The Aesthetics of Exile

Abstract

It seems only a slight exaggeration to say that without exile there would be no contemporary Irish fiction. Even the most cursory glance through a bibliography of Irish novels and short stories since 1960 reveals the presence of a variegated and discordant clan of emigrants, expatriates and escapees of one kind or another.¹ The line extends from the displaced persons of Francis Stuart’s postwar Europe to Brian Moore’s various North American nomads; from Edna O’Brien’s girls in their married bliss to Julia O’Faoláin’s ‘daughters of passion’;² and from Joseph O’Connor’s ‘nippilsi’³ to the ‘lumpen’ London-Irish depicted in such novels as Carlo Gébler’s Work and Play (1987) and J.M. O’Neill’s Open Cut (1986) and Duffy is Dead (1987). Members of this nation in waiting are also to be found in the Andalucia of Aidan Higgins’s Balcony of Europe (1972); in the Barcelona and Pyrenees of Colm Tóibín’s The South (1990); and in the Marne-la-Vallée of Glenn Patterson’s Black Night on Big Thunder Mountain (1995), building that shrine to hyper-reality, Euro Disney.