Gender and Sexuality Ireland Sample

7/29/2019 Gender and Sexuality Ireland Sample

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Boland's Cartesian Perspectivalism and "The Real Thing"

To the extent that these perspectives persist as alternatives, we might clarify

Ní Chuilleanáin's baroque perspective by contrasting it with the fixed and

foregrounded first-person of Eavan Boland's poetry. Boland's insistence on

speaking in the first person and on filtering all experience through anautobiograpical speaker corresponds, at least analogically, to the classic

perspective as first defined in Alberti De Pictura ( 1435). According to Bryson,

Alberti intended that

the eye of the viewer is to take up a position in relation to the scene that is

identical to the position originally occupied by the painter, as though both

painter and viewer looked through the same viewfinder on to a world unified

spatially around the centric ray, the line running from viewpoint to vanishing

point (it is probable that Alberti had in mind the model of the cameraobscura); unified spatially, but also informationally, since all the data

presented by the image are to cohere around a core narrative structure.34

Boland's preference in painters signals her differences from Ní Chuilleanáin's

baroque perspective and point of view. In her autobiographical treatise on

poetry, Object Lessons, Boland tells of searching for a model for celebrating

women's ordinary life but one free of feminist anger in response to that life's

restrictions:

In the genre painters of the French eighteenth century--in Jean Baptiste

Chardin in particular--I saw what I was looking for. Chardin's paintings were

ordinary in the accepted sense of the word. They were unglamorous,

workaday, authentic. Yet in his work these objects were not merely described;

they were revealed.35

A Chardin scholar praises this reactionary against French academic painting

for his "single-minded, uncompromising and passionate commitment to thething seen."36 Although Chardin's interiors limit spa

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cious prospects, he conforms to a conventional Renaissance or Albertian

perspective which situates our point of view securely with the artist's. As an

analogue to the perspectivist tradition in which Chardin participated where

the paired orthogonal lines fade to an intersection, Boland's poems

conventionally employ an imperial first- person speaker, and frequently open

with the pronoun "I," identified with the poet. The superb "Oral Tradition"37with its fixed first-person and its Chardinesque palette begins, "I was standing

there,"there being with her more than with the occasion, which is "a reading /

or a workshop or whatever." From this position she overhears two women in

muted conversation, scraps of one's story about her great- grandmother's

birth of her grandfather in an open field. Conveyed by women's memory

down several generations to lodge in a present moment, this story's summer

setting contrasts sharply with the setting of its retelling: a bitter winter's

night and this temporary refuge: "a firelit room / in which the color scheme /

crouched well down--/ golds, a sort of dun / a distressed ocher--/and the sole

richness was / in the suggestion of a texture / like the low flax gleam / that

comes off polished leather." A little later, the settling firelog inserts a

flickering parenthesis in the woman's story: "(Wood . . . / . . . / broke apart in

sparks, / a windfall of light / in the room's darkness)," an interruption that

emphasizes the fragile momentariness of the woman's retelling. The

seasonally enforced contrast between the original event and this retelling

extends into a contrast between the pellucid language and the textured

objects it describes and between the story's relative sparseness of

detail--"and she had on a skirt / of cross-woven linen"--and its resonance of

elaborated details in the poet's mind: "the bruised summer light, / the

musical subtext /

of mauve eaves on lilac

and the laburnum past

and shadows where the lime

tree dropped its bracts

in frills of contrast

where she lay down

in vetch and linen

and lifted up her son



to the archive

they would shelter in:

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This sheltering "archive" ("a public office" from the Greek root "to command,"

not to be confused with the plural, meaning "a body of records") becomes

ostensibly "the oral song," but in its poetic elaboration--the apparently

happenstance but actually highly opportunistic rhyme, the short pulsing

lines--the woman's story enters the archive of the poem, through the strict

governance of the poet. Although we receive directly scraps of talk, we

perceive through the poet who begins by standing, then journeying, then

reaching her epode, "a sense / suddenly of truth, / its resonance." This last

phrase could characterize a typical Boland poem which conveys quotidian

accident through the channel of the poet toward, if not truth, a sense of truth,

poetically delineated and elaborated through images presumed to be from a

shared world.38

We might presume that Ní Chuilleanáin's poem entitled "The Real Thing"39

underwrites such Bolandesque assumptions by seeming to nominate "Sister

Custos," (L. guard or custodian), as the passive butt of irony. In this convent

bricked off from modern life, she "Exposes her major relic, the longest /

Known fragment of the Brazen Serpent." On the basis of this irony, we might

suppose that the poem supports Eavan Boland's appeal to poets in "The

Journey" to turn from mythic artifice to subjects such as antibiotics or "the

protein treasures of the sea bed": "Depend upon it, somewhere a poet is

wasting / his sweet uncluttered meters on the obvious / emblem instead of

the real thing."40

Another reading of the last stanza of Ní Chuilleanáin's poem, however, can

support a different interpretation, one more consistent with other poems in

the volume.

Her history is a blank sheet,

Her vows a folded paper locked like a well.

The torn end of the serpent



Tilts the lace edge of the veil.

The real thing, the one free foot kicking

Under the white sheet of history.

Here, the force of displaced or latent action--choices of faith folded and

locked; rejected icons torn and kicking--and the image of blankness suggest

that the acting out and writing of history depend on such emblems of faith or

such "unreasonable" fictions freely chosen, which therefore are "the real

thing," as Sister Custos says.

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Ní Chuilleanáin's poem "Daniel Grose"41 addresses more directly the relation

of geometric, scientifically endorsed perspectives to the history they repress,

reminding us that, as W. J. T. Mitchell writes, "Perspective is a figure for what

we would call ideology--a historical, cultural formation that masquerades as a

universal, natural code."42 Early in the poem, the poet steps aside from the

artist's line of sight, which is aimed like a weapon: "Now the military

draughtsman / Is training his eye / On the upright of the tower, / Noting the

doors that open on treetops." The draughtsman, Daniel Grose, assumed the

authorship of Antiquities of Ireland ( 1792) at the death of his more famous

uncle the Englishman Francis Grose, and provided most of the etchings of

picturesque ruins that filled this book.43 His actual drawings, which includesuch famous ruins as Kells Church and Tower, Mellifont Abbey, and Boyle

Abbey, are parodied here in the "Abbey of the Five Wounds," his vanishing

point. Nowhere explicit in Grose's text, Christ's woundings echo in the words--

shatter, falls, pierced, spasm, the first wounding--associated with the

destruction of these buildings and their societies, which began during the

Reformation's confiscation of church properties: "Then silence for three

centuries / While a taste for ruins develops." In this picturesque panorama,

history is omitted: "No crowds engaged in rape or killing, / No marshalling of

boy soldiers, / No cutting the hair of novices."44

Responding to one of the strongest eckphrastic attractions, the poet then

temporalizes space, opening this picturesque effect to its historical causes:

Where is the human figure



He needs to show the scale

And all the time that's passed

And how different things are now?

The response is startling, even uncanny:

The old woman by the oak tree

Can be pressed into service

To occupy the foreground.

Her feet are warmed by drifting leaves.

This final line recalls the association of autumnal life and a repressed past in

Shakespeare's indirect reference--"bare ruined choirs"--to

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ruins of the "Old Church" (Sonnet 73). The aged woman, standing druidically

beside the oak, is the cailleach, that mysterious abandoned figure of Irishsociety and legend, a persona assumed sometimes by Eithne Strong and

Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill in their poetries and by Ni Chuilleanáin herself in a

recent essay subtitled "The Cailleach Writes about the Renaissance." She also

suggests the spéirbhean, the skywoman appearing here in her third

emanation as the hag,45 and therefore a figure of colonial repression,

employed to enforce the Anglo-Irish draughtsman's perspective but otherwise

ignored:

He stands too far away

To hear what she is saying,

How she routinely measures

The verse called the midwife's curse

On all that catches her eye, naming



The scholar's index finger, the piper's hunch,

The squint, the rub, the itch of every trade.

The cailleach represents the poet herself as the return of the repressed, abaroque extravagance, who, literally, "takes us beyond" the framed or bound

space of the engraving, aside from the geometric perspective, beyond spatial

into poetic measure and, thereby, into unrepresentable time.

Baroque Art and the Irish Language Tradition

Our use of baroque must be heavily qualified before it can become a valuable

way of characterizing Ní Chuilleanáin's poetry. An epochally, culturally, and

generically specific term must be translated from the seventeenth century to

the edge of the twenty-first, from a counterreformational Italy to the Irish

nation whose major religion was repressed, and from painting to poetry. In

fact, it is tempting to do as art historians have done, according to Jay, ever

since the late-Victorian publication of Heinrich Wölfflin Renaissance and

Baroque:

postulate a perennial oscillation between two styles in both painting and

architecture. In opposition to the lucid, linear, solid, fixed, plimetric, closed

form of the Renaissance, or as Wölfflin later called it, the classical style, the

baroque was painterly, recessional, soft-focused, multiple, and open.46

-202-We might free the term altogether from its seventeenth-century base as

Jay and Buci-Glucksman do when they declare baroque "the scopic regime

that has finally come into its own in our time."47 One could suspect that their

claim merely refashions standard binaries such as romantic and classic,

Arnold's celtic and saxon, or even Catholic and Protestant. Yet, even if we seesuch binaries as fictions of a dialectical view of history, we have to concede

also some oppositional, and thereby binary, element in all literature.

Certainly, Ireland's colonial position has forced many of its writers--

particularly but not exclusively Catholic ones--to recover their own traditions

within an adversarial situation. Without extending the term in this essay, we

might entertain the possibility that the word baroque could helpfully

distinguish certain Irish writers from other British or Irish writers.



Although other Irish writers, such as Joyce, Synge, the Yeats of "Vacillation"

and the Crazy Jane poems, Devlin, Flann O'Brien, Clarke, Kinsella, Montague,

Muldoon, McGuckian, and Ní Dhomhnaill, to name only a few, may reveal

baroque characteristics, the term seems paricularly appropriate for thepoetry of Ní Chuilleanáin. In those qualities we have named--a return of the

feminine, shifting or indeterminate points of view, an emphasis on the body

and desire, a disjunction between different levels of reality, mobile or

disappearing borders or frames, startling metamorphoses, sudden or fleeting

references to the sacred, and the housing in architecture of her own art-- Ní

Chuilleanáin translates the Baroque aesthetic into her own distinctive poetic

art. Because her subject, and that of the writers named above, is the return

of the repressed--religion, the Irish language, the feminine--her poetry

necessarily conveys glimpses, incomplete or unrecovered narratives, and

sudden eruptions.

Representing this gap between an emotional response to some event and an

account of that event, or between what can be told and what must remain

secret or unsaid, preoccupies much of Ni Chuilleanáin's poetry. As one

reviewer states succinctly, "Usually her poems encapsulate a telling scene

from a larger untold narrative . . ."48 Furthermore, this very absence or

suppression of the context for poems or stories or songs has its own tradition

in Irish culture. We find this gap represented in enigmatic and secret poems

not only by Ní Chuilleanáin but also by some of the other poets most deeply

rooted in Irish tradition, such as Kinsella, Carson, Muldoon, and

-203-Gender and Sexuality in Modern Ireland

By: Anthony Bradley; Maryann Gialanella Valiulis

Documents

Gender and Sexuality Ireland Sample