The Peripheral World of the Hedgeland

This chapter explores the hedgeland as a distinctive but understudied European periphery in two novels: That They May face the Rising Sun by Irish writer John McGahern and L’Homme des haies by French writer Jean-Loup Trassard. The concept of the hedgeland is used firstly to evoke the material, rooted reality of hedges, hedgerows and their relevance to the long, complex histories of European bocage landscapes. It is also used as a trope for developing a critical engagement with rural, (agri)cultural peripheries in the two locations where the novels are set: county Leitrim in Ireland and the département of Mayenne in France. The hedgeland complicates any reading of these novels and the representations of their European peripheral settings as elegiac laments for vanishing worlds. The chapter deploys the techniques of close readings of literary fiction to highlight the hedgeland as immersive world where McGahern and Trassard can observe human lives in close relation with nature. Applying an ecocritical definition of the two concepts of care and violence, the chapter's comparative analysis also shows that calm rhythms of these novel's entangled worlds should not be mistaken as an idealised portrayal of Europe's rural peripheries even as they reveal themselves to be sources of important ecological wisdom. Instead, both authors reveal the hedgeland, and the peripheries they figure, to be places where an ethic of care for human and non-human species is invariably held in tension with different forms of violence.