Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination Also by Gerry Smyth DECOLONISATION AND CRITICISM: The Construction of Irish Literature THE NOVEL AND THE NATION: Studies in the New Irish Fiction Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination Gerry Smyth Senior Lecturer in Cultural History Liverpool John Moores University © Gerry Smyth 2001 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2001 978-1-349-42004-9 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2001 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 978-1-349-42004-9 ISBN 978-1-4039-1367-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781403913678 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Smyth, Gerry, 1961– Space and the Irish cultural imagination / Gerry Smyth. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. 1. Ireland—Historical geography. 2. Space perception—Social aspects—Ireland. 3. Deane, Seamus, 1940– Reading in the dark. 4. Northern Ireland—Historical geography. 5. Popular culture– –Northern Ireland. 6. Northern Ireland—In literature. 7. Space and time in literature. 8. Personal space in literature. 9. Popular culture—Ireland. 10. U2 (Musical group) Joshua tree. I. Title. DA969 .S69 2001 941.50824—dc21 2001021721 10987654321 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 For Lizzie and Esther, with all my love Contents List of Maps ix List of Abbreviations x Some Aphorisms and Definitions xii Preface and Acknowledgements xiv 1 Irish Cultural Studies and the Re-emergence of Spatial Analysis 1 Philosophy 1 Ecocriticism 7 Postmodern geography 11 Marxism 15 Ireland and the ‘special relationship’ 19 Conclusion 22 2 Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination 24 Travel and tourism 24 Mapping/naming 40 Poetry 56 The country and the city 76 3 The Location of Criticism, or, Putting the ‘I’ into ‘Ireland’ 93 The River Dodder 100 Tallaght 108 Firhouse 117 Conclusion: homework 127 4 Big Mistakes in Small Places: Exterior and Interior Space in Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark 130 Reading in the Dark 133 Derry 136 Aileach 140 Borders and bridges 146 House 151 Conclusion 157 vii viii Contents 5 ‘Show Me the Way to Go Home’: Space and Place in the Music of U2 159 Introduction: mapping the beat 159 U2: space and place 166 Into the arms of America 176 Conclusion 185 Notes 188 Bibliography 203 Index 219 List of Maps ‘Ireland’ by Gerry Smyth xi ‘Tallaght and Environs’ by Sam Ball 118 ‘Firhouse’ by Lizzie Smyth 119 ix List of Abbreviations AFM John O’Donovan (ed.), Annala Rioghachta Eireann: Annals of the Four Masters of the Kingdom of Ireland from the Earliest Period to the Year 1616, 7 vols (Dublin: Hodges & Smith, 1848–51) CDIL Various Arrangers, Contributions to a Dictionary of the Irish Language (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy) INP P.W. Joyce, The Origin and History of Irish Names of Places (Dublin: McGlashan & Gill, 1869) MD Edward Gwynn (ed. and trans.), The Metrical Dindsenchas: Parts I–V (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis & Co., 1903, 1906, 1913, 1924, 1935) MM Eugene O’Curry, Lectures on the Manuscript Materials of Ancient Irish History (1861; Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1995) OED The Oxford English Dictionary 2nd edn., prepared by J.A. Simpson & E.S.C. Weiner, 20 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) x Ireland Some Aphorisms and Definitions [There] is ground for taking the house as a tool for analysis of the human soul . [for] by remembering ‘houses’ and ‘rooms’, we learn to ‘abide’ within ourselves. Gaston Bachelard (1994: xxxiii, original emphasis) The city is a map of the city, / Its forbidden areas changing daily. Ciaran Carson, from ‘The Bomb Disposal’ (1988: 32) ballyboe (ballybetach) (Ir. baile biataigh, ‘residence of a food provider’), a medieval territorial unit, a subdivision of the cantred, of varying extent, depending on the quality of the soil and the nature of the terrain. from S.J. Connolly (1998: 34) Representation becomes the auratic process by which a place that had been misrepresented or not represented at all finally achieves presence. Seamus Deane (1994: 132) Every story is a travel story – a spatial practice. Michel de Certeau (1988: 115) The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. Michel Foucault (1986: 22) History is the chronicle of man’s concern for ‘place’. Martin Heidegger (1971: 24) There is always a figure in the landscape. J. Hillis Miller (1995: 4) History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. James Joyce (1922: 42) Deliverance, oh Lord; Deliverance or Death – Deliverance, or this island a desert! James Fintan Lalor (1921: 57–8) xii Some Aphorisms and Definitions xiii To finally escape from the English shadow, we must fashion a new sense of political, cultural and economic space for ourselves. J.J. Lee (1985a: 94) Space is becoming the principal stake of goal-directed actions and struggles. Henri Lefebvre (1991: 409) Ireland is something that often happens elsewhere. Fintan O’Toole (1994: 27) All that we can do is re-collect and creatively juxtapose, experimenting with assertions and insertions of the spatial against the prevailing grain of time. Edward Soja (1989: 2) Preface and Acknowledgements In an essay written at the beginning of the 1990s the historian Kevin Whelan suggested that ‘[the] last decade has seen a surge of interest in Irish local places’ (1992: 13). In this book I would like to suggest that such an interest has continued into the new millennium. I submit fur- ther that a concern with ‘local places’ has in fact been extended to the wide range of spaces which bear upon experiences and practices across the island. This study is premised on the impression – anecdotal and observational in the first instance, scholarly and critical at a later stage – that modern Ireland is in fact obsessed with issues of space, and that this obsession may be understood to function at a number of interrelated levels. In geopolitical terms it registers in issues such as the Republic’s role within the European Union, the relations between the northern and southern parts of the island, the status of its huge emigrant population, the increasing interpenetration of island and global economics, and the crisis of the nation-state as a unit of international territorial organisa- tion. Emigration, for example, has created a situation in which, as Fintan O’Toole puts it, ‘the people and the land are no longer co-terminous. In this sense, the map of Ireland is a lie’ (1994: 18–19). Or again, the popu- lation of the Republic awoke one morning in January 1999 to find that as citizens of a state which had signed up to the single European currency, they had suddenly become inhabitants of a new geographical entity called ‘Euroland’. This entity was related in many complex ways to other spatial units which already impacted upon Irish life. As a result of ideologically motivated decisions, and without any corresponding shift in the earth’s tectonic plates, the relations between (and hence meanings of) places such as Dublin, London and Brussels had altered significantly overnight. At an interim level, there is much concern about urban and rural development, and also about the impact of infrastructural changes on established practices. One thinks of the controversies surrounding the construction of bungalows in (environmentally and economically defined) ‘sensitive’ landscapes, or the erosion of small-farm culture and its subsequent impact on the landscapes which sustained it and were in turn sustained by it. In an urban context, it would be an understatement xiv Preface and Acknowledgements xv to say that the civic institutions have not as a rule kept pace with the rapid conversion of Dublin from city to city-region since the 1960s. Then there is the issue of regionalism as a post-national administrative paradigm. In 1999, two new super-regional authorities were established in Ballaghaderreen, Co. Roscommon and Waterford City. Many con- sider regionalism to be a positive development. On the one hand, it is seen as an acknowledgement of the ideological limitations of the nation-state, and thus a contribution to the restoration of permanent peace on the island. More pragmatically, regional bodies offer both a more efficient and a more sensitive means of organising the expansion of the Celtic Tiger beyond the metropolitan areas. However, some crit- ics see regionalism less as an attempt at administrative decentralisation along continental lines, and more as a fairly blatant redeployment of the existing geography designed to maximise financial benefits from the European Union. At the more interpersonal level first identified by Whelan, Irish people seem to have become fixated with issues of individual, local and private space.