Oneiric Places: Diaspora, Ambivalence and the Locus Amoenus

Since the Classical period, the use of the locus amoenus (‘pleasant place’) topos has been used as a way of defining and reflecting human desire for landscape, notably in Virgil’s Eclogues and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. However, as Schama has noted, ‘[b]efore it can ever be a repose for the senses, landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock’ (Schama 1995, pp. 6–7). This chapter suggests that the locus amoenus topos is a useful category with which to explore diasporic imagining and representation of the ‘homeland’, particularly in the case of second- and third-generation immigrants. The chapter argues that a diasporic tendency to represent the ‘homeland’ through use of the locus amoenus is shaped less by direct experience of place than from the oneiric resources of literary traditions, folklore, family history and memory (‘the mind’). What this produces is a site of tension between the oneiric presentation of place via the locus amoenus and the granularity of lived experience in that actual place. To explore this further, the argument will be traced through three works by and/or representing figures of the Irish diaspora, namely McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane (1996), Barry’s Beatlebone (2015) and my own novel, The Nacullians (2020). These works actively play on unresolved tensions between Ireland as a locus amoenus, while simultaneously representing Ireland as a disappointment of those oneiric expectations. In doing so, the chapter will highlight how the oneiric, while often problematic, is an irresistible aspect of psychogeographic creation of ‘place’ as opposed to ‘space’ (Ingold 2011). The chapter will finish by linking representations of the Irish diaspora with literary representations from other diasporas, namely the Afro-Caribbean and the Eastern European.