Utopian island realism in J. M. Synge’s travel narrative of The Aran
Islands and Tomás O’Crohan’s autobiography The
Islander
What is the relationship between the
“no-where” of utopian imagination and the realist impulse to
represent faithfully the world in the here and now. This case study explores this
question through an examination of the literary-spatial topos of the island in two
key texts of twentieth-century Irish works of realist literature: Tomás O’Crohan’s
Irish-language autobiographical work, The Islander (1937), and
J. M. Synge’s diaristic travel narrative, The Aran Islands (1907).
Reading these works comparatively, I link Synge’s and O’Crohan’s apparently
sui generis representations of life on the western islands of
Ireland to the broad literary and critical tradition of European realism and locate
the influence therein of positivist, anthropological currents of thought as well
as the cultural politics of post-imperial nation building. Working in dialogue with
postcolonial, spatial, and Marxist criticism, this study articulates how a realist
fixation on the spatial figure of the island in these works enables a form of
culturally nationalist utopianism as well as an ambivalent form of spatially utopian
discourse that resists geographical, cultural, and epistemological totalization.
Article outline
- Introduction
- The utopian island: Real and imaginary
- Yeats’s dream, Synge’s island
- The blaskets: An autochthonous Island utopia
- Conclusion
-
Notes
-
Works cited