ITC Conference, London, 12. May 2011 Dr. Peter Schiefer CEO.
Conference London 2011
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Transcript of Conference London 2011
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Elisa Lima Abrantes - Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRRJ, Brasil)
ABSTRACT
Symbolic Cartographies in Edna OBriens Mother Irelandand House
of Splendid Isolation
This paper examines the literary representation of the city of London by the
contemporary Irish novelist Edna OBrien, both in her memoir book, Mother
Ireland (1976), and in her 1994s novel, full of autobiographical tones, House
of Splendid Isolation. The aim here is to explore the affective and subjective
dimensions of place experienced by an Irish woman writer self-exiled in
London in the early sixties. The selected works have been placed in the
context of accepted historical and cultural narratives of England and Ireland.
What the reading presented in this paper offers to the audience is a contrast
between the urban city of London and the suffocating atmosphere of rural
Ireland from the late fifties/early sixties, both seen from a personal point of
view of a subject who went through a painful experience of migration. In this
perspective, which privileges the spatial dimension of subjectivity, not only
the geographical aspects (landscape itself) are taken into account, but,
particularly, the construction and elaboration of a so-called symbolic
cartography, in which imagination, history and memory are tightlyinterwoven. The theoretical foundations which underlie this reading are based
on the spatial studies of Walter Benjamin, Henri Lefebvre and Michel de
Certeau, together with the contributions of Mikhail Bakhtins concept of
chronotope (1981), Michel Foucaults reflections of the multiple intersection
among knowledge, space and power (1991), Roland Barthess semiological
approach to urban spaces (1967), as well as Trevor-Barnes and James Duncan
studies which conceptualize discourse, text and metaphor in the
representation of landscapes (1993).
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Good morning. This brief paper I present today aims at exploring the affective and
subjective dimensions of place experience of an Irish writer self-exiled in London
since the early sixties, Ms. Edna OBrien. This paper examines the literary
representation of the city of London as a counterpart to the suffocating atmosphere of
rural Ireland from the fifties both seen from a personal point of view of a subject who
went through a painful experience of migration. In this perspective, which privileges
the spatial dimension of subjectivity, not only the geographical aspect (landscape
itself) is taken into account, but, particularly, the construction and elaboration of a so-
called symbolic cartography, in which imagination, history and memory are tightly
interwoven.
I start my talk by using a quotation from the first chapter of Ms OBriens 1994 novel,
House of Splendid Isolation, in which she claims that History is everywhere. It seeps
into the soil, the sub-soil. Like rain, or hail, or snow, or blood. A house remembers.
An outhouse remembers. A people ruminates. The tale differs with the teller. (HSI,
p.3). The author here associates peoples history with their memory and their territory,
or as OBrien states here, their soil.
Its interesting to notice the choice of word soil and not land, as the Irish theorist
Seamus Deane states in his article entitled The Production of Cultural Space in Irish
Writing: Soil is what land becomes when it is ideologically constructed as a natal
source, that element out of which the Irish originate and to which their past
generations have returned.(Deane, p.11) As Deane points out, land is marked by
references to its economic status: property, rent, productivity, improvement,
impoverishment, distribution, buyings, sellings and so forth. The laws of the land are,
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in this vision, dependent upon the rightful ownership of the soil. Thus, soil is prior to
land. It is real and it is symbolic. The romantic-nationalist conception of the soil, its
identity with the nation, its ownership by the people, its priority over all the
administrative and commercial systems that transform it into land, is powerful
because it is formulated as a reality that is beyond the embrace of any concept. It does
not belong to the world of ideas; it gives birth to the idea of the world as a politically
and economically ordered system. So, its a geographical aspect, but also a political
notion.
The recent methodological frameworks developed around spatial theories and cultural
geography are increasingly looking at space not as given but as produced, the product
of social and economic relations, practices and interactions (Lefebvre). Space is indeed
seen as one important site for the articulation of national/local/global subjects, but it
both produces and is produced by very unstable meanings of identity. The notion of
spatial beings means that we shape as much as are shaped by the spaces and places,
global, local, national, we live in and share with others. Naturally, space is connected
to history, and to this aspect Id like to call your attention to the historical perspective
of Ms. OBrien.
When OBrien claims that History is everywhere; a house remembers; a people
ruminates; the tale differs with the teller, one might identify a degree of
correspondence to Walter Benjamins theses on the concept of history from 1940. For
this thinker and his idea ofnow-time, historical temporality is neither homogeneous
linear time addressing the future nor cyclical, but chaotic, instead. In this perspective,
human beings in their individuality understand themselves as universal beings who
encompass their past not in a sense of rescuing it but in recreating their memories of
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facts for life, in a way that what has been experienced is not restricted to rationality
or discursive capacity to establish the truth.
For Benjamin, historical temporality is related to present conditions of individuals in
a capitalist society. It suggests a continuous, quasi-organic flow of events. History is
never completed or perfect but radically imperfect and open to its retroactive
modification. The historical subject is exposed to their unfulfilled past without being
contemplatively separated from it. Benjamin's specific point of view is to seek the
future in the past (as Proust in Remembrance of Things Past). He claims that hope
does not arise from satisfied men but from unsatisfied ones. Only if the present
generation makes the hopes of the past generations its own hopes, can it break the
present, and hope something different from what already it is. He seeks for that past
capable of shaking the actual structures, capable of stopping the trade of present
happiness for past suffering, capable of stopping the reproduction of past misery and
injustice. It is a special past, which must reveal a new dimension of history. The past
that Benjamin is interested in is that unknown side of reality that could rise in the light
of the present. We can discover this hidden past in the debris of history. As Ms
OBrien illustrates.
Although OBrien has been living in London since 1959, she writes principally about
the Irish experience. She keeps faithful to her origins, which she seems to dig within
her own texts. This search may be noticed throughout her works, which carry
biographical elements and reflections upon political, social and cultural questions of
her native country. In an interview to Helen Thompson, published in Thompsons
2003 book,Irish Women Writers Speak Out: Voices from the Field, Ms OBrien talks
about her origins: County Clare inhabits my thoughts and my writing wherever I
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happen to be. Ireland is always speaking a story and I have to search for it. As
Benjamin and Proust, OBrien searches future in her past. When OBrien sets her
novels in Ireland, especially in the rural Ireland of her childhood, one can figure out
that her real homeland is her writing, from which she gets in touch with a symbolic
Ireland alive inside her. This memory of a country is related to her experience of
exile, which is evident in the majority of her works. The writer herself verbalizes it:
One cannot get back, except through words; and though that may seem like
compensation it is in fact a double loss (1978 collection; 8). It is a double loss
because it is a continuous reconstruction and recreation of herIrishness, and by
extension the Irish past, through written words.
OBrien was born in a small village, Tuamgraney, County Clare, Ireland, in December
1930 and after spending part of her childhood there, she was sent to a convent school
in Loughrea when she was only 12, a place in which she lived for 4 years. At 16 she
moved to Dublin to study at a Pharmaceutical College and she lived by herself
working as a pharmacist for some years. In 1959, after getting married to a Czech
novelist much older than her, Ernest Gbler, the couple decided to move to London.
Her memories are vivid, as she recollects in a recent interview: "It was so lonely. We
lived in SW20. Sub-urb-ia. When I came 'up London' as I called it, I thought it was
heaven: all sorts of shoes in the windows. I passed the Cafe Royal, and I thought:
Oscar Wilde was in there. (interview February 2011).
OBrien claims that England was a escape for her. She escaped the suffocating
atmosphere of Ireland. In many interviews, OBrien explains that hadnt she escaped
Ireland; she would never have been a writer. In her memoirs book, Mother Ireland,
OBrien describes her childhood in her hometown: I was born and bred in a townland
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that bordered on other townlands of equal indistinctiveness - potatoes, bulls, religion,
history and mythology () life was fervid, enclosed and catastrophic. (28) In the
same book she explains her decision to live in England: Leaving Ireland was no
wrench at all (87) I had got away. That was my victory. The real quarrel with Ireland
began to burgeon in me then; I had thought of how it had warped me, and those around
me, and their parents before them, all stooped by a variety of fears fear of the church,
fear of phantoms, fear of ridicule, fear of hunger, fear of annihilation (87)I live out
of Ireland because something in me warns me that I might stop if I lived there, that I
might cease to feel what it has meant to have such a heritage.(89)
To illustrate her painful experience with migration she gives her first impression of
London just on her arrival in the city: Euston station was a jungle, grim and
impersonal; the very pigeons looked factory-made. This was to be home. It had
nothing to recommend it. Unhealthy, unfriendly, mortarish and to my ignorant eye
morbid because I kept seeing wreaths and did not know that there was such a thing in
England as Remembrance Day. (87) The city of London seemed threatening to her.
Besides, as an exile she knew that what seemed an unwelcoming place would be her
home from that moment on.
Later on the same book she explains how her relationship with her native country has
changed after living in exile for some time: time changes everything including our
attitude to a place. There is no such thing as a perpetual hatred no more than there are
unambiguous states of earthly love. OBrien illustrates her affective perception of
landscapes when she says: Hour after hour I can think of Ireland, I can imagine
without going far wrong what is happening in any one of the little towns by day or by
night, I can see the tillage and the walled gardens, see the spilt porter foam along the
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counters, I can hear argument and ballads, hear the elevation bell and the prayers for
the dead. (88) She continues by defining her feelings towards her native country:
Ireland for me is moments of its history, and its geography, a few people who
embody its strange quality, the features of a face, a holler, a line from a Synge play,
the whiff of night air, but Ireland insubstantial like the goddesses poets dream of.
(89)
OBrien makes use of exile as a strategy for the representation of Ireland.
Paraphrasing Seamus Deane, I would say that exile is a form of dispossession that
retains imaginatively the claim to possession. In this view, an exiled writers
perspective is a place caught between geography, history and memory. The writers
identity is deeply rooted in her sense of place. About being Irish she comments:
Irish? In truth I would not want to be anything else. It is a state of mind as well as an
actual country. It is being at odds with other nationalities, having quite different
philosophy about pleasure, about punishment, about life, and about death. At least it
does not leave one pusillanimous.(88) She adds to her view of Irishness: if you are
Irish you say lightly and you walk London streets at four and think of how Yeats
predicted such a thing and walking the streets you have no trouble at all in re-invoking
the wind that shakes the barley. (24) And also: 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. (85) About living in exile as other Irish people do,
she says: to meet ones kinsmen is to unleash a whole sea of unexpected
emotionalism: You wont forget us, will you? He said. I wont. I said. (MI, 86) This
approach to the production of meaning which involves not only analytic knowledge
but also emotional one is what has been called affect-meaning. The spatial studies of
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Walter Benjamin, Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau could be categorized in this
mode of approach which can be particularly seen in their emphasis on lived spatiality.
Now, talking about novels as works of fiction, Id like to make use of Mikhail
Bakhtins concept of chronotope, or the relationship between time and space in a
novel. In his work The Dialogic Imagination Bahktin concludes: All the novels
abstract elements -philosophical and social generalizations, ideas, analyses of cause
and effect -gravitate toward the chronotope and through it take on flesh and blood,
permitting the imaging power of art to do its work. Such is the representational
significance of the chronotope (1981).
Bakhtin also made a distinction between the real socio-cultural historical and natural
worlds, and the ones which are represented by chronotopes. The relationship between the
real world and its chronotopic representation, consists of continual, mutual interaction.
The work and the world represented in it enter the real world and enrich it, and the real
world enters the work and its world as part of the process of its creation, as well as part
of its subsequent life, in a continual renewing of the work through the creative
perception of listeners and readers. (281) In House of Splendid Isolation, her 1994
novel, OBrien represents rural Ireland and one might relate the novel to theIrish Big
House Novel genre from the nineteenth century. In fact, there are some features of it in
OBriens work. Josie OMeara is an old widow living in a decaying mansion outside
an Irish village, as described on p.27 of the book: the imposing silver gates which led
to the front of the house () a variety of windows in the house proper. OMeara came
to the house many years ago as a bride, and now she lives childless, ill and alone. The
servants are long departed, her hated husband is dead. OMeara is kept alive by her
memories of a troubled marriage and one clandestine love affair with a priest. Her
solitude is violated by the arrival of an escaped IRA terrorist, McGreevy, a bloody
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crusader for a United Ireland, who has chosen her beautiful home for sanctuary as he
has plan for a new action. Their coexistence - a hostile standoff at first evolves in to
something far more ambiguous. Before the novel reaches its powerful conclusion, they
have come to an understanding. The elderly inhabitant of an Irish country mansion
dwells in the shadowy world of remembered pain and loneliness. McGreevy, the
terrorist, reintroduces the possibility of compassion and tenderness, but there is an
inevitably violent conclusion to their understanding as the police closes. The big house
in OBriens novel presents a counter narrative and counter image to the traditional
view of a big house novel. In OBriens work, the house functions as heterotopia (M.
Foucault, Of other Spaces, 1967), or a place/space which has the property of being
outside of the society which produced it, while at the same time carries a relation to all
the other remaining external spaces. Heterotopias suspect, neutralise or inverse the
relations which it signifies, mirrors or reflects. It is the case here, when the relationship
between captor and captured is different when theyre in that space of illusion.
Metaphorically both step outside their houses of isolation. The house survives its
inhabitants: Its months now. The spring came a week early, the air lost its bite, it was
like honey. Petals, white petals and yellow petals, spattered with pollen, blew all over
the ground. Even the stones of the fields and the boulders looked less angry. (215) The
walls and windows gone and the inside and outside all one. The birds have made nests
in there and animals trance around, bits of furniture and pictures and star-rods flung
out on the grass. (215) Thank you.