A terrible love is borne

Love and romance are not exactly emerging as central to the Irish psyche, at least not according to speakers currently discussing "Love and Passion in Modern Ireland" at KISS '97 which began this week and continues until next Friday.

Happy tourists wander the streets of Tralee, content if bemused by the diversity of the weather. Meanwhile non-Irish participants at the Kerry International Summer School of Living Irish Authors, spurred on by the somewhat troubled accounts of love as experienced - or rather endured - by the characters in modern Irish fiction, begin to look with new wariness at the natives.

"Is love that very terrible here?" asks one foreign visitor. "It is," claims an otherwise non-comittal man. "We don't much like romantic things, they make us uneasy."

Looking brave, if slightly disappointed, the woman walks away. Are the Irish romantic? Read Shaw's John Bull's Other Island. "Shaw was right, the Irish are pragmatists." Nods of assent greet this comment as KISS participants anxious to track down a genuine Irish romantic decide tea would prove more useful to this quest than pink champagne. Fond notions about the Irish as a race of passionate lovers prepared to die for a glimpse of the beloved's blue eyes are rapidly disappearing.

Onlookers are being helpful, not cynical as they explain: "We tend to get more excited about money and drink and politics than about sex and women." Dr Patrick Gallagher, professor of Spanish at University College Dublin, feels Irish poets have failed to address love poetry as an ancient literary convention. "Love poetry is an art, it is not a documentary. I think Irish poets tend to feel writing about love has to be autobiographical."

Drawing on Ovid as well as some ancient Egyptian love poetry, Prof Gallagher says that Irish poets have a fairly literal response to the subject. "When Keats wrote his romantic poems, he wrote them as works of art, not as reports on what he did with Fanny Brawne," he adds.

The professor of English at Moorehead State University, Minnesota, Sandra Pearce, examines the work of Edna O'Brien, an Irish writer who has often paid a heavy price for her intense and candid explorations charting the experience of women in pursuit of sexual love. "The protagonists of O'Brien's many works display an incredible paucity of common sense when it comes to matters of the heart, but O'Brien treats each compassionately," says Dr Pearce. According to her, critics have concentrated on O'Brien's dark, loveless landscapes and self-destructive protagonists, while missing "the emerging, stronger women".

Images of broken glass, china, trapped butterflies and dreams of flight are dominant metaphors in O'Brien's fiction. Pearce directs her audience to August Is A Wicked Month (1965), an early O'Brien novel which has always been somewhat overlooked by the Country Girls Trilogy.

"Clearly in the shadow of Kate and Baba, Ellen Sage's story is rarely read or discussed anymore," she says. "Its ironically named protagonist is clearly not wise in the ways of the heart. Separated two years before from her husband, Ellen sets out on a vacation of her own, determined to find companionship when her husband and son go camping in Wales." Tired of being alone, Ellen fantasies about sex and a succession of images, most particularly a broken necklace and its spilt beads tumbling down the garden steps, personify the disasters awaiting her.

Elsewhere, in Casualties Of Peace, another doomed O'Brien character, Willa, a glass artist, having shielded herself from the world behind the protective glass, finds romance, only to die because of an argument she has nothing to do with. Throughout her lecture Pearce presents O'Brien's portrayal of love as a menacing, brutal quest.

Recently appointed the principal of Loreto Convent Foxrock, Dr Dolores McKenna begins her discussion about William Trevor's Ireland, by first searching for Trevor the man, an outsider figure. Though having left Ireland in 1954, Trevor has never lost touch with his own country. His vision of Ireland as seen in work such as The Ballroom Of Romance, is a bleak one.

"His Ireland is in many ways an Ireland of the past but his moral preoccupations are universal and timeless," she says. Trevor's work has invariably concentrated on small lives. "Marriage is something to be endured and is, at best, a compromise," says Dr McKenna, who then points to Reading Turgenev as an illustration of Trevor's belief in the elusiveness of love. His work with its calm terror, is different from the more dramatic frenzy of O'Brien's in which ". . . everyone is holding on. Just. If their skins were peeled off, or their chest bones opened, they would literally burst apart." Despite the considerable stylistic contrasts, O'Brien and Trevor appear to agree on the impossibility of love and romance. Next week, Dr Wim Tigges will discuss the violent love undercutting Eugene McCabe's outstanding novel, Death And Nightingales.

WHILE his delivery is calm and measured, there no mistaking the passion at the heart of Fred Aalen, professor of geography at Trinity College and co-editor of Aalen, Whelan and Stout's Atlas Of The Rural Irish Landscape which was launched at KISS. He describes the atlas team's central objective as that of "increasing an appreciation and understanding of the landscape as central to national heritage". Far from promoting a reactionary romantic vision, Aalen's practical comments are cautionary, yet positive.

Six regional studies feature in the book and he hopes to bring a travelling exhibition of the atlas around the country, featuring the photographic and art work, as well as co-editor Matthew Stout's original maps, to stimulate landscape discussion at a local level. A book such as this requires constant updating and Aalen reiterates Dr Kevin Whelan's calls for financial sponsorship to adapt it for a CD Rom. Perhaps love and passion at its best in Ireland continues to be more about land than romance?

Still, Poetry By Candlenight takes place tonight in Crag Cave, in Castleisland as poets Bernard O'Donoghue, Fred Johnston and Eamon Grennan read from their work. First discovered in 1983, the ancient cave with its astonishing passage-sequence of natural chambers and limestone formations, is a suitably romantic, if surreal setting, evoking images both of a romantic ice-palace frequented, no doubt, by the ghosts of Diarmuid and Grainne and of Tolkien's fantastical Middle Earth.