Conference London 2011

8/2/2019 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.

Conference London 2011

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