Irish Studies - Contents
- THE SEA INSIDE[1]
- Ciaran Carson – A Subjective History
- The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty
- SOME MOTHER’S SON
- The Garage
- Some Mother’s Son
THE SEA INSIDE[1]
by Marcela Iuga
(Metaphoric images of the sea in Mary Lavin’s short stories At Salygap
and The Great Wave)
Mary Lavin (10 June 1912 – 25 March 1992) was a noted Irish short story writer and novelist. She is regarded as a pioneering female author in the traditionally male-dominated world of Irish letters.
Mary Lavin was born in East Walpole, Massachusetts, in 1912, the only child of Tom and Nora Lavin, an immigrant Irish couple. She attended primary school in East Walpole until the age of ten, when her mother decided to go back to Ireland. Initially, Mary and Nora lived with Nora's family in Athenry in County Galway. Afterwards, they bought a house in Dublin, and Mary's father too came back from America to join them.
Mary attended Loreto College, a convent school in Dublin, before going on to study English and French at University College Dublin (UCD). She taught French at Loreto College for a while. As a postgraduate student, she published her first short story, 'Miss Holland', which appeared in the Dublin Magazine in 1938. Tom Lavin then approached Lord Dunsany, the well-known Irish writer, on behalf of his daughter and asked him to read some of Mary's unpublished work. Suitably impressed, Lord Dunsany became Mary's literary mentor.
In 1942, Mary Lavin published her first book. Tales from Bective Bridge, a volume of ten short stories about life in rural Ireland, was a critical success and went on to win the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. That same year, Lavin married William Walsh, a Dublin lawyer. Over the next decade, the couple had three daughters and moved to a farm they purchased in County Meath. Lavin's literary career flourished; she published several novels and collections of short stories during this period. Her first novel The House in Clewe Street was serialized in the Atlantic Monthly before its publication in book form in 1945.
In 1954, William Walsh died. Lavin, her reputation as a major writer already well-established, was left to confront her responsibilities alone. She raised her three daughters and kept the family farm going at the same time. She also managed to keep her literary career on track, continuing to publish short stories and winning several awards for her work, including the Katherine Mansfield Prize in 1961 and an honorary doctorate from UCD in 1968.Some of her stories written during this period, dealing with the topic of widowhood, are acknowledged to be among her finest.
Lavin remarried in 1969. Michael Scott was an old friend from Mary's student days in University College. He had been a Jesuit priest in Australia, but had obtained release from his vows from Rome and returned to Ireland. The two remained together until Scott's death in 1991.
In 1992, Lavin, by now retired, was elected Saoi by the members of Aosdana for achieving 'singular and sustained distinction' in literature.
Aosdána is an affiliation of creative artists in Ireland, and the title of Saoi one of the highest honours in Irish culture.
Mary Lavin died in a Dublin nursing home on March 25, 1996.[2]
The short-stories, that we are going to tackle, are the leading stories of her volumes: At Sallygap and Other Stories (1947) and The Great Wave and Other Stories (1961): At Sallygap and The Great Wave. The stories’ line is built on the same principle: there are two central characters whose story is being told through flashbacks from the past.
The central character of At Sallygap is Manny Ryan. Considered one of the author’s most complex characters, Manny’s evolution of discontent can be noticed throughout the story: “Take the story At Sallygap. It is on the old Irish theme of saying goodbye, of leaving for a better life abroad. A weak young man who belongs to a band is off to Paris on the Dublin mail boat with his friends, but at last moment cannot bear to leave his girl waving on the quay. He scrambles back down the gangway. His palls throw his violin to him […] Henceforth he is the girl’s prisoner and we shall see him turn into a meek dealer whose only freedom is to go to farms on Dublin mountains to collect eggs every now and then. Up to Sallygap he goes and one day makes a mild, but, for him, ecstatic gesture, by missing the buss and walking back home four hours late.( his wife is waiting for him) She despises her husband for having given up his freedom for her. She is bored with him”[3]
The other character building up a story is an ecclesiastical figure: a Bishop. He is on the sea, on his way to visit the diocese of his birth place village. The Bishop, described as an almost narcissistic person, rememorizes an event from the past, when the young boy called then Jimeen makes his first journey on the sea. His fishing partner is another young man, future priest, called Seoineen. He returns in the little fishing village, and exactly before the storm takes the boat on the sea. The experience is described as traumatic; the sea swallows a few fishermen lives, but the two, young, inexperienced boys survive. But Seoineen’s mental health seems forever damaged. He becomes alienated.
A central, repeating, motif in both of these short-stories is the sea. The life of those who live by the sea is influenced by it. The sea, as Ireland itself, becomes a mother, a protector but also a lover that requires certain sacrifices.
In the dictionary of symbols the sea is closely connected to the symbols of the water and the ocean. The sea represents the dynamics of life itself because of the continuous movement of advance and withdrawal (flux-reflux). It is the place of birth (see Venus), of conceiving, of becoming, of revival.
Psychologically, the symbol of the sea is associated with the images of the subconscious, an intermediary state between formal and informal realities. That’s why the sea stands between uncertainty and doubt, life and death.
The ancient Jewish writers say that the sea is Christ’s creation. The third day of the genesis is dedicated to the creation of the earth and of the sea. So, as one of its creation it must obey to its creator, which the sea does: in a biblical episode from the New Testament Jesus Christ goes sailing on the sea with his apostles. He falls asleep, a storm begins and they are afraid for their life. When Jesus wakes up peace is restored, because its creator can walk on the sea like on the ground. Only Peter does not have faith that he can do that and falls in the sea. The sea, in this way, becomes the symbol of faith.
In the same spirit, in all Irish texts the water is an element submitted to the druids, which have the power to bind and to unbind. In Strabon’s opinion, the druids pointed out that, at the end of the world there shall be the Kingdom of fire and water. So the circularity of the world is clear.[4]
In the story of the trip at Sallygap, the reader is faced with the image of Dublin as a protected space. The original Irish name is dubl linn meaning the black pool. The city’s image is associated to the vicinity of the Irish Sea: “Dublin was all exposed […] the sea that half circled this indistinct city seemed as gray, as motionless as air.”[5] The Gothic architecture of Dublin brings back the image of faith itself, because of the “spires and steeples that rose up out of the blue pools of distance below looked little better then dark thistles rising up defiantly in a pale pasture”[6] This is interpreted in a neo-Baroque way. Modern man, that has lost his faith, cannot have peace so he builds up these huge shrines, arching towards the sky. This becomes his sacrificial gesture, his atonement.
There are three images of reflection in the water. The first is a chain reflection: sky, city, sea. The city is an axis mundi between the sea and the sky: “the dark hills and the pale sky and the city pricking out of its shape upon the sea with starry lights filled him with strangely mingled feelings of sadness and joy.”[7]
The next images both rely on the eyes metaphorical mirroring. Manny’s eyes suffer a mutation from light to dark: “Only the eyes were different. The eyes of the photograph were light in color; […] The eyes of the older Manny were dark. They had a depth that might have come from sadness…”[8] Annie’s eyes are daring, threatening, and static: “Her eyes were greener than ever. They used to remind him of the Sea at Howth… They were the same color still, but now they reminded him suddenly of the green water under the landing stage at Dunlaoghaire. And as the sticky sea had that day been flecked with splinters of a broken fiddle, Annie’s eyes above him were flecked with malevolence.”[9]
The most representative image is that of the sea and the music – that is fiddle or violin. The two merge together in an everlasting symphony: “I get to thinking of the sea and the way it was that day, with all the dirt lapping up and down on it and the bits of the fiddle looking like bits of an old box.”[10] The fiddle and Manny look almost the same because of their delicacy. The day the fiddle dies; Manny’s spirit seems to go with it: “His palls on the boat throw his violin to him. Farcically – but with what symbolism- it smashes on a stanchion. There he is. The question of escape is over.”[11]
The Great Wave starts with the same artistic image, ofthe landscape - the island: “ Its familiar shapes were coming into focus; the great high promontory throwing its purple shade over the shallow fields by the shore, the sparse white cottages, the cheap cement pier, constantly in need of repairs.” And again the gothic architecture: “ the plain cement church, its spire standing alone standing out against the sky, bleak as a crane’s neck and head.”[12]
The sea is not seen as a calm entity as it was at the beginning. Jimeen is the son of a woman widowed by the sea. His father was killed by the sea: “That was the worst of being an only child, and the child of a sea widow into bargain.”[13]
Seoineen recognises the sea as a familiar ground, because the people on the island were fishermen, therefore sea people: “God! Isn’t it good to be out on the water!”[14] The sea becomes agitated and the storm gradually takes in. The other boats begin to withdraw, but the boys remain. That is the moment when the disaster begins. The whole scenery is described as apocalyptical - see the druids’ opinion- : “As Jimeen rose up to its full height to throw the net wide out, there was a sudden terrible sound in the sky over him, and the next minute a bold of thunder went volleying overhead, and with it, in the same instant it seemed, the sky was knifed from end to end with a lightning flash…God’s Cross!...It’s maybe the end of the world”[15]
There is another moment that can be compared to a biblical one: Moses Sea splitting. “It wasn’t the others Jimeen saw through, when he raised his eyes from the torn hands in the mashes. All he saw was a great wall, a great, green wall of water. No currachs anywhere. It was as if the whole sea had been stood up on its edge, like a plate on a dresser. And down that wall of water there slid a multitude of dead fish.”[16]
The madness theme is not new in the Irish culture- see Sweeney. Seoineen goes mad after seeing the Great Wave: “he and Seoineen, in the white dawn of the day after the Great Wave… [Seoineen,] was a bit odd”[17]
Dissemination
The theme of madness because of/ on the sea is recurrent in literature. There are at least three authors who develop this theme: Herman Melville Moby Dick (Captain Ahab grows obsessed with the White whale, tries to kill it on a storm like atmosphere, and dies doing this).
The second is T.S. Coleridge in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. It is a rammerserzählung told by an old sailor to a wedding guest. There is a ship that must cross an ocean and needs a good omen. The sailor kills a sea-gull. The luck of the ship runs out. They blame the sailor-see Jonah- and put the dead gull at his neck. The sailor blesses the ocean and he achieves forgiveness, the gull falls in the ocean. The ship ultimately sinks, but the sailor survives, his curse remaining all his life to tell this story. A kind of life in death metaphor develops, the sailor, in an almost madness, telling his story: “Water, water, everywhere/ and all the boards did shrink/Water, water, everywhere/ Nor any drop to drink”
The third is…Heine’s Lorelei. The story is simple, following the mythology of the mermaid. Lorelei is this kind of vision, that, when seen by sailors, the sailors have a strange behavior and they even drown: “The loveliest maiden […] She combs it with a golden comb/ And sing a song as she does/ A song with a peculiar/ powerful melody/ It sizes upon the boatman in/ his small boat/ With unrestramed woe/ He does not look below to/ the rocky severs …/ If I’m not mistaken, the waves/ Finally swallowed up the fisher and boat/ and with her singing/ The Lorelei did this”
Mary Lavin’s PhD thesis is on Virginia Woolf. Lavin wrote her first short-story when finishing her thesis. From that moment, she writes: “I have never written a single paragraph that had not had its’ source in the imagination.”[18] Consequently, the woolfian style is adopted: the sea, the waves become characters themselves in Virginia Woolf’s novels. She has an early childhood memory of the waves, from the time she sat in her cradle. She says she could hear the waves breaking on the shore.”
In the synonymous novel The Waves she tries to recreate that atmosphere for the characters: Bernard, Neville, Louis, Jinny, Susan and Rhonda. When the narrators are children, the first thing they hear in the morning is the sound of the waves crashing on the shore. Each of them tries to make sense of the rhythmic pounding – Louis hears the roar of a chained beast- the sound becomes the background noise to their day. When in Spain, Rhonda has the vision of the ocean: “Beneath us lie the lights of the herring feet. The cliffs vanish. Rippling small, rippling gray, innumerable waves spread beneath us. I touch nothing. I see nothing. We may sink and settle on the waves. The sea will drum my ears. The white petals will darken with water. They will float for a moment and then sink… Everything falls in a tremendous shower dissolving me.” The rhythm of the waves is associated with the passage of time; therefore the novel ends with the image of the breaking waves.[19]
To the Lighthouse is the second novel that brings about the symbol of the sea. Reference to it appears throughout the novel. Broadly, the ever-changing, ever-moving waves parallel the constant forward movement of time and the changes it brings. Mr. Ramsey says that the wave “eats away the ground we stand on”, the sea becoming a powerful reminder of the impermanence and delicacy of human life.[20]
In the same modernist spirit, it is necessary a parallel with James Joyce’s novel Dubliners. In particular to one story, and that is Eveline. The pattern of the action is the same as in At Sallygap. The characters are different: Eveline is not Manny but she also wants to leave Dublin, and at the last moment she changes her mind: “A bell clanged upon her heart. She felt him size her hand. ‘Come’ All the seas in the world tumbled upon her heart. He was drawing her into them: he would drown her. She gripped with her both hands at the iron railing ‘Come’ No! No! No! It was impossible.”[21]
The last intertext goes back to the title of the essay itself. The title of a movie was paraphrased and that is Mar Adentro (The Sea Inside). Alejandro Amenabar tells the story of Ramon Sempedro, a quadriplegic. In his youth, twenty years earlier, he made a jump into the sea at reflux. He fell into the sand and hurt his spinal cord. In his opinion he should have died then. The movie raises many issues: love, death, pain, sickness, euthanasia. What stays in the viewers’ mind, after having seen the movie, is the image of the sea invading Ramon’s being in his moments of loneliness. And that is mar adentro.
Notes:
[1] Paraphrasing an Amenabar movie title Mar Adentro (The Sea Inside)
[2] Apud Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
[3]Pritchett, Introduction to Mary Lavin Collected Stories, p.x
[4]Chevalier, James, Gheerbrant, Alain, Dicţionar de simboluri,p.115
[5]Mary Lavin Collected Stories, p. 16
[6]Id:ib
[7]Idem,p.26
[8]Idem,p.18
[9]Idem,p.36
[10]Idem,p.22
[11]Pritchett, Introduction to Mary Lavin Collected Stories, p.x
[12]Mary Lavin, op.cit, .p. 314
[13]Mary Lavin, op.cit, .p. 315
[14]Idem,p.320
[15]Idem,p.325
[16]Idem,p.328
[17]Id:ib
[18]Mary Lavin, Brigid, p.329
[19]Apud www.Sparknotes.com
[20]Idem
[21]James Joyce, Dubliners. p.42
Bibliography
- Chevalier, James, Geerbrant, Alain, Dictionar de simboluri, mituri, vise, obiceiuri, gesturi, culori, numere. Editura Artemis, Bucuresti, 1994.
- Joyce, James, Dubliners, Penguin Books, London, 1996.
- Lavin, Mary, Collected Stories, Haughton Mifflin, Boston, 1971.
- www.sparknotes.com
- www.Wikipedia.com
Ciaran Carson – A Subjective History
by Narcisa Braşoveanu
Life
Ciaran Carson was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, belonging to an Irish –speaking family, a communitarian background that conferred him a the opportunity of creating a strong bond with the Irish Celtic past, tradition, values and, most important, language. This latter issue is the one that is rendered by the poet for constructing a uniquely Irish poetic identity in a foreign language (i.e. English). He attended St. Mary’s College in Belfast and, afterwards, he entered and graduated from Queen’s University, Belfast. For over twenty years he worked as the Traditional Arts Officer of The Arts Council of Northern Ireland and, in 1998 he was appointed professor of English at Queen’s University, also running the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, an ironic function if one takes into account the fact that Carson was opposing his contingent view on history and poetry to Heaney’s mythic one.
History
From a political-historical point of view, Carson’s lifespan intersects a period of changes and instabilities, one which imposes to the concepts and words of the language new realities to cover and to verbalize. Thus, in 1967 The Civil Rights Association demanded the erasure of any discrimination related to allocation of houses, jobs, electoral issues and emergency legislation; the growing disorder could not be handled by the local administration and the United Kingdom sent in troops in 1969. But these were fought against by the Provisional IRA and even the internment, introduced in 1971 as a last resort to control the conflict between the Nationalists and the Loyalists, could not prevent the recurrence of violent acts between these two “parties”. If the years 1969 and 1970 had been characterized by the riots between the Protestants and the Catholic, the following two or three years brought about violence between the Provisional IRA and the British army, with intervention from the Loyalist paramilitaries. The government of Northern Ireland was replaced with the rule from Westminster, a situation which continued in the 1990s. During the 1980s and the 1990s there were several attempts to regain power, such as the Rolling Devolution (1982-1984), proposed by James Prior – elective representatives – and the Brooke-Mayhew initiatives which sought to introduce phased talks, involving the Irish parties and politicians (who were left out when signing the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985) and, in a later stage, the Dublin government. In 1993 John Major, the British PM, and Albert Reynolds, the Irish Taoiseach, included the Sinn Fein into the above-mentioned talks. In return, they must stop the violence for at least three months and the Irish government should accept any constitutional change in the status of Northern Ireland only with the support of the majority of Northern Ireland. Thus, this declaration opened the way to finding a solution for both constitutional and security problems that have convulsed the history of Northern Ireland (and of the entire island, for that matter).
Aesthetics
Moreover, another important element that constructed the external, “theoretical” background of Carson was the aesthetic movement/criticism. Tony Curtis and his delineation between the real space of history and the suspended aesthetic space of poetry, Edna Longley and her belief according to which the function of poetry is one of resistance to history, transcending it, Theodor Adorno and his sense of everything being caught into, being subject of history and, more important, to historical change – all these seem to be the most important theorists who create an aesthetic perspective dedicated to art and reality/history. In fact, Adorno’s perception of history is the most important in relation to Ciaran Carson as it exposes history as a part of art, uniting the individuals, the artists with their outer deterministic surroundings – everybody lives within a historical context which generates a more or less artistic equation: “History is constitutive of works of art. Authentic ones give themselves over completely to the material substance of their period, rejecting the pretense of timelessness. Unbeknown to themselves, they represent the historiography of their times.” (Matthews: 1997, p.22).
Work
In what regards Carson’s work, this is characterized by creativity, productivity and variety, including mostly volumes of poetry (twelve volumes, the last one, The Midnight Court – translation of Brian Merriman’s Cuirt an Mhean Oiche, being published in 2005), but also essays, prose (Letters from the Alphabet, 1995; Shamrock Tea, 2001), translations (The Tain, translating the early Irish epic Tain Bo Cuailnge, 2007) and even papers on music (Irish Traditional Music, 1986; Last Night’s Fun: About Time, Food and Music, 1996). He also received many important literary prizes, such as Alice Hunt Bartlett Award, Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Poetry, T.S. Eliot Prize and Forward Poetry Prize. Thus, from a critical perspective, if his first poems were perceived as smoothly following the line of Heaney, the critics discovered that, with his second volume, The Irish for No (1987) he distinctly departed from “Heaney tradition”, creating his own style, finding his own voice and perspective on history and the human being, more specifically the Irish of the Northern Ireland. As a matter of fact, Carson was the one who strongly expressed his opinion about Heaney’s North, one of his most famous poems, published in 1975, and about his method of dealing with the interwoven threads of history and poetry. And, he chose to do that by the review of this poem in the Belfast Honest Ulsterman – Heaney‘s portrait as a poet is that of a “laureate of violence – a mythmaker, an anthropologist of ritual killing, an apologist for ‘the situation’, in the last resort, a mystifier”, Carson’s conclusion being that “No one really escapes from the massacre, of course – the only way you can do that is by falsifying issues, by applying wrong notions of history, instead of seeing what’s before your eyes.” (Corcoran: 1992, p.213). Taking this fragment as a starting point, one can easily discover Carson’s ars poetica, one that has been constructed in an antithetical relation with Heaney’s ideatic, mythic ars poetica. At a simple analysis, Carson’s poems reveal an authentic history of small, but significant details, of subjective, vividly lived historic episodes, anchoring the poetic reality, as well as the historic reality in the continuum of the present, catching every flicker of his emotional response to the external state of facts and events. But, contrary to Muldoon’s “here and now”, which is permeated by uncertainties and suspicions, thus creating a sense of kaleidoscopic, restless individual perception of the external overwhelming force of history, Carson’s act of “presentifying” subjective history through language (i.e. poetic language) is rather an attempt to disclose history as a superimposed factor and to plunge into the individual histories, constantly unveiling the corresponding individual stories. This act is rendered, in the volume of 1990, Belfast Confetti, by the intersection of two frames of evolution belonging to a living structure hosting individuals and, more specifically, hosting Ciaran Carson both as an empiric/biological poet and as a poetic voice/self – the city of Belfast (Beal Feirste); these tow frames are “the change of the city across history”, a linear, chronological one, and “the way in which the city is constantly changing in his own experience” (Matthews: 1997, p.186). Beside this comparison to Muldoon, a poet fellow and colleague of Carson’s at Queen’s University, critics have also identified the threads of Louis MacNeice’s influence in his 1993 volume, First Language: Poems, especially in the long, dense and rhythmic lines of the Bagpipe Music. Still, if MacNeice is set to “fix or cure his own or anyone else’s condition, he (Carson) is happier to delve into the flux, to contract, and, thereby know, the illness.” (McCracken in Kenneally: 1995, p.356).
Thus, Ciaran Carson exhibits his unique style, assuming at the same time, intertextual influences which do not only interpretatively enrich his own creations, but also connects his poems in a typically Irish poetic network, revealing self-awareness of both the poet and his poetry.
Poems
From a practical standpoint, the poems that I have chosen to study are all concerned with the triadic relationship between history, language and identity/self. According to Steven Matthews, Ciaran Carson has a specific perspective upon language, using it in the form of the result of its subjection to historical change, its most important constitutive elements – words, orthography signs, the laws of syntax – covering new semantic contents corresponding to the constantly new reality: “Word themselves are open to change and to history, independently of the self and ‘reality’ which are in their changing[…]; all ‘meaning’ is about to give way or to be ‘overwhelmed’ through the process of temporality and history.” (Matthews: 1997, p.187). But, when analyzing five of Carson’s poems, Belfast Confetti, Turn Again, The Exiles’ Club, Punctuation and Yes, I discovered that he, besides using language in the manner mentioned above, transforms it and its meanings into graphemes which are constructions on a double level: on one hand, the tabular display is naturally infused by words, while, on the other hand, the interpretative, receptive events thus created are vivid episodes, images which take various shapes: an abstract typographical shape in Belfast Confetti, a labyrinthic one in Turn Again, more semantically concrete shape in The Exiles’ Club, a typographical shape of potentiality of things and events in Punctuation and a sensorial shape in Yes.
Belfast Confetti – is one of the most interesting poems that is constructed on a very strong visual scale, imprinting a staccato rhythm to the lines, to the violent emotion expressed and, ultimately to the readers’ perception of those acts of violence. As it is well know, the “confetti” acquired a new meaning within the borders of Irish history, especially, of the Northern Ireland, designating “the flotilla of ammunition fired during street riots, which may consist of anything from bricks and saucepans to buckets, glass, nails and bolts.” (McCracken in Kenneally: 1995, p/363). Thus, even from the beginning, the title resounds with Carson’s perspective upon language (see above), a simple word being adorned with a different designating corresponding reality, but, at the same time, keeping the other semantic value, namely of tossed paper used for happy occasions, such as weddings. With this word, confetti, one cannot speak about polysemantic usage, about a single graphic form sheltering two semems, but about its local, individualized semantic evolution – regional history is the one that imposed this evolution within the Northern Irish community, Belfast, to be more exact, the meaning thus generated being unknown to other communities. Moreover, the there is an antinomic relationship between the general meaning of this word (the one known to almost all communities of this world) and the individualized one: if the former is associated with happiness, luck, and, indirectly with life (a new beginning), the latter is associated with violence, misunderstanding and death (the end of existence). Of course, the cumulated effect of these two meanings is even more powerful, as it suddenly introduces the reader within a frantic atmosphere, right into the middle of real events, of lived history, wherein the violence is overwhelming, allowing no individual to regain his/her sense of wholeness, of compact entity, but subjecting him/her to a rapid process of disintegration, the result being an identitary loss. In fact, the identitary loss also stems from the destruction of the external reference points – the personal geography of the city (i.e. Belfast), and, alongside, its history disappear, offering to the self only ruins, unrecognizable landmarks which are simultaneously transferred into the inner geography, disturbing its once secure coordinates.
From a structural point of view, one can distinguish between two main sequences: the explosion itself, the image of violence and the individual’s loss within familiar “milestones”. The former reveals the sudden explosion and destruction of the city, rendered by the constant, overwhelming accumulation of non-verbal elements of the language, namely its orthographic constituents: dots, asterisks, colons, stops, hyphens. What is interesting in this case is the fact that the poets’ choice of using non-verbal elements indicates the intense effect of the blast, sweeping any rational thought translatable into coherent language and creating space only for instinctive reactions, transferable to the above mentioned components. Furthermore, these elements also have equivalents into the real world, equivalents that are characterized by the same type of linearity, dot-like shape:
“Suddenly as the riot squad moved in, it was raining
exclamation marks,
Nuts, bolts, nails, car-keys. A fount of broken type.
And the explosion
Itself – an asterisk on the map. This hyphenated
Line, a burst of rapid fire…”
The poetic, and, for that matter, every individual’s inner stream of thoughts struggles to reenter a coherent pattern, a struggle ending in a failure in the surrounding, repeating fire of violence: “I was trying to complete a sentence in my head, but/ it kept stuttering,”. The chaos of the external reality offers no rational interlude for the mind and self.
The second scene of this poem displays the motif of the labyrinth, one that emerged out of a process of defamiliarization that applied not only to the ones who are impersonating the strangers, but also to its own inhabitants – what was a labyrinth for the outsider has also become a labyrinth for the insider. In addition to these, this mythic motif is also semantically/interpretatively twisted in Carson’s view: instead of leading the neophyte to the establishment of a clear identity, through a search of knowledge and self-knowledge, it follows the reverse way, guiding the mature personality back to the uncertainties and instability of the neophyte status:
“I know this labyrinth so well – Balaclava, Raglan,
Inkerman, Odessa Street – […]
shields. Walkie-talkies. What is
My name? Where am I coming from? Where am I
going? A fusillade of question marks.”
What Belfast Confetti unveils is a backwards catharsis, a direct and intense poetic experience of the divergent forces of violence, forces that tear the human being apart, in instantaneous destructive historic incidents, suspending time, thought, and life.
Turn Again – is another Carsonian piece, focusing, this time, on the symbol of the map – as it is commonly known, this is a representational work, a document through which the human being does not only reduce reality to a smaller scale, but also tries to take possession upon the external elements that are overwhelming. Moreover, the map is not a natural representation of reality, but an artificial one, accessing the process of symbolization, transforming reality into a form of art, in the Aristotelian way, a form of “techné” displaying accurate, minute craft. But the Carson’s map is an unstable one, built not on concreteness of things, but, in a deconstructivist manner, on a lack, on an absence of things and landmarks, on the potentiality of the existence perceived as a creative force which alternates between creation and non—creation :
“There is a map of the city which shows the bridge
that was never built.
A map which shows the bridge that collapsed; the
Streets that never existed.”
The war and its devastating effects give birth to an ontological uncertainty which comprises both the external and the internal levels of existence stretched along the measures of Chronos, the result being that even the solid geographical structures are shaken to the ground and turned into plasmatic, changeable entities: “Today’s plan is already yesterday’s – the streets/ that were there are gone.” The second section of the poem, as it is the case with the former poem, introduces the poetic voice/ subject, the image thus constructed being of a movement from the general, multi-focused scene to the particular, uniquely focused episode of the individual searching reference points in his own city, in his own country, in his own history and, ultimately, in his own identity:
“When someone asks me where I live, I remember
where I used to live.
Someone asks me for directions, and I think again,
I turn into
A side-street to try to throw off my shadow, and
History is changed.”
As one may easily observe, there is also a strong sense of mutability, of change and alteration, every moment being another chance given to this process, reality acquiring a cubic outline, constantly reshaping itself. As a matter of fact, even the title is suggestive in what concerns this issue. At a closer analysis, there is a double mobility of the subject involved in this flexible history: on one hand, the verb “to turn” implies a revolving movement, on the other hand, its determinative, “again” entails a repetitive pattern to it; but this quality refers only to the form, to the expression of the movement, and not to its content, as this is the subject of change, and, as such, has unique variants. Therefore, the narrative of the poetic self delves into historical contexts, exploring the history of a continuous present.
The Exiles’ Club- this poem may be considered as being the replica of the labyrinth and the map at the human level. The worlds developed by these two in the previous poems are rendered, here, by the construction of a parallel universe, “an upstairs lounge”, one within which the individuals that escaped the outside violence may artificially recreate their identity, a space of their own, a miniature – a map, maybe – of the ruins left behind. What they strive to do is to fill the gaps generated by the innumerable explosions from Belfast, always being in touch with what happens outside the walls of their building; in fact, they are involved into a Sisyphic, complementary labour of continually (re)creating inside the destroyed constituents of the outer reality:
“Every Thursday in the upstairs lounge of the
Wollongong Bar, they make
Themselves at home with Red Heart Stout, Park […]
After years they have reconstructed the whole of
the falls Road and now
Are working on the back streets: lemon, Peel and
Omar, Balaclava, Alma.
They just keep up with the news of bombing
and demolition, and are
Struggling with the finer details: the names and
dates carved out”
Thus, the theme of exile is underlined in such a manner as to infuse the reader with the authentic atmosphere of those times in which the insecurity of the next moment induced a creative instinct to the inhabitants of Belfast, an instinct that, at least, gave them the appearance of a chance for survival, both physically (biological life) and spiritually (inner life): as long as they constructed and reconstructed (giving life after it was taken by history) they were alive.
The last two poems that are to be discussed, Punctuation and Yes, repeat the same theme of destruction and annihilation of realities surrounding the Irish individual actively or passively mingling into history. While the former has taken the shape of an intense staccato rhythm, even more dramatic, more “punctuated” than in the case of Belfast Confetti, the latter slowly succumbs to a hypnotic, lyrical pace. But they both end in death, violent in essence, still delivered aggressively (Punctuation) and peacefully (Yes).
“This frosty night is jittering with lines and angles
invisible trajectories: […]
For the moment, everything is X, a blank not yet
filled in. […]
When another shadow steps out from behind the
Hedge, going, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot…”(Punctuation)
“I’m drinking from a 7-Up bottle-green eyes of the
barmaid […]
I’m about to quote from Basho’s The Narrow Road
To the Deep North –
Blossoming mushroom: from some unknown tree a
Leaf has stuck to it –
When it goes off and we’re thrown out of kilter.
My mouth is full
Of broken glass and quinine as everything reverses
South. (Yes)
The first poem (between these two) is centered on anonymity and randomness, two qualities that death seemed to acquire with Northern Ireland. The individual is no longer perceived as a subject, but as a simple part of the mass, counting only in a general statistics, identifying himself/herself with a number. Thus, the consciously inflicted death of a human being upon its fellow being does not bear any longer the signs of responsibility and remorse, of guilt and culpability, offering the murderer (whoever he/she is) the possibility of escaping her/his own consciousness, losing the unique coordinates of his/her individuality into the broad-spectrum proposed by the historical context. The unexpected end arbitrarily chooses its own victims.
The second poem leads the reader into a seemingly calm episode selected from the poet’s ontological stream – a journey with the Enterprise Train. The effect of the brutal bombing is the more powerful as it is antithetically displayed to the common event of a train journey, the blast of the bomb generating the split of reality into thousands of fragments.
Ciaran Carson remains a poet whose poems conjure history and reality in an attempt of “re-humanizing” them. The process of disclosing these two is a very minute and intense one, gathering not only the tabular structure of poetry, but also the force of the narrative, the result being epic-like, emotional and explosive, but, above all, authentic. In fact, the poet’s confession, although it refers to only two of his poems, best describe these characteristics of contextual, local and subjective history:
“I see those poems [Belfast Confetti and Turn Again] as being very much as if I were an eye on the scene. As if I were alert to the sounds of the time and what was going on at that exact time.” (www.bbc.co.uk/northernireland)
Bibliography
- Corcoran, Neil, The Chosen Ground. Essays on the Contemporary Poetry of Northern Ireland, Andmar House, Bridgend, Mid Glamorgan ,1992.
- Denman Peter, Ways of Saying: Boland, Carson, McGuckian, in: Michael Kenneally, Poetry in Contemporary Irish Literature, Gerrards Cross, Colin Smythe, 1995.
- http://cain.ulst.ac.uk
- http://lett.ubbcluj.ro/~aradu
- Matthews, Steven, Letters from the Alphabet: Carson’s and Muldoon’s Contingent Poetics, in: Steven Matthews, Irish Poetry: Politics, History, Negotiation. The evolving Debate: 1969 to the Present, Houndmills, Macmillan Press Ltd, 1997.
- McCracken, Kathleen, Ciaran Carson: Unravelling the Conditional, Mapping the Provisional, in: Michael Kenneally, Poetry in Contemporary Irish Literature, Gerrards Cross, Colin Smythe, 1995.
- www.bbc.co.uk/northernireland
- www.contemporarywriters.com/authors
- www.crescent.org
- www.gallerypress.com
- www.kindamusik.net
- www.middlemiss.org
- www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive
- www.wfu.edu
- www.wikipedia.com
The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty – the Postmodernist (Irish) Wanderer
by Narcisa Braşoveanu
“And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was
cast into the lake of fire.” (Revelation, Ch.20: v.15)
The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty is a novel written by Sebastian Barry and, although the Irish author is mostly known as a playwright, his novels acquired a famous status due to the combined dialogic, dramatized technique of displaying the narrative and of constructing the characters’ subjectivity. The novel under discussion was published in 1998 and emerged out of a long narratorial pause of the writer, a fact which conferred it the aspect of a craftily designed scriptural entity.
As a matter of fact, the novel was initially intended to be a play and Eneas McNulty just a dramatic character, but, as the author stated in an interview given in response to his novel growing success, “the play didn’t work. Slowly it began to take shape as a novel, almost without me realizing it. […] The crucial aspect, I think, that prevented it being a play was that Eneas McNulty has a sort of silence and confusion at the heart of him. As I usually write plays in long speeches, this was awkward because Eneas did not want to speak in that way. The interior world of the novel, the descriptive and psychological world, was more suitable for painting, you might say, of Eneas McNulty.”
These statements, beside unveiling the birth of the novel and of the character, also reveal the process of narrative creation specific to this Irish writer, a process based upon a certain or rather apparent will driving him away from the creational autoscopic/self/reflexive view. Moreover, the same interview is the witness of the blend of reality and fiction intrinsic to the creation and ontological entity of Eneas McNulty. Thus, the model of Barry’s “hero” might be considered his great-uncle Charlie, but the name was accidentally chosen, or, at least, this is what the author pretends to be the “truth” about Eneas.
I was told as a child about him, Charlie was his name. He had disappeared in the twenties or thereabouts because of something he had done to earn himself some kind of death threat. It was all kept very vague in the telling, as you might expect. In the sixties my grandfather, his brother, tracked him down through the records of the British Army Pensions Office, to a hotel on the Isle of Dogs in London. When my grandfather went there he was told that Charlie did live there, but was out that day, and to come back in the morning. Next morning my grandfather duly returned, but found the little hotel burned to the ground. He assumed that Charlie had taken flight when he heard "a man from Sligo" was looking for him and burned the hotel to cover his traces. Or indeed my grandfather feared he might have been followed from Sligo by his brother's enemies, and that they had caught him and killed him. Either way, he never could find any trace of his brother again. My grandfather died some years later. Just in the week I finished the book, my aunt rang my mother to say that she had received an unexpected bequest—a few pounds from Uncle Charlie. He had just died in an old people's home in London. For a moment I entertained the notion that he might have been transmitting his story to me as he lay dying, but perhaps that is merely fanciful.
When I was looking for a name that I could use in my book, I was having difficulty finding something. One night I was watching television and on the news was an account of a car accident in the midlands. One of the witnesses was a local man and his name appeared briefly on the screen. . . Eneas McNulty. It surprised me that the name Aeneas had survived in Ireland, but when you consider the old hedge schools, whose penniless masters spoke more Latin and Irish than English, perhaps it's not so surprising. It seemed the right name for an Irish wanderer.
From another standpoint, the narrative of this novel might be assessed to belong to the buildungsroman genre, as it revolves around the life and the particular ontological contexts constructing Eneas McNulty’s destiny, fate. In fact, one can envisage his lifespan as a tremendous journey generated by his wish of becoming a hero, of transforming himself from NO-BODY into a YES-BODY (in Peter Sloterdijk’s terms), of living beyond the limits imposed by History to the masses. From his daring act of joining Jonno Lynch’s “bunch”, to his desire to go to war (“By God, he will go to the war, Eneas, as soon as he is let, if his fine pride in himself is to be eroded.”), to his struggle to understand and “conquer the horror of his mother’s mystery” (her bastard origins and her uncommon enjoyment of dance and music), up to his apprenticeship period on Bull Mottram’s ship (“Yet, having sailed about for the sake of France, is he not a hero of sorts?”) and the enrollment into the Royal Irish Constabulary he seems to try to create his own heroic destiny, unconsciously tailoring it according to two contradictory patterns: on one hand, the ancient (hi)story of Aeneas and other stories of the past, of the great, glorious history - “Eneas puzzles out his own ancestry. […] When Eneas first came into the class Mr. Jackson showed some interest in the name Eneas, pointing out it was taken from the Roman story about a long-suffering and wandering sea-captain.”; “In fact, his favourite talk is of the old Greeks, and their dooms and their wars, and how the Gods were forever decreeing the fates of the mortals, and girls were turned into trees and the like.”; on the other hand, the Irish history, and, moreover, local and familial stories. Thus, the identitary circles keep narrowing in this latter case till they reach the individual, subjective history of Eneas (his momentary interests) – “But he can’t try and catch these curious trout of information now, he has other legends to puzzle out. Legends of Sligo. The master tries to swamp his head with decent information from what he magnificently calls the Classical Eras of the World, but the terrier of his mother’s origins sees him off every time. It means something for himself, this business of his mother”.
If Eneas acted according to his inner drives, his act of enrolling the Royal Irish Constabulary turned his internally determined life towards an almost completely externally determined existence; the main reason of this is his quite innocent involvement into a matter that highly surpassed his boyish/childish wish of heroism: the war of independence. Moreover, his act, translated into the restless Irish History is an act of taking sides which has always been a tragic one, one’s decision being judged, socially blamed and usually ended by violence or death. Unfortunately for Eneas, he takes side with the Loyalists and not the Nationalists, and, although his decision is a formal one (not being a personal conviction too), his life map is to be drawn from now on by the consequences of this personal choice with strong inherent political hues. Still, these hues are not to be attributed to Eneas as he doesn’t seem to notice them; his sight being obliterated by innocence related to the political purposes, he only keeps his heart and soul open to the human aspect of the issue, an openness that is actualized into the death of a fellow being, disregarding any other identitary coordinates – “And places the gun a second time into the left cheekbone, where it might well be if the blood and splinters and scraps of flesh were cleaned off, and fires again and Eneas looks into the face of the killer and it has the set effort in it of a person struggling for precision in a world of vagueness and doubt, struggling with a physical task in a world of Godless souls and wormy hearts.” (sergeant Doyle’s killing).
Another important narrative sequence refers to the death order issued on his name after Eneas’s refusal of killing the Reprisal Man, and its importance resides in the fact that these two elements generate the hero’s lifetime wandering through space and world, through time and memories. However, the essential difference between his previous wanderings and his actual wanderings is constituted by the element of freedom – if this was the driving engine with the former, the same, or rather its lack is the constraint with the latter: twice does he try to return home and twice he is rejected by his home town (the fragmented episode of returning home seems to be symmetrically constructed with his double rejection of the offer made by the rebels, namely that of killing the Reprisal Man) – “He must be wandering as a displaced man and wandering and never coming back and always maybe be telling strangers of his love for Sligo or never seeing Sligo again”; “An asylum, the whole of Sligo is an asylum now.”; “At the least Eneas himself will softly vanish, softly vanish into the blackened canvas of his father’s paradise.”
Nevertheless, one must notice that, although the narrative abounds in disruptive spaces and chronologies, there are also hunks cut out of Eneas’s existence that cursively flow towards a teleological end. Thus, years pass between his life on the fishing boat of Captain Simon Cousins, in the North of England, his war experience in France - Dunkirk (and his hard work on Jean’s vineyard), his labour under the harsh sun of Lagos and Port Harcourt, his new true friend Harcourt and, finally their hotel on the Isle of Dogs. And, though his ontological journey covers various spaces (or rather loci), the map of his experiences never completely obliterates Sligo, neither erases his memories or friends. And the strongest proof of this fact is that Eneas, although tries to switch identities with his friend Jonno (when he comes on the isle to kill him), he never succeeds in doing that: he dies in his attempt to save Jonno’s body (apparently alive, or alive for Eneas) - “it strikes him that any person alive in the world, any person putting a shoulder against a life, no matter how completely failing to do the smallest thing, is a class of hero.”; “The moon rises over Eneas’s France. He is forty, no he is forty-two or three, he can’t say anymore. Time is a dark puzzle, certainly.”; “Primitive, but after a few days in Lagos it’s a sort of a Sligo, but bigger, and alive as a Yankee port. So his fourpenny ideas aren’t worth fourpence.”[…] Moonlight brings Nigeria closer to Ireland. It might be Ireland because the night is still and quiet as a stone.”; “Bloody politics! Deathly, killing, seducing politics. Feckin ould freedom anyway.”; “Jonno is imprinted on his brain like a potato stamp they used to make at school together, a potato stamp.”
From the many narrative interplays put forward by Sebastian Barry, the creation of a mirror-like character is one of the most interesting as it argues a certain globalizing perspective of the political and national phenomena of former colonies. Thus, Harcourt is Eneas’s narrative twin, suffering the political consequences of his personal choice, having a father who dwelt in the realm of music, ending up digging and hiding for fear of his life, for surviving, making a friend and starting life all over again in the Isle of Dogs. According to Foucault, the mirror is a type of heterotopia, but at level of the subject, of the individual, showing yourself there where you are not is a mixture between a presence doubled by an actual ontological content and an apparent, non - doubled presence. In Barry’s novel Harcourt serves the function of a mirror, dispersing Eneas into multiple dimensions, externalizing his own self.
Moreover, Foucault also argues that the hotel, the museum and the boat are other types of heterotopia, enclosing not only multiple, plural spaces (be them personal or not), but also plural layers of time that could not coexist otherwise; from this standpoint, the fact that these two friends choose to live in a hotel at the end of their life gathers new significance – they try to recapture all those lost moments of their existence, always abiding different persons, always interacting and communicating. In addition to this and although Harcourt proves to be a loyal friend, the feeling of estrangement is a lifelong companion to Eneas, joining him from his first departure till the arrival on the Isle of Dogs, making him feel like a spy in his own church, in his own community, amid those who rejoiced the independence of Ireland: “Fellas his own age look older and bleaker than him, […] the sea has put a different clock into him. He’s always got the wrong time in Sligo.”; “And other men that kept their hands clean of the European war are inclined to get blood on the selfsame hands in a war for the old prize of freedom for Ireland. And Eneas knows that Jonno Lynch is one such”.
Coming back to the interview mentioned at the beginning of this text, when being asked about his narratological intentions regarding the use of such a name and character (i.e. Eneas), Sebastian Barry answered that he was aware of the correspondences between the ancient hero of Virgil and his own hero, stating that this intertextuality is “quite informal”, his purpose being that of creating “a kind of unfounding myth”:
Actually the background of the Aeneid is quite informal, in that, yes, I read Latin at University years ago and read Virgil carefully, and of course as an Irish person it interested me how the Roman writers had absorbed the Greeks and turned them to their own imperial purposes, as you might say. All our founding myths in Ireland have been based on revolutions and new beginnings and I suppose I wanted to write a book that had as its shadow the reverse of that, a kind of unfounding myth, if there is such a word. An anti-epic with an ambiguous hero. Because we have had in Ireland in recent years to try to accommodate the two traditions, Nationalism and Unionism (those who want to keep union with Britain), in order to create a new ground for a new beginning. Because when we have concentrated on either one or the other, terrible exclusions and murders have taken place, and unendingly. By writing this shadowy great-uncle of mine back into the book of life, I was trying to put something back on the balance. Because if we exclude a part of ourselves, even a disreputable or reprehensible part, we by extension exclude and erase a part of the family, and by further extension a part of the nation. The miraculous fact is Ireland no longer wants victory of one over the other, Nationalism over Britishness, in general terms, but only peace, ordinary peace.
But, in fact, Eneas, wherever he went outside the borders of his country was assigned an English identity, and not an Irish one (Galveston, France, Nigeria).
However, Aeneas is the typical figure of the glorious hero, the founder of a new civilization, the survivor of the Trojan War and the bearer of past and future (when he flees Troy he also takes his father, Anchises and his son, Ascanius with him). Compared to this description Eneas is the opposite, a failure of the antique heroism and of the local Irish type of heroism, and he is rather displaying a fragile heroism of his inner world, one that is being crushed by the imprints of history and national (not individual) independence goals. Still, there is one connection mark, namely the one residing in the love of the father, the “sacred figure” in their life (both Aeneas’s and Eneas’s).
Furthermore, another interaction point might be considered their common wandering destiny forced by external factors of political reasons (the war, the power) and even the trajectories of their journeys seem to have intersected as they both reached the shores and the lands of Africa (Carthage, with Aeneas, and Nigeria with Eneas); and, even though Eneas never actually landed in the Greek islands, as Aeneas had done, his thoughts were constantly associating his existence with Greek mythological figures: “Men of strength are needed, who can dig like blessed dogs, and have eyes in the backs of their heads like Greek mythologicals for whatever tremendous dangers might bear down on them.”
Therefore, Eneas McNulty, through his fragmented subjectivity, displaced spacial and temporal identity and disseminated heroism actualizes the figure of the Postmodernist (Irish) wanderer.
Aeneas's Journey
Eneas McNulty’s Wanderings
- SLIGO (IRELAND)
- GALVESTON (USA)
- THE NORTH OF ENGLAND (UK)
- DUNKIRK (FRANCE)
- LAGOS (NIGERIA)
- PORT HARCOURT (NIGERIA)
- THE ISLE OF DOGS (UK)
Bibliography
- Barry, Sebastian, The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, Picador, Macmillan Publishers Ltd, London, 1999.
- Foucault, Michel, “Des Espaces Autres”, in Architecture/ Mouvement/ Continuité, October, 1984.
- Sloterdijk, Peter, Critica raţiunii cinice, Polirom, Iaşi, vol. I (2000).
- www.readinggroupguides.com/guides_W/whereabouts_of_eneas_mcnulty2.asp
SOME MOTHER’S SON
by Marcela Iuga
The film Some Mother’s Son is set in the 1980’s Ireland. The main characters are Kathleen Quigley and Annie Higgins, two mothers who struggle to help their sons alive. These women form a special couple, a kind of duality, because they belong to different social classes: Kathleen (Helen Mirren in a wonderful part) is a teacher and Annie Higgins (Fionnula Flanagan) is a housewife managing with a small farm. The story begins by describing the women harsh, but apparently common life.
The plot is dramatic because it is drawn from real life events. The action develops progressively. It is first portrayed the life in a Northern Ireland village at the beginning of the 80’s to the Early signs of Troubles. The Initiating action has in the centre Gerard Quigley (Aidan Gillen) and Frank Higgins (David O'Hara) both being part of the Irish Republican Army, the IRA. They are arrested for terrorism and sentenced to life.
In Prison, they refuse to admit any other status than prisoners of war. So they are transferred to a single - story brick unit called the H- Blocks. This standing point means, in the beginning, rejection of the prison clothes. The “blanket protest” mutates these prisoners appearance. Gerard is put in the same cell as Bobby Sands, the former leader of the Provisional IRA and he is shocked by Bobby’s appearance “You look like Jesus Christ”
They all end up looking like that because there is a failure of negotiation on the prison’s condition: as they reject clothes they are granted civilian clothes. Thanks to a British bluff, speculation scheme, the prison management offers them the prison’s uniforms but not their own clothes. Things get worst when, trying to force the prisoners’ hand, the guardians refuse to empty their pots. Therefore the prisoners begin throwing their faecal on the walls. In a desperate attempt to help the prisoners, the head of the Irish Catholic Church makes an appeal of decency to the State’s authorities.
The protest reaches its highest peak and therefore intensity when Bobby Sands begins his hunger strike on 1 March 1981. From this moment on Bobby Sands seems to tie his destiny to every other character: Gerard, Frank and consequently their mothers’. Kathleen and Annie make desperate attempts to be heard by the authorities when, after 66 days, Bobby dies and all the other prisoners enter the hunger strike. Bobby dies after being elected by a majority of people in Northern Ireland as their MP.
The sons’ life would be, at the end, in their mothers’ hands. In the days that follow, the IRA starts killing people who work at the Prison. Therefore a solution of blood comes to help the hunger strikers; and their mothers can as well, by signing a declaration allowing their sons to be treated.
The women’s roads, separated at the beginning, meeting in the middle- they actually become friends like their sons-, divide again at the end. Annie does not sign, which means the irremediable loss of the second son (a younger one had been killed before). She is herself a woman with strong political convictions.
Kathleen is an apolitical being. The fact that she does not believe in violence can be seen in three occasions: when Kathleen has a drink with Annie and Annie says that all the Briths should go home, which Kathleen notices that will not help her because her life will be the same. The second scene is placed a minute after Bobby’s death: riots begin in the streets and her youngest son is lost. She finds him with a rock in his hands aiming at a British tank. She throws the rock away meaning a stopping, maybe of the Killing. The third is the scene after Gerard’s arrest after having killed a British soldier. In Kathleen’s division of the world as sons and mothers, not Irish and British, the Soldier was also” a mother’s son as you are mine”.
In 1992, five years before the release of Some Mother’s Son, Romania had a premiere of Cel mai iubit dintre pamanteni (The Most Beloved among Men). The script was adapted by Lucian Nicolau for the screen. It is based on Marin Preda’s homonymous novel. It should have been called The Bastards Era being set in Romania, more exactly the Cluj, of the 1950’s. Nicolau wanted to extract the whole essence of the drama of Victor Petrini, a Philosophy university assistant. His tragedy begins when he is arrested - no reason whatsoever - by the Security, the Communist militia. The Communist regime has just started so there is a change, a mutation of the weltanschaung here too.
Petrini goes in a high security prison, crowded with aristocrats and intellectuals. There is a tragical-comical scene where the intellectuals are re-educated meaning that they are taught to do practical things like baskets. A completely uneducated man, a craftsman, explains the procedure of the basket making and then had the prisoners repeat after him, his conclusion being that “I like this people, they are really smart”. Petrini has awful experiences: cold mines, he assists at a rape scene, and he even kills a guardian that was always giving him troubles.
The cast is really wonderful: Stefan Iordache (a little bit older and not so convincing Petrini), Mircea Albulescu, Dorel Visan, Gheorghe Dinica, Maia Morgenstern. It is a real life movie made after the fall of the regime. Consequently we can see it as liberation from the old ways.
You should definitely see them both not only for aesthetical pleasure but because they are a vivid reminder of the past. There would be also the marvellous cast and splendid director Terry George of Some Mother’s Son. He and Jim Sheridan gave hands for another gripping film In the Name of the Father, starring Daniel Day Lewis. You shall be impressed by the cold touch of reality when Annie tells Kathleen: “At least you had a choice”
The Garage
(Director: Lenny Abrahamson)
by Ormeny Francisc
“Garage”, pretty much like the movie “The Cage”(with Nicholas Cage) and like Camus’s novel “The Stranger” deals with the subject of the misfit one and with two main issues: “What’s going to happen to those who simply cannot and will not adapt themselves to this society?” and “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.”
This movie, directed by Lenny Abrahamson is an ultra-minimalist drama about a very, very lonely man, Josie (played by Pat Shortt)…but! paradoxically very happy, or, better said, more at peace with himself and with his condition than any existentialist philosopher could ever-never actually be.
Far from being an idiot or the buffoon of the village, Josie(the name suggests femininity and tenderness) is in fact a much too deep and good individual. The problem of the society is that he(Josie) does not truly accepts it; instead he has learned to very kindly avoid it by becoming IMMUNE TO IT. That is why this sweet and gentle man is by no means bothered by the fact that he is taken advantage of by his boss, who gets him to work extra hours for no extra pay, and made fun of by his low-life chums in the local pub.
Society will not tolerate such immunity(utter sign of disrespect) and will destroy him by hitting him where it hurts the most: it questions the very purity of his inner self and projects him into a pedophile. Too deep and too idealist in relation to himself(this could be interpreted as an act of utter egolatry as well) he cannot accept this perfidious foul( in fact a deprived of fair-play finishing stroke) and commits suicide. The sad thing about it is that, before drowning himself, he has a child’s sad and remorseful face, not the usual full-of-despair-lust-and-utter-hatred look of the average suicidal guy. (the movie falls into cheap symbolism: the drowning of the innocent puppies anticipates the drowning of the innocent Josie). This is the final test that a beatific unruffled smile plastered permanently on his complex, unusual(in the sense of too childish for his age), funny and sad at the same time face---was not a lie!
He reminds me more and more of that neutral(in fact “strategic” enough) idiot/”idiot”[to use Linda Hutcheon’s terminology] who, during the séances of the Communist Party would make a tiny little clumsy blunder by means of which he provokes laughter and thus destroys the general atmosphere of sobriety within that gathering. Despite the séance being compromised, the Party can’t do anything about this Deconstructionist: apart from his hilarious behavior he poses no real threat to the Party and to brutally annihilate him would be a sign of depravity on the part of the Strong Party…so It simply lets him live on. This was Josie’s case until he was accused of immoral behavior (pedophilia). This is the point where the previous comedy falls into tragedy, where “the suspension of disbelief” on the side of the System is turned into aggressive suspicion.
Our national main 19th century literary critique, Titu Maiorescu said that “Behind each and every comedy , there lies a tragedy”. Shakespeare knew it as well, for which reason he purposely introduced passages of tragedy into comedies and passages of comedy into tragedies. The critiques say that he(Shakespeare) did it because he knew that laughter after laughter within a comedy may result into that situation appearing sad to the public, as well as that tears after tears within a tragedy may result into something very comic. In order to avoid such a painful and uncomfortable situation, he mixed the two genres. It may be so, but it may also be the fact that the genius of Shakespeare foresaw and brilliantly illustrated with his subtle tragicomic mixtures the universal truth that, life,
invisibly turns from comedy to tragedy. The difference of level created in the abrupt process of fall from comedy to tragedy may be fatal to most of us…it could be a sort of a no-man’s-land out of which few actually manage to get out: who would or could imagine that a guy who phlegmatically and laboriously gathers up a bunch of empty beer cans, finds no receptacle to place them in, and throws them all back into the high weeds(the scene would cause ecologists a heart attack) will end up committing suicide?!
First a total defiance and even a provocation of society’s accepted norms, then the as-helpless-as-a-child victim of its(society’s) hypocritical dogmatism. Weird !
The abrupt transition from tragedy to comedy illustrates how fragile life can actually be…
The film tackles on other issues as well: the evil nature of children, their satanic, hypocritical nature: now your friend, the next moment your utter executioner.
The child is a naturally born tyrant: should you only allow him to, he/she won’t hesitate to exploit you to the maximum and to stab you in the back whenever necessary. David’s act of betrayal is unpardonable…The theme is brilliantly exploited by Benoît Duteurtre’s novel “The Little Girl and the Cigarette”, where, in a politically-correct society a Hedonistic guy hides himself in the toilet in order to enjoy a good old healthy Marlboro(smoking was utterly prohibited in that type of society). In order to make it more credible he takes his pants down and smokes naked with his genitalia exposed(as if evacuating)…in case one might suspect what he’s doing, he can produce a sound as if getting his pants back on. One day, while doing it, he forgets to lock the door properly and gets caught by a little girl. He threatens her to get the hell out but, being naked when he threatened her, he is accused of having lured her into the toilet in order to have intercourse with her. He is at first imprisoned and, as the trial evolves, a hostile public opinion leads to his effective decapitation!!!
A surrealistic moment(like the fight with the potatoes in Poteen) is Josie’s love for an unhappy horse. Like in Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher”(where, as Roderick Usher gets healthy-his sister seems to fall dead again, and thus the two brothers seem to feed on the very same reservoir of energy and, in order for one to survive, the other has to die), Josie’s decay in life and energy, energizes the horse up to the moment when Josie’s death, strangely brings about the liberation of the horse. Strange!!!
Lucky me that I wasn’t forced to see another scene like the one from George Orwell’s “Animal’s Farm” where the good old horse is unjustly taken to the slaughter house. I simply couldn’t have taken that kind of images again…
Some Mother’s Son
by Narcisa Braşoveanu
The movie Some Mother’s Son is a very good production constructed on the story of two families, the Quigleys and the Higgins, whose destiny is intertwined with the larger frame of Irish history, this time the Irish History of the second half of the twentieth century, more precise the hunger strike of 1981 in Northern Ireland. Directed by Terry George and co-written by Jim Sheridan, the 1996 movie manages to recreate the insertion of political atmosphere into the smaller, but still important private life of the Irish individual of Northern Ireland. As a matter of fact, this movie seems to reshape the general theme of the 20th century Irish history, continuing a typical mixture of the private with the general, of subjectivism with objectivism, of individual destiny with collective, national destiny. Moreover, the individuals depicted within this movie display a concoction of diffused individual and national consciousness.The opening scene of the movie is very interesting as it presents the real Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister in 1979, quoting Francis de Assisi and transferring the content of some of his reflections about hope, peace and harmony into the context of Northern Ireland, a region which can hardly be characterized by such aspects. The insertion of the real into a fictive filmic reality, though different from a narrative world, it has the same effect of blundering the boundaries between universes with clearly distinct ontological status. Thus, this technique is meant to create a certain common framework between these worlds, a framework wherein the concepts of similitude and verisimilitude are the focuses of the filmic narrative.
Nevertheless, the real Margaret Thatcher and the fragments of some of her statements and declarations do appear throughout the movie, creating a separate sequence; the technique of introducing such real-life persona/figures/characters into the “narrative” flow of the movie is fortunate in this case as it strengthens the above-mentioned verisimilitude. In fact, the story that it presents is inspired by a true story. Moreover, the use of another real-life character, Bobby Sands (although he is interpreted by another actor, which is not the case with Thatcher, in her case the director using actual footage) helps to consolidate a realistic, intense story.
Beside the techniques of insertion and verisimilitude, the movie also unveils many parallelisms rendering synchronicity of time and displacements of space. Kathleen Quigley’s dancing lesson and the IRA bombing (in which her son is involved); Kathleen opening the Christmas gifts with her daughter and her son, Gerard, being captured along with Frankie Higgins; and Kathleen’s decision of keeping her son alive is simultaneous with Annie Higgins’s choice of respecting Frankie’s desire (being on hunger strike till the end), a choice resulting in Frankie’s death. All these are only some significant examples of the movie’s parallelisms, parallelisms that have as a main consequence the disruption of not only the time – space continuum, but also of the individuals’ subjective, internal existence.
Being an intense drama, Some Mother’s Son, is torn apart between the story of two women fighting for their sons’ life and freedom, on one hand and the general nationalistic will of the IRA members in jail regarding their status of “prisoners of war” and not simply prisoners. A comparison with a Romanian movie, namely Moartea domnului Lăzărescu may be drawn at a partially abstract – thematic level, the common feature being that of disregarded human rights (be them national, as in the case of Some Mother’s Son or social, in the case of the Romanian movie). Directed by Cristi Puiu, this film tells the story of Mr Lăzărescu, a 63 year old man who is sent from one hospital to another, nobody having any place for him. Subjected to this last deprivation, he dies. Although the comparison may seem far-fetched (at the first level of a critical view), it can be noticed that the similitude rests in the human decay ending, obviously, in death – the existential extinction which is willingly embraced by Frankie in order to make a point and to respect his own creeds, on one hand, and which is externally determined, and not subjectively assumed by Mr. Lăzărescu, on the other hand.
Thus, the Irish film reunites private destinies with public destinies on the background of a restless history, the human being having the paradoxical status of a prisoner of both objective history and individual ontology.