"Catholic Ireland and Catholic Spain. One Cut Off from Europe by the Pyrenees, the other by the Irish Sea": Aidan Higgins's Discovery of 1960s Spain as "Another Ireland" in Balcony of Europe

Abstract

The Irish novelist Aidan Higgins has received scant critical attention both in Ireland and abroad. This is partly a consequence of the writer’s troubled relationship with an Ireland he considered excessively insular and puritanical and the resultant fact that he spent much of his adult life abroad and set many of his writings outside Ireland, which has complicated his straightforward classification as an “Irish writer.” This paper analyses how Higgins’s love-hatred relationship with Ireland manifests itself in his highly autobiographical novel Balcony of Europe (1972), which describes the escapist sojourn of the middle-aged Irish artist Dan Ruttle, Higgins’s fictional alter ego, in an impoverished Andalusian fishing village amidst a colony of American and European (would-be) artists in the early 1960s.