish Citizen (1912-1920). One key inspiration is the subversion of domesticity within the regular gardening column titled “Woman with a Garden” which was featured in Bean na h-Éireann. The author of the gardening section is disputed as many authors concealed their identities with Gaelic pseudonyms. Some suggest this section was penned by Maud Gonne, others maintain it was by Countess Constance Markievicz19, Steele, who attributes these writings to Markievicz, discusses how the gardening section was rife with allegorical descriptions. For example, ‘mature blossoms, such as summer roses, recalled Roisin Dubh, as well as the blood of martyred United Irishmen (July 1909)’20. Within the section ‘the garden’s enemies – slugs, snails, wasps, flies – were viewed as British Soldiers, invaders that destroyed the flowers and fruits of the land’ and ‘destructive “forces of the earth” such as heavy frost, cruel blights, bitter gales and blinding snow, were predictably associated with the British Empire or its symbolic presence in Dublin Castle’21. The column also used garden allegory to recall past nationalists heroes. For example, the author used reference to lavender to recall Robert Emmet’s love of the plant and refer to the confiscation of a sprig of lavender handed to him in court during his trial lest it be used to conceal poison. Steele also highlights the criticisms of the gardening section, detailing that Innes views ‘the ‘“startling” transitions between revolution and roses’ as evidence of the authors’ ‘rhetorical

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entrapment between the nationalist discourse of warriorhood and stereotyped feminization’22. In my performance, however, I purposefully sought to play with the imagery evoked in the gardening section to draw out these tensions between nationalism and feminism.

Helena Walsh, Autonomy, 2016, in “Future Histories”, Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin

Photo: Joseph Carr.

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Helena Walsh, Autonomy, 2016, in “Future Histories”, Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin

Photo: Joseph Carr.

During the performance I took up residency on the central staircase of the East Wing of Kilmainham Gaol, dressed in an outfit that merged early twentieth century modesty with a warrior-type aesthetic, which comprised of a green leather corset, shiny black leggings, a long dark green suede coat, which one of the tour guides remarked looked like an authentic relic of 1916. I also wore an army belt containing butter-knives and gold-sprayed tampons around my waist. The arch of the staircase was decorated with plastic ivy. A number of baskets, which were positioned around the staircase contained apples, lavender, roses and white rubber lilies. The ‘tackiness’ of some of my materials, such as the plastic ivy, made for a purposefully cheapened- looking ‘nationalist garden.’ During the performance I spent my time dismantling this ‘nationalist garden.’ I peeled apples and flicked the skins at members of the audience and those participating on the official prison tours, which trailed through the space persistently throughout the day, flinging the skinned apples from the top of the stairs. I crushed the lavender between my fingers releasing its aroma before blowing it towards viewers. I beheaded individual roses and sitting on the staircase, held each rose head to my crotch, fingering it so that it opened up and the rose petals fell from between my spread legs, making a red stained pathway down the staircase. Outlining the fight for reproductive autonomy as an ongoing contemporary battle, at other times, I inserted the gold-sprayed tampons, reminiscent of bullets, inside a rubber lily, as if it were a replacement stamen. The lilies, of course, drew on the iconography of the Easter Lilly used to commemorate the Rising. On pulling back the lily head, making use of the elasticity of the rubber stalk, I hurled tampons across the prison. Throughout, I eyeballed the audience, both those intending to see the performance and those on the tours, with what one audience member described as

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my ‘panoptical gaze.’ Over the course of the ten hours I performed in ‘Future Histories’, I developed a connection, of sorts, to the women revolutionaries of 1916 that were once imprisoned in the gaol. As the performance progressed my actions became emboldened and inspired by an embodiment of the sense of the threat these women posed to the patriarchal ideologies of the foundling Irish state, which the state authorities sought to fervently repress. This embodying of a threatening presence, I might add, was a thoroughly enjoyable communing with history.

CSC – Did other female live artists involved in ‘Future Histories’ at Kilmainham aim to reflect the same loss of voice and subjecthood, the same subjugation of women? HW – At the same time as I embarked on giving body to a threatening female force, another of the Live Artists performing in the event, Katherine Nolan, explored ‘the embodiment of the Irish nation as woman’23. Entering the space on the hour throughout the day, Nolan vocalized a woeful wailing and breathlessness that heightened in tension and rapidity as she moved around the East Wing with an ever- increasing pace. She would then vanish only to return to ‘haunt’ the site again at a later point. Nolan states that her mournful melodramatics sought to evoke the haunting presence of ‘mythical figures’ such Cathleen Ni Houlihan in response to ‘the Gaol as site of trauma and loss’, yet equally ‘the repression of women’s full access to subject-hood in Irish society, lore and law’24. Indeed, Nolan’s embodying of the sorrowful figure of Cathleen was loudly declared and she had a solid presence in the space demonstrating the deployment of the body in live art to deprive the haunting, idealized representations of women central to Irish nationalist iconography of their power to vanish real women.

CSC – Flouting the conventions of the female nude and self-portraiture, you repeatedly expose your naked body in your works. Neither idealised nor aestheticized, your performative body is a deliberately organic, sentient and erotic body. How does it become a locus of resistance? HW – Just as the canon of art is populated with idealised imagery of the female nude, contemporary Western visual culture is saturated in imagery of airbrushed, predominantly white, female bodies that conform to hetero-normative, patriarchal desires. Alongside objectifying women, such images negatively impact on women and young girls by making them feel as if their real bodies are somehow inherently flawed or that they have to look and behave in a certain way in order to be acceptable or desirable. In exposing my naked body in my work, I attempt to counter this by confronting audiences with the actualities of the female body, its fluids, its abject functions, its everydayness. Yet, given the pervasiveness of patriarchal imagery and norms, countering oppressive gender constructs is not an easy or simple task. Relevant to this, my work explores the subjugation and vulnerabilities of the female body, while simultaneously attempting to develop more empowered expressions that counter patriarchal ideals. I find that durational performance, in particular, allows a space in which the difficulties inherent in countering idealised images and patriarchal norms can be exposed, while the possibilities for pushing the expressive potentials of the female body towards the development of more empowered gestures can be organically opened up overtime. Within my durational performances, I often explore histories of oppression and work through repressive patriarchal imagery or constructs that serve to impose a particular set of behaviours. I attempt to dismantle this imagery, while simultaneously working towards the development of gestures that positively trouble patriarchal ideals and contribute to the development of feminist discourses. As such, within durational performance I engage in the often

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slow, often tiring and often repetitive labour of undermining long-ingrained patriarchal constructs of their oppressive power. This sometimes involves the deployment of the erotic body in a subversive manner. For me, perhaps, it is within this process of interrogating the subjugation of the female body (both historic and present), while simultaneously attempting to counter oppressive patriarchal constructs and twist towards the development of more empowered expressions that the performative body becomes a locus of resistance.

CSC – The piece you performed at the Atheneum, Dijon, in 2013 is a perfect example of your exposed body as locus of resistance, isn’t it? Tell us about this piece. HW – My performance in the Atheneum Theatre, Dijon used the abject body to directly confront the ‘sanitised images of woman as muse and woman as nation’25. The performance was developed from the work resultant from my participation in LABOUR, a touring group durational exhibition featuring eleven female artists resident within, or native to, the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, which was co-curated by Amanda Coogan, Chrissie Cadman and myself. In response to the theme of ‘Irish self-portraiture’ I sought to positively violate the positioning of the female body as representative of the Irish nation. Parodying the iconography of the Virgin Mary and the proverbial Mother Ireland, I wore a gold-embossed pale blue dress and a gold-sprayed balaclava, rolled up to reveal my face; the balaclava had numerous knitting needles spiked through its top resembling perhaps a crown of thorns or the halos. Around my waist I wore two army belts. Baby bottles containing a mixture of menstrual blood and milk were attached to one belt. The other contained pouches of Catholic altar bread or Holy Communion. The row of baby bottles circling my waist, which looked like a bullet belt, alongside the balaclava endowed my appearance with a sense of militancy, which referenced the territorial control of female reproductive autonomy.

Helena Walsh, In Pursuit of Pleasure, 2012, in “Labour”, Void Gallery Derry / Londonderry

Photo: Jordan Hutchings.

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At the beginning of the performance, I stood on a circular bed of soil, covered in a circle of condoms, which were filled with washing powder, hence, taking on a phallic shape. The laundry powder referenced the enslavement of women in the Magdalen Laundries and, in turn, the moral regulation of women. With my arms held outstretched I parodied the pose of the Virgin Mary, tilting my head and looking serenely at the audience. As a soundtrack played the Irish national anthem, I pulled a rolled up Tricolour (the Irish flag) from my vagina and placed it over the bed of soil. This action, on the one hand, made explicit the alignment of women’s bodies as representative of the nation, and equally the resigning of women to the duties of motherhood, breeding and nurturing the new nation. On the other hand, it also upset the ways in which, as outlined by Mary Condren, martyrdom enables men to lay claim to the birth of the new nation (gendered as female) and establish patriarchal systems of power based on a sacrificial social contract. As Condren notes this produces a ‘return to the pre-Oedipal mother issues in a final act of patriarchal reversal where the warrior now gives birth to the mother rather than she to him’26. This action of giving birth to the national flag then, perhaps, troubled the privileging of martyred male bones, which is dependent upon the disappearance of female genealogies. As the performance progressed, and the Irish anthem became increasingly distorted and mechanical sounding, I marched around the space, balaclava down. At intervals I defiled the flag by dripping the mixture contained in the baby bottles on it. I also inserted one of the laundry-filled condoms inside my vagina, taking one of the knitting needles from the balaclava on my head and using it to pierce the condom so that the white washing powder sprayed out onto the soil, parodying of a man pissing and, in turn, undertaking a territorial marking of the soil. To add to my purposeful irreverence, at times, I crumbled the Holy Communion wafers onto the floor and at other times, chewed it, spitting the soggy bread toward the audience. As the odour of the laundry powder, soil and the rancid smell of menstrual blood and milk permeated the air, the realities and actualities of women’s reproductive bodies and maternal labour, in all its messy, leaky glory entered the atmosphere. This unleashing of the threatening or destabilising potentials of the female body in the performance enabled, perhaps, an undoing of the sanctified, patriarchal versions of femininity that have perpetuated the systematic punishment of women in institutions such as the Magdalen Laundries.

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Helena Walsh, In Pursuit of Pleasure, 2012, in “Labour”, Void Gallery Derry / Londonderry

Photo: Jordan Hutchings.

CSC – How much do you draw on your own experiences in your works? HW – My work has always been influenced by my lived and embodied experiences. For instance, my early works were very much inspired by the experience of coming of age and challenging the social pressures that young women live through to conform to patriarchal ideals of beauty. Later works, such as the aforementioned Invisible Stains, were informed by my experience of motherhood, which led to an interrogation of the policing of pregnant bodies and reproductive autonomy. Hence, while my works are informed by personal experiences, I explore these experiences in relation to broader social, political, cultural and historical contexts. In turn, the responses to my work also enable understandings around how the female body is perceived within specific contexts. For example, judging by the responses of the audiences, Food for Thought (2001) proved acutely revealing as to the ways in which the female body is central to ideals of nationhood. This work was a personal response to my teenage experience of Anorexia Nervosa – an eating disorder characterised by self-starvation that I succumbed to in the midst of the Celtic Tiger era, as the overt consumerist commodification of women’s bodies in accordance to homogenized Western ideals of beauty became increasingly present in an Irish cultural context. Food for Thought constituted a simple, yet deeply personal, self-portrait of this experience. As part of this video performance I covered my body in a mixture of spring roll pastry and latex, lighting the set in such a manner that the false layers of skin applied to my body were not readily noticeable and the skin of my naked body appeared unblemished. Sat on a stool, I scratched at the latex, peeling, picking and at times ripping it off my skin. I also binged voraciously on what appeared to be my own flesh by flaking off the spring roll pastry, gathering clumps of it in my hands and shoving it into my mouth. Lifting my foot to my mouth I gnawed on it and ripped layers of ‘skin’ from my breast or knee with my teeth. The action of pulling ‘flesh’ from my body was over-layered with harsh ripping sounds, made through tearing

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paper. Visualising the notion that following prolonged reduction in food consumption, relating to anorexia, the body begins to consume itself, the performance staged the driven yet destructive aspects of my teenage self-starvation. This video was exhibited with a number of my other works focused on critiquing the pressure placed on young women to conform to Western ideals of beauty. This included another video performance titled Body Mist, which explored how the expanse of beauty products for female aesthetic improvement may make women feel as if every area of their actual bodies requires a form of erasure. Throughout this performance I covered myself from head to foot in cosmetic products. On the video documentation following each aesthetic improvement or the application of each product, the part of my body attended to darkens, then fades and eventually becomes transparent, until all that remains of my body is a ghostly outline. To achieve this effect I used what is technically termed a ‘green screen.’ Both videos were exhibited in The Real Art Space, a gallery located in a two-storey townhouse in Limerick city. Drawing on the inherent domesticity of this site the videos were installed in the upstairs bedrooms. Audience members watched the videos by peering through the peepholes of the closed door to each bedroom. The looped videos were projected onto the bedroom walls so that the projection was reflected in strategically placed mirrors, making further ghostly my vanishing or diminishing flesh. These works play with what Rebecca Schneider in her book, The Explicit Body in Performance (1997), details as a habituation ‘to watching a secret’ in a society where ‘the feminine’ is ‘emblematic of the private sphere’27. In performing the erasure of my naked body the videos interrupted this system of voyeuristic viewing in that the more the viewers watched the less they saw. When playing in loop, however, the videos showed a cycle of disappearing female flesh, bodies being erased or consumed only to reappear whole again: this relates to Schneider’s positioning of woman as ‘emblem of consumptive desire and designated capitalist consumer, [who] sets out to consume herself in an anorectic frenzy of the logic of the vanishing point – attempting to consume her own inaccessible image, chasing after disappearance infinitively’28.

CSC – How did the audience understand this performance? HW – Despite the framing of this exhibition as a body of work concerned with the sanitising effects of the ‘beauty myth’ in a contemporary Western context, a considerable quantity of the audience located this exhibition as relevant to Irish cultural histories. Many audience members related Food for Thought, in particular, to the Great Irish Famine (1845-1851), the Catholic ritual of Holy Communion and the 1981 republican hunger strikes in the H-Block Prison, Belfast. In retrospect, perhaps, my feasting on my own flesh relates to the consumption of the ‘Body of Christ’ within the Catholic ritual of Holy Communion. Perhaps, my animal-like savagery also relates to the use of female imagery to represent the Famine. As outlined by Kelleher, ‘the recurrence of female images in representations of the Famine (…) enables the Famine’s narration’29. The reflections of my fading female body in mirrors, which sought to evoke my personal experience were, albeit inadvertently, ghosted with historical perspectives central to the Irish nationalist archive. The responses to this early work demonstrate how deeply intertwined female bodies are with the ideals of nationhood in an Irish

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context and how such operates to negate the actuality of women’s experience. Yet, these works equally outline how the use of the explicit body can expose what Schneider outlines as ‘the paradigm of perspective, as a historical habituation to any scene’30. Noting the gendering of perspective, Schneider claims ‘the scopic field is riddled with desire,’ to which the disembodied or detached phallic gaze is historically implicit31. When standing at the keyhole, Schneider notes, this historical habituation of perspective ‘haunts’ explicit feminist performance art and ‘performance art of the explicit body in turn interrogates the prerogatives of that ghosting’32.

CSC – To what extent do you consider your works as self-portraits? HW – On the one hand, my works stem from my autobiography in that they draw on my lived and embodied experiences. I equally use my body / self in the works to interrogate the cultural and social contexts related to my identity. In this sense, my works could be seen to constitute self-portraits of sorts. However, on the other hand, in their interrogation of the relations between gender, national identity and cultural history the works are not strictly or solely concerned with self-portraiture. Rather, they seek to speak more broadly to women’s experiences and open up dialogue around the ways in which female bodies are policed within specific contexts, alongside retrieving radical histories that have transgressed gender norms. For example, this is pertinent within my explorations of the histories of the Magdalen Laundries or the lives of the female revolutionaries that participated in the 1916 Rising. Of course, my gestures and expressions within my works often issue an irreverent, sometimes audacious, challenging of patriarchal conventions, which is very much a personal response. However, it is equally important to me that the works remain open to broader interpretations that extend past my personal responses. Primarily, I see performance as a politicised or activist practice centred on countering gendered constructs and developing more empowered feminist discourses.

NOTES

1. Edna O’Brien, Mother Ireland, Middlesex, Penguin Books, 1976, p. 23. 2. Anne Enright, The Gathering, London, Jonathan Cape, 2007, p. 1. 3. Lois Keidan, ‘What is Live Art?’, Live Art Development Agency, < http:// www.thisisliveart.co.uk/about/what-is-live-art/> [Accessed January 2018]. 4. Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment, London and New York, Routledge, 2011, p. 100. Emphasis in original. 5. Ibid., p. 100. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., p. 100. Emphasis in original. 8. Ibid., p. 103.

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9. Ruth Fletcher, ‘Post-colonial Fragments: Representations of Abortion in Irish Law and Politics’, Journal of Law and Society, Vol. 28(4), 2001, pp. 568-589 (p. 572). 10. Magdalena Maria Wieckiewicz writing as part of ‘Right Here, Right Now – Back There, Back Then’, Performance Art Live, [Accessed January 2018]. 11. Kathleen M. Gough, ‘Girls Interrupted: Gendered Spectres. Atlantic drag’, Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, Vol. 13(4), 2008, pp. 115-126 (p. 117). 12. Margaret Kelleher, The Feminization of Famine: Expressions of the Inexpressible?, Cork, Cork University Press, 1997, p. 123. 13. Mary Condren, ‘Sacrifice and Political Legitimation: The Production of a Gendered Social Order’, Journal of Women’s History, Vol. 6(4), 1995, pp. 160-189 (p. 162). 14. Sinéad McCoole, No Ordinary Women: Irish Female Activists in the Revolutionary Years 1900-1923, 2nd edition, Dublin, The O’Brien Press, 2015. 15. Frances Gardiner, ‘Political Interest and Participation of Irish Women 1922-1992: The Unfinished Revolution’, in Irish Women’s Studies Reader, Ailbhe Smyth, ed., Dublin, Attic Press, 1993, pp. 45-78 (p. 51). 16. Department of the Taoiseach, Bunreacht na hÉireann / Constitution of Ireland, <">https://www.taoiseach.gov.ie/eng/Historical_Information/The_Constitution/ [Accessed January 2018]. 17. Fintan Walsh, “Homelysexuality and the “Beauty” Pageant’, in Crossroads: Performance Studies and Irish Culture, Sara Brady and Fintan Walsh (eds), Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 196-209 (p. 197). 18. The exhibition curated by Áine Phillips and Niamh Murphy as part of the Arts Council of Ireland’s centenary programme. 19. Lisa Weihman, L., ‘National Treasures and Nationalist Gardens: Unlocking the Archival Mysteries of Bean na h-Éireann’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Vol. 27(2), 2008, pp. 355-364, (p. 360). 20. Karen M. Steele, ‘Constance Markievicz’s Allegorical Garden: Femininity, Militancy, and the Press, 1909-1915’, Women’s Studies, Vol. 29, 2000, pp. 423-447 (p. 431). 21. Ibid., p. 432. 22. Ibid., p. 431. 23. Katherine Nolan, blogspot, < http://katherine-nolan.blogspot.co.uk/> [Accessed January 2018] 24. Ibid. 25. Jacqueline Belanger, ‘The Laws of Metaphor: Reading Eavan Boland’s Anorexic in an Irish Context’, Colby Quarterly, Vol. 36(3), 2000, pp. 242-251 (p. 249). 26. Mary Condren, ‘Sacrifice and Political Legitimation: The Production of a Gendered Social Order’, op. cit., p. 165. 27. Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance, London and New York, Routledge, 1997, p. 72. 28. Ibid., p. 71.

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29. Margaret Kelleher, The Feminization of Famine: Expressions of the Inexpressible?, op. cit., p. 153. 30. Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance, op. cit., p. 66 -67. 31. Ibid., p. 66. 32. Ibid., p. 67.

AUTHORS

CHRISTELLE SERÉE-CHAUSSINAND Université de Bourgogne Franche-Comté, TIL EA 4182. Christelle Serée-Chaussinand is Associate Professor at the Université de Bourgogne (Dijon) where she currently holds the position of Vice- President in charge of undergraduate and graduate levels. She teaches contemporary Irish literature, civilisation and culture. Her special research interests lie in autobiographical writings and portraiture or self-portraiture in literature as well as in the visual arts. She has published several articles on contemporary Irish literature and art, in particular on such writers and artists as Sean O’Faolain, Sebastian Barry, Derek Mahon, Paul Muldoon, Seamus Heaney, Sinéad Morrissey or Louis le Brocquy. She is a member of Centre Interlangues TIL (EA4182) and has recently run a research seminar on contemporary creation in its relation to critical theory: "Critical theory and creation: questioning images". She is a member of the editorial board of Interfaces: Texte Image Language, an international bilingual journal dedicated to intermediality / word and image.

HELENA WALSH Helena Walsh is a live artist from Co. Kilkenny Ireland. She has been based in London since 2003. Her practice explores the relations between gender, national identity and cultural histories. Drawing on her lived and embodied experience through her work Helena seeks to positively violate the systems, borders and rules that construct gender. In 2009 she received a Doctorate Award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to undertake a practice-based PhD in the Department of Drama, Queen Mary University of London, which she completed in 2013. Her doctoral research, is entitled, ‘Live Art and Femininity in Post-Conflict Ireland: Between Negation and Reproduction, Rebellion and Conformity.’ Helena has performed widely in galleries, museums, theatres and non-traditional art spaces, including public sites. Her current research practice is focused on the legacies of feminist activism. As part of this research, in 2016 Helena performed a new site-responsive live art work that considers the activism of the women imprisoned in Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin following the 1916 Rising in relation to contemporary tensions between nationalism and feminism. This was featured in 'Future Histories' at Kilmainham Gaol in 2016 as part of the Arts Council of Ireland's 2016 programme.

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Comptes rendus bibliographiques Book reviews

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John Crowley, Donal Ó Drisceoil and Mike Murphy (eds), Atlas of the Irish Revolution

Christophe Gillissen

RÉFÉRENCE

Ó Drisceoil and Mike Murphy (eds), Atlas of the Irish Revolution, Cork, Cork UP, 2017, xx + 964 p., ISBN: 9781782051176

1 En cette décennie des commémorations en Irlande (2012-2022), la publication d’un atlas de la Révolution irlandaise est bienvenue. Il couvre en effet la période des événements qui se sont succédé entre la crise du Home Rule de 1912 jusqu’à la fondation de l’Etat libre d’Irlande en 1922, c’est-à-dire celle d’une révolution qui a abouti à la création d’un Etat irlandais, amputé des six comtés du nord-ouest de l’île. L’amplitude chronologique de l’atlas est même plus large, puisqu’il évoque aussi la guerre civile de 1922-1923.

2 L’atlas de la Grande Famine (2012) avait déjà démontré le savoir-faire des Presses universitaires de Cork en ce domaine. On trouve dans celui-ci les ingrédients qui avaient fait le succès du précédent : une approche encyclopédique, une grande richesse cartographique et iconographique – il propose plus de 350 cartes et 700 illustrations –, ainsi qu’une centaine de contributions de spécialistes, précédées d’une préface du président Michael D. Higgins.

3 L’ouvrage est organisé en dix chapitres qui suivent une trame chronologique : les crises politiques et syndicales de 1912 et 1913, le début de la Grande Guerre et le soulèvement de Pâques 1916, la montée en puissance du mouvement nationaliste, la guerre d’indépendance – abordée successivement sous ses angles militaires, politiques et sociales, ainsi que régionales –, et le Traité anglo-irlandais et la guerre civile. Les deux derniers chapitres sont consacrés aux retombées de la révolution et à ses enjeux mémoriels, historiographiques et culturels.

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4 L’ambition de l’atlas est considérable, car il cherche à synthétiser l’état de l’art sur un épisode historique dense, à ouvrir de nouvelles pistes de recherche, et à conjuguer histoires nationale et locale, sans négliger les aspects internationaux. L’approche est en outre pluridisciplinaire, la révolution irlandaise étant abordée sous toutes ses facettes : histoire politique, géographie, histoire sociale, histoire culturelle, etc.

5 Tous les grands noms sont présents au rendez-vous – Mary Daly, Ronan Fanning, Roy Foster, Michael Laffan, J.J. Lee, Martin Mansergh, Clair Wills, etc. –, ainsi que les nouvelles générations de chercheurs. On notera par ailleurs les contributions de trois membres de la SOFEIR – Jérôme aan de Wiel, Grace Neville et Frank Rynne – qui apportent des éclairages précieux sur la couverture du soulèvement de 1916 par la presse française, le contexte européen de la participation irlandaise à la Grande Guerre et du soulèvement, et les arrestations effectuées dans le cadre de la loi de 1881 (Persons and Property Act).

6 Il s’agit en somme d’un ouvrage de référence essentiel, tant par son exhaustivité que par sa qualité et, cerise sur le gâteau, le prix de l’atlas (59€ sur le site du CUP) ne limite pas son acquisition aux seules bibliothèques. De fait, la demande fut telle que les Presses universitaires de Cork furent brièvement en rupture de stock.

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Patrick Fitzgerald and Anthony Russell (eds), John Mitchel, Ulster and the Great Famine

Catherine Conan

REFERENCES

Patrick Fitzgerald and Anthony Russell (eds), John Mitchel, Ulster and the Great Famine, Irish Academic Press (2017). ISBN-13:9781911024668, 224 p

1 This collection of essays is based upon the contributions to the annual Great Famine Commemoration of 2015, when the event was held for the first north of the border, in Newry. The occasion of the location of the conference provides the volume with one of its two central lines of questioning: most of the contributions thus set about revising the popular perception that Ulster got off rather lightly in the Famine, especially in comparison with the horrendous suffering witnessed by the South and West of Ireland. Because the implication of the stereotype could be that the North suffered less than the rest of the island because it was an area where the Protestant proportion of the population was higher (thus giving justification to accusations of Irish – Catholic – genocide), Anthony Russell reminds the reader that “it can no longer be claimed that the Great Famine […] did not impact severely upon both communities in the North” (p. 73). Patrick Fitzgerald quotes the figures of a 19% decline in the Catholic population, as opposed to 18% for Protestants over the period of the Famine (p. 124), but the figure fails to tell the whole truth as it does not distinguish between population loss due to emigration and excess mortality. Indeed, both editors in their introduction establish that “population decline in the northern province during the Great Famine resulted disproportionately from the impact of emigration, as opposed to excess mortality or averted births” (p. ix).

2 From the methodological point of view, these inquiries into the fate of Ulster during the Famine are carried out through the study of little-known or previously unpublished

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primary sources, such as data on baptisms from Roman Catholic churches, which have been made available online in 2015, the diaries of Stephen De Vere, brother to poet Aubrey, or the passages from the reports of the Devon Commission relating to the Newry area. The volume thus contains exciting new research by world-class Famine scholars such as Cormac O Grada, Christine Kinealy or Cathal Poirteir, and confirms the trend in local assessments of the extent of the disaster, and insistence upon local variations in severity established by the publication in 2012 of Cork UP’s Atlas of the Irish Famine. The importance of the local perspective is mirrored in the form of the volume, which is concluded by eight shorter pieces giving an individual, often non-academic point of view on the history and legacy of the Famine.

3 The second major preoccupation evidenced by this collection of essays also has to do with the location of the 2015 Great Famine Commemoration. Indeed, John Mitchel, the prominent Young Irelander responsible for the popularization of the Famine as genocide, was a Newry resident. Although it is the clear intent of the editors to link the two aspects of the Newry conference, it seems that the figure of Mitchel, who sought to exploit the Famine for nationalist purposes, resists, or escapes, a detailed and balanced study of the local impact of the disaster. Very early on in his article on “John Mitchel’s town, its hinterland and the Great Famine”, Anthony Russell has to acknowledge a failure to find a local relevance to Mitchel’s writings: “[Mitchel’s] descriptions of terminal destitution were penned not about the landscape surrounding Mitchel’s home town, Newry, but rather they followed an electioneering visit in support of Young Ireland to Galway in 1847” (p. 47). James Quinn’s engaging study of Mitchel’s defence of slavery in The Southern states of the US at the time of the Civil War shows that there was no inherent contradiction between Mitchel’s aggressive brand of Irish nationalism and a belief in the inferiority of Blacks, which was instrumental to the agrarian system of the South. Having derived from Thomas Carlyle the combination of anti-capitalism and racism, Mitchel blamed on the English both the Irish situation and the rise of capitalism, to which a Southern-style slave-based agrarian economy was the answer.

4 Despite a number of unnerving typos (notably in Anthony Russell’s article), this is a stimulating volume that offers solid analyses of fresh material and new perspectives that underline the local dimension of recent Famine scholarship as a way to counter nationalist-based over-simplifications that have for long dominated popular perceptions of the Famine.

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Matthew Barlow, Griffintown : Identity and Memory in an Irish Diaspora Neighbourhood

Camille Harrigan

REFERENCES

Matthew Barlow, Griffintown : Identity and Memory in an Irish Diaspora Neighbourhood, Vancouver, UBC Press, 2017, xiii+249 pp., ISBN 9780774834346

1 In this monograph based on his PhD dissertation, Matthew Barlow writes a biography of Griffintown whilst tracing the memory work - the stories “created, recreated, reinforced, and projected about it over the past century” - that has shaped the Montreal locality (7). It is these stories and narratives, examined through the lenses of diaspora and memory studies, which are Barlow’s critical contribution.

2 Griffintown has been the subject of much amateur attention in the last decades. Thus, Barlow’s work constitutes a long awaited academic analysis of a key locale in the history of the Irish in Canada. First, Barlow contextualizes the Irish Catholic working- class of Griffintown in Montreal’s ethno-religious and linguistic milieux. His introduction also lays the bases for his analysis of the necessary interplay of history and memory in the neighbourhood.

3 Chapter 1 opens this analysis of the “persistent memory work” which the community engaged in to reinforce their Irishness, forever reshaping their history as Irish Catholic. Chapter 2 continues to chronicle the history of the area whilst engaging critically with previous work done on the Irish in Montreal. Chapter 3 traces the history and identity of the locale during its last glorious days and examines its already changing physical landscape in the years leading to World War II.

4 The last chapters, which constitute half the monograph, are Barlow’s best input. Chapter 4 is an exploration of the trends that impacted Griffintown and explained its

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demise. Barlow places it at the confluence of socio-economic and political changes that impacted Montreal after 1945: industrialization, the socio-economic rise of working- class Irish Catholics, their voluntary removal from the area and the changing politics in Québec. It is therefore a re-imagined Griffintown that cultural caretakers celebrated in multiple initiatives from the 1990s onward.

5 Chapter 5 examines those initiatives, which Barlow termed the Griffintown Commemorative Project. They were part of the larger resurgence of Irish culture in the diaspora in the era as well as an attempt by Irish Montrealers to reinscribe their own history into the city’s cultural and physical landscape. So successful were they that Griffintown has become synonymous with Irish Montreal. This is something Barlow himself contributes to throughout this book when he applies his Griffintown conclusions to the entire Irish Catholic population in the city.

6 If one might have wished for more from material Barlow collected himself, the scholar chose to engage instead with the sources created by the Griffintown enthusiasts that preceded him. Chapter 5 nevertheless remains Barlow’s most engaging analysis. His exploration of who tells the Griffintown story - and how - proves invaluable in showing how collective narratives used in remembrance are often simplified and nostalgic. Barlow is, finally, quite effectively contributing to our understanding of the interaction between history, memory and identity in Irish Montreal.

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John Dorney, The Civil War in Dublin: The Fight for the Irish Capital

Olivier Coquelin

RÉFÉRENCE

John Dorney, The Civil War in Dublin: The Fight for the Irish Capital, 1922-1924, Newbridge, Merrion Press, 2017, xii + 352 p., ISBN 978-1-78537-089-2

1 S’inscrivant dans le cadre de la « décennie des centenaires » débutée en 2012, cet essai se propose d’examiner un épisode de la Révolution irlandaise Ô combien épineux et clivant : la Guerre civile de 1922 à 1923. Également auteur de Peace After the Final Battle: The Story of the Irish Revolution, 1912-1924 (2014), John Dorney – qui se présente comme historien indépendant – restreint ici le champs de ses investigations à Dublin, sans pour autant perdre de vue le reste du territoire. Si le conflit fratricide a déjà fait l’objet d’études à l’échelle régionale (voir par exemple, Tom Doyle, The Civil War in Kerry, ou James Durney, The Civil War in Kildare), l’historiographie a en revanche jusqu’ici quelque peu négligée Dublin et son comté. Dorney explique pareil phénomène par l’extension des combats de la capitale irlandaise au sud et à l’ouest du pays, quelques semaines seulement après le début d’une guerre de près de dix mois. Pourtant, précise l’auteur, la ville n’en demeura pas moins le théâtre d’événements cruciaux, à l’issue de la « bataille de Dublin » remportée par les forces du nouvel État libre d’Irlande.

2 L’ouvrage – qui se veut impartial quant aux motivations de chaque camp antagoniste – procède d’abord par contextualisation, afin de mieux cerner les éléments déclencheurs de la guerre civile. Dans les cinq premiers chapitres, l’auteur remonte ainsi aux origines du processus révolutionnaire jusqu’aux élections législatives de juin 1922, en passant par la crise des réfugiés catholiques, victimes de pogroms dans le nord-est de l’île, et les premières dissensions au sein du mouvement séparatiste au lendemain de la signature du Traité anglo-irlandais en décembre 1921. Des dissensions qui virent notamment certains combattants de l’IRA irrégulière s’emparer du palais de justice de Dublin, les Four Courts, et imposer leur autorité dans les quartiers avoisinants. Puis, les seize

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chapitres suivants nous font entrer dans le vif du sujet : l’évolution de la guerre civile, de la « bataille de Dublin » de juin-juillet 1922 à l’arrêt des combats en mai 1923 et ses suites jusqu’en avril 1924, avec Dublin pour toile fond. Traitée de manière diachronique, donc, la thématique de l’ouvrage s’accompagne aussi de problématiques, non dénuées d’intérêt, que l’auteur soulève au fil de son analyse.

3 La guerre civile se divise ainsi en plusieurs étapes. La première correspond à la « bataille de Dublin » qui se confond aussi avec le déclenchement du conflit, lequel visait dans un premier temps à déloger les rebelles républicains des Four Courts. La défaite de ces derniers vit les combats se poursuivre sur tout le territoire. Passées sous le contrôle de l’IRA irrégulière, les principales villes du pays – en dehors du nord-est – finirent par revenir dans le giron de l’État libre fin août 1922. Puis, la lutte perdurant néanmoins, les nouveaux gouvernants se firent de plus en plus répressifs. Après les exécutions, en novembre 1922, de certains dirigeants anti-Traité, emprisonnés dans la prison de Mountjoy à Dublin, la guerre civile entra dans sa phase la plus sombre, où les rebelles républicains n’hésitèrent plus à prendre des civils pour cibles, certains soldats de l’armée nationale à employer la torture pour obtenir des aveux. Terreur et contre- terreur, représailles et contre-représailles se succédèrent ainsi pour ne prendre fin qu’à partir de mai 1923. À ce stade, l’auteur pose la question suivante : si les troupes gouvernementales se retrouvèrent en position de force dès la fin du mois d’août, le conflit n’aurait-il pas dû alors cesser à l’automne 1922 ? D’autant plus que maintes tentatives allant dans ce sens furent entreprises à ce moment-là. Toutes se soldèrent cependant par un échec, ne laissant aux belligérants d’autre choix que de se lancer dans une lutte implacable pour le pouvoir.

4 D’autre part, l’auteur s’interroge sur la pertinence d’un combat à mort que se livrèrent deux camps que pourtant rien de vraiment fondamental ne semblait distinguer idéologiquement parlant. Dorney précise toutefois qu’au fil du conflit, des divergences autres que strictement politiques firent leur apparition. Le virage à droite d’un gouvernement de l’État libre, se voulant avant tout le défenseur de l’ordre et de la propriété face à l’anarchie et au despotisme militaire, ne pouvait en effet que susciter la sympathie des classes possédantes. Ce qui, à la longue, ne laissa pas indifférents nombre d’activistes anti-Traité – notamment à Dublin – qui se mirent alors à tracer une ligne de démarcation entre eux, vrais patriotes et représentants des « petites gens », et les autres, traîtres pro-britanniques et champions des tenants de l’ordre social établi – les anciens unionistes ou « impérialistes », la bourgeoisie, les gros exploitants agricoles, l’Église catholique et la presse.

5 Autre sujet sensible abordé par l’auteur : le cas de Michael Collins. Le commentaire se veut ici équilibré. Collins prit certes quelques libertés avec la démocratie, d’aucuns lui prêtant même des intentions dictatoriales (voir John Regan, The Irish Counter-Revolution, 1921-1936). Il n’en mit pas moins toute son ardeur à trouver une issue pacifique à la guerre civile, contrairement à la plupart de ses collègues. À tel point qu’au lendemain de sa mort, le 22 août 1922, la violence devait doubler d’intensité pour atteindre son paroxysme au cours des derniers mois du conflit.

6 Outre son indéniable richesse analytique, le présent ouvrage présente également l’intérêt de tordre le cou à nombre d’idées reçues relatives à cette période tourmentée. Il s’avère donc un outil indispensable pour tout chercheur et étudiant désireux d’explorer la Révolution irlandaise, via l’un de ses épisodes les plus tragiques, où Dublin joua un rôle prépondérant.

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Oliver P. Rafferty, S.J., Violence, Politics and Catholicism in Ireland

Christophe Gillissen

RÉFÉRENCE

Oliver P. Rafferty, S.J., Violence, Politics and Catholicism in Ireland, Dublin, Four Courts Press, 2016, 247 p., ISBN 978-1-84682-583-5

1 Ce recueil de dix chapitres, rédigés par l’auteur entre 1999 et 2015, couvre l’histoire irlandaise depuis le soulèvement des Irlandais Unis en 1798 jusqu’aux accords de paix de 1998, soit deux siècles caractérisés par des interactions complexes entre l’Eglise catholique, les Etats britannique et irlandais, et la population majoritairement catholique de l’île, dont une frange radicale parfois révolutionnaire.

2 Ces interactions sont étudiées à l’aune d’événements ou d’enjeux spécifiques, tels la participation irlandaise à l’Empire britannique, la Grande Famine (1845-1851), le mouvement Fenian aux Etats-Unis, les réformes lancées par l’archevêque Paul Cullen, les rapports entre la revue jésuite Studies et le modernisme au début du XXe siècle, les aumôniers catholiques dans l’Armée britannique lors de la Première Guerre mondiale, les positions de la hiérarchie de l’Eglise catholique pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, ou encore les relations entre l’Eglise et la communauté nationaliste en Irlande du Nord depuis les années 1960. Un chapitre de conclusion s’interroge sur la contribution des Eglises à la mémoire collective en Irlande. Deux chapitres – « God in the Famine » et « The Catholic Church in Ireland and the Second World War » – ont été écrits spécialement pour ce livre, tandis que les autres ont été publiés dans diverses revues et ouvrages.

3 Pendant toute la période de l’Union, il convenait du point de vue de l’épiscopat catholique, conformément à une longue tradition remontant au « Rendez à César ce qui appartient à César » de l’Evangile et aux épitres de Saint Paul, de reconnaître l’autorité établie, c’est-à-dire l’Etat britannique, d’autant plus que l’Empire britannique ouvrait à l’Eglise catholique irlandaise des perspectives missionnaires immenses. Le cardinal Paul

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Cullen a ainsi soutenu l’anglicisation de l’Eglise en Irlande et s’est montré favorable à l’émigration, afin de renforcer la présence catholique au sein de l’Empire et aux Etats- Unis. Au cours du XIXe siècle, l’influence de l’épiscopat catholique irlandais connut ainsi une expansion remarquable et un rayonnement mondial, comme en atteste la forte présence d’évêques irlandais ou d’origine irlandaise au Concile Vatican I en 1870.

4 Mais cette reconnaissance de la légitimité de l’autorité britannique supposait de contenir les débordements révolutionnaires de catholiques irlandais, dont les opinions politiques étaient partagées par certains prêtres et évêques. On note à cet égard des divergences entre l’ancien et le nouveau monde, les ecclésiastiques américains se montrant mieux disposés à l’égard des Fenians que leurs homologues irlandais ; les luttes d’influence à Rome visaient entre autres à départager ces deux attitudes vis-à-vis des fidèles révolutionnaires. L’équation devenait particulièrement difficile à résoudre lorsque l’obéissance aux pouvoirs en place portait atteinte à la crédibilité de la hiérarchie ecclésiastique par rapport à ses ouailles.

5 On ne saurait résumer un ouvrage aussi riche en quelques paragraphes, d’autant que l’érudition de l’auteur force le respect : outre les archives officielles et ecclésiastiques, elle s’appuie sur une connaissance approfondie de l’historiographie. Que ce soit sur la Grande Famine ou la Seconde Guerre mondiale par exemple, O. P. Rafferty est en mesure d’apporter des éclairages nouveaux et fertiles grâce notamment à cette connaissance intime des sources, qui nourrissent des analyses fines, pondérées et convaincantes. Il s’agit sans aucun doute d’un ouvrage indispensable pour quiconque s’intéresse au rôle joué par l’Eglise catholique dans l’histoire irlandaise depuis 1798 – ou devrait-on dire au vu du poids de l’Eglise en Irlande pendant cette période, pour quiconque s’intéresse à l’histoire irlandaise.

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Richard Murphy, The Kick, A Memoir of the Poet Richard Murphy

Florence Schneider

RÉFÉRENCE

Richard Murphy, The Kick, A Memoir of the Poet Richard Murphy, Cork University Press, 2017, xxi+360pp, ISBN : 978-1-78205-234-0

1 Début février, il y a quelques semaines de cela, le poète irlandais Richard Murphy s’éteignait à l’âge de 91 ans, après une vie partagée entre l’ouest de l’Irlande, où il naquit et vécut de nombreuses années, le Sri Lanka, la Grande-Bretagne et les Etats- Unis où il séjourna et enseigna.

2 Aussi, la nouvelle publication de The Kick, A Memoir of the Poet Richard Murphy, parue il y a quelques mois, prend-elle une allure testamentaire. Bâti sur une linéarité chronologique de près d’un siècle, ce texte mêle brillamment anecdotes personnelles, amoureuses et douloureuses parfois (Murphy confie, entre autres, ses complexes relations homosexuelles) et réflexions politiques plus générales sur l’Irlande, sur le milieu protestant dans lequel il grandit, ou sur les relations internationales en des temps de guerre mondiale et de décolonisation.

3 Ces va-et-vient s’insèrent dans le milieu littéraire et culturel de l’époque, de New York à Londres, ou Dublin. Le lecteur est ainsi convié à partager des souvenirs réunissant Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, John McGahern, Philip Larkin ou « Paddy Kavanagh » entre autres. Cette impression d’un monde artistique où tout le monde se connaît, se côtoie, rivalise ou s’entraide lors des lectures publiques par exemple, trouve un écho dans les petits villages de l’ouest de l’Irlande où Murphy emménage et déménage régulièrement, sous le regard bienveillant ou non du reste de la communauté. De nombreuses pages sont ainsi consacrées aux excursions en bateau ou aux constructions de maisons, moments de partage et de tensions aussi parfois.

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4 L’un des intérêts de ces mémoires est la volonté d’honnêteté qui les sous-tend : qu’il parle de ses relations tumultueuses avec son père, maire de Colombo au Sri Lanka alors que les questions coloniales grandissent, ou de celles, non moins tumultueuses avec Patricia Avis, sa première femme, ce sont les sentiments et l’exactitude des détails (consignés dans des carnets pendant plusieurs décennies) qui touchent le lecteur.

5 A la fin du recueil, Richard Murphy cite l’une de ses sœurs qui lui suggère « A Conventional Rebel » comme titre pour ses mémoires. C’est bien cette tension entre résistance et conventions - politiques, artistiques, amoureuses – qui est au centre de l’auto-portrait de cet « Oxford-educated Anglo-Irishman » à qui Mary O’Malley rendait hommage en ces termes, il y a quelques semaines, dans The Irish Times, « Craft was of great importance to him, in sailing and building, as well as in the making of a poem. And his poems were, indeed, the work of a master craftsman ».

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Nicholas Grene. The Theatre of Tom Murphy Playwright Adventure

Eibhear Walshe

REFERENCES

Nicholas Grene. The Theatre of Tom Murphy Playwright Adventurer. London, Bloomsbury, 2017, xiii + 252. Isbn 978-1-4725-6811-3

1 Tom Murphy has been an intriguing figure in Irish drama, well served up to this by scholars like Grene, Fintan O’Toole, Alexandra Poulain and Christopher Murray and this volume maintains the high standard of literary engagement. Tom Murphy’s plays, at their best, are amongst the most powerful writings for the Irish stage over the past fifty years, and this is a substantial critical volume, edited and largely written by one of Ireland’s leading scholars of the Irish theatre and ‘Murphy’s daring theatrical imagination’ is what Grene is pursuing. This current study opens with a short and illuminating biographical account of Murphy’s career and of his development as an artist and the key elements within his aesthetic formulation. It is clear that Grene knows Murphy well and he provides very useful details concerning Murphy’s methods of composition. Grene recounts Murphy’s upbringing in Tuam, his training as a welder and then as a teacher and on to his years in London as a successful dramatist in the 1960s. There, his early play, A Whistle in the Dark was first staged at the celebrated Theatre Royal, Stratford East and then transferred to the West End. Grene then traces the diverse results of his decision to return and live in Ireland in the 1970s, and outlines his time writing at the Abbey Theatre, with a number of distinctly unsuccessful experiments in different dramatic styles, with the later success of his play, The Gigli Concert in 1983. The Gigli Concert centres on an unnamed Irish businessman, on the brink of despair and breakdown, and music, specifically the voice of Beniamino Gigli is what the Irishman aspires to emulate, the soaring voice of longing and beauty for his embittered and lost soul and he transmits this longing for beauty to the volatile JPW King. Following this success, Grene recounts Murphy’s time with Druid Theatre in

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Galway in the 1980s, when Bailegangaire, his most profound and moving rendering of the blighted legacy of the West of Ireland, was realised. The key to the success of this play was the performance of Siobhan McKenna. A doyenne of Irish theatre, Siobhan McKenna, remade herself as the senile old woman in the bed Mommo, a rambling old crone in a thatched cottage in the west of Ireland in 1984, telling the story of the laughing competition that resulted in the renaming of the town as Bailegangaire, the town without laughter. At the core of this play is the account of the laughing competition, a perfect metaphor for a rare moment of defiance in the lives of these misfortunate people. Druid and its director Garry Hynes was a key element in Murphy’s success in the latter part of his career. Grene finds a way of encompassing the wide diversity of Murphy’s dramatic experiments by identifying two dominant strands in his imaginative preoccupations. As he sees it, Murphy’s works fall into two broad categories, in his own words, ‘Plays grounded in Irish social realism and those which transcend any such limits in their imaginative conceptions.’ Using this binary opposition, Grene breaks down his study of Murphy’s plays into thematic chapters to pursue his interrogation of the many aspects to Murphy’s imagination and his examination of his country. For example in his chapter, ‘Predicaments of Irishmen’, Grene notes that Murphy’s representations of Irish masculinity, beleaguered and uneasy, were dominant in earlier plays like A Crucial Week in the Life of A Grocer’s Assistant and the powerful A Whistle in the Dark. He connects much of the violence, unease and turmoil in Irish males around the constraints of the Catholic Church and the exclusionary nature of the Irish rural class system His obsession with music is seen in his most successful Abbey Theatre play, The Gigli Concert and Grene comments that: ‘The operatic voice counterpointing and contrasting the spoken dialogue as a measure of meaning beyond words and human action. In Murphy’s plays operatic arias in all their perfect beauty sing out above the broken mess of unspeakable human lives. ‘Grene is at his strongest when he writes about Murphy’s use of music. Finally, anticipating Lucy McDiarmid’s concluding essay, Grene provides a chapter called ‘The Lives of Women’ and argues for a self-conscious difference in Murphy’s representations of gender. Grene deals with the issue of Murphy’s plays being, as he puts it tactfully, ‘not so easily accessible to non-Irish audiences,’ by including two essays from critics based outside Ireland, Alexandra Poulin and Lucy McDiamid. McDiarmid’s essay on A Thief of A Christmas and Bailegangaire follows Grene’s own final chapter on the lives of women and provides a useful context for these linked Murphy plays and suggests that the events of Ireland in the early 1980s, the Kerry Babies case, for example and the Ann Lovett influenced Murphy’s framing of these dramas. Likewise Alexandra Poulain used the critical essays of Francois Lyotard, in particular his 1988 essay, ‘Survivant’ to read Bailegangaire as a work that ‘speaks forcefully to contemporary preoccupations about the nature of survival – about what it means to survive disaster and what responsibility it entails.’ Both essays are perceptive, well-grounded in Murphy’s oeuvre, sensitive to the traditions of Irish theatre, clear and to the point. Grene also includes a lengthy interview with Tom Murphy and traces Murphy’s enduring influence on the contemporary Irish stage and provides renewed insight into this compelling dramatic imagination. Supported by an impressive and wide ranging bibliography and a lively and passionate writing style, in each chapter, Grene works across genre to provide an ongoing analysis of Murphy’s imagination. Grene’s own experience as a preeminent critic and his earlier work Talking about Tom Murphy 2002 and his magisterial 1999, The Politics of Irish Drama inform this impressive study. In addition, his extensive use of

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interviews with Murphy in 2015 and his use of the archive allow him to state, as he does in his conclusion that, ‘A playwright who disavows any political intention has nevertheless created a powerful vision of a small post-colonial country struggling to come to terms with modernity.’ Tom Murphy has been well served by this scholarly and readable volume.

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Ruben Borg, Paul Fagan, John McCourt (eds), Flann O’Brien Problems with Authority

Thierry Robin

REFERENCES

Ruben Borg, Paul Fagan, John McCourt (eds), Flann O’Brien Problems with Authority, Cork University Press, 2017, xv+330 p. ISBN 9781782052302

1 This book is dedicated to the late Professor Werner Huber whose contribution to Irish studies in Austria, in the rest of Europe and beyond, is therefore celebrated and duly acknowledged. A large number of the essays to be found in this collection find their origins in the papers delivered at Problems with Authority: The 2nd International Flann O’Brien Conference, which was held at the University of Roma Tre in June 2013. The themes of subversion, transgression, and irreverence prove particularly apt to tackle O’Brien’s work, whose satirical and experimental talent looms large in his three prominent novels At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), An Béal Bocht (1941) and his posthumous The Third Policeman (1967) as well as in An Cruiskeen Lawn, the humorous column he wrote under the penname of Myles na gCopaleen for the Irish Times from 1940 to 1966 the year of his death.

2 This collection falls into three parts. The first part deals with miscellaneous contemporary issues ranging from popular culture, alcoholic stereotyping of the Irish, English/Gaelic bilingualism to the parody of scientific discourse and mocking Imperial Japan in the 2nd world war. The second part tackles O’Brien’s relationship with his “peers”, that is, fellow writers in general: from poets John Keats and James Stephens to writers like Beckett and Joyce. The third part explores O’Brien’s relationship with ‘canonical’ texts, be they biblical or Early Irish. While the reader may legitimately be entitled to note the rather contrived nature of this structure or thematic division, in other words the artificial organization of essays, all of these prove to be enlightening as

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regards the caustic –not to say corrosive– nature of O’Brien’s multifarious prose. A few contributions though, actually stand out from the rest of this scholarly work, which will doubtless prove useful to every aspiring Flanneur. Maebh Long’s identification of stereotypes and the way they are processed and recycled demonstrating “a performance of the anxiety of identity in the face of deep-rooted yet protean clichés” (53), proves particularly convincing. So does Catherine Flynn’s original contribution on Cruiskeen Lawn, Japan and WWII. Flynn manages to encapsulate the whole paradoxical and contradictory nature of Myles’ social, aesthetic and stylistic stance in his column, describing it as “both conservative and experimental, as it displays the polyvalent power of the traditional Irish language while undermining any identity associated with it” (86), revealing O’Brien for what he is more often than not, that is a deeply contrarian literary and public figure. In part II, Ian Ó Caoimh’s piece on Ciarán Ó’Nualláin’s, that is Flann O’Brien’s own brother’s ability to wield irony as a stylistic weapon that takes the whole genre of biography to a “meta-level” also turns out to be enlightening.

3 Finally, part III is probably the most coherent part in the whole book since it deals mostly with satire whose diverse manifestations are thoroughly investigated by Dieter Fuchs, through its Menippean, Lucianic, Varronian variations. Let us note in passing the exceptional brilliance of Ruben Borg’s reflection on the central trope of conversion throughout O’Brien’s work and also Alana Gillespie’s very cogent reading of O’Nolan’s “treatment of time and insistence on the mutability of (interpreting) narratives [as] a radical critique not only of historical authority itself, but also of a non-critical attitude to history” (205). The previous volume derived from the 1st International Flann O’Brien Conference held in Vienna in 2011, entitled Flann O’Brien: Contesting Legacies was listed in the Irish Times top ten non-fiction books of 2014 and has since become a classic in O’Brienology. After this new convincing installment, the academic reader can only look forward to yet another volume of criticism drawn from the conference recently held in Salzburg in July 2017, whose theme was “Acting Out”, insisting on performance and theatricality. No doubt, this new collection of essays –like the previous ones–will definitely further enrich and bolster the academic understanding of the work of an author who declared with tongue-in-cheek, in his first full-fledged novel that was At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), that “[a] good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings” (9).

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Brad Kent (ed.), The Selected Essays of Sean O’Faolain

Gustavo A. Rodríguez Martín

REFERENCES

Brad Kent (ed.), The Selected Essays of Sean O’Faolain, Montreal & Kingston, McGill- Queen’s University Press, 2016, xlii + 516 pp. ISBN 9780773547773

1 This collection of essays by Sean O’Faolain is a welcome addition to the primary sources of contemporary Irish studies for several reasons. In particular, because the author remains relatively unexplored in comparison with some of his contemporaries. In a time when the figure of the public intellectual has returned as an ideal “in absentia,” O’Faolain constitutes a model in this respect—regardless of the ideological stance the reader may have. In addition, there are several aspects of his style that have been largely unacknowledged—Kent singles out humour—, like his keen eye for the metalinguistic and the structure of language itself: there is indeed more to his essays than literary criticism and socio-political controversy.

2 Given the multiplicity of interests that O’Faolain expressed in his writings, one celebrates the alternative arrangement of the essays in a list of “suggested thematic groupings” so that readers can engage with the texts as they are printed (chronologically) or in a random sequence—à la Cortazar’s Hopscotch—that allows us to trace the author’s ideas on burning social questions, matters of poetics, etc. The editorial material is carefully crafted and it illuminates the text at different levels: the range of the footnotes will enable scholars, students, and discriminating readers alike to situate the meaning of the essays, for they will find biographical information on the people mentioned in the text (from world-renowned authors like Ernest Hemingway to relatively obscure figures in Irish history) as well as bibliographical references or more elaborate commentaries on passages that may well bemuse some readers—as when O’Faolain called Frankenstein an “ancient myth.”

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3 Indeed, many will no doubt be puzzled—perhaps shocked—by some of the remarks that punctuate the essays. In general terms, the essays on the ‘Irish Question’ are worth revisiting: his keen, critical stance goes beyond patriotism and ‘soot-or-whitewash’ interests, even when his political engagement was at its peak. But when it comes to displaying his faculties as a literary critic, O’Faolain is probably at his best, and he himself becomes dazzlingly literary. Take, for instance, the image he resorts to in order to describe Liam O’Flaherty’s ‘superlative’ style: “It is not the amazings and terrifics, though if O’Flaherty’s typewriter printed not letters but words these two words would be flattened bare by now…” Likewise, his encapsulation of Joyce’s aesthetic motivation can only come from an Irishman of his kind: “[Joyce] knows what he is doing—knows that like Stephen Daedalus [sic.] he carries through all the squalor of life the chalice of his heart’s ineffable desire for beauty.” He even seems to adapt the style of his critical pieces to the author he is dealing with; for example, the resemblance to Bernard Shaw’s witty, pithy style is uncanny in his coda: “Shaw is a writer of fantasies full of common- sense. The dissidence is obvious. He has never resolved it.”

4 It should come as no surprise, then, that a man with such a long, changing vital experience expresses his ideas in wildly different ways over a 48-year span. After all, the man who “worked as a bomb-maker and propagandist in the IRA’s war against government forces” would—several decades later—witness an Ireland where “many of the liberalising forces [he] had argued in favour of” had gained some currency while he would turn to writing “travel features for Holiday.” Thus, when O’Faolain (in his fifties) wrote “Love Among the Irish,” we can already witness not only his liberalism in a broader sense, but also how much he resented the stagnation that still gripped Ireland both socially (“Rural living conditions are enough to drive any young man of spirit to emigration or to drink”) and intellectually (“the motto of the Censorship Board could be, ‘If it’s good, we’ve got it!’”).

5 Whether as an invaluable starting point to discover O’Faolain or as a springboard to explore his work beyond the short stories, this volume is indispensable. If, in the author’s own words, “It is after all only the philosopher and the artist who might be expected to find that language as it stands does not suffice,” it is clear that O’Faolain can be considered to have been both.

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Jean Viviès, Revenir/Devenir, Gulliver ou l’autre voyage

Claude Fierobe

RÉFÉRENCE

Jean Viviès, Revenir/Devenir, Gulliver ou l’autre voyage, Paris, Éditions Rue d’Ulm, 2016, 142 p., ISBN 978 2 7288 0555 6

1 D’entrée de jeu, une question : « Comment écrire sur les Voyages de Gulliver après tant d’éminents annotateurs, commentateurs et critiques, après tant d’exégètes perspicaces, anciens et récents ? » Pour Jean Viviès la réponse est simple ; il reste un angle mort de la réflexion critique : « les retours du voyageur, son retour comme problème. » Six chapitres pour éclairer cette zone obscure.

2 La mise en regard de Robinson et de Gulliver permet de saisir ce dernier comme « une mise en scène » de cheminements textuels mutiples qui consomme la déroute de toute tentative d’emprisonnement dans un genre. L’espace blanc des cartes permet le déploiement de l’imaginaire qui, dans le 4e voyage, creuse un écart maximal avec le réel.

3 D’où les détours – pour brouiller les repères – et les retours de plus en plus difficiles : Gulliver s’est aliéné, par rapport à son propre pays et par rapport à lui-même ; le moi ne s’est pas construit mais fragmenté : Swift n’a pas écrit un récit de formation, mais un « récit de déformation » où, en fin de compte, le retour vers soi est devenu impossible. C’est l’idée-force de la rigoureuse argumentation de Jean Viviès : les pérégrinations du héros s’achèvent en effet par « un voyage au bout de l’inouï. » Don Pedro de Mendez est le premier lecteur du dernier récit, celui d’un séjour dans un pays où règne une seule vérité, et où le seul sujet de débat est de « savoir si les Yahoos devaient être exterminés de la surface de la terre. » S’abstenant volontairement de toute lecture « irlandaise », Jean Viviès rejoint Orwell pour montrer comment se trouve anticipé ici le cauchemar nazi. Puis il évoque le peu de cohérence du personnage de Gulliver, personnage sans

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identité, aux qualités changeantes : c’est une simple voix qui relégue aux oubliettes le postulat réaliste de l’incipit, et ouvre peu à peu le chemin de la déraison.

4 Jean Viviès nous conduit ainsi vers un « cinquième voyage », voyage de retour ambivalent – quiétude et inquiétude mêlées – en se demandant si Gulliver, comme l’Ulysse de Giono, n’a pas tout inventé ; si Swift n’avait pas entraîné son lecteur « dans un vertige fictionnel borgésien. » Alors Gulliver devient « une histoire philosophique » qui rejette stase et sécurité et postule l’existence d’un lecteur en état d’alerte permanent. Remarque : N’est-ce pas, déjà, le « Qui vive ? » du vieux Danielo (Le Rivage des Syrtes) ? Au-delà du Grand Tour, Gulliver s’est aventuré dans le pays du chamboulement des catégories (naturelles et littéraires) et, en corollaire, dans celui d’un texte déstabilisé à mesure qu’il s’édifie ; une fable pleine d’énigmes, ne dictant pas de loi, n’affirmant rien, en perpétuelle révolte, et d’abord contre elle-même.

5 L’ouvrage savant et alerte de Jean Viviès (avec bibliographie, filmographie et index) fait honneur à son sujet. Avec lui, avec « le cinquième voyage », la critique swiftienne aborde un nouveau rivage. Sommes-nous au bout de nos surprises ?

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