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.