Adventure in France and Ireland through Literature and Culture

Figures

Figure 1.1.  AVENTURER, verbe

Figure 6.1.  Extract from manuscript of Mary de Cork by J. Kessel

Figure 6.2.  Extract from manuscript of Mary de Cork by J. Kessel

Figure 7.1.  Carte de Pascal Génot, p. 92

Figure 9.1.  Propaganda poster – Emotionalism

Figure 9.2.  Orpen, Evelyn St. George (c. 1912)

Figure 9.3.  Orpen, Field-Marshall Sir Douglas Haig (1917)

Figure 9.4.  William Orpen Blown Up, Mad (1917)

Figure 9.5.  Orpen, The Mad Woman of Douai (1918)

Figure 9.6.  Exhibition poster – ‘War’ lithograph

Figure 9.7.  The Signing of Peace in the Hall of Mirrors, Versailles, 28 June 1919

Figure 9.8.  To the Unknown Soldier in France (1921–28)

Figure 12.1. NAI/DFA/4/246/299, Banquet menu in honour of French Minister Jean Rivière at Iveagh House, Monday, 19 February 1945

Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank all the contributors for their professionalism. They are also most appreciative of the support of the French Embassy to Ireland, CRHIA (Research Centre for Atlantic and International History) of the University of La Rochelle, IUL (Institut universitaire des langues), G.I.S. EIRE (Groupement d’intérêt scientifique Etudes Irlandaises, réseaux et enjeux) and AFIS (Association of Franco-Irish Studies), which all financially supported the conference in 2023, from which most of the collection emerged, and which funded this publication.

A special thanks to Eamon Maher, the co-founder of AFIS and editor of the series ‘Studies in Franco-Irish Relations’ at Peter Lang, for his continuous moral support and great help.

BRIGITTE BASTIAT AND FRANK HEALY

Introduction

In 2015, when we organised the eleventh AFIS Conference, we wanted to explore themes that would reflect not only the geographical situation of La Rochelle, its history and culture, but also research fields that were of relevance both to the university and the town. We therefore decided to focus on the voyage.

In 2023, for the fifteenth AFIS Conference, we decided to choose a theme which overlaps with that of the voyage, an element without which voyagers could not begin their travels, i.e. adventure. Adventure, like a voyage, shakes the foundations of our identity, exposing us to the opposing tidal forces of inclusion and exclusion. It intensifies our perception of self, leading us to continually seek to define and redefine ourselves in the liminal space where we are confronted with the Other. A meeting with the Other often leads to a change of perspective in our attitudes to culture, art, war, politics, identity, food, etc.

This volume can be considered as a follow-up to the previous and post-pandemic volume of Studies in Franco-Irish Relations, published in 2023 by Peter Lang and entitled ‘New Beginnings’, because fresh starts always involve a certain amount of adventure, and as the French philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch pointed out, it’s the beginning that is adventurous, especially when the destination is unclear.1

We are traversing a time of transformation and transition, a time in which climate change, health crises, wars such as those in Ukraine and the Middle East, and the re-emergence of populism as a force across the planet, are profoundly disrupting geopolitics, the relationships between countries, and between the environment and humans. This heightened instability has the potential to trigger food and energy catastrophes with devastating social consequences.

The combined pressure placed on our societies by successive crises will force us to develop our adventurous spirit in order to guarantee our survival. We may need to invent new types of society, new relationships with Nature and between humans, new forms of political and social organisation. Rather than the reactionary policies followed by conservative and/or populist authoritarian political regimes around the world, we will be forced to imagine new ways to feed ourselves, produce and use energy, travel and create new expressions and cultural practices, a new way of life. This is the adventure that awaits us.

Adventure comes from the Latin ‘adventurus’ which means ‘about to happen’. In an incomparable book entitled L’aventure, l’ennui, le sérieux (Aubier: Paris, 1963) Jankélévitch described an independent thought that defines adventure as a ‘disposition temporelle’, i.e. our relationship to time, rather than a series of actions. He clearly differentiates between ‘l’aventurier’, the adventurer, who makes a career out of planned actions, and ‘l’aventureux’, the adventurous, who consents to what he calls ‘futurition’, that is to say uncertain, unexpected and sudden events. He also distinguishes three types of adventure:

- Mortal adventure: the spice of adventure comes from the fact that we are vulnerable.

- Aesthetic adventure: the artist does not know in advance what he/she is going to create.

- Love adventure: a serious and continually moving game.

The authors of this book examined the role that adventure has played and continues to play in French and Irish society and culture in areas as diverse as literature, theatre, war journalism, painting, photography, sport and diplomatic dining. We can recognise the three types of adventure as defined by Jankélévitch in this collection of essays. Mortal adventure can be found in sport (surfers who take risks), journalism (war reporters), painting (William Orpen during WWI) and in pioneer work (the first women photographers and reporters). Aesthetic adventure can be found in literature through the fictional characters invented by writers such as Kessel, who transformed his personal and journalistic adventures into aesthetic adventure (Mary de Cork); Colm Tóibín and Colum McCann, whose characters are exiled and whose lives are threatened by political regimes; Paddy Bushe, Jan Carson and Anna Burns, who have all developed innovative and challenging styles; whether Annie Ernaux’s writing can fit into this category is a question that is open to debate; and Brian Friel and the audacious French theatre director Laurent Terzieff. Love adventure can be found in the stories developed by the aforementioned writers.

Part I Adventure in Literature, Poetry and Theatre

Mary Pierse begins her essay by reflecting on the etymology of the word ‘adventure’, and on some apparent differences in the French and English languages. Then, she discusses the concept with reference to the work of Colum McCann, Anna Burns, Jan Carson and Annie Ernaux. She describes the writing of Jan Carson as a venture into magic realism, a genre usually associated with Latin America. Colum McCann and Anna Burns challenge their writing and our reading both in structure and style; Anna Burns does not name her characters, for instance. According to Pierse all three ‘are challenging the novelistic form’, unlike Annie Ernaux who, she argues, does not appeal to some readers who fail ‘to locate adventure in her books’.

Claudia Luppino’s essay examines different types of travel and the various reasons and effects of this displacement, whether it be a wish for adventure or a better and freer life, a desire for independence or the need to escape political or religious persecution. She compares Colm Tóibín’s novels The South (1990) and Brooklyn (2009), with the journalistic and travel writings of Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border (1987) and The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe (1994), and demonstrates that travelling, living abroad and dislocation are ‘a quest for meaning, freedom and happiness’. Luppino also rightly underlines the fact that the body of criticism around exile literature has rarely focused on female subjects despite the high percentage of women who have emigrated to Great Britain and the USA over the last two centuries.

Eamon Maher’s chapter traces the extent to which two writers separated by social class, experience and environment, the Irish writer John McGahern and the French novelist Marcel Proust, shared many interests, for example in their similar use of memory – in particular the memories of unrequited love and of their mothers. They also viewed literature as being ‘a constant quest or adventure that could bring joy, pain, mystery or journeys into the imagination’. Concentrating on the first volume of Proust’s monumental A la recherche du temps perdu, The Way by Swann’s, and some of McGahern’s fiction alongside Memoir, Maher shows how they both managed to embrace a theory of art which looked on words as a source of healing and adventure.

Benjamin Keatinge deals with Paddy Bushe’s ekphrastic poems in Peripheral Vision (2020) that were inspired by his residency at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris in 2015 and his walks in the city. For Keatinge, there is a connection between the Paris and the Kerry poems because Bushe writes about and compares urban artwork (Brancusi and Pompon) with Skellig Michael’s constructions, and in both locations ‘stone sings’. The poet’s work echoes to some extent that of William Orpen, as evoked in Tony Kiely’s article in Part II, to the extent that both have confronted the horrors of war and rejected its aesthetisation by choosing to show its raw cruelty.

Martine Pelletier ponders over the fact that it was only in 1984 that a play by Brian Friel was finally staged by a French professional production, despite the playwright’s success in Ireland and the English-speaking world. One of the reasons could be that Irish plays are sometimes ‘viewed in a reductionist way as being ‘folklorist’’. French professionals also tend to favour Avignon as a marketplace for new authors and productions, while ignoring the Dublin and Edinburgh festivals. Finally, they only work with a small number of trusted translators. Using material from the INA (Institut National de l’Audiovisuel) as well as the Brian Friel archive in the National Library of Ireland, she maps and lists the adventurous first stages in Friel’s journey towards ‘a still too-limited recognition on the French stage’, notwithstanding the remarkable production of Laurent Terzieff’s Faith Healer at the theatre ‘Le Lucernaire’ (Paris) in 1986.

Part II Adventure in War

This section will focus on the writer Joseph Kessel for several reasons. First, a pilot, war correspondent and adventurer, Joseph Kessel began his literary career at the end of World War I. He published his first two books, La Steppe rouge and L’Équipage, in the early 1920s and quickly became a successful author. He would go on to write some eighty books between 1922 and 1975. Some of his works, such as Belle de jour, Le Lion and Les Cavaliers, gained international recognition. However, this section focuses particularly on his journalistic writings as he covered the Irish Civil War for the French newspapers Journal des Débats and La Liberté, as well as his short story Mary de Cork (1925) and its film adaptation by Maurice Cazeneuve (1967).