One of Ireland’s most-lauded poets, Derek Mahon’s work dealt often with themes of displacement and alienation, cultural decay, and the environment. In this article from 2018, James McElroy analyses the dismissal within Irish critical practice of nature as a distinct presence within Irish literature. McElroy argues this is especially true in the case of Mahon, where “nature as extra-textual other, or important poetic trope, has often been passed over in order to serve some of the more pressing ideological needs of Ireland’s critics”.
A Belfast native, James “Jim” McElroy lectured at the University of California, Davis, where his teaching focused on a variety of disciplines, including Nature & Irish Literature, Early Victorian Literature, and Journalism. He passed away in 2021.
James McElroy, ‘Eco-Criticism and Derek Mahon’s ‘A Disused Shed in County Wexford’’, Studies: An Irish Review, Vol. 107, No. 426 (Summer 2018), 215 – 229. JSTOR link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/90021951
A wide assortment of what might be called ‘eco-contradictions’ define Irish critical practice. These serve to fashion a critical notation that narrows or eliminates the significance of nature in Irish literature by forestalling any extended discussion of floral or faunal species variation. The net result is that ‘nature’ often ends up being hidden in plain sight. This is true of Mahon Studies, where nature as extra-textual other, or important poetic trope, has often been passed over in order to serve some of the more pressing ideological needs of Ireland’s critics. Such an optic guarantees (all but) that mainstream critical approaches remain locked inside, and fixated on, a stymied sense of ‘nature’, which only has to do with, and only finds its assertionist epistemological roots in, established topographical questions and answers. In a gradual and graduated departure from that ubiquitous metonym known as ‘the land’, this article will therefore pursue an eco-symptomatic reading that tries to identify some of the more egregious gaps, lapses and silences – aporiai – that have gone unmentioned in critical discourse because the idea of nature, as deployed in most Irish criticism, either sidelines or suppresses the very ‘nature’ it claims to open up for analysis.
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For the record, Mahon is a poet who has, whatever his omission from certain eco-texts in recent years, engaged in any number of eco-ventures focused on what the world so often defines, or dismisses, as subjects of lesser taxonomic importance because they are, from a homocentric or species-ist standpoint, said to be uninviting, unimportant or unpoetic. None of his ecological reference work is mere happenstance. Rather, almost all the flora and fauna he uses in his poetry tend to exhibit certain key taxonomic characteristics, the same kinds of speciate characteristics which could, at the level of cultural anthropology, be ascribed to a beleaguered Protestant community known for its perpetual concerns over survival in an inhospitable environment.
This fascination with survival under pressure is clearly spelled out in such poems as ‘Under the Volcanoes’, where Mahon references ‘volcanic sand, the cactus thick and coarse / in the dry scrub beyond the beaten track’. He further, and defiantly, celebrates how it is right in the midst of such scrub-like conditions (‘formed from the dark interior of the globe’) that ‘cork and honeysuckle start from scratch’.
A related expression of plant (and other) life forms appears in ‘Tithonus’, which is set in a post-apocalyptic world where the sun is said to rise ‘On cinders, ashes, / Their textures bright / By nuclear light’. What is perhaps most intriguing about this text is the way Mahon’s plant species continue to survive, if not flourish, in a hostile environment and bear witness to ‘a violent/ Riot of saxifrage / Splitting the rocks’…Not only that, but Mahon makes it clear that the cricket of his poem is a real survivor. And it – she? he? – is a real survivor because, even though the poem suggests ‘nature is dead’, the cricket still gets on with it, telling the reader that whenever it stops ‘nattering on’ the only thing left is the ecology of a remnant wind.
Thus the same cricket who proclaims, ‘I hoped to catch / My death, to croak / On this mountainside’, turns out to have a vivid memory of times past. And what does Mahon’s post-apocalyptic cricket remember most? Well, among his most cherished memories there are the ecologies of ‘the leaf-plink’ of raindrops and a ‘lizard-flick’ in the scrub as ‘Genghis / Khan entered Peking’…
Nature loves to hide,
Heraclitus said, But nature is dead:There are no branches To frame the eyes
Of my contemporaries.I hoped to catch My death, to croak
On this mountainside;But Eos’ wish Proved greater Than any winter.
I forget nothing But if I told
Everything in detail –Not merely Golgotha And Krakatoa
But the leaf-plinkOf raindrops after Thermopylae, The lizard-flick
In the scrub as Genghis Khan entered Peking And the changing clouds,
I would need Another eternity, Perish the thought.
The express need to feature botanical or, as above, insect species in anthropomorphically speaking unendearing environments is something that has characterised Mahon’s work from early on.
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Mahon’s poetic is clearly one that likes to envision the natural order as being ‘other than’. In ‘A Postcard from Berlin’, this means moving readers from the urban, ‘we know the cities by their stones / Where Ararat flood-water shines’, to a ground level of violets which ‘have struggled through / The bloody dust’. Another iteration of things that ‘have struggled’ is available in ‘A Garage in Co. Cork’, where Mahon runs down some entropic memorabilia and introduces the kinds of peripheral – or so-called ‘peripheral’ – species that he finds so captivating. Hence, although the poem might at first seem to offer nothing more than some non-descript ‘earth-residence’, once we take a closer look at its inhabitants we slowly begin to realise just how much his talk of ‘uneven ground’ serves as an important pitstop for a living ecology – ‘Rainbowed with oily puddles, where a snail / Had scrawled its slimy, phosphorescent trail’.
It is in such an ‘uneven’ but immensely rich environment that we come across a botanical cosmology which is as alive as it is uncultivated and untended, with ‘Dust-laden shrubs and coils of rusty wire, / A cabbage-white fluttering in the sodden / Silence of an untended kitchen garden’. According to Richard Rankin Russell this, Mahon’s world of ‘Dust-laden shrubs’, owes a particular debt to Philip Larkin who, Russell claims, had a considerable impact on Mahon’s work even though his importance has been ‘slighted’ in some critical quarters.
Russell claims that this unrealised influence is especially noticeable in ‘A Garage in Co. Cork’, as evidenced by the close correspondence between it and Larkin’s ‘Church Going’ and ‘The Whitsun Wedding’ (he adds to this list ‘Aubade’ and ‘High Windows’). He feels it is particularly important for us to recognise that, despite Larkin’s great influence on him, Mahon in the end rejected Larkin’s ‘eventual drift toward death and nihilism’, and instead embraced ‘lost and marginalised human, animal and vegetal life’.
This talk of marginalia, as in marginalised ‘animal and vegetal life’, helps to further reinforce the premise that Mahon’s verses like to make their homes in what anthropomorphists construe as dire and dank circumstances…‘Plant Life’ touches on similar subject forms with Mahon’s botanica being sorted out as resilient typologies which – who – want ‘to think and propagate, / escape from the close earth, / the traditional dark fate’.
These diverse botanical works provide a crucial coefficient for evaluating Mahon’s world of off-track shades and crepuscular lighting, where plants and neighbouring taxa survive, even if their lot appears to offer no hope, or provide no way out. In one of his own critical articles, ‘Huts and Sheds’, Mahon provides some important insight with reference to how we might set about speaking of such alternative ecological spaces. Throughout, he hails sheds and huts as being nothing short of ‘magical’ and shows himself to be sold on the idea that they serve as supplements which can, if permitted, influence our conventional understanding of space and spatial-ness: ‘Known or unknown unknowns, immune to market forces, they offer their own spatial poetics’. As it happens, Mahon’s shed-based criticism (knowingly or not) helps throw into question traditional pastoralist readings and enters into a thoughtful discussion about the fact that a certain ‘fascination’ with huts and sheds, and other ‘modest interiors’, is a ‘curious and recurrent feature of twentieth century “Anglo-Irish” fiction’. In an attempt to understand this feature of Anglo-Irish writing, Mahon surmises that such interiors symptomatise an ‘obscure longing for intimacy and absolution, as if grace and truth lay there and not in their own drawing rooms’…
…As well as trying to figure out why Ireland’s Protestant Ascendancy might find some measure of absolution in a ‘disused potting shed’, Mahon’s own concerns on the shed/hut front have often seen him take refuge in just such sheds, huts or outhouses. This predilection to work on, and inside, alternate structural environs seems to satisfy, though admittedly under somewhat different socio-historical circumstances, much the same ideological needs Anglo-Irish writers have expressed as members of a colonial class with roots in historical Protestantism…[his] verses (and whether this is clear to critics or not) help to de-territorialise the standard expectations of Irish criticism, since Mahon’s triangulated references to sheds and huts – not to mention their diverse inhabitants – serve as antitheses, or, better, antidotes to ‘geographical determinism’…
…Mahon continues his unabashed celebration of sheds and huts by asserting that, whenever it comes to looking at sheds, ‘The riches of this world will be found in a handful of dust or the faint stir of a cobweb’.
It is with this last reference to huts and sheds that we edge closer and closer to reading the ecologies of ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’, with its lines about how ‘Spiders have spun’ and flies have ‘dusted to mildew’. Moreover, it is time for us to begin looking at the eco-world Mahon’s mushrooms inhabit and try to understand how the poem showcases (knowingly, unknowingly, or otherwise) a cenobitic micro-habitat, with attendant micro-climate, which is perfectly well suited to the kind of intrepid species variation that dwells within the ‘Shed’s’ confines.
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It is evident that Mahon’s fly figures sometimes represent, and even at times actualise, an entrapped species which, under human purview, tries to find some way out of small-spaced darkness and find resurrection (as it were) in the light to come. In some respects, the similarities between the insular worlds that these flies inhabit and the world his own Northern Irish Protestant community inhabit are striking: such insects are in their eco-actuality, as well as in their symptomatic bearing, indices of an over-determinate quality which pervades Mahon’s works even when a poem dealing with flies, wildflowers or the like, appears to have nothing to do with nature, and perhaps even less to do with Protestantism. What has just been said about Mahon’s flies can also, quite easily, be applied to Mahon’s mycological types and how they are portrayed as conscious life forms possessing a kind of animate will, wherein they ‘have learnt patience and silence’. To the point, ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’ makes clear that, even after years and years of isolation in a cenobitic environment of uncelestial shade, ‘there is life yet in their feverish forms’. More, it is ‘their feverish forms’ that beg us, in their ‘wordless way’, to rethink the poem’s mycological species in terms other than our own and so withstand the temptations of species-ism in both theory and practice.
In so many ways and in so many senses, ‘A Shed’ is therefore a work whose mushrooms evidence rhizomatic possibilities and suggest…that the West’s foundational iconographies, as in our Garden of Eden imagery, have precluded alternative ways of thinking about roots, rootedness and ‘the land’…By extension…Mahon finds an alternative means of writing about roots and rootedness by introducing a version of ‘rootedness’ that is in a sense unrooted but never in danger of being uprooted.
This rhizomatic preference is something that Mahon has favoured from early on in his career. We can think back to his critical review of John Hewitt who was so intent on proving, as he put it in his article, ‘The Bitter Gourd,’ that a true Ulster native is a ‘rooted’ man because any real Northern Irish Protestant has to be rooted or he would end up being nothing more than ‘an airy internationalist, thistledown, a twig in a stream’. In a related article, ‘No Rootless Colonist,’ the same Hewitt, after arguing that ‘people of Planter stock often suffer from a crisis of identity, of not knowing where they belong’, insists, and this in avowedly cartographic terms, that ‘An artist, certainly in literature, must have a native place, pinpointed on a map, even if it is only to run away from’.
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We should never forget, of course, that Mahon’s intriguing mushroom colony found abundant textual antecedent in Sylvia Plath’s ‘Mushrooms’, as published in The Colossus and Other Poems (1968). David Kennedy agrees that Mahon’s ‘Shed’ had, from the beginning, an altogether close association with Plath’s mycelial piece in a number of respects, though he notes that Mahon’s mushrooms tend to be passive victims while Plath’s fungi ‘seem like a guerrilla force, working under cover of darkness’. This and a few other minor differences, notwithstanding, Kennedy highlights some notable similarities between both pieces, as when Plath’s mushrooms are said to be ‘voiceless’, while Mahon’s are ‘wordless’. Kennedy further observes that the mushrooms in Mahon’s poem – ‘Those nearest the door’ which cry out, “Elbow room! Elbow room!”’ – are, in Plath’s poem, ‘“nudgers and shovers” in spite of themselves’. Perhaps the most inviting part of Kennedy’s analysis is that it ends up fashioning a reading of ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’ which supports the core premise that ‘the use of mushrooms articulates scepticism about deriving symbols from the land itself’. Kennedy concludes, regarding the ‘inadequacy of symbols’ at the level of the eco-semiotic, that Mahon’s shed ‘is what the poet has to work with and, as such, it suggests both the impossibility of representing a whole society and historical period and the inadequacy of symbols’.
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This and a host of Buell’s other questions could surely now be brought to bear on Irish literature in general and Mahon Studies in particular: ‘To what extent is the ambiguous legacy of western pastoralism adaptable to an environmentalist end? How can the categories of literary theory be reenvisioned so as to bring the environmental dimension of literary texts into better focus? What happens when we try to reread literature with biota rather than homo sapiens as our central concern? What then become the major discourses, and what fundamental informing – and reforming – perceptions do they bring to light? How does a green reading of literary accomplishment illuminate the history of public taste and help to shape its underlying values?’
Photo credit: Flickr, Coalfields Local History Association