Stepping Through Origins: Nature, Home, & Landscape in Irish Literature by Jefferson Holdridge (review)

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• Stepping Through Origins: Nature, Home, & Landscape in Irish Literature by Jefferson Holdridge
• Marjorie Howes (bio)

STEPPING THROUGH ORIGINS: NATURE, HOME, & LANDSCAPE IN IRISH LITERATURE, by Jefferson Holdridge. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2022. x + 286 pp. $80.00 cloth, $39.95 paper.

The subtitle of this ambitious and original book indicates the particular terms that are most important to its central arguments. "Nature," as Jefferson Holdridge defines it, encompasses a vast array of forces, both internal and external, that humans struggle to [End Page 158] control. Nature is above all a principle of disruption; "eruptions of nature," Holdridge says, are "Oedipal, animal, erotic, ecological, or varying combinations of these categories" (2). Nature can also erupt variously in the realms of politics, religion, or violence. "Landscape," for Holdridge, is "a humanized version of nature" (2) that has been shaped and controlled by humans. In Holdridge's argument, nature emerges as something, or a series of somethings, that humans try to tame and manage but that constantly thwarts such efforts at control. This exceptionally capacious and flexible definition of nature allows Holdridge to forge connections across a wide range of texts and time periods. The result is frequently illuminating.

The chapter on the eighteenth century locates "nature" in Jonathan Swift in that author's satirical view of human nature as monstrous and contrasts this to Oliver Goldsmith's more pastoral vision, while also arguing that the two share the same "aim to unmask bad government and the destruction of beauty and morality" (35). Moving to the nineteenth century, and to Lady Morgan and William Carleton, Holdridge continues to trace contrasting responses to Ireland's colonial history: "If the rupture reflected in the landscape is a strong encounter with history, then pastoral harmony is a compensatory shift in the psychology of aesthetics. … The eruptions of wilderness and the compensations of the pleasant place are mutually defining opposites" (44). This argument is both broadly synthetic and admirably dialectical. It allows Holdridge to make intriguing connections among authors as apparently disparate as Swift, Morgan, and Carleton. Such connections, rather than extended or original readings of individual texts, are the book's main strengths. Given the book's ambitious chronological and textual range, it is perhaps inevitable that occasionally a connection or a sweeping generalization falls somewhat flat. The claim that "[i]f society is harmonious, so are its aesthetic representations; if it is in upheaval, its art reflects the troubles" (36), for example, is too reductive to be helpful and lacks the sophistication of the book's more specific and nuanced juxtapositions of, say, Swift and Goldsmith.

Later chapters on W. B. Yeats and James Joyce shift away from political history, focusing on Yeats's conception of the divine and Joyce's representations of desire, betrayal, and Oedipal dramas, respectively. The Yeats chapter explores the insightful formulation that "for Yeats … God and nature are at times opposed and at times one and the same" (84). Yeats, Holdridge argues, forges links among "the divine, the instinctual world of animals, and the unconscious," a juxtaposition of registers that gets at some profoundly important aspects of Yeats's thinking, particularly the middle and late Yeats and the Yeats of A Vision (85).¹ The Joyce chapter chooses to focus primarily on his Pomes Penyeach,² arguing that the "lyric moment" is [End Page 159] "as important if not more important" to Joyce in relation to his satirical voice (105). Here, too, Holdridge's thinking is subtle, flexible, and dialectical: "If nature as emblem of psychological wounds reminds Joyce of exile and suffering in the image from 'Tilly' of the 'torn bough,' then in these poems landscape provides the common ground for love and escape" (106).³ He also situates Joyce in relation to the Irish Literary Revival, arguing that in response to the "pastoral meditations" of the Revival, Joyce "gives us an urban pastoral not only to show how the pastoral myth excludes the city dweller, but also to illustrate how the land has often been a sign of exclusion for the Irish" (106). For Joyce, Holdridge observes, "[n]ature is double-sided: a blessing and a curse, a sign of sin and a pathway to redemption...