Place-in-Process in Colm Toíbín’s The Blackwater Lightship: Emotion, Self-Identity, and the Environment

Abstract

Because human dispositions toward the material environment are ubiquitous, various, and changeable, they are, like other aspects of cognition and emotion, largely unconscious. This essay claims that one of the ethical functions of cognitive literary studies is to bring to conscious understanding the phenomenon of how affective-conceptual perception of physical locations changes dynamically in light of events, experiences, and relationships. To this end, this chapter adopts the perspective of place studies to interpret changing feelings for material spaces as a result of evolving human relationships in Colm Tóibín’s contemporary Irish novel, The Blackwater Lightship . After first explaining research in place studies , an interdisciplinary area that has expanded significantly over the past fifty years, and then demonstrating the compatibility of place studies with a model of evolved human cognition, this chapter provides an interpretation of feelings for place in light of human relationships as depicted in Tóibín’s novel. The rather antiseptic modern home inhabited by the main character, Helen, serves as a physical extension of a determined, efficient, and somewhat cold character willing to repress her dysfunctional relationship with her extended family. Ironically, her grandmother’s crumbling house by the eroding coastline in Cush becomes the site of positive place reconstruction after the arrival of Declan (Helen’s brother) and his gay friends. The supportive community that Declan’s friends establish infuses the house and surrounding environment—the place—with new meaning.