Country.

ŀ
Joseba Tobar-Arbulu and Aintzane Legarreta Mentxaka

on Kate O’Brien

Born in Bilbo in 1967, Aintzane Legarreta Mentxaka grew up in Gernika and

Goitiz. In the early 1990s she moved to Dublin, where she graduated in
English at University College Dublin. She completed an MA in Irish
Literature, Drama, and Film, with a thesis on Fanfiction in Ireland. This was
followed by a PhD, also at University College Dublin, on Mary Lavelle, a
novel by the Irish writer Kate O’Brien, set in Bilbo in 1922, and dealing with
O’Brien’s own experiences when working as a governess in the Basque

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Well Aintzane, why Ireland?

By accident. I knew someone who was working in Dublin, she was leaving
her job and she arranged for me to take it. I couldn’t get a job in Euskadi,
so I just thought I’d go away for a few months, for a change. If that person
would have been working in Finland, I would have ended up in Finland.

I did feel at home from the day I arrived, though. Dublin looked old
and dirty, and full of character. I didn’t mind the rain that much, people
seemed friendly, and, most important of all, I was able to get work quite
easily. Between the choice of working in Ireland or being unemployed in
Euskal Herria, I chose the former. I consider my self Basque-Irish now.

How is it that you were involved in literature, in Irish literature?

You left cuisine, being a chef, and go into literature, didn’t you?

I always enjoyed reading, not only fiction and poetry, but also history and
theory – philosophy, politics, art criticism… I was always a bit ‘literary’,
because I loved talking about books and I wrote short stories, essays,
poems. Being a chef was never a vocation, it was a means to earn a living
(I trained as a chef and I attended Catering College in Dublin, not in
Euskadi) while doing something relatively interesting – and I did and do
love food. When I was a chef, I used to study in my free time; I was always
doing courses, from tai chi, to computer applications, to psychology and
theories of education… I got progressively more ambitious with my studies
until it got to the point that I began to think of going to university in Dublin.
The county council had a scheme to encourage mature students (over 25s)
to go to university, and when I saw that my basic financial needs would be
covered, I decided to give it a try. In Ireland, in the first year of the
arts/humanities degree, students chose three major topics, and in second
year they keep two subjects (or one, if they specialize); I chose the three

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subjects that I thought would be most fun: Philosophy, History of Art, and
Literature [literature in the English language]. I fell in love with the
literature course, and on my second year, when I had the chance to
specialize in literature, I did.

Before your MA thesis, you were analyzing fan cultures. Why? You
wrote a very good paper on Trekphobia:
http://nsrc.sfsu.edu/article/trekphobia_identity_construction_con
cealment_policing_and_star_trek_fans. How were you involved in
that field?

I am glad that you liked the paper, but I felt that the editor shred my
original article to pieces, so I’m actually not too fond of that one. The
original was written with conviction, and it made some strong but necessary
points about the way fans are perceived. I was already very interested in
popular culture as a field of study, but I began to look at fan cultures more
closely after my own experience of becoming a fan of some television series
and after getting to know other ‘media fans’. There are lots of
misconceptions about fans, but you only realize the extent of it when you
become one. I originally wanted to do an MA in popular culture, but such a
thing didn’t exist in Ireland then, so between my favourite options, which
were Film Studies and Irish Literature, I chose the later. When I had to
choose a topic for my MA thesis I thought, ‘hey, why don’t I try to find out
what is happening right now in Ireland with fan literature?’ I wanted to try
to contact some fanfic writers, and I was very lucky because not only I got
in touch with ten writers, but they were all good writers, and some of them
in fact were exceptionally good.

What are the main outcomes of your MA thesis?

My MA thesis, ‘Fanfiction in Ireland’, demarcated fanfiction as a new form of

literature by defining its characteristics. It also considered some crucial
issues that are specific to the form: it is written mainly by women, it has
been developed within a not-for-profit arts network, it is a trans-national
phenomenon, it has invented a number of genres/formats, it has erased the
writer/reader divide. My thesis showed that all of these have radical political
implications. Also, aesthetically, fanfic is the epitome of the postmodern.
Some of the conclusions of the thesis were published in 2007 as part of a
collection on Popular Culture in Postmodern Ireland (Palgrave MacMillan
publishers). The thesis showed that this new form of literature, when
considered in a national context, gives us a new understanding of literature,
and perhaps also a new understanding of national identity. Fanfic writers
adopt the ‘culture’ of the borrowed texts they inhabit, interacting with
virtual ‘citizens’ in a textual dialect unique to each specific fan community.
These virtual citizenships/nationalities are voluntary, based on commonalty,
and disembodied, but they are also self-regulated and policed. Fandom (in

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general) is like a federation of regions (different fandoms within Fandom),
and fanfic writers are local artists from those regions.

The thesis also offered a selection of work by a group of outstanding

writers from Ireland who have not been picked up by critical radar because
they work in a marginal form of literature, so implicitly my thesis
questioned how the canon of Irish literature is formed and maintained.
There are a million and one studies about Joyce, but how about what is
happening under our noses, how about what people are writing and reading
right now?

In fact one of my current research projects deals with the work of a

Basque writer, Basterzal, who has created a subversive version of ‘Don
Quijote’ with a single reader in mind, in interactive installments sent
through mobile text messages. Her work questions most assumptions about
literary creation and the literary market.

You also wrote about Yeats and Taoism, also about Foucault. Why
did you deal with this author? Yeats belongs to literature, but
Foucault?

My interest in Michel Foucault began when I got acquainted with queer

theory, which happened shortly after I went to university (I was later
coordinator of the Dublin Queer Studies Group between 2003-5). Foucault’s
History of Sexuality Volume One was a key text for queer theory, because it
questioned the idea that sexual identities are something we are born with
and something which does not change. To provoke his readers, Foucault
claimed that homosexuality had been invented in 1870 (the year when the
term appears in official texts in France), and that before that date there had
been homosexual acts, but not homosexual identities/people. Foucault was
himself gay, but he was not discussing orientation; he wanted to show how
identity is something that is partly or wholly fictitious, and that it changes at
different historical periods for various reasons, often because the fixing of
certain identities is convenient for a dominant group (for example, the
invention of women as prone to ‘hysteria’ in the nineteenth century). This is
an important distinction for queer theory. Foucault’s analysis of medical and
legal discourses is very interesting in other ways too. For example, I wrote
an article on representations of imprisonment in the work of Wordsworth,
Coleridge, and Godwin, and it was impossible not to keep in mind Foucault's
analysis on the function and nature of the prison system. I also find that
Foucault’s idea of power as ‘net’, rather than a ‘us versus them’ scenario, is
extremely useful.

Later on you were involved with Kate O’Brien? Later on or before?

When did you know about KOB? How is it that you chose KOB?
When did you publish your first article about KOB? In Pergola,
2000? What were you doing at that moment? Were you still a chef?

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I was interested in Kate O’Brien before I went to college. I heard someone
mention that Mary Lavelle was set in Bilbo, so I bought the novel and read
it and was absolutely astonished. Then I read every other book that she had
written. Later, when I was a college student, I felt frustrated at the absence
of her works from the curriculum, so I organized an annual conference (An
Evening with Kate O’Brien, University College Dublin 2003-6), inviting the
main O’Brien scholars to come over and talk in the university. I think I first
heard about Kate O’Brien’s Basque connection in 1999. My immediate
reaction was to try to publicize her work in the Basque Country, so I wrote a
short article which was published in Pergola, the cultural supplement of the
paper Bilbao. I was working as a chef in Dublin at the time – I had no idea
that my life would soon change very dramatically, and that I would become
a literary critic! As I have mentioned to you before, I undertook the
publication of that article as a civic duty.

Did I choose Kate O’Brien, I wonder? I was immediately attracted to

her work, and the more I learnt about her the more interested I was. She
was lesbian, a feminist, she had supported the left in the Spanish civil war,
she had been banned several times. I later discovered that she had been
close to anarchism. She certainly loved the Basque Country. And we
certainly seemed to have a lot in common. When the time came to think of
a topic for my PhD, I almost felt that I ‘had to’ investigate Mary Lavelle,
because I was in a unique position to do it justice. That is, I almost felt that
I had no choice, as if this direction was the only one for me.

Why did you publish the article ‘Kate O’Brien y Bilbao’ in Bilbao, in
Pergola? Do you have more articles or whatever in Spanish?

I published that first article out of a sense of duty. I had wondered, ‘are
people in Bilbo aware that this woman wrote so much, so intelligently, and
so beautifully, about them?’ Bilbao is a municipal paper, with thousands of
copies freely distributed in the city, and with some literary content, so it
seemed the perfect vehicle to publicize Kate O’Brien’s work among those
she wrote about. I was also intrigued about the political connection with
José María Areilza, and I thought that Bilbaians may be too. As it happens,
O’Brien’s connection to Enrique Areilza, José María’s father, is far more
relevant and interesting. One of the beautiful surprises of my research has
been to get to know more about ‘Dr Areilza’, a truly extraordinary person.

I haven’t published anything else on O’Brien in Spanish. I am about

to publish a short piece on her work, in euskera, in a Basque newspaper.

After finishing your MA, you decided to follow with a PhD. How is it
that you chose KOB? Even more, how is it that you chose KOB’s
Mary Lavelle?

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Sorry, Joseba, I am a little ahead of your questions, I think I have already
replied to this…

I can add something, though. When I decided to investigate Mary

Lavelle, I asked a number of scholars for their opinions and suggestions on
the topic. Many of them were shocked by my PhD proposal. Kate O’Brien
was still not generally considered a major writer (that is changing very
fast), and Mary Lavelle wasn’t even considered one of her important books.
It seemed a very strange topic for a thesis. Someone suggested that I look
at the Spanish background for O’Brien’s novel That Lady (about Ana de
Mendoza and king Philip II), but I had no interest whatsoever. My main
interest was the Basque context for Mary Lavelle, but this seemed a very
small, relatively un-important aspect of the novel to most scholars in
Ireland. I didn’t care anyway. I was not pursuing a PhD to launch an
academic career or to find an ‘easy’ way into a job, but to have fun and do
something productive research-wise, so I was determined to do whatever
felt right for me. Mary Lavelle was perfect.

I had written an extensive essay on the Basque background of the

novel for one of my MA courses, taught by Wanda Balzano. She was very
supportive and very interested. Funnily, that essay has only been published
recently, in August 2009 (as ‘Politics and Feminism’, in the Irish University
Review). Eibhear Walshe read this essay in 2004 and used it in his
biography of Kate O’Brien. At this point in my MA I didn’t know if I would do
a PhD, but the essay was already another door opening, in that amazing
building that is Mary Lavelle, to invite me in; in this case my curiosity was
roused by the discovery that the novel included a portrait of Enrique Areilza.
When I considered doing a PhD, this essay gave me confidence to go ahead.
But I had no idea of the wonderful labyrinth I was stepping into.

Tell me a little bit about your doctoral dissertation? Its main

conclusions…

My doctoral dissertation on Mary Lavelle was an interdisciplinary work. It

consisted of two volumes, roughly divided into criticism (i) and history (ii).
The thesis had sections on general contextualization issues, activist
literature, modernism, history, biography, and autobiography. The
concluding section was almost a separate chapter on philosophical
approaches to subjectivity in Mary Lavelle. I felt that the novel was largely
misunderstood by critics, and that it was crucial to underline those aspects
that had been neglected or misinterpreted: the Basque setting, the
revolutionary Spanish context, the influence of intellectual movements like
the ‘generación del noventayocho’, the activist approach to representations
of sexuality, the technical experimentation, and the roman à clé elements.
The project took me into loads of directions I had not predicted; sometimes
I was forced to go deeper and deeper into O’Brien’s work, sometimes I had
to leave it behind. My general conclusion was that Mary Lavelle is a radical

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and experimental novel, stylistically and thematically, and that it is a crucial
book to understand O’Brien’s work. Another conclusion was that Kate
O’Brien’s experiences (positive and negative) in the Basque Country in fact
shaped all of her books. I did not expect this at all.

Ireland and the Basque Country: Did your thesis adviser know
anything about us, Basques?

My PhD supervisor, Gerardine Meaney, was very interested in my initial

proposal, as she had herself researched Kate O’Brien. I don’t think that my
supervisor knew much about the Basque Country, but she was more
sensitive to this context than other scholars. In fact, although I only
discovered this when the PhD project took off, she had already published an
essay, called ‘Territory and Transgression’ (1997), where she briefly
discussed the importance of the Basque location of Mary Lavelle – she was
the only scholar in Ireland to mention it.

Wanda Balzano was also very interested in O’Brien and very sensitive
to the Basque context, and I was very fortunate to have her as a lecturer
for the MA (she is now director of Women’s and Gender Studies at
Wakeforest University, USA). In 2003 in University College Dublin, she gave
a paper on Mary Lavelle where, among other things, she looked at the use
of euskera in the novel. Throughout the years, I have met other Kate
O’Brien scholars who had some knowledge/interest in Basque history and
culture, but they normally treated these two areas of interest as separate.

I know that you have given lot of talks about KOB. Tell me about
them, the listeners, the topics, … KOB is remembered every year in
Limerick. Are you planning to go there and give some talk?

Yes, I have given many talks about Kate O’Brien, on many different aspects
of her work. For example: Irish nationality as ‘accident’, beauty as
metaphor, Spanish intellectual and artistic movements, references to gay
people, influence of film, Basque characters, representations of sexuality,
catholic-agnosticism, rewriting Virginia Woolf, European vocation, lesbian
literary tradition, the ‘governess abroad’ bildungsroman, feminism,
modernism. I have spoken in many different contexts, to students, to
O’Brien fans, to academics, and to many people without a primary interest
in literature. Sometimes I have written papers for specific conferences, and
it is relatively easy to do it - there is no shortage of material with O’Brien,
because she had very broad interests, she was very opinionated, and she
wrote on a wide range of issues in a variety of ways.

Yes, the ‘Kate O’Brien Weekend’, in Limerick, is an annual event

organized by a local committee. The scope of the event is broader than its
name would suggest, with only one lecture, on average, being concerned
with Kate O’Brien. It is more like a cultural festival, with papers on topics of

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current interest, from law reform to ecology. The speakers at the event
speak by invitation only. If they invite me to speak, I would be happy to go.
In February 2007 there was an event organized by University of Limerick
called ‘The Kate O’Brien Seminar’, organized to celebrate and study her
work; I was invited to speak and I gave a paper on O’Brien and the Basque
Country.

Also you have written articles, papers on KOB (some of them are
already published). Tell me about the different topics you dealt
with.

My published articles on Kate O’Brien deal with the same wide range as the
papers, with titles such as: ‘Kate O’Brien y Bilbao’, ‘La Belle – Kate O’Brien
and Female Beauty’, ‘Recognition: Two Anglo-Irish Texts Building on
Lesbian Literary Tradition’, ‘Kate O’Brien’s Modernism: Selves, Subtexts,
“Mixed Media”’, ‘Film into Novel: Kate O’Brien’s Modernist use of Film
Techniques’. Mainly, I cover aspects of O’Brien’s work that have been
misinterpreted or overlooked. For example, many of her heroines are
extraordinarily beautiful, and this has been seen as stereotypical
representation, but the fact is that those heroines don’t care about their
physical appearance, so that O’Brien gives them beauty precisely to show
how irrelevant it is to them. For example, she is regularly described as a
daring writer in her themes (sexuality, the church, etc), but a very
conservative writer in terms of style, when the fact is that O’Brien was
committed to formal experimentation, using stream of consciousness,
mixing genres/forms/mediums, duplicating and triplicating characters, and
regularly relying on intertextuality, intratextuality, and subtextuality. For
example, O’Brien’s lesbianism is sometimes focused on, but this is rarely
taken beyond the purely biographical level, when in fact it is incredibly
fruitful to place her in a lesbian literary tradition, something which can be
clearly seen in her work, or to look at her constant pushing of sexual
boundaries as a form of queer activism.

Since all these talks and papers are given and/or published in very
different places, do you plan to put all of them together?

Yes, I am hoping to make all the relevant papers and published essays
available, as far as it is feasible, on the internet.

I know that you are interested in Basque studies too. Did you
publish anything about us, Basques?

Yes, in 2008 I published an essay on Basque Studies in a collection on

Histories of Sexualities (in Cambridge Scholars Press). The essay is called
‘The Witch, the Nun, and the Goddess – Some Basque Lesbians of History
and Myth’, and it looks at three women: Katalin Erauso, a cross-dresser
from Donosti who became famous in the seventeenth century as ‘the ensign

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nun’, Maria Ximildegi, the young woman who seems to have started the
witch hunt in Zugarramurdi in 1608 with her accusations of sexual
misconduct, and Mari, traditionally seen as the most important deity in
Basque mythology and notorious for her tendency to kidnap maidens to
serve her as companions. The purpose of the essay is to show one possible
way to articulate a Basque lesbian tradition.

Also, my essay ‘Politics and Feminism’, already mentioned, deals

mainly with a Basque man, Enrique Areilza, a once well known surgeon and
intellectual who was portrayed in Mary Lavelle as the Christian-anarchist
historian Pablo Areavaga.

Following KOB, I did know about you through internet. This was the
link:
http://www.helsinki.fi/jarj/sqs/sqs2_06/sqs22006mentxaka.pdf.
I guess that you have been dealing with ‘the Other’, with
‘Dissenting’, with Gender, with Feminism, with Sexuality, with
Lesbianism. Did you use Foucault, Guattari, Deleuze?

Yes, the link is to those lovely people at the Society for Queer Studies in
Finland.

And yes, I have dealt with othering, dissent, gender and sexuality...
Broadly, my main interests are popular culture, Irish literature and culture,
literature in the English language (especially modernism), and women and
writing. The theoretical approaches that I normally rely on are feminism,
queer theory, and anti-authoritarian readings. I have used Foucault in my
work, but only at specific points. I tend to bring in queer theorists (Butler,
Sedgwick, Rubin…), feminist thinkers (Woolf, Beauvoir, Irigaray…), literary
and cultural critics (postcolonial, reader-response, the carnivalesque…), and
philosophers (taoism, existentialism, quantum theories…). As for your
question, I am interested in the work of Deleuze and Guattari but not very
familiar with it, although I once presented a short paper on ‘Deleuze and
jouisance’.

I tend to be eclectic with my sources, availing of different

theories/texts for different topics. Sometimes, I bring in non-canonical texts
such as artworks, popular songs, television series, to illustrate a point.
Whenever I can, I refer to earlier, sometimes lesser known thinkers, who
may have pioneered certain approaches, but who are rarely if ever used in
literary criticism or cultural studies. For example, I have used the work of
Jeanette H. Forster, Alan H. Goldman, Margaret Mead, Emma Goldman, or
Gloria Anzaldua in queer theory, and the work of Otto Rank, Norman
Bryson, Francisco Pi y Margall, Margaret Lawrence, Erwin Panofski, or
Miquel Oliver in literary criticism. I have also referred to writers who are not
primarily considered as critics, such as Tom Wolfe and his survey of the

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invention of modern art, or Lucia Etxebarria and her interesting essay on
queer theory.

What do you plan to do (in Literature, of course) in the future?

More about KOB? Some more articles? Talks? Books?

I have written two books on Kate O’Brien. One of them, in English, will
appear next year with the American publishers McFarland. The other, in
Spanish, is currently being considered by a Basque publisher. Right now, I
am completing manuscript revisions for the book with McFarland. I am also
researching the links between literature and the visual arts in Ireland, and I
have been investigating early experimental film. I see literature, drama,
and film as crisscrossing areas. I am busy with related projects, such as the
art and film collective Brain Fog (we have made two short films to date and
are in the process of setting up a film club in Dublin), and the artisan
publishing house Gur Cake (I am the general editor, and we are about to
publish our third book).

I will definitely continue publishing and giving talks on Kate O’Brien. I

am also hoping to publish books on other literary topics, such as the
influence of eastern philosophies on the west, and anti-authoritarian
criticism.

I’m trying to find someone who can translate Mary Lavelle into
Basque? What do you think about it?

It would be wonderful to have a translation of Mary Lavelle into euskera. It

is long overdue. Ideally, we should have two versions, one in Batua and
another one in a ‘Spanishised’ Bizkaiera. It is very important that the
translation be handled sensitively by someone alert to the idiosyncrasies of
Kate O’Brien. It is very tempting for a translator to smooth out awkward
turns of phrase, but in the case of O’Brien she often purposefully chooses
words that sound strange in English, and creates implausible dialogue, and
she does this to point to hidden meanings. For example, the Areavagas eat
dinner “with industry”, a reference to the industrialization of Bilbo, or,
another example, the child Mary dreams of “perpetual self-government” as
a woman, a reference to the development of nationalism in Ireland and
Euskadi.

Do you want to add anything?

It is very encouraging to meet people like yourself who are really passionate
about promoting the work of Kate O’Brien in Euskal Herria. She was a
fantastic writer, and the ties between her work and the Basque Country are
many and important ones. She began to write in 1922-3 in Portugalete (a
story on Roncesvalles, among other things), and the experiences of that
period were incorporated into her very last novel, the unfinished Constancy.
O’Brien’s arrival in the Basque Country gave her a first and lasting

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impression of austerity and individuality in northern Spain, and encouraged
her very vocal stance against Francoism. In Mary Lavelle she left us a
unique documentary portrait of Bilbo before the coup d’état of Primo de
Rivera, while using the city as backdrop to an experimental self-portrait of
remarkable power.

Thanks a lot, Aintzane

Thank you!

joseba felix tobar-arbulu (donejurgi)

Aintzane Legarreta Mentxaka, Dublin

Here an interesting link to Aintzane’s work:

- http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb162/is_1_39/ai_n32395095/?
tag=content;col1

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