Washed
by the Gulf Stream is a comparative analysis that
tackles modern literary manifestations of Ireland and
the Caribbean. The author focuses on three main themes
related to Irish and Caribbean cultural experiences: (the
impossibility of) sanctuary or refuge, wandering or errantry
and (the inevitability of) exile. McGarrity’s text can
be compared to a kaleidoscope, in which the multi-coloured
beads form one whole image once light enters it and reflects
off its three mirrors. The image of the ‘Gulf Stream’
is revealing, and, together with the historic and geographic
elements, it creates the beam of light that connects the
different facets approached in this study of Irish and
Caribbean modern literary works. The novelty presented
in her work is the use of a historically contextualised
‘geographic imaginary’, the island imaginary, which determines
both literary traditions.
Although the book is divided into four chapters and a conclusion, McGarrity is able to link the dense literary texts that she profoundly explores, and she manages well the transitions not only from one narrative text to the other, but also from one chapter to the next. The outcome is a text with a flow that is a metaphor of the warm current of the Gulf Stream, described in mythology as ‘a single, distinct, clear current’ (p. 113), yet its actual course is dynamic and challenging.
In
the Introduction the author warns the reader against what
Foster calls ‘the common pitfall of comparative postcolonial
studies’ (p.22) when juxtaposing two islands with different
historical backgrounds. Though McGarrity charts with precision
the shared experience of colonialism, she highlights the
historical and cultural differences between Ireland and
the Caribbean. The first chapter depicts the historical
presence of the Irish in the Caribbean; the second deals
with the common themes of transgressive sexuality and
violated maternity in Irish Big House and Caribbean Plantation
novels in Rhys, Somerville and Ross, Banville and Carpentier;
the third is about the wandering of Joyce and Walcott
in their epic geographies; and the fourth presents the
connections between the Irish and the Caribbean Bildungsroman
tradition (Joyce and Lamming) and the more contemporary
memoirs of diaspora (Kincaid and McCourt). The aim of
the present review is to rethink the problematic of space
– thoroughly present in McGarrity’s work – and how the
authors of the selected novels create borders through
which the centre is constantly being displaced.
Although
space, as an aesthetic element, is recurrent in postcolonial
literatures, critics have not taken into consideration
how the process of creation is influenced by the locus
of a work. As expressed by McGarrity’s quoting Benedict
Anderson, the geographical space is commonly seen as ‘a
state imposed grid for imagined communities’, and this
grid is usually drawn to the benefit of those who have
more power - the metropolitan centres in the case of Ireland
and the Caribbean. Washed by the Gulf Stream
subverts this idea of space by stating that, ‘Island geographies
are imagined in and shape the consciousness of writers
and peoples, for whom the Gulf Stream operates as a metaphor
of geographic connection. This waterway reveals fundamental
aspects of individual identity and collective cultural
formation’ (23).
The
first space that McGarrity explores is the domestic space,
represented by the image of the house, in Irish Big House
novels, such as The Big House of Inver (1925),
by Somerville and Ross and Birchwood (1973),
by Banville, and in Caribbean plantation novels, as Wide
Sargasso Sea (1966), by Jean Rhys and The Kingdom
of this World (1957), by Carpentier. Both forms of
construction reveal luxury and ostentation on the outside,
with high walls built in the latest European styles, so
as to imitate the metropolis.
In “Of Other Spaces” (1967), Foucault expresses the idea of ‘heterotopias’ that are contrasted to utopias, for they are real places that are formed at the founding of a society. In Plantation and Big House novels, the physical space is represented by the Great House, whose grandiosity on the outside creates an image of strength; however, paradoxically, on the inside, these dwellings do not offer refuge. More specifically, the spaces represented by these houses can be considered, according to Foucault, as ‘crisis heterotopias’, that is, privileged or sacred places, reserved for individuals who are in a state of crisis in relation to society, such as the falling of empire and of the aristocracy, in both Ireland and the Caribbean. Thus, the imagery of the Big House constitutes a way of life where the coloniser in the colonies mimics that of the British metropolitan powers, which results in juxtaposed times and places.
In
Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1948), the
image of the house illustrates how imagination works in
the presence of shelter: it can either be a wall made
of shadows that offer the illusion of protection, or physical
shelter can be itself an illusion, when one doubts the
protection provided by the thickest of walls. Therefore,
in these literary genres, the walls do not offer refuge,
so it becomes impossible to escape the tragic ending,
common to the four novels. The monumental houses are literally
destroyed by fire in Carpentier, Jean Rhys and Sommerville
and Ross; however, in Birchwood it is Grandmother
Godkin who ignites. According to McGarrity, ‘fire becomes
an equalizing force, undermining distinctions based on
race, class, and religion, rejoining seemingly disparate
social groups’ (151). Due to the spatial limitations of
the island, the novels share a common ending represented
by the imagery of flight as the protagonists attempt to
escape the decayed environment that encircles them.
Washed
by the Gulf Stream also deals with geographical space,
since it ‘operates in literature as a marker of cultural
identity and as a means of association among what Europeans
consider the margins, the former colonies themselves’
(19). Both Joyce, in Ulysses (1922) and Walcott,
in Omeros (1990) remap their specific geographical
sites in order to establish new centres and question the
borders that separate land and sea, culture and identity.
Mc Garrity challenges the relations between the centre
and the margins, while stating that ‘The move to rethink
margins and borders is clearly a move away from centralization
with its associated concerns of origin, oneness and monumentality
(…) as the center becomes a fiction’ (58). This implies
that the boundaries between time, place and cultures no
longer divide; they, instead, express continuity.
Mc
Garrity mentions the way that Bhabha, in “How Newness
Enters the World”, highlights the necessity to consider
the ‘anxiety of the borderlines’ (137), which leads to
the understanding of the Bildungsromane of Joyce,
The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
and Lamming, In The Castle of My Skin (1953),
and the succeeding memoirs by McCourt, Angela’s Ashes
(1996) and Kincaid, My Brother (1997), all
of which symbolise the fragmentation of cultures that
arise through exile and emigration. In both genres, the
Bildungsromane and the memoirs, the displacement
of the protagonists is necessary in order to raise their
awareness about their geographical surroundings and about
the borders between centre and margin that are imposed
by the imperial centres. In Joyce and Lamming awareness
is raised once the protagonists return to their islands
of origins, whereas in Kincaid and McCourt, the only way
to escape the limiting island geography is to escape to
America, and return becomes impossible.
McGarrity’s
comparative analysis, which is based on the interface
between fiction and what she calls ‘island imaginary’,
provides a different perspective on the study of the aftermath
of the demise of imperialism in Ireland and in the Caribbean.
This review focuses on how the aesthetic element of space,
present in the aforementioned selected postcolonial works,
is subverted, as in the Irish Big House and Caribbean
Plantation novels, in which the domestic space no longer
offers sanctuary or refuge. Moreover, the present analysis
of Washed by the Gulf Stream concentrates on
the geographic space and the way McGarrity deals with
the constant displacement of the borderlines that existed
between the centre and the margins, which suggests that,
according to Linda Hutcheon, ‘To be ex-centric on the
border or margin, inside yet outside is to have a different
perspective’ (p 67). There is, therefore, a privileged
point of view from both the inside and the outside, once
the islands’ geographical limitations are overcome either
by a return to the place of origin, or by definite escape
from it.
Washed
by the Gulf Stream is fundamental for readers who
are interested in the cultural and historical relations
between Ireland and the Caribbean. It is also aimed at
students of postcolonial literatures as a whole and those
who grapple with the displacement of borderlines and the
problematic of space as an aesthetic element.
Maria
McGarrity is an associated professor at Long Island University.
She sits on the Editorial Board of the Caribbean journal,
Anthurium and has previously served as Managing
Editor of the James Joyce Literary Supplement.
References
-
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space (New
York: Orion Press, 1964).
-
Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias”
in Architecture Culture, 1943-1968: A Documentary Anthology. Ed: Joan Ockman. (New York: Columbia Books of Architecture/Rizzoli, 1993), pp. 419-426.
-
Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism (New
York: Routledge, 1988).
Notes
1
Mariana Bolfarine is a postgraduate student at the Department
of Modern Languages at the University of Săo Paulo, Brazil.
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