feminist might view the sea in terms of Cora Kaplanís Sea Changes
(1986) as a maternal, saved and womb like place.^32 Women and the
sea tend to be linked in literature and in French writing. Kristeva
thinks the maternal in terms of semiotic seas and this may be due to
the phonetic connections between ëmerí and ëmËreí. Although in On
Baileís Strand (1904), Yeats imagines the sea in terms of the father,
James Joyce and Carl Jung viewed the sea as an archetypal image of
the mother and the feminine.^33 In Symbols of Transformation (1956),
Jung notices:
The phonetic connection between G. mar, F. mËre, and the various words for
sea (Lat. Mare, G. meer, F. mer) is certainly remarkable, though etymologically
accidental. May it perhaps point back to the great primordial image of the
mother, who was once our only world and later became the symbol of the
whole world.^34The sea can be understood in terms of shifting, indeterminate
meanings or waves of alterity. Regarding Irish history, the sea is a
place of escape from violence on land, a place from which the
colonizers come and a place from which a connection with France can
be established. The sea is also associated with the strange or unknown.
McGuckianís sea is involved in an ever changing process of
deconstruction and this may allude to a nervous breakdown: ëEven the
Atlantic has begun its breakdowní. It is therefore not surprising when
the language of the poem fragments into a series of images of
geographical location or ënorth and eastí, and the temporal or ëlate
summerí. In the poem it is as if the world is falling apart. In ëOn
Ballycastle Beachí there is a merging and dissolution of linguistic
borders, and a sense of falling in and out of the Symbolic between the
rational and irrational. The image of the book of ësquaresí and
ëcirclesí evokes the incompatibility of the linguistic icons chosen by
32 Cora Kaplan, Sea Changes (London: Verso, 1986).
33 William Butler Yeats, On Baileís Strand, John P. Harrington, Modern Irish
Drama (London: Norton, 1991), pp.12ñ32; James Joyce, Ulysses (London:
Penguin, 1992).
34 Carl G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation: An Analysis of the Prelude to a Case
of Schizophrenia, Collected Works of C.G. Jung Vol.5, eds., Sir Herbert Read,
Michael Fordhamn, Gerard Adler, William McGuire, trans., R.F.C. Hull
(London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 2nd edn., 1956, 1970), p.251.