Dwelling and displacement: Tim Robinson and the questions of landscape

Abstract

A study of the work of the writer Tim Robinson, this paper also presents a series of wider arguments regarding concepts of landscape, dwelling and writing. English-born, but resident in the far west of Ireland for nearly 40 years, Tim Robinson is the author of a series of increasingly féted books about the Aran Islands and Connemara. Erudite and dense, these texts present the Aran and Connemara landscape to the reader via a heady mix of cultural and natural history, and personal reflection and speculation. Two recurrent questions arguably frame these texts: what does it mean to dwell in a landscape? and What does it mean to write about landscape? In this paper, after contextualizing the writer, Aran and Connemara, I develop a contrast between Robinson’s work and some influential current understandings of landscape and dwelling, in particular the mobile and dynamic notions of dwelling developed by the anthropologist Tim Ingold. The paper then hinges on an examination of a recurrent motif in Robinson’s work – ‘the good step’. In the image of ‘the good step’, I argue, we witness neither a nostalgic romanticism, nor a dynamic identification with landscape, nor more widely a fusion of land and life, but rather a displacement of land and life from each other – a displacement that is originary. The good step, the step that cannot be taken, is thus less the ideal goal, and more the aporetic possibility of writing through landscape per se – a conclusion offered here for both cultural geographers and landscape scholars and writers more generally.

El tren fantasma: arcs of sound and the acoustic spaces of landscape

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Traveling in Lifeworlds: New Perspectives on (Post) Humanism, Situated Subjectivities, and Agency from a Travel Diary

“…These might range from hope and excitement to tiredness and disillusionment and were often affected by the causality of events such as postal errors or missed appointments. This is an example of the complex interactions that build the relation between the subject and the world, constantly displacing and renegotiating subjective and external agencies (Wylie 2012).…”

Anticipating Deep Mapping: Tracing the Spatial Practice of Tim Robinson

“…By looking a little more closely at the relationship between this neglected alter ego, Timothy Drever, and the more familiar Tim Robinson, a comprehensive picture appears of the developing practice of a quite singular, inquiring mind, one capable of very striking leaps of faith in pursuit of his elusive subject matter. "Deep mapping" as an emerging form of artistic and academic practice offers perhaps the most appropriate critical framework through which to consider Robinson's work like this in full without segregating any one aspect of the work such as his writing, as other studies have (very illuminatingly) done [7,8]. Deep mapping may also be the only appropriate description of precisely what he has been doing in the west of Ireland since 1972.…”