Michael Livermore 0:10
Welcome to the free range podcast. I’m your host, Mike Livermore. With me today is literary scholar Nicholas Allen, who is the Baldwin professor in the humanities at the University of Georgia. His latest book is Ireland literature and the coast. See tangled. Hi, Nicholas. Thanks for joining me today.
Nicholas Allen 0:27
My pleasure to be with you. Thank you for having me.
Michael Livermore 0:30
So you really have this absolutely wonderful book that you’ve published recently. The title is, Ireland, literature and the coast see tangled. And it’s an investigation of of those themes, a critical perspective on Irish literature. Maybe one way to just kind of get us into the subject is to interrogate the title a little bit. See, Tangled is a incredibly beautiful and evocative word. Also, one thing that’s interesting, I don’t know. It comes after the colon. And sometimes, maybe the convention would be to put the cool word first, and then more descriptive words later. So I’m wondering just about that the disk that that word see tangled and and is that telling us is that does that relate to Ireland literature in the coast, or, you know, kind of what’s going on with these with these words that we see right on the front cover of the of the manuscript.
Nicholas Allen 1:31
Sure. And thank you for noticing that actually, it’s kind of a funny story about it really should be called see tangled, colon, and then whatever it is afterwards, but they were worried in the press that in digital searches, it would get mixed up with white sea angling, which actually I thought would be a good thing and might indeed, boost sales. So it might disappoint readers, I think, if you were looking for any technical merits. So that’s the reason for that. But yesterday, we see Tiger but the word it’s interesting when it pops up a choice. And it really comes into my mind whenever Stephen is walking along the beach and thinking about his future, Stephen dadless. And their Portrait of the Artist says, Yo, man, I’m wondering what he’s going to make of himself until he walks out to the verge of the city and doubleness, we sometimes forget. And part of that forgetting is a reason to write the book was a great maritime city of the 18th and 19th century. And he sees the sea tangles, which are little shreds of seaweed in the water. And so I just thought about that moment to the moment of takeoff of lift, Stephen Dedalus, as compared to someone who flies to high lands, of course drawings, but thinking about those metaphors of flight, metaphors of motion. And also, I think also these ideas of fermions some higher, that he was looking at these bits and pieces of things and trying to put them together. And I suppose that’s been the story of so much of 20th century literature, certainly being what I’ve responded to you. And finally, a little hidden American aspect isn’t that I’ve often thought as I went home, in the summers to Ireland, or like to swim as much as I can, because I live too far away from the car in America. But it really reminded me the color of a broken rock and ladder of the fall in the American northeast. So there’s a funny sense of tapestry and color and time that you carry in your imagination and maybe registers and books that might be legible to a reader as a direct thing, but it gives us the kind of sensation and experience that I tried to include in the writing.
Michael Livermore 3:22
Yeah, it’s really and now it’s a beautiful image. And and it has Yeah, all these really wonderful connotations to it now, you know, when I just as a, as a naive reader, I kind of saw that word on the on the, on the front. What What kind of struck me was this idea of, again, with the Ireland literature and the coast together, that these things were entangled with each other in some kind of meaningful way. And in some sense, it’s like, well, of course, you know, there’s Ireland and literature’s important Ireland, Ireland is important to literature. And, you know, there’s a big coast that surrounds the island. But, but but there’s lots of non obvious ways that these things are related to each other. So what is the you know, so I don’t know if that’s, if that if that notion of tangled is essential?
Nicholas Allen 4:14
No, absolutely. I think, you know, it’s all trying to stretch what I was trying to do was stretch forward towards a different language of description that wasn’t binded by land and territoriality because I grew up in Belfast, in the north of Ireland in a very contested place. And although I am a citizen of the Irish Republic now, I certainly wasn’t brought up in that world as being very conscious of the ways in which things overlap, they seep into each other. And how could you not rejoice in the it’s a wonder that literature tells you by holding many different kinds of realities in mind at once. So if you mix that kind of modernist perspective of multiplicity with historical reality of interconnectedness that seemed to me that wateriness perverseness not yet quite fine. it’s way into the historical the cultural of the literary representation of the island, I think Ireland sometimes is forgotten in a sense that it is a place blinded by and washed over by water. Partly an inheritance, I think of its long Imperial attachments for to have a national sovereignty was to have a sense of independence and freedom. And including that sense of an island apart, we thought perhaps a little bit too much about looking in London looking offshore, which I think for a long time was associated with migration, with leaving with famine, with domination, and trying to find a way to describe more flexible understandings of being in the world in the literature, by being true also, to those complex historical interactions was one of the reasons to write the book.
Michael Livermore 5:47
Now, so the way that book proceeds is, you know, there’s some kind of thematic discussion, but that the core chapters of the book are close readings of, of authors in particular, authors and other artists and, and particular works. So one, one question that I have, and I suspect others do, too, is kind of when you when you do a project like this, it’s not an anthology, right? This isn’t intended to be a complete history of Irish literature, or Irish, which would be very long, or in or even within a particular period of, you know, whatever, 20th century or something. And so So how do you how do you collect? How do you decide who’s in and who’s out in some sense of, of a project like this?
Nicholas Allen 6:38
Great question. And would you believe that this was meant to be just a short book that started out of a particular obsession, which was, you know, literally, actually coming back to America, second time, looking at the map, we used to live in Chapel Hill and thinking that Athens was about as far away from the coast as Chapel Hill was, so we would get to see a lot. It’s not quite the same. And so that’s, that’s if you don’t missing the ozone. And being to land, it was something that was, I think, drove a kind of obsession. And, of course, with the changes over the world over the last five years, and all of our living circumstances change to that was in there. And thinking to, I suppose, starting with books, and texts, and moments that were lodged in my imagination, and sometimes, you know, it might take you a couple of years to write a book, but the writing of the book might be yours in your head, a long time ago, when I first came to America teaching James Joyce, his short story, the dead. And it ends with a snowstorm. And a student asked me, quite rightly, does it snow a lot in Ireland, and I thought, well, actually, you know, it doesn’t hardly ever snows at all. And so it made me think about water cycles, and about the way in which the weather is used to represent psychologies and states of mind. And the way that that might have a particular kind of Atlantic perspective. And then I had lived for a couple of years in Galway, where I taught in the university there and I became a great friend, or at least a great admirer. And a friend of a writer called Tim Robinson, who created these maps and accounts and stories in the Irish and English languages of the western coast that I thought were just really magnificent and opened a whole portal of place and understanding and description for me that I never had before. So they were the kind of the larger firms, and then trying to think about a chronology here. And so I started, you know, you think late 19th century, that’s a wonderful early novel by yet that nobody ever really paid much attention to called John Sherman, which is about a shipping clerk who moves to London. And thinking about Joyce, and then not just wanting to write a book about the economical things. I’ve always been very interested in visual arts. And I’ve always been very interested in literary magazines. So trying to weave together that broad context to give the narrative a kind of forward momentum, while taking stops to take time with close readings. And the portal in Aquila Nan, who actually for a brief time when I was a graduate student in Trinity College, Dublin was the head of department after think it’s comical at this great genius. I think of the 20 or 30/21 century Irish poetry was someone who used to go to to ask for money to go to conferences. But it and say yes, but she was a really lovely, beautiful, powerful, incredible presence. And so that sense of intersection between the historical works that you’ve come across in the canon of Irish literature and then trying to adjust and rewrite that through the perspective of these other tangled see places was aborted long.
Michael Livermore 9:35
Yeah, yeah. And so, as you mentioned that, you know, the story of the the snow and the student and, you know, kind of the what, what brought you into the project, I mean, one of the, one of the the messages I guess, that I took away from the from the project from the book is this. Obviously, there’s a tangled and complicated relationship between between all these eight Diaz images and how they work together, but But I kind of, I’m a law professor, I tend to categorize things. So the categories that I the categories that I kind of came up with were that, you know, these these images and seem to play two kinds of roles, things like sea, the sea and coasts and water, that there’s this role of metaphor as a, you know that we can that we can use the coast as a liminal space between the real and the imaginary or a metaphor for escape or metaphor for Colonial influence. And so this is kind of metaphoric role that, that water or close the liquid can have in within the literary landscape. And then there’s kind of like the quote, unquote, real influence of the coast or the maritime economy, or the built environment of docks, and, you know, the effects what people do for a living, and it affects their sensory environment and affects their economic reality, and so on. And both of these are present in the book, as you describe the present in the literature and their present and the readings that you offer. Was there one of these that drew you more into the subject than the other? I mean, one question is just is that a legitimate way of thinking about things? But then also like, is there one that drew you in? Or is it kind of kind of both together that drew your interest in this in this in this idea way of thinking about this?
Nicholas Allen 11:29
No, thank you. It is a legitimate way to think but I would say it’s also to some degree a foundational or a preliminary one. I think I understand these interactions as being more on a spectrum. And that you see different reflections at different points on that spectrum. I often think about the word constellation when I’m reading. And really what you’re trying to do are finding these points of refraction of hidden or buried or forgotten or neglected histories, words, thoughts, ideas, that I think literature is almost like a kind of radio star, or some kind of frequency, emitter that a critic can tune into, that they might think in a kind of almost, I don’t mean to be grand, and compare myself to a physicist. But physics is also a problem with language and the imagination as it is measurement and observation, but trying to think about these broken narratives and patterns that exists over historical time, and are offers and represented in different kinds of cultural artifacts. And when you can make them reflect upon each other, what different depression of the world would you have afterwards. So I suppose I don’t see there’s such a distance between the real the harbours, the piers, the maritime forts, the great entrance to Cork Harbor, where you can see gun emplacements and other side that go back many centuries. But when I take to be places of pleasure and leisure in Cork Harbor that were once centers of global incarceration, I don’t think those real things are detached from imagination, or from words. And I’m glad to talk with you about the idea of sea tangled and vocabulary and language, because I think they’re real and powerful things that have real impartial effects on people’s experiences. And I suppose just the last kind of closing thought of it is that, you know, the provocative part of the book, I mean, it is an account of the past in one sense, but I suppose it also asks you, if we were to think of things like this, would we be able to categorize our president in the same way? Would we read differently? And I think even further than that, a question that we don’t always ask because critics of ourselves, would we as critics write differently, and people have responded to that in different ways. People with different training and background sometimes don’t appreciate that question. Sometimes they don’t like the writing, sometimes they wonder as a cific thing to do, should you categorize more and make metaphor less. But I think for myself, you know, and I thought this is I’ve got a lot in my own career, such as it is that there’s a, if there’s a freedom to this education, and I’m the first in the first generation of my family to go to university, if there’s something different than this, apart from the acquiring of knowledge, or the you know, the burdening of oneself with others learning is an individual way to express yourself within it. But I think that that is also connected to this question of liquidity, of transition of nervousness of a certain kind of openness to the world that might allow us to access conditions of empathy and understanding in the literature that would set us to think again about what art and literature cultural history might be, let’s see was very important in this time of environmental collapse to try and think about things differently in that way and or rising generations of students Doom so certainly, we should do so too.
Michael Livermore 14:44
So so that you so it’s a really interesting, it’s a really interesting set of ideas. And so maybe to explore that a little bit further, we could take something that is both a concrete reality and a metaphor and And, and every point on the spectrum, something that you’ve kind of returned to and the authors and artists in your book return to is, is, is the coast. And there’s lots of different you know, the coast is a physical reality and ecosystem a scientist, you know, an ecologist can study coastal ecosystems, it’s an economic, it’s a place of economic activity. It’s a particular kind of landscape that generates since sensations right? When you moved inland to, to Athens, its units the coast, right, you, you know, part of that is the is the sights and the smells and the experiences. But then there is also in several of the works that you described, there’s a, there’s a metaphorical characteristic to the cousin, of course, these things as you know, they’re entangled, right, where you, when you experience the physicality, that’s not a, you know, it’s this is not something that can’t be read, or it’s not something that doesn’t involve imagination, I mean, it when you’re standing on the coast and staring at a real person standing on the coast, staring off in the distance, there, when they do that physical activity, it’s triggering all kinds of associations, literary, cultural associations, all kinds of meaning, right, that are happening. And so So what are some of the ways that coast as, as an idea as a physical thing as a, as a metaphor, works its way into some of the works that you describe in the in the book?
Nicholas Allen 16:38
It’s such an interesting question, because, you know, it’s so motive and changes. And I’m thinking, you know, one end of the 20th century at the beginning, it’s a place for people looking at because it suggests a certain kind of leaving by sea, it has a kind of melancholy attached to a fire perspective. And then you get to the end of the 20th century, and you have some electrical machinery coming out in the evening time, or maybe even an end, right, looking at and thinking about planes flying out from Dublin. And that is a kind of privilege of leaving in return the perhaps wasn’t there in early years, even though it’s also a kind of carbon cost, that has increased exponentially in Ireland, all the way across the 20th century, right up to the present. And so I will say in that sense, it’s always a mutable thing in the imaginative sense. And what you may be trying to do what I was trying to do in a book like this was less to describe every single exhibition of these qualities at the coastal zone, but to think about practices. So you I mean, your question is great, but really what we’re thinking about here are trying to describe almost genealogies of practice, or I sometimes think about it in terms of declension, almost like a verb. Could you give broad enough forms that shift over time, that could include all of these diversities of reality? With these literary and artistic and Sonic operations that are so important to our cultural mediation, and imagination of landscapes we often come into after they’ve always been formed. You make any thank you I first went to go away. And people were telling me you know, I love the western seaboard. It’s so beautiful. It’s this place that I kept thinking, goodness, this is like a place someone described 100 years ago, but everybody has left. Yes, Singh was here. Yes, it says here. That night, all I can see is a concrete car park in the rain on November morning in the dark, like Where where is that world gone. But of course, it was a stupid perception of mine and partly to do with a sense of transition between two places that I never managed very well. But going out, then somewhere like rhinestone, Tim Robinson would have these salons in his house at the end of the pier there. People will come from all over the world. But they were they were important, more important than local people and fisherman and people who had their livelihood in the local village or the surrounds the people who worked in rhinestone bog or traveled through, but the sense of a community of conversation, and if a particular place that had very specific experiences, but it could also have echoes with other places. And I suppose that’s the other part of my writing of work comes back to your question about how we describe all of these multiplicities of experiences, I’m not so interested in saying that one thing is like another. But if I am thinking about a kind of declension, if I use that word about firms, I’m thinking about declensions in different languages, in which certain words sound like each other, but they’re not necessarily the same. And trying to keep that open space where you’re describing something without containing it seems very important to me, and again, seems like another kind of practice of self liberation but also in a way of honesty that I can we write about the post Imperial or the post and conduct colonial or the environmental or the blue humanities, if we can’t find a language to describe the sensation of something without colonizing it ourselves?
Michael Livermore 19:58
Yeah, one of the things I think is is a interesting feature. And it’s very different from the kind of work that normally is. Yeah, I think one would be hard pressed to, and this could be wrong. So you’ll correct me if I’m wrong. But I think it would be difficult to articulate an argument that runs through the book other than something very, very general. And, and you know that something like this is an interesting way to read the literature or something. And it’s more of, as you were just describing, it’s a series of, of connections of linkages of holding different things up to, you know, near each other and kind of through a particular lens. Now, so I guess my first question is, is that wrong? Do you see that there, there’s a, you know, an argument that you’re you’re trying to make, other than the the argument of this is a valuable way to do things, I guess, or this is a useful or productive way of reading this, this literature? So I guess that’s one that’s that’s just a kind of a almost like a method question or a question about the content of the, of the work as you see it.
Nicholas Allen 21:12
Yeah, I think that even to say that it’s a large claim to make, you know, I don’t think I’ve ever really been interested in someone who would want to read a book that you would write about other books, because you’re making an argument about the other books. I think people I would like, for me anyway, I’m more inclined to read books that make me feel something that see something make a connection with books, it seems to me more of a sense of criticism as a kind of rhythm and practice that allows the reader SPS for understanding and connection that they might not otherwise have had. Now, having said that, I think I’ve only really began to reach that point. And it’s, you know, it’s one that I continue with in self reflection. But what I really felt when I wrote this book that was different from all the other books that I’ve written before was, I kind of felt like I had a knowledge and a breadth of experience, that there’s a subtlety in the book, my friend that critic Lucy Collins picked up on. And actually it was the most flattering thing in anybody said about it was that it was subtle, because actually, there are words that I use in their incumbrance that have a kind of historical thread that make a gesture to another kind of historical discourse. I don’t put it in a footnote, I don’t make it explicit. But within the rhythm of language of the criticism, there are ways that people from other disciplines and backgrounds with formal professional knowledge can follow those cues and think of like, see what’s being suggested here. And then people who don’t necessarily have that specific knowledge can still appreciate the breadth of language being used the description, and make a wall for that kind of an implicit set of contexts or references that might make them think or see things differently anyway. And in a way, I suppose that’s a little bit like teaching a class, that you have this opportunity to expand the conversation. And if everyone didn’t think the same, but if people can broaden their horizons of perspective and understanding, then at least the decisions they make afterwards are going to be informed by different information and feeling of the art before that.
Michael Livermore 23:21
One, just as you’re speaking, one, thought that kind of occurred is the distinction between, it was a very silly one, but just to simplify things a little bit is, is the kind of the idea that what you’ve offered is like a decoder key, right? That that the book is a way of reinterpreting or decoding kind of latent characteristics in this literature, I suspect you would resist that characterization. That there that there was a there was a code that was there and that you’re extracting another metaphor, I guess, for the practice would be something more like and so this something well, Ibuki, again, just curious on your thoughts of this is almost as kind of meta question about literary criticism, but really thinking about your work and your work in this particular book, is, is that the literature serves as a kind of raw material for even that maybe we don’t love that, but just to go that as a kind of as an input into your own creative process of establishing links and drawing connections and building a new artifact that is related in some sense to, to the works that you’re reading, but isn’t presenting itself as a like a definitive reading or the correct reading or anything else. In the same way that an artist wouldn’t say that they’re a painting is the correct way of applying paint. Get to a piece of canvas.
Nicholas Allen 25:02
Yeah, I think in a way, these are also questions of where the self resides in the text to, you know, both as the reader and as the writer of versions of the text that you share with other people in relation to other texts. But to come back to the decoder, I mean, if I had that done Brian aspect, I’d certainly have so many more books. So I can only imagine the puzzlement of people who would pick up see tangled as the last book in the Davinci Code secrets. But in a way, I sort of think I will come back again to try and get away. And actually I think it’s a fundamental point about the book from those questions of linear sequence, that there is a path to be followed in this step, there is one single argument I mean, I suppose the one singular argument is that we should attend to the imagery of water in literary texts, it turns out that it’s actually extremely powerful way to understand build space and human experience and Aliette, Imperial and post colonial culture. So that’s an argument that not sense. But making that visible or imaginable is not just a question of accounting for all of these different, you know, formations across time. But if you could give a sense of their cultural presence through a drawing of the ship around them, as much as you could have their filling in their colors, and their backgrounds and everything else, that utilize space, then for readers to draw their own conclusions about books that they will have read, and then to have a kind of recognition at the text of what it is that you’re trying to say. And I think that, to me, seems an important way to meet people, not to meet people, but to invite people to help you create something in the work of criticism that makes them think differently about literature. And really, the question about what literature is, is also about human perception is about empathy. It’s about community is about solidarity. And that’s really the kind of impression I think I’m trying to make whenever I write, but I mean, I do so at all modesty as well. I mean, I don’t think of it as being an artwork, I had a very peculiar and welcome experience in the spring of being invited to the Irish pavilion at the Venice Biennale and asked me to write a little essay about the coast in Ireland, the became a kind of a prose poem. And they asked me to read it at this opening vernissage. And I looked at it this route, I’m well used to speaking in front of people, I looked up and said, Oh, my God, this is the first time I’ve ever had to read anything. It’s just me, as opposed to me talking about what someone else wrote. Just for that moment, that was a kind of, oh, that’s, that’s a funny, you know, it’s a little transition to make. So it’s a again, so disruption spectrum, critical writing, I mean, critical writing has to be moving to make people read it. And there are forms of it that follow very established procedures and gestures, and genealogies of lineages. And I’m aware of those things. And in writing the way that I do, it is not a denial of their power or appropriateness. But I just for myself, I have wanted to find a different space and freedom in my writing that will express a different understanding of the texts that’s legible to those more formal traditions. But it’s not the same as that.
Michael Livermore 28:28
Yeah, I mean, my, you know, I’ve always experienced literary criticism as as itself a kind of a create. It’s certainly from the outsider’s perspective appears as as a creative act, a lot of things are creative. Science is creative in a lot of ways. Writing a mathematical proof as creative, or constructing a mathematical proof is creative. But but I’m not sure what the exactly the the distinction I’m trying to make. But it does seem to be a particular kind of creative act. It’s interesting that you would you would be disinclined to think of it as it’s like, as a little as a work of literature itself. Or maybe, yeah, maybe that’s not quite right.
Nicholas Allen 29:08
I think this is why I think myself as an ultra partisan, when we were discouraged from believing that we ever had imaginations. But yeah, I do. I mean, of course, I think it’s creative. Absolutely. It’s just a really interesting conversation to have a boat. Again, the decades of reading, and thinking and conversation and exchange and collaboration that goes into writing. And I think, you know, I actually I take your prompt seriously. And I agree with you, in a sense that we should all of us think more about the value of the creative work that we do as critics or thinkers or people who reflect on the world as it is or appears to be in any sense because there’s so much conversation in the moment about university is about value, and especially about the place of the humanities in the arts more broadly. And where we need to be more is confident the right word, the consciousness, to be more conscious of ourselves as creative beings within a critical context, that there could be a different understanding of value. And I think, given us teaching of education, in public institutions, especially because, you know, it’s very easy to talk about creative economy and not think about English literature, to think about history, to think about philosophy, to think about dance, to think about any of those things. And so, you know, maybe not the worst thing in the world to think about better languages to describe ourselves as creative makers, as well as critical thinkers.
Michael Livermore 30:46
Yeah, it’s really it’s just the last year thing you were mentioning is that, you know, there’s talk of the creative economy or creatives, there’s right, that’s an economic role, and it’s somehow removed from literature and dance. And these are these are, I mean, the core of what traditionally we kind of thought of as, as creative as what the definition of creative in some sense. So I don’t know if you have any thoughts about that is an economic proposition or what you know, just curious to hear your thoughts on it. Yeah,
Nicholas Allen 31:19
I do think it is a kind of a long, but intensely recent history of capital colonization of specific terms, which are extracted from the public Commons to become subjects of exploitation. And which then gives some people a kind of hesitation about their re transition back into more equitable forms. And I think at the root of much of what I do in general, and I think even in my writing, I’m thinking about these things, and thinking about the ways in which, you know, Freedom matters. But freedom can mean many things. And even if it’s the freedom to think, feel, see or experience another person’s, perhaps for a different representation of the world, in ways that you may or may not agree with, in ways that may or may not change your own attitudes to life, but may also equip you with responses to challenges in life that you have not yet experienced. I think that’s a very powerful thing. And I think that’s what the humanities and the arts can do in general, and certainly what they can do in university education. Yeah, something I argue for a lot in many different contexts. And I suppose what you’re seeing at one end of the spectrum is this kind of book I’ve ever written. But in my day to day life, I also do that in different forms, too, but it’s important work to do its work has done very well as the University of Virginia, and the work that many people around the world are thinking about, I think,
Michael Livermore 32:50
you know, one of the as we’re thinking broadly about this kind of Humanities and criticism, one of the, the, it’s like a cliche almost to say that the humanities eautiful, if someone wants to defend the humanities against whatever the attacks are, I mean, there’s course there’s a question about where those attacks come from, and how they’re motivated and whatever else. But just just for the moment, one of the things folks will say or catchphrase would be, that we promote critical thinking, critical thinking. And that’s an interesting, that’s an interesting phrase. And I think it’s interesting to compare the notion of critical in that phrase, as we are, as it is commonly used in say, American political discourse, with the way that you’re describing, I think, many of the of the goals of the way you read and discuss things that you’ve read, where you talk a lot about kind of connection, and you were just mentioning kind of perspective taking or learning about other folks, even if you don’t agree with them, empathy, empathy, compassion, those kinds of those kinds of skills, or those kinds of experiences. And that I think, is very different from what we typically associate with kind of quote unquote, critical thinking, which is, you know, skepticism, or, you know, analysis in a particular way, breaking things down understanding the component parts. So, yeah, so I just be curious about your thoughts on the relationship between criticism as you think of it and this other notion of critical thinking that’s current in our culture and, and and just you know, how it is that we have these two very different modalities that that fall under the same word
Nicholas Allen 34:42
shall always see things slightly askew, kind of being a foreigner twice in the sense of you know, coming from the north of Ireland and going to Dublin and really feeling liberated there and then having lived in two different times in my life three happily in the American South, but again, hearing kind of back goes to some of the disturbances that were there in my earlier life to or to place it often seems strangely familiar to me, and not always for the best reasons as much as I love it. But I suppose you can hear criticism as deconstruction as a ticking a part of analysis as the breaking down, which I suppose in the language of, you know, kind of capital is a sort of negative thing, you’re someone has built this car for you. And now you want to tell me that it’s badly engineered by the design, and you don’t like the color, I mean, that kind of as high people project. And understanding as the humanities that could be good for you is never enough. Whereas in fact, you know, criticism is a practice of informed empathy and understanding a kind of an amplification, a connection and networking. And they are interestingly words that coincide with forms of modern life, social media comes to mind in which terms like that have themselves been obligated for very particular capital and information to stick purposes, that instruct you to one thing we didn’t talk about about coastal works earlier is that, you know, this understanding of the coast is a marginal space has certainly been an Irish and also in forms of indigenous American history, a place that people who have been pushed to the margins, who have been who’ve suffered, the variables are being pushed out to the edges, and now the liminal as a place of last survival before expulsion, or removal. And so in looking at the curse as a place of looking at, it’s also always awareness of the deeply fractured history in which we live day to day, in Ireland and in the United States. And while I don’t think of the humanities, or literature or criticism as a workers repair, if it is a work of awareness, and a work of heightened self consciousness, it does invite us to ask questions differently of the present under the kind of future that we’d like to build that might be more inclusive, that might be more representative, that might be more empathetic. And, of course, that can be very challenging idea. But there are many ways to carry out that practice, it can begin in the reading of a poem, it can begin in a student introducing a writer who comes to campus, it can begin with a graduate student creating a film or artwork, or a photograph of one fracture of their experience, who knows what career they’re going to end up going to have, who knows what their relationships with their family and friends will be. But you’d like to think again. And I go back to that point of being in the first generation of people who went to university, if there was anything in this experience of life that I have had, surely, some sense of self discovery has to be critical, because it was denied all those generations before who lived in poverty, it is in the extremity of having very little or nothing and having no horizon of expectation. And I do and I’ve always felt that sense of responsibility, not to speak for anyone, but speak as myself to be aware, to try and learn as I go along for all my mistakes. And to find a space that I can think is I would just say, representative of at least, that they might if they couldn’t understand it, at least they wouldn’t think that I had let anyone down. I’ve always felt that.
Michael Livermore 38:24
So there’s lots of different ways we could kind of take the conversation, but I wanted to pick up on something that you mentioned just to kind of a second ago about the relationship between Ireland that you were describing in the south where you live now and and the coast as a, the role that Coast had played for, for people who have been, you know, kicked off their land or who have you know, faced going to civil war, you know, difficulties. So the book is about Irish literature as interesting even question to define. There’s, there’s, there’s definitional questions of how you draw a boundary around something like that if you if you want it to. But, but But you mentioned these resonances with other, you know, with, with other cultures without the literature’s and obviously, water is a is a human universal, there’s no people where there’s not water, obviously, there’s better places and drier places, but even dry places are defined by water. It’s just the lack thereof. And so I’m curious how you see your your project and maybe Irish literature. Within this global context, you mentioned that the blue humanities, which is a movement within within the humanities to think in certain ways, when you get into engaging in humanistic projects, there’s there’s the Environmental Humanities, which is a project within the humanities. So maybe, maybe you could just place that this work within, you know, either where it has resonances and how something like the an idea like the blue humanities or the Environmental Humanities is a kick as a career of residents or exactly what it means when we think about these kinds of cross cutting ways of reading and criticizing and thinking.
Nicholas Allen 40:13
Yeah, well, you know, I’ve been very lucky, I think when I think about it now, and I’ve really thought about like us until we’re talking today, Mike. But I’ve been very lucky to do my work and to come to whatever consciousness I have at the moment whenever two things have intersected. So the publicly engaged humanities has been a movement. I mean, it’s always been there. But perhaps in the last 1020 years has become more formalized, better connected, more network more visible. At the same time, like grit and deep tradition, which goes back until at least the middle of the 20th century, the Environmental Humanities has grown into this awareness and appreciation of the oceans of the rivers of estuaries, coasts, and what people might call the blue humanity’s thinking about water on the largest scale. And the really wonderful thing about these two fields coming up is not just that they’re fascinating and interesting and full of rich questions that you could spend many lifetimes thinking about. But they also require the creation of new networks of association. And so I feel so blessed to use that American term, which I never thought I would ever say to have been part of two social networks that have overlapped and really given me a sense of community that even though you know, I’m here in Athens, Georgia, writing about Ireland, and there is a definition in the title between Ireland and Irish literature, I put a comment in there as for purpose, but this sense of immediate interest, of energy, and also of community, which is something that you don’t always get into very small field of Irish literature, a certain room to breathe, for people to say, Oh, really, you write about that you write about that. Tell me more about it. You know, I’ve been to long term environmental research stations across the United States, with marine scientists, I’ve talked with people who dine in deep sea submersibles to try and follow the flow of oil, which has come out from pollution in the Gulf of Mexico, and listening to their excitement about what they do. And having them be interested in something as obscure as what I do has been a very energizing thing. So I suppose you know, not to answer your question directly. But to give you a different sense of possibility, perhaps of where all this leads. It’s very easy in these conversations about the humanities in arts, and it is a dreadful reality for people who are suffering on their cuts and job losses and student numbers going down. And I don’t for a second want to diminish any of that. But there is still the energy within institutions, public and private, to put together forms of knowledge and experience in new connections, and networks that I think are truly radical and have the power to change how we think about who we are and what we do. And that’s kind of what gives me the enthusiasm and excitement about all this. I mean, in one sense, I might be writing about a very specific part about a very specific poll, the perhaps not too many people who aren’t specific nearby. But those deep structures in the poem, would you say they’re molecular, would you say they’re micro organisms of their cells in cultural form. And I find so often here in America, and it’s actually one thing I find really freeing about the place that I love working in the public university system. There’s such a broad capacity of thought that if you can make these kinds of neuro like connections between them, you can really change how people perceive and talk about the very largest questions such as
Michael Livermore 43:40
well, just, you know, kind of following on then there’s this this kind of style of thinking, I wanted to maybe fold back into an earlier point of entry, which was was the title of the book, you mentioned, Ireland literature in the coast, that you please put a comment in there for a reason. So I wanted to return to that for a second. So right, the title is an Irish literature in the coast, that the title is Ireland literature in the coast. And so. So that’s, as you note that that’s a meaningful distinction. And so I guess, just the questions that immediately come to mind is, I mean, is, is Is there such a thing as Irish literature, as the claim is the idea that, you know, maybe that’s an idea that requires complication? The idea of Ireland is obviously a very complex thing, it’s a it’s a political thing. It’s a cultural thing. It’s a you know, it’s a it’s a real, physical thing in the world. Obviously, literature is a very complicated thing. So So yeah, so so that choice about the comma and then the notion of Ireland that you’re working with in the in the title and in the in the book Um, yeah, just I just want to invite some some some thoughts on that.
Nicholas Allen 45:04
I can hear all of your listeners who I’ve just brought Ryan to thinking of criticism as being a positive engaging thing, though rolling their eyes as they’re listening and their air pods walking their dogs while you and I talk about a calmer, calmer, a
Michael Livermore 45:19
lawyer, you know, lawyers have to worry about cameras.
Nicholas Allen 45:20
Yeah. Well, so you can qualify something without saying that it doesn’t exist. So I wanted in the book to give the impression that that is a set of sequences or impressions, I suppose in that sense. And I don’t mean this in a negative way, it’s impressionistic. It is not an account of all of Irish literature, there’s not an argument for what Irish literature is or is not. I was really conscious I was brought up in Belfast and educated in the school where you could learn Russian, French, German, Latin, Greek, but you could not learn Irish. And that’s acknowledgement of Irish language, literature not being in there seemed to be important. So that’s partly the Ireland, coma literature and the coast. And I suppose the other qualification about it all which is, you know, see tangled, looking at where the sea or the ocean meets the coast, I tried to keep myself relatively within a zone that didn’t go too deep, because I thought actually oceanic studies is a whole other thing. And perhaps the only bit right cheated in that regard is the American part, I had a chapter in the middle, which slightly unbalanced the book and it’s about three male authors. And it gives the gender balance of the book a slightly skewed sense of things a little there are actually many female writers, women writers written about all through the book, especially in the literary journals. But still I in some senses, that chapter the book is how many times should I have taken that out, the book will be shorter would have been more readable. But it was in a way I kind of bridge to my actual I should American, it’s inherently dishonest, and if you like, so Ireland is a set of conditions in the book, a set of imaginable and places as opposed to the predicate of a national literature. And I think that’s important that I know, you’ve been thinking as you read the book, because you we’ve talked about this before, but you know, can you make a claim for an Irish literature that you could infer a German literature or English literature, or a French or German. And I’m interested to say that literature in an underbite, Ireland often engages with a set of specific historical experiences and questions that require particular attention. But that’s not to say that those particular experiences and circumstances don’t have echoes with other places. And it’s also important to say that many Irish writers, I mean, if you think about the end of Ulysses, Joyce is thinking about not just Dublin, he’s thinking about Triest, he’s thinking about Zurich. So there is something fundamentally global about our experiences, and perhaps global as a word, it’s associated with Empire and colony, and going forward, maybe words that we might approach is planetary, the different kinds of consciousness of other things and beings in the world, that the sea is populated by many kinds of creatures. And the thinking about the blue humanities is again, a kind of empathy that opens up two entirely different kinds of consciousness and attention that we still need new languages for
Michael Livermore 48:21
you in this, this puts me in mind of other critical projects that have, you know, related to literature and to national literature, and this is something you touched on in some of the chapters as well, I’m thinking of the the each chapter is, is nationalism, and the project of nationalism and literature, of course, you know, that’s a critical project that has existed at various points in human history is to is to use literature and other arts, as you know, is basically to argue for a kind of national consciousness or a national, you know, Volk or something like that, and, or as an expression of some underlying some kind of underlying reality about what the national community is. And obviously, that’s a project with deep ideological, and then real political consequences. And obviously, what you’re talking about is very, very different. It’s really about, you know, there’s a lot of boundary breaking, and a lot of what you’ve been talking about today, and empathy and so on. But I’m just curious if you see the project of the blue humanities and Environmental Humanities and just curious about your thoughts visa vie, other kind of ideological projects, if that’s what we want to refer to them as, that have kind of existed within a history of literature and especially when we when we clump literature into these kinds of National Style cat, you know, kind of categories.
Nicholas Allen 49:53
Yeah, that’s a great question. And actually, but of course, one thing we must always remember also is nationalism is itself a comparative pro. Chapter Two always engaged with, you know, thinking about other places and things, although it likes to think of itself as being insular if I can use the word it is by necessity, always in relation to something else. And so there is even not especially for the histories of Irish nationalism. I’m talking to you from the United States. Those diasporas of thought and imagination have been very powerful to changes that have happened to to him. It’s a great question also to think about the blue humanities, you know, and to think about the Irish coastline because it really provokes and challenges you at the level of reading to think about what your points of orientation or when you are imagining a sandy coast on Arlen’s eastern seaboard. Where’s your point of comparison, it might be to the parts of the English Kent coast which are falling into the sea. It might be some great work by Obama called kitty Ritson is done on the thinking about the sandy shores of the Baltic, which might take you to that chapter then on Erskine riddles are Erskine Childers, I should say, and the riddle of the Sands, which is, in one sense, a mystery novel, which actually provoked the British Navy into its arms race with the German navy before World War One, which led the specific circumstances to its author becoming executed by the independent RSD to default to free. So it seems obvious, of course, that these complexities of allegiance and belonging in place cannot be explained by a national reading that ties one place off for another, the blue humanities, what they might do in a way that perhaps a post colonial really might not do. And this is maybe why stress in the book or why I like to think about the term with Imperial, rather than post colonial is to think about conditions of attachment to the world that are mediated by these metropolitan dominant forms, but they can’t see beyond them, they can get through and pass them, and they can do so without themselves and having to be conditioned by these reactive national histories afterwards. So I suppose, you know, under the practice of this freedom that I’m trying to think about is a freedom from the things that followed as reactions to that which had been before which sometimes, and again, this might be to do with my slightly misplaced Belfast childhood has always been very skeptical or aware of one narrative being pitted on another, and you just end up with this thick layer of imposter that doesn’t help anyone. I’m much more interested in news, thin washes of watercolor that might help you see through the paper that I am with painting everything over.
Michael Livermore 52:50
So, so one question, you know, and this is, this is like, super interesting. And I really, I really liked the idea of thinking of the booth humanities or Environmental Humanities in the context of, you know, other other movements in criticism in the humanities, including post colonial criticism and others, and how they build on and relate to each other. This is a really super interesting question. But what but one of the just broader questions, which again, maybe just to keep going in a bit of a spiral to take us back to the
Nicholas Allen 53:26
deposition, like, exactly this was,
Michael Livermore 53:29
which I’ve literally never done, never will do. As you could tell. But to just back to the book, in the in the process of writing the book eight, you know, one of the ways that I thought of the project, as a reader was, you know, that, that you had kind of come up with a way of reading this literature or some portion of this literature that the, you know, you could draw associations with and do some work with that, that wasn’t maybe possible, or as easy with other ways of reading, and you collected your works. And then you just kind of imagine you going through and doing this process. So what I’m curious about is, what was surprising or unexpected, as you actually did the work of writing the book. So you, as you noted, something like this is probably the work of many years of kind of thinking and writing other pieces and talking with others and engaging with the literature and with other other, you know, other people doing similar work. But then there’s the process of writing where you have to choose the, you’re going to do the work. So you’re going to include in your you’ve got your, you know, your methodology, which is this blue humanities kind of watery method of reading, and then you do the and then you do the work of writing so, so what was there in that process, something that you learned or about the works or about yourself or the themes of the book? That you Yeah, that was surprising or different?
Nicholas Allen 54:58
Yeah, it’s like you feel that actually I love that idea of making a certain sense of texts accessible to them. And I think that’s connected to gesturing to the idea of freedom in the books, but that access that you are making legible, or helping someone else make legible conditions or suggestions in the text that might otherwise remain invisible, I suppose you know, one of the most enjoyable moments for me not surprising, but I went to look at for years, I have loved going to the National Gallery of Ireland. And I’m one of those people I’ve always loved going to the archive, and I love going to the miscellaneous boxes, the things that they can’t categorize, you know, the stuff that nobody else really pays much attention to. There is a fabulous box in the National Gallery of Ireland in the jackets collection and jackets, was a painter and illustrator, the brother of the poet William Butler yet, and perhaps the more fun and entertaining character, but there is a mystery box is called miscellaneous and we pull it out it is from Brian Thomas, which is the pot shop and Dublin still on Grafton Street. And it was his wife’s box for her silk stockings, which were long gone, but which was full of rubber bands, corks and bits of wood, which he had used as the rigging and structure of his toy boats, which he used to seal on the little stream outside his house when we lived in Devon. And I thought, Oh, my God, that really no that that is almost like a deconstructed paragraph about the blue humanity’s there. I mean, it’s sensational. It’s used the word naive earlier, it’s innocent it is of the moment it is preserved. And it’s all just sitting there in its own little constellation. And trying to reassemble the thoughts and interests and enthusiasms that would lead someone like an internationally famous illustrator and painter to have that in their wife’s silk stocking box into me. If I could do that, I will be creating a kind of architecture for people to understand the past world in a way that perhaps they have not appreciated. And then Jack kids had collected these scrapbooks which were was a Greek language dictionary of huge big old books such as a thing you might find in a charity shop. And over years, he would cut out things he would make drawings, he would collect stamps, he used to go and buy what was then a very valuable commodity, but boxes of oranges, which came with their own very delicate, beautifully drawn wrapping paper, and he would fit all this together into these scrapbooks. And you know, they were there in the archivos jackets, scrapbooks. And it didn’t really make much relation to his paintings, and nobody really thought much about them. But every time I opened each page, I thought, my God, that’s like another map of the world here. This is like a sequence of atlases, like, how did you come across a box of oranges, and a stamp from South Africa? And an advertisement for the different pool to New York steamer? Like where did that all come from? And you collected it and you stuck it here and obviously you didn’t stick them all totally random and they kind of again, refract upon each other. They’re trying to tell the story of those scrapbooks was a kind of biggest Writing Challenge. I feel in a way that chapter of the book is a kind of experiment than writing to try and think oh, well, if I could do that with these scrapbooks, then I then do I write about poems I wrote about novels. How do I capture sensation in the text? And I think that would be one thing I haven’t said so far. But it’s very important to me. That sense of feeling of a literary in your books, because it gives you a sense of the world. They do that through smell, touch feeling. Criticism doesn’t always do that. And I really wanted readers to think oh, yeah, not only that, I’m feeling something but feeling something. So often in choice makes me remember something, which in this current context, makes me make a comparison. And that comparison makes me think something differently. And I think that’s the kind of internal circuitry that I was trying to build.
Michael Livermore 59:07
Well, it’s a it’s a it’s a wonderful contribution. It’s it’s it’s a great way of experiencing all these authors. And it’s a it’s a wonderful entry in the in the new and growing field of the blue humanities in the Environmental Humanities. So thanks so much for the for the work, Nicholas and thanks so much for the conversation today. It’s been a real pleasure to chat with you.
Nicholas Allen 59:28
Thank you, Mike. It’s a pleasure for me to appreciate it.
Michael Livermore 59:31
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