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seems partly inspired by the real-life Alfred Cort Haddon (1855–1940). As David McConnell explains in the programme notes, Haddon, a graduate from Cambridge University, was appointed Professor of Zoology at the Royal College of Sciences in Dublin in 1880: ‘A follower of Galton he became interested in distinguishing races and sub-races by measuring the shapes of skulls (craniology), and in relating these physical qualities to behaviour’.34 The Gallery Press edition of the playscript features both an extract from ‘Studies in Irish Craniology: The Aran Islands, Co Galway
in the old ancestral homeland. It is towards the west of Ireland, the place of myth and folklore and Irish language, that the memoir is drawn. The title recalls another literary work of indeterminate genre, John Millington Synge’s book The Aran Islands, in which the Irish playwright in the guise of anthropologist encounters the denizens of those far-flung islands. In his account of his visits to Inishmore, the largest of the islands, Synge recalls how he met an old blind fisherman called Mairtin Conneely, who told him the story of how Satan and his angels were
troublesome friendship with Kevin Concannon, Vid gains access to Kevin’s life story and to a dark family legend of discrimination and exclusion linked to the symbolically charged Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland. Thus, Kevin’s life story and the family’s ‘silent [or, rather, silenced] ancestry’ are the two narratives that will enable Vid to find a different sense of place in his host country. By emphasising the connecting points between Kevin’s and Vid’s experiences of estrangement in Ireland, the novel fosters what Ronit Lentin has called a ‘politics of
. The final breakdown of the Gaelic language and the accompanying penetration of its territory by English-language newspaper and political posters, by mass-produced goods and the demands of the London markets, will be delicately reflected in the work of J. M. Synge. The Aran Islands has more to say about factory trawlers than W. B. Yeats ever conceded, and the recognition of
, and then washed up on the shores of the Aran Islands, a century earlier. As Hamilton makes clear in his afterword to the novel, the story of the drowned woman is neither fictional nor literary but a vestigial folktale ‘about her death which entered into the memory of the landscape’ (89). From Vid Ćosić’s perspective, it is the protrusions of modernity on this landscape of memory that prevent the Concannon family and community at large from comprehending and mourning her loss.2 183 Jason King Hence, Vid Ćosić travels to Connemara to conjure an image of Máire
, written in consequence of Artaud’s Irish affair, concerned largely with attempts to secure payment of a lodging debt of £1 17s 6d run up by Artaud in the Aran Islands (with the whereabouts of a cherished ‘walking stick’ a prominent side issue), has been published: ‘“An absent-minded person of the student type”: Extracts from the Artaud file’, Dublin Review, 1 (Winter 2000–1), 55–80; as the editorial commentary suggests, these texts could of themselves constitute a viable sketch for the theatre of the absurd. The Irish composer Raymond Deane conflated the Irish visits of
, 1910–55 the previous chapter, Steinbeck was inspired by J. M. Synge’s depiction of Aran island peasants in Riders to the Sea (1903) when writing his own ‘play-novelette’ Burning Bright (1952), which transposed the Atlantic coast location of Synge’s play to the three settings of circus, farm and ship. The Revivalists’ portrayals of peasants, which saw them alternately as spiritual visionaries or uncouth symbols of the ‘real’ Ireland, garnered popularity and controversy. Yeats comments in Dramatis Personae how his playwright patron and friend Lady Gregory ‘was born to
across the Burren affording magnificent views across Galway Bay to the Aran Islands. This is obviously the central action in the essay (as in the later novel) – geographic and symbolic in equal measure. But she asserts that while the scenes are stunning, they are on an ‘Irish’ scale and ‘therefore a little less than vast’. This may be her father’s part of the world, yet the terrain is somehow for her ‘always maternal’. She remembers it from childhood; it comforts her and allows her a sense of homecoming. It corresponds then to the mother Enright appears to have had and
