by Paul Theroux
A strange country—but how strange ? One where the sun bursts through the clouds at ten in the evening and makes a sunset as full and promising as dawn. An island which on close inspection appears to be composed entirely of rabbit droppings. Gloomy gypsies camped in hilarious clutter. People who greet you with "Nice day" in a pelting storm. Miles of fuchsia hedges, seven feet tall, with purple hanging blossoms like Chinese lanterns. Ancient perfect castles that are not inhabited; hovels that are. And dangers: hills and beach-cliffs so steep you either hug them or fall off. Stone altars that were last visited by Druids, storms that break and pass in minutes, and a local language that sounds like Russian being whispered and so incomprehensible that the attentive traveler feels, in the words of a native writer, "like a dog listening to music".
It sounds as distant and bizarre as The Land Where the Jumblies Live, and yet it is the part of Europe that is closest in miles to America, the thirty mile sausage of land on the southwest coast of Ireland that is known as the Dingle Peninsula. Beyond it is Boston and New York, where many of its people have fled. The land is not particularly fertile. Fishing is dangerous and difficult. Food is expensive; and if the Irish Government did not offer financial inducements to the natives they would probably shrink inland, like the people of Great Blasket Island who simply dropped everything and went ashore to the Dingle, deserting their huts and fields and leaving them to the rabbits and the ravens.
It is easy for the casual traveler to prettify the place with romantic hyperbole, to see in Dingle's hard weather and exhausted ground the Celtic Twilight, and in its stubborn hopeful people a version of Irishness that is to be cherished. That is the patronage of pity—the metropolitan's contempt for the peasant. The Irish coast, so enchanting for the man with the camera, is murder for the fisherman. For five of the eight days I was there the fishing boats remained anchored in Dingle Harbor, because it was too wild to set sail. The dead seagulls, splayed out like old-fangled ladies' hats below Clogher Head, testify to the furious winds; and never have I seen so many sheep skulls bleaching on hillsides, so many cracked bones beneath bushes.
Farming is done in the most clumsily primitive way, with horses and donkeys, wagons and blunt plows. The methods are traditional by necessity—modernity is expensive, gas costs more than Guinness. The stereotype of the Irishman is a person who spends every night at the local pub, jigging and swilling; in the villages of this peninsula only Sunday night is festive and the rest are observed with tea and early supper.
"I don't blame anyone for leaving here," said a farmer in Dunquin. "There's nothing for young people. There's no work, and it's getting worse."
After the talk of the high deeds of Finn MacCool and the fairies and leprechauns, the conversation turns to the price of spare parts, the cost of grain, the value of the Irish pound which has sunk below the British one. Such an atmosphere of isolation is intensified and circumscribed by the language—there are many who speak only Gaelic. Such remoteness breeds political indifference. There is little talk of the guerrilla war in Northern Ireland, and the few people I tried to draw on the subject said simply that Ulster should become part of Eire.
Further east, in Cork and Killarney, I saw graffiti reading BRITS OUT or UP THE IRA. It is not only the shortage of walls or the cost of spray cans that keep the Irish in Dingle from scrawling slogans. I cannot remember any people so quickly hospitable or easier to meet. Passers-by nod in greeting, children wave at cars: it is all friendliness. At almost three thousand feet the shepherd salutes the climbers and then marches on with his dogs yapping ahead of him.
Either the people leave and go far—every Irishman I met had a relative in America—or they never stir at all. "I've lived here my whole life," said an old man in Curraheen on Tralee Bay; and he meant it—he had always sat in that chair and known that house and that tree and that pasture. But his friend hesitated. "Well, yes," this one said, "not here exactly. After I got married I moved further down the road." It is the outsider who sees Dingle whole; the Irish there live in solitary villages. And people who have only the vaguest notion of Dublin or London, and who have never left Ballydavid or Inch, show an intimate knowledge of American cities, Boston, Springfield, Newark or San Diego. The old lady in Dunquin, sister of the famous "Kruger" Kavanagh—his bar remains, a friendly ramshackle place with a dark side of bacon suspended over one bar and selling peat bricks, ice cream, shampoo and corn flakes along with the Guinness and the rum—that old lady considered Ventry (her new homestead, four miles away) another world, and yet she used her stern charm on me to recommend a certain bar on Cape Cod.
I did not find, in the whole peninsula, an inspired meal or a great hotel; nor can the peninsula be recommended for its weather. We had two days of rain, two of mist, one almost tropical, and one which was all three, rain in the morning, mist in the afternoon, and sun that appeared in the evening and didn't sink until eleven at night—this was June. "Soft evening," says the fisherman; but that is only a habitual greeting—it might be raining like hell. In general, the sky is overcast, occasionally the weather is unspeakable: no one should go to that part of Ireland in search of sunny days. The bars, two or three to a village, are musty with rising damp and woodworm, and the pictures of President Kennedy—sometimes on yellowing newsprint, sometimes picked out daintily in needlepoint on framed tea-towels—do little to relieve the gloom. The English habit of giving bars fanciful names, like The Frog and Nightgown or The White Hart, is virtually unknown in Ireland. I did not see a bar in any village that was not called simply Mahoney's, or Crowley's, or Foley's or O'Flaherty's: a bar is a room, a keg, an Irish name over the door, and perhaps a cat asleep on the sandwiches.
The roads are empty but narrow, and one—the three miles across the Conair Pass—is, in low cloud, one of the most dangerous I have ever seen, bringing a lump to my throat that I had not tasted since traversing the Khyber. The landscape is utterly bleak, and sometimes there is no sound but the wind beating the gorse bushes or the cries of gulls which—shrill and frantic—mimic something tragic, like a busload of schoolgirls careering off a cliff. The day we arrived my wife and I went for a walk, down the meadow to the sea. It was gray. We walked fifty feet. It rained. The wind tore at the outcrops of rock. We started back, slipping on seaweed, and now we could no longer see the top of the road, where we had begun the walk. It was cold; both of us were wet, feebly congratulating ourselves that we had remembered to buy rubber boots in Killarney.
Then Anne hunched and said, "It's bloody cold. Let's make this a one-night stand."
But we waited. It rained the next day. And the next. The third was misty, but after so much rain the mist gave us the illusion of good weather: there was some promise in the shifting clouds. But, really, the weather had ceased to matter. It was too cold to swim and neither of us had imagined sunbathing in Ireland. We had started to discover the place on foot, in a high wind, fortified by stout and a picnic lunch of crab's claws (a dollar a pound) and cheese and soda bread. Pausing, we had begun to travel.
There is no detailed guidebook for these parts. Two choices are open: to buy Sheet 20 of the Ordnance Survey Map of Ireland, or climb Mount Brandon and look down. We did both, and it was odd how, standing in mist among ecclesiastical-looking cairns (the mountain was a place of pilgrimage for early Christian monks seeking the intercession of St Brendan the Navigator), we looked down and saw that Smerwick and Ballyferriter were enjoying a day of sunshine, Brandon Head was rainy, and Mount Eagle was in cloud. Climbing west of Dingle is deceptive, a succession of false summits, each windier than the last; but from the heights of Brandon the whole peninsula is spread out like a topographical map, path and road, cove and headland. Down there was the Gallarus Oratory, like a perfect boathouse in stone to which no one risks assigning a date (but probably 9th Cent.), and at a greater distance Great Blasket Island and the smaller ones with longer names around it. The views all over the peninsula are dramatic and unlikely, as anyone who has seen Ryan's Daughter knows—that bad dazzling
movie was made in and around the fishing hamlet of Dunquin. The coastal cliffs are genuinely frightening, the coves echoic with waves that hit the black rocks and rise—foaming, perpendicular—at the fleeing gannets; and the long Slieve Mish Mountains and every valley—thirty miles of them—are, most weirdly, without trees.
We had spotted Mount Eagle. The following day we wandered from the sandy, and briefly sunny, beach at Ventry, through tiny farms to the dark sloping lake that is banked like a sink a thousand feet up the slope—more bones, more rabbits, and a mountain wall strafed by screeching gulls. We had begun to enjoy the wind and rough weather, and after a few days of it saw Dingle Town as too busy, exaggerated, almost large, without much interest, and full of those fairly grim Irish shops which display in the front window a can of beans, a fan belt, a pair of boots, two chocolate bars, yesterday's newspaper and a row of plastic crucifixes standing on fly-blown cookie boxes. And in one window—that of a shoe store—two bottles of "Guaranteed Pure Altar Wine"—the guarantee was lettered neatly on the label: "Certified by the Cardinal Archbishop of Lisbon and Approved by his Lordship the Most Reverend Dr Eamonn Casey, Bishop of Kerry."
But no one mentions religion. The only indication I had of the faith was the valediction of a lady in a bar in Ballyferriter, who shouted, "God Bless ye!" when I emptied my pint of Guinness.
On the rainiest day we climbed down into the cove at Coumeenoole, where—because of its unusual shape, like a ruined cathedral—there was no rain. I sent the children off for driftwood and at the mouth of a dry cave built a fire. It is the bumpkin who sees travel in terms of dancing girls and candlelight dinners on the terrace; the city-slicker's triumphant holiday is finding the right mountain-top or building a fire in the rain or recognizing the wildflowers in Dingle: foxglove, heather, bluebells.
And it is the city-slicker's conceit to look for untrodden ground, the five miles of unpeopled beach at Stradbally Strand, the flat magnificence of Inch Strand, or the most distant frontier of Ireland, the island off Dunquin called Great Blasket.
Each day, she and her sister-islands looked different. We had seen them from the cliffside of Slea Head, and on that day they had the appearance of sea monsters—high backed creatures making for the open sea. Like all offshore islands, seen from the mainland, their aspect changed with the light: they were lizard-like, then muscular, turned from gray to green, acquired highlights that might have been huts. At dawn they seemed small, but they grew all day into huge and fairly fierce-seeming mountains in the water, diminishing at dusk into pink beasts and finally only hindquarters disappearing in the mist. Some days they were not there at all; on other days they looked linked to the peninsula.
It became our ambition to visit them. We waited for a clear day, and it came—bright and cloudless. But the boat looked frail, a rubber dinghy with an outboard motor. The children were eager; I looked at the high waves that lay between us and Great Blasket and implored the boatman for reassurance. He said he had never overturned—but he was young. On an impulse I agreed and under a half-hour later we arrived at the foreshore on the east of the main island, soaking wet from the spray.
No ruin in Ireland prepared us for the ruins on Great Blasket. After many years of cozy habitation—described with good humor by Maurice O'Sullivan in Twenty Years A-Growing (1933)—the villagers were removed to the mainland in 1953. They could no longer support themselves: they surrendered their island to the sneaping wind. And their houses, none of them large, fell down. Where there had been parlors and kitchens and vegetable gardens and fowl-coops there was now bright green moss. The grass and moss and wildflowers combine to create a cemetery effect in the derelict village, the crumbled hut walls like old gravemarkers.
I think I have never seen an eerier or more beautiful island. Just beyond the village which has no name is a long sandy beach called White Strand, which is without a footprint; that day it shimmered like any in Bali. After our picnic we climbed to Sorrowful Cliff and discovered that the island which looked only steep from the shore was in fact precipitous, "Sure, it's a wonderful place to commit suicide," a man told me in Dunquin. A narrow path was cut into the slope on which we walked single file—a few feet to the right and straight down were gulls and the dull sparkle of the Atlantic. We were on the windward side, heading for Fatal Cliff; and for hundreds of feet straight up rabbits were defying gravity on the steepness. The island hill becomes such a sudden ridge and so sharp that when we got to the top of it and took a step we were in complete silence: no wind, no gulls, no surf, only a green-blue vista of the coast of Kerry, Valencia Island and the soft headlands. Here on the lee side the heather was three feet thick and easy as a mattress. I lay down, and within minutes my youngest child was asleep on his stomach, his face on a cushion of fragrant heather. And the rest of the family had wandered singly to other parts of the silent island, so that when I sat up I could see them prowling alone, in detached discovery, trying—because we could not possess this strangeness—to remember it.
The Exotic View
[1977]
Towards the end of a life he had spent largely in disguise—he was now sixty—Daniel Defoe sat down to write a book he hoped would clear him of debt. In his first novel, perhaps the first real novel in English, he gave shape to the oldest dream of Western man: he created a castaway Adam and marooned him in Eden. Although one must conclude that by the end of the novel Crusoe is a model colonist and has reduplicated in clumsy island artifacts the England he knew, it is also pretty certain that Robinson Crusoe contains most of the essential props of the exotic. The mild climate, the wild goats which provide food and clothing, the fruit trees, the fertile soil, and by happy accident a loyal servant willing to renounce cannibalism—it is a dream setting to which Crusoe brings homely skills (one of the triumphant chapters concerns his bread-making). Crusoe prospers in this island world. He ridicules money, he calls his hut his "castle", he has a tremendous sense of power, he is happy. It is the ultimate success story: he has regained Paradise.
The exotic dream, not always outlandish, is a dream of what we lack and so crave. It may be the plump odalisque squinting from her sofa with her hands behind her head, or else a glimpse of palm trees—the palm tree is the very emblem of the exotic: or else power, or riches, fine weather, good health, safety. It is the immediately recognizable charm of the unfamiliar, so the grizzled herdsman with his bullock in stony Kafiristan counts as much as the dancing girl. And something more: the exotic is elsewhere. The word itself implies distance, as far from the world of politics and scheming as Prospero's island is from Venice. It is the magic of travelers' tales, the record of enormous journeys of quest and discovery—the heroism of these returned travelers is the glorious note of enchantment in their stories. The legacy is both fictional (Odysseus and Othello) and historical (Marco Polo and Raleigh). But the notion is more than a bookish conceit. We would have a fairly clear idea of what the exotic means even without the occasions that art offers the imagination.
It seems as natural to dream of the exotic as to dream at all. We are born with the impulse to wonder and, eventually, to yearn for the world before the Fall in which we may be the solitary Crusoe (with his bad conscience he is rather more credible than Adam); and who has not dreamed of being a princeling with a jeweled sword, marching across an eastern caliphate? In a sense, the literature comes later. Because the dream's perfection emphasizes that it is unattainable, man searches for proof that it is not. And whatever fantasy one has reveals one's peculiar hunger. It might be very simple: the island paradise. Or it might be complex: the oriental kingdom of silks and plumes.
And between Tahiti and Istanbul, the pretty island and the fabled city which are two of the exotic's frontiers, there is a middle zone that combines palm trees and riches, the exotic of India and China— nautch girls, howdahs, the pink palace, the court, and the sahib's pipe-dream of himself in stately repose. The frontiers are actual. It is possible with a model globe and a free afternoon to sketch the geography of the exotic
. Isn't it a large rectangle on the other side of the earth, with lines running from Samarkand south to Africa and east through Peking to the Pacific? It is Persia and Egypt, Arabia and Burma, Central Asia and the tropics. Its capital—at its geographical center—is Shangri-La. The cruellest irony is that most of the lands comprise what is commonly known these days as The Third World, but nothing is more valuable than that irony in suggesting that the exotic is partly illusion.
It must be. How else could it contain so much of what we regard as ideal? And the exotic is not Christian—that is undoubtedly part of its appeal; it is not usually religious, it is never political in the harsh rigged-up sense (unless one regards the young chieftain in his silly hat as a political figure). With the Christian element removed, the concept of innocence is unnecessary—the word itself is meaningless. But gentleness is implied, for the exotic very often calls to mind a peaceable kingdom, an aristocracy in which every dream girl is a princess and every man a warrior. The contradiction is that the girls in the seraglio are seen to be virginal and the warriors rather comic and harmless—their antique weapons might be garden tools (it is a fact that in Africa, Asia and the Pacific, weapons—the long knife and the axe— are garden tools as well). The exotic image is not explicitly erotic but often subtly sensual, which is perhaps why we seldom associate elderliness with exoticism, and so often, in imagining this world, conceive a mental image of youth, of children and the child-like. Part of the formula which goes to make up this dream relates to time. In the world of the exotic, which is always an old world peopled by the young or the ageless, time stands still.
It goes almost without saying that the exotic notion is a Western dream, a hankering for the East. The ancient Chinese had the nautical skill of the Europeans, and they navigated as far as the East Africa coast. But the Chinese map of the world, in which China was—as it is called even now— Chung Guo, "The Middle Kingdom", showed the oceans as filled with tiny islands of no significance, populated by devils and barbarians and hairy monsters. Lord Macartney's embassy to China was regarded by the Chinese as something of a joke; they laughed at Lord Amherst, they laugh still as Americans stumble along the Great Wall. Their dreams are inward. The search-stories, the travelers looking for fabled cities, the dream of a return to desert island simplicity, have a Western, Christian source: the European sought his opposite in imagining the exotic. He needed a word to express a refinement of the foreignness he found attractive; with the word "exotic" (which receives inadequate definition in the dictionary) he nailed it down.