Liquid Labyrinths

Stewart Parker’s play, Northern Star, begins with the character of Henry Joy McCracken reciting his seaborn heritage as a descendant of Huguenots and Covenanters, his mongrel inheritance ‘natural’ to his Belfast birth, the city a port of refuge from ‘the storm of history’. McCracken is remembered now as a United Irishman who was executed for his part in the 1798 rebellion, an insurrection that lingers still in the public consciousness of the city and its past. Northern Star was first performed in 1984 and through it Parker created a space for expressions of identity and place beyond the Troubles; that he did so in metaphors of storms and sea suggests the imaginative depth of the city’s maritime attachments, which form the basis of this chapter’s readings of mid-twentieth-century cultural production in the north of Ireland, including Seamus Deane, Medbh McGuckian, Sinead Morrissey, Glenn Patterson, and Ciaran Carson.

Heaney Offshore

This chapter reads Seamus Heaney’s engagement with water, liquidity, and shore and coastlines throughout his poetry. Seamus Heaney is so familiar as the laureate of Mossbawn and its extended enclosures that his poetry seems impossible to uproot from its locality. The northern countryside that nourished, and often troubled, his imagination is a dominant metaphor for the poet’s ideas of family, community and, by extension, nationality. Under-observed in all this is another element in Heaney’s writing, which is the use of water as a medium to imagine other kinds of human association. Water is a key image throughout Heaney’s work in the form of rivers, streams, bogs, lakes, and oceans; it is there at the beginning as a drip from the farmyard pump, and there again at the end in the eel fishery at Lough Neagh, as this chapter discusses in close readings of his poems.

Into the Archipelago

This chapter reads the twelve issues of the journal Archipelago, which was first published in 2007. Launched from the unlikely port of the Bodleian Library, it carried a complement of writers and artists whose coastal work was not thought previously to be part of a collective enterprise. Under Andrew McNeillie, the writer, editor, and provocateur, the twelve issues of Archipelago created a tilted framework through which to interpret the cultural history of the formerly, and temporarily, British Isles. This much is evident from the journal’s cover, which features an illustration of Ireland, Scotland, England, Wales, and the very tip of France from the far north-west perspective of a gannet’s plunge. This is a composite vision, geographic, ecological, and prophetic, a manifesto sketched in the unfamiliar outlines of an archipelago whose borders the journal navigates in a journey that proceeds in sequences of association.

Kevin Barry’s Atlantic Drift

Kevin Barry is a short story writer, novelist, dramatist, and editor, with Olivia Smith, of Winter Papers, an annual anthology of contemporary Irish writing. His work is steeped in music, film, and television, and echoes with their influence. Underpinning this is an attachment to writers like Dermot Healy and John McGahern, both novelists whose importance to a writer like Barry makes all the more sense from a coastal, and an archipelagic, perspective. His binding theme is disappointment and his lyricism is braided into the tragic perspective his characters, and his narrators, have of the human condition, which is for the most part a tilting balance between anxiety and drink. These edgy narratives are often set in wet weather by the sea and as so often in this book, the coastal margin operates as a hydroscape in which the boundaries between innocence and experience fragment and shift.

Wavy Rhythms

The idea of other islands on farther shores resides deep in the traditions of Irish literature and goes back to phases of mythology, exploration, and odyssey. In the modern period this dispersal has happened from economic necessity, which has depended in turn on innovations in the technology of travel. The transit overseas was shaped by Ireland’s traumatic historical experiences, and this complex panorama is background to many works of Irish literature, both historical and contemporary. At the same time, an interest in the sea crossings that were the bridge between Ireland and its emigrants’ destinations is a subject in itself, as are the many port cities into which these temporary mariners filtered on disembarkation. This chapter reads versions of the sea-crossing to New York in fictions of Joseph O’Connor, Joseph O’Neill, and Colum McCann, all of whose works suggest the idea of the Atlantic as a place of continual transit.

Coastal Joyce

Coastlines shape all of Joyce’s books, which are all immersed in water. Images of liquidity and fluidity are central to Joyce’s practice, while the physical and historical geography of Ireland in his works is connected together by the construction of watery links. This geography extends to the mental coordinates of the characters themselves, many of whom are linked to other places by the sea and its commerce, joins that become visible on Dublin’s quays and foreshores. This chapter situates Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by the coastal curve from Howth head to Kingstown, an arc in which much of Joyce’s writing is set, Dublin an aqua city that had, by the beginning of the twentieth century, dwindled in significance to Britain’s oceanic empire.

Erskine Childers and The Riddle of the Sands

Of all the characters involved in the Irish revolution Erskine Childers is among the most ambiguous. The son of an English father and an Irish mother, both of whom died in his childhood to leave the young boy in the care of relatives in County Wicklow, he went to Haileybury College and then to Cambridge, where by the end of the 1890s he served as a parliamentary clerk with a view to becoming a Liberal Member of Parliament. The critical turn in his life was Childers’s marriage to the Boston-born Molly Osgood in 1904, the year after he published The Riddle of the Sands, which was an immediate and a runaway success. This chapter is a study of the book as a work of coastal literature and includes never before seen archival material.

Fluidity and Form in Hamilton, Banville, and Enright

This chapter offers readings of three recent Irish novels that take water, the coast, history, and family as their subject: Hugo Hamilton’s The Speckled People, first published in 2003; John Banville’s The Sea, which won the Booker Prize when it was published in 2005; and Anne Enright’s The Gathering, which also won the Booker when it was published in 2007. The chapter explores these novels as experiments in a liquid prose whose porous narratives complicate ideas of memory and belonging. Mournful and resilient, The Gathering is one of the best written and most relentless novels in modern Irish fiction. Like The Speckled People and The Sea, it is speculative and uncertain, Enright’s reflections on family and attachment shaped, like those of Hamilton and Banville, by an intense awareness of water as a resource for imagery and characterization capable of representing the complexity of the evaporating moment.

At the Ebb Tide

This chapter maps the diverse coastal cultures of Irish literature through the periodicals of the mid-century, moving from The Bell, to Atlantis, the Honest Ulsterman, Poetry Ireland, and others. When Seán O’Faoláin began The Bell in 1940 he faced severe challenges of war, partition and economic distress, which had fragmented his audience and stunted his resources. It begins with a description of O’Faoláin’s childhood upbringing in the port city of Cork and follows the diverse ways in which the sea, and its fringes, shaped literature and criticism in a period of rapid cultural transition. Populated by a diverse cast of writers, artists and adventurers including Elizabeth Bowen, Peadar O’Donnell, Robert Gibbings, and Claire McAllister, this chapter winds from the Lee to the Seine by way of the Wye in its mapping of mid-century archipelagic cultures.

Jack Yeats’s Scrapbooks

A one-time commercial illustrator, a playwright and a fiction writer, Jack Yeats spent much of his early adult life in in Devon, where he lived before he moved to Greystones, County Wicklow, in 1910. He loved to swim and to sail, and the characteristic he valued most was a wildness that he associated with a natural freedom, a liberty that drew him to paint travellers, fishermen, and circus performers. Wildness for Yeats was a freedom from self-consciousness and a capacity to act gaily, a characteristic he drew with vigor in his sketches of jockeys, boxers, and pirates for his children’s theatre. This last represented a freedom of the port and sea that was anchored in a much older culture of oceanic trade and discovery and the portals of this maritime world were a threshold between the diverse cultures that Yeats inhabited, which this chapter reads through his scrapbook collection.