Migration and Experimentation: Introduction

In Ailbhe Darcy’s “Alphabet” (analyzed in this section by Ailbhe McDaid), the formal acceleration of the lines reflects the awareness of imminent ecological collapse. The poem, however, also records a hopeless resilience: These lines echo the ending of Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable, “I can’t go on I must go on I will go on” and, in a more general register, the existential anxiety of the protagonist of the modern novel according to Georg Lukács. This “transcendental homelessness” is felt perhaps most acutely and poignantly, the following chapters suggest, by those untethered from everything that used to be their world: the exile, the refugee, the displaced. The novels, film, play, and poems analyzed here dramatize through formal experimentation the condition of being and feeling unsettled in the world. The effort to suture it back again, to give life a shape, a new context and meaning, is fundamentally a quest for form.