the emergence of an irish literary tradition and its...
TRANSCRIPT
THE EMERGENCE OF AN IRISH LITERARY TRADITION
AND ITS IMPLICATIONS
Modem Ireland provides us with the classic case of an
impressive literature brought to birth by Politics”.1
This astute remark, at first sight simple, brings home exactly the
nature and function of artists in a land wrought by long-standing
political volatility and the resultant socio-cultural adjustments and
alignments to be made by the community in general and the writer in
particular. The Irish are said to have “a deep reverence for their
past”,2 a reverence bordering on an obsession with their history as no
other race. This national self-consciousness is eloquently expressed
by Thomas Davis, considered to be the pioneer Irish poet-statesman:
This country of ours is no sand-bank, thrown up by some
1 Malcolm Brown. The Politics o f Irish Literature. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1972, p VII.
2 Quoted in A Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry, Neil Roberts (Ed.), London, Blackwell Publishers, 2001, p 346.
13
recent caprice of earth. It is an ancient land, honored in the
archives of civilization, traceable into antiquity by its piety,
its valor, at its sufferings,3 (Stress mine)
He envisions the interconnectedness between Art and historical milieu
that such contexts will produce:
National Poetry (stress mine) is the very flowering of the
soul, the greatest evidence of its health, the greatest
excellence of its beauty.4
Hence, the peculiar ‘angst’ of the writer belonging to Ireland. Does he
align ‘Art’ and ‘Reality’ in a single response as the demands of the
community urge or could he separate ‘Song’ and ‘Suffering’? Does
‘Song’ entail a “betrayal of suffering”?5 These are some of the central
questions that all Irish writers have confronted throughout; that
whether a delicate balance might be achieved between the poet’s
commitment to the artifice of his or her own creation and the poet’s
responsibility (in this case pressingly so) to his or her immediate
political, historical and social world. What role does the Irish writer
then play in the shaping of the pre-existing “material” (historical and
3 Thomas Davis, “A Nation Once Again”, Source www.google.com
4 Ibid.5 Seamus Heaney. The Government of the Tongue. The 1986 T. S. Eliot Memorial
Lectures and other critical writings. London: Faber & Faber, 1988, p XII.
*
14
social) with which he grapples? What happens when historical
situation and artistic technique confront each other? Does the Irish
writer demonstrate in his writings the need to reconcile “lyric
celebration” with the demands of an ethical imperative? Commenting
on the nature of poetry emanating out of these compulsions, Seamus
Heaney says:
I think that the drama and interest of the self may be the real
subject, but in this country, the self is closely involved with
the society that produces it, and it’s bonded into a communal
life.6
The result has been an outstanding literature that, though resonating
with a peculiarly and passionately felt sense of history and culture,
ultimately transcends the immediacy of the situation, thus achieving
universal status and acceptability.
Though never a favourite with Post colonial theorists who
prefer the obvious examples of Asia and Africa, Ireland’s history is
tied up with colonialism. Ireland forms part of the British Isles, yet
the Irish never really formed part of the British nation. Race, religion,
history and the ensuing social and economic developments have all
6 Interview in Viewpoints Poets in conversation with John Haffenden, London: Faber & Faber, 1981, p 256
15
helped to keep the two peoples distinct. The majority of the Irish have
remained Roman Catholics and though many leading writers have
come from the Protestant minority, it is the traditional faith that still
colors the background of most Irish writing. The Celtic / Anglo-
Saxon, English / Irish, Roman Catholic / Protestant divisions would
be some of the fundamental issues at stake in the political and cultural
development of the country.
An early as 1557, under Henry the VIII, the English Crown
desired to incorporate Ireland into the realm of British authority and
the vehicle for this was seen to be the implementation of British
settlers into Ireland who would Anglicize the natives. But despite
successive attempts by the central British authority to stimulate
Ireland into the British statS, these efforts never cemented into a
merger: “All Englishmen since the war of the roses understood that' j
the Irish tie was not secure.”
British hegemony over the lesser equipped neighbor was
resisted forcefully, sometimes through insurrection and revolution and
guerilla warfare. Ireland is the first of the English colonies and
7 Malcolm Brown. The Politics o f Irish Literature. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1972, p 4.
16
continues to be its last at least, if Northern Ireland, ‘the illegitimate
child’ of the union between England and Ireland, is seen in the light
of an imperialist legacy. Ireland was consequently seen as the
prototype of colonial unrest, an advance model for a great deal of
subsequent world history:
Most of the standard stratagems by which a small nation may
defy a great one are Irish improvisations - among then the
very powerful weapon of moral force, the technique of the
boycott, parliamentary obstruction, and urban guerilla
harassment against an army of occupation.8
Ireland’s history thus became one of chronic violence and
dispossession.
Ireland’s native Gaelic tradition was undermined by the
imperial authority of the English presence, which often took
aggressive directions. English ‘heroes’ of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries like Raleigh, Spenser, Cromwell must temporarily be
converted into villains if the full implications of the brutal colonial
encounter are to be understood. This would also account for the
persistence with which the horrors / bitterness of English imperial rule
still sometimes color Irish writings of the post modem period.
8 Malcolm Brown. The Politics of Irish Literature. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1972, p 5.
I
17
Deciding Political events that would eventually shape much of
the developments in Ireland include the defeat of the Irish at the Battle
of Kinsale 1601, the Armed revolution of 1798, the Act of Union 1800,
the Movement for repeal of the Act of Union in the 1840’s mostly by
Catholics, the Home Rule movement that occupied centre stage in Irish
Politics from 1874 until 1913 , and finally the Independence struggle,
waged explicitly from 1916 until the secession of Southern Ireland in
1921, the same year of the creation of the state of Northern Ireland.
This partition situation (reminiscent of the division of the Indian
subcontinent) is still the cause of strained Anglo-Irish relations. The
English / Irish question though apparently ‘resolved’ would find a way
to rankle persistently in the form of the ‘Troubles’ - a new lease of
violence that would rock the northern statelet in Dec 1960’s and 70’s
by demands of Catholic Nationalists for Catholic empowerment and
resentment against the splitting of the Nation into two. This is one of
the reasons why poetry from Northern Ireland in particular is prone to
the demands that this troubled history makes over its writers. Seamus
Heaney’s poetry particularly is a case in point. His earlier and powerful
poetry is said at times to be deeply expressive of the agony and tumult
of his community - the Catholics of Northern Ireland.
18
This leads to the next question - that of national and cultural
reconstruction in the aftermath of colonization. First, the task of de-
homogenizing the imperialists construct of the Irish nation, at all
levels. G. J Watson remarks:
The culture clash between Ireland England has been so
enduring because it has expressed itself mainly through
opposing images...and images, as well as being the raw
material for the artist, are always more powerful than rational
arguments.9
This idea would work both ways: The English habit of creating
unflattering images of the Irish would be countered by Irish writers
from Thomas Davis in the nineteenth century to Brian Friel writing in
the postmodern times. In his View o f the Present State o f Ireland
(1596), Spenser had outlined his programme: the Gaels must be
redeemed from their “Wildness”, they must cut their “glibs of
overhanging hair, they must convert their mantles into conventional
cloaks, and above all they must speak the English tongue.”10 The aim
was clearly a Macaulay-like erasure of Irish culture, to impose a
central administration and an attempt to define a unitary Irish
9 G. J. Watson. Irish Identity and the Literary Revival. Synge, Yeats, Joyce, O ’ Casey. London: Trowbridge & Esher, 1979, p 16.
10 Declan Kiberd. Inventing Ireland. The Literature o f the Modem Nation. Cambridge and Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995, p 10.
19
character. In its aim to project Ireland as a retarded child, two major
Irish stereotypes created by the English would become central in the
projection of Ireland as the “other”, namely, the threatening
vainglorious soldier and the feckless but cheerily reassuring servant.
The ‘Stage Irish’ as it is called, finds a place even as far back as the
sixteenth century, in Shakespeare’s character Captain Macmorris in
Henry v. Macmorris’ fundamental queries “What ish my nation?’
Who talks of my Nation? are paradigmatical in Irish studies in general
and Irish English literature in particular though perhaps Shakespeare’s
intention was a parody of the braggart’s inferior status as belonging to
“Ireland”. Macmorris could also be understood as a Caliban-figure
who is deeply sensitive to the concept of Nationalism and its validity
in the formation of identity, an issue that lies at the heart of Irish
studies. The serious overtones of MacMorris’ interrogative regarding
‘his nation’ is borne out by the way the same question enters a
modem Heaney poem, centuries later, called ‘Traditions’. Heaney’s
juxtaposition of MacMorris, himself and James Joyce in the poem
challenge any English assumptions of Stage-Irish stereo typicality.
Since Ireland would enter history like most colonies via
England or the English version of things, the demands on both the
20
political as well as the artistic areas/arenas were strong and manifold.
The Irish Literary Revival was one response to these demands. The
aim of the revivalists was to retrieve the indigenous Gaelic culture
that had been largely destroyed by the Act of Union 1800-1 that
subordinated Ireland into ‘the United Kingdom of Great Britain and
Ireland”. This resulted in an experience of an unsettling sense of
cultural deracination in the face of growing British political, linguistic
and economic hegemony. The writers of the Irish Literary Revival
attempted to redress this cultural “erasure” by reclaiming Ireland’s
Celtic past. As Standish o’ Grady declared, “These legends represent
the imagination of the country, they are that kind of history which a
nation desires to possess”.11 The Revivalists created a deliberately
national literature with which they meant to foster a spiritual rather
than a particularly anti-colonial identity for Ireland. It is worthwhile
to notice that the task of cultural reconstruction in Ireland was mainly
in the hands of its literary artists since the eighteenth and the
nineteenth centuries. Declan Kiberd comments:
What makes the Irish Renaissance such a fascinating case is
the knowledge that the cultural revival preceded and in many
11 Declan Kiberd. Inventing Ireland. The Literature o f the Modern Nation.Cambridge and Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995, p 20.
21
ways enabled the political revolution that followed.12 He
further says accurately of the task set upon themselves by the
members of the Irish Literary Revival. No generation before
or since lived with such conscious national intensity or left
such an inspiring (and in some ways intimidating) legacy.13
True and it is this tradition or legacy that the Irish is heir to. Partaker
of a strong tradition, he looks backwards to the storehouse of his
literary ancestry and their contribution to the making of the nation. He
boks forward too; dynamically poised to set forth an indigenous
aesthetic that would build upon the rich foundations of the past, a
hope for the future. Declan Kiberd talks about a “generation” of Irish
writers turning to writing as a means of seeking power “and how it
forged one of the most formally daring and experimental literatures of
the modem movement”.14 The task of cultural reconstruction or the
formation of a resistant tradition opposed to the imperialist’s tradition
has always been undertaken with extreme commitment by Ireland’s
artistic community. In this sense a crucial juncture in Irish cultural
history is also the founding of the Field Day theatre company in 1980,
12 Declan Kiberd. Inventing Ireland. The Literature o f the Modem Nation.Cambridge and Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995, p 71.
13 Ibid.,pl>.
14 Ibid., p. 24
22
with poet Seamus Heaney and dramatist Brian Friel as members. This
project sought to bring the artistic and intellectual focus of its
members into a productive relation with the crisis that was ongoing in
Irish political life. The aim of the group is clear: to combine theatrical
productions and academic pamphleteering culminating in the
publication of the “Field Day Anthology of Irish writing” in 1990.
The Field Day Theatre Company was founded with the belief:
that it could and should contribute to the solution of the
present crisis by producing analyses of the established
opinions, myths and stereotypes which had become both a
symptom and a cause of the current situation.15
Attempts like these clearly illustrate the nationalist - cultural nexus
that lies at the heart of all Irish literary enterprise.
Clearly, some model/frame work is needed to fit in the concept
of “Irishness”, particularly its obvious importance for the Irish writer.
The postcolonial model offers itself as does Benedict Anderson’s
concept of “Imagined Communities”, or Declan Kiberd’s notion of
“Inventing Ireland.” A brief survey of these theoretical models
follows: The introduction of the English language into the
15 Quoted in Elmer Andrews. (Ed.) Seamus Heaney. A Collection o f Critical Essays. London: Macmillan, 1992, p. 8.
23
imperialist’s colony in order to deracinate the indigenous peoples and
culture to a subsidiary status is well known. The nexus between
Empire building and the English language has been established by the
post colonial critical canon, whereby language or discourse becomes a
source of power over the colonized.
Thomas Kinsella argues:
The defeat at the battle of Kinsale, in 1601, marks the
beginning of the final phase of English colonization. With the
native Irish aristocracy driven out, poetry in Irish quickly
found a new place, falling from a privileged role into a kind
of internal exile.16
Joyce would later take up the ‘language issue’ aggressively in his
‘modernist’ masterpieces, as will Seamus Heaney after him. The
resultant linguistic scenario enacts the dialectic between the
competing discourses, Gaelic and English. The writer’s commitment
is therefore to a form that is bom out of the “conviction that the
person who owns the language owns the story, and that he who
wishes to change the story must first change the language”.17
16 Thomas Kinsella. The Dual Tradition. An Essay On Poetry and Politics. Carcanet, 1995, source www.questia .com.
17 Helen Vendler. Seamus Heaney. USA: Harvard University Press, 2000, p 126.
24
Kinsella asserts the ‘dual’ nature of the Irish literary tradition as
a result of the Norman conquest of the country. He says:
Within a hundred years, English was the language of the
spreading colony, and the area of settlement had increased
dramatically. This was the beginning of a counter - tradition
in the country, and a series of changes, some gradual and
natural seeming, others violent - which was to have an
extraordinary long term effect. This lead to an abandonment
of one language for another by virtually an entire population.
It is this change in vernacular, with the elements of gain and
loss involved, which gives the Irish literary tradition its dual 18nature.
An understanding of this dialectic interaction is important because
invariably the Irish writer will align himself / herself with this native
Gaelic tradition- linguistically, culturally, even psychologically -
instead of situating himself within the stronger presence of the British
literary matrix out of which he apparently writes. Every Irish writer,
Yeats onwards would grapple with issues of national and cultural
repossession and rediscovery through a clever maneuvering between
these two traditions. Kinsella, himself a practicing poet, therefore
points out from an important, Irish point of view the discrepancy
18 Thomas Kinsella. The Dual Tradition. An Essay On Poetry and Politics. Carcanet: 1995, source www.questia .com.
25
between the British and the Irish traditions. He speaks of the ‘great
inheritance’ that Irish-language literature bequeaths to the modem
Irish writer but it is also a ‘great loss’ because the ‘inheritance’ is
only available “at two enormous removes-across a century’s silence
and through an exchange of worlds.”19 Such a double-remove is a
result of the eclipse of the Irish language through the imposition and
adoption of the English tongue. The modem Irish writer thus works
in what Kinsella calls a ‘dual tradition’; he or she has a necessarily
‘divided mind’, and is thus distinct from the modem English or
French poet, whose tradition is basically monolingual, and relatively
unaffected by linguistic and other forms of colonization.
In view of the above discussion about the history of the Irish
nation, Ireland would appear a very appropriate site for post colonial
explorations. What makes Ireland an anomaly is its position as a
European nation. Post colonial theory developed at its outset upon the
model of European interactions with subjugated non-European
peoples, applying it within an entirely European context would have
perhaps seemed problematic to early post colonial readings but as has
been pointed out, the colonial history of Ireland is certainly longer
19 Quoted in A Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry (Ed.) Neil Roberts. London: Blackwell, p 354.
and arguably more complicated than those of most of the colonial
ventures beyond Europe that initially provided subjects for academic
post colonial literary and historical theorizing. Yet Ireland provides an
a stereotypical version of postcoloniality, enriching the scope of
postcolonial studies: “Ireland is ... a somewhat awkward fit for post
colonialism; the strains and disjunctions of its own history defy any
totalizing inclination in that discourse. More comprehensively than
most other critical systems, however, post colonialism can embrace
the paradoxes ...Ireland [presents].”20
Yet, Ireland’s proximity to its imperial neighbor and the
cultural intersection between the two countries having at times
reached a point of undetectebility, the teasing out of postcolonial
implications becomes at once more challenging and ultimately more
demanding. To disentangle a canonical “English” writer like W. B
Yeats or James Joyce from the unquiet home of the English literary
tradition is intellectually stimulating as well as amounting to a
reappraisal of stagnant formula that might be a direct result of the
Imperial theme.
20 Luke Gibbons: “Transformations in Irish Culture”. Robert Mahony (Ed.), Swift, Postcolonialism and Irish Studies: The Valence of Ambivalence, www.questia.com..
27
The question becomes two - fold: it veers between theorizing
about the general principles that govern what can be called “Post
Colonial” literature and looking at the more specific instances of such
literary productions. Given the diversity and richness of the field,
culturally, socially, politically and geographically, no sweeping
assumptions can be made. Therefore, a model which would espouse a
post coloniality specific to Irish culture would be a satisfactory one,
just as there could be post colonialism peculiar to the Indian or Asian
model.
Ian Crump pays special attention to Ireland and validates a
post colonial interpretation of its literature. He starts by mentioning
the canonical The Empire Writes Back and its neglect of Ireland as
91a post colonial literature. He counter-claims:
...yet, since its emergence at the end of the nineteenth
century, Irish literature has self consciously defined itself
as primarily a nationalist, anti-colonial literature and add
Moreover, precisely because of its many re(constructions) of
Irish racial, linguistic and sexual identities, this literature
21 Ireland has never been given its due place in post colonial theory: even in the canonical The Empire Writes Back, its position as a post colonial literature is hastily overlooked.
28
offers an esp ecia lly potent paradigm for the p ostco lon ia l
condition in all its m ultiplicity.22
He also points out that the phrase ‘postcolonial condition’ or post
coloniality “down plays” multiplicities of locations and temporality in
the struggle against colonialism, further, it conflates the very different
historical situations of colonialism, post - colonialism and neo
colonialism. He adds ‘yet rather than reject the term ‘Postcoloniality’,
we should follow the lead of critics who have begun to explore its
many permutations.23
He develops further Frantz Fanon’s model of the “three
levels” in the anti-colonial ‘evolution’ of the native writer.
According to him, Irish literature provides an example of a post
colonial literature that can be divided into five stages of development.
Writers from the first stage produce a radically conservative national
(ist) literature that revives the indigenous pre-colonial culture. In
the second stage, writers forge a literature of delegitimation which
is transnational or continental in vision. These writers frequently
22 Ian Crump. ‘“A terrible beauty is Bom” Irish Literature as a Paradigm for the Formation of Postcolonial Literatures’, English Post-coloniality: Literatures from around the world, Radhika Mohanram and Gita Rajan, (Eds.). Source www.questia.com
23 Ibid.
29
choose to write from exile. In the third stage, after the colony
achieves political independence writers attempt to demythologize the
literature of the first stage. Writers from the fourth stage continue the
process of demythologizing but also create a literature that espouses
the continental vision of the writer from the second stage. And in the
fifth stage, women writers challenge the “double colonialism” which
they have endured by producing a literature that rewrites the male
canon and offers an explicitly female perspective. Interestingly,
Frantz Fanon’s indictment of Imperialism is often read in conjunction
with the Irish cultural resistance which predates the latter by
centuries. Declan Kiberd corroborates:
The history of independent Ireland bears a remarkable
similarity...to the phases charted by Frantz Fanon in The
Wretched of the Earth.24
Similarly other critics have argued for the deconstructive aspect
of postcolonialism with reference to an Irish context:
Rethinking concepts such as irony, hybridity, mimicry, the’
contact zone’ and transculturation in the Irish context will
produce readings of Irish culture which arise out of a
24 Declan Kiberd. Inventing Ireland: The Literature o f the Modem Nation. HarvardUniversity Press, Cambridge and Massachusetts: 1996, pp. 551-552.
30 ’ '-a! .Library. ..O:
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recognition of the claustrophobic intensity of the relationship
between Ireland and Britain. It can also allow for the
fractured range of complex cross-colonial affiliations which
have existed within the British /Irish cultural axis...it is these
abilities to read culture as ideological...and to prioritize
cultural interchange within a colonial structure, which makes
postcolonial theory an essential critical tool for understanding
Irish culture.25
Edward Said’s essay on Yeats entitled “Yeats and Decolonization”
strengthened Ireland’s position vis-a-vis post colonial studies. This
essay first published in Culture and Imperialism was later published
as a pamphlet by Filed Day in 1988. His perception of Ireland as a
colonized country and of Yeats as a poet of national liberation is
endowed with an acute sense of the dispossession of a people and its
after effects. Said points out that since Edmund Spenser’s tract on
Ireland, a whole tradition of British and European thought has
considered the Irish to be a separate and inferior race, often
delinquent and primitive. Usually overlooked as an example of
national struggle, Said says, the Irish problem of liberation has
continued longer than other comparable struggles. He goes on to show
25 Eugene O’ Brien. Seamus Heaney. Searches for Answers. London: Pluto Press, 2003,p 124.
31
how England’s colonial exploitation of Ireland received justification
from nineteenth century English ‘liberals’. Said shows that even such
scholars as John Stuart Mill so eloquent on the rights of white
English, approved of English expropriation and domination of
outlying countries and their incorporation into the economic system of
the “ Mother land”. This is one of the revelations of Said’s work:
Scholars and statesmen of the English Enlightenment, he shows, were
completely in accord with the colonial and imperial policies of
England.
Another glaring “official oversight” was also the neglect by
English official records of the Great Famine of 1845 which led to the
death and starvation of millions of Irish people. The Great Famine
had far reaching tortured effects on Ireland:
In the decades of the 1840’s, there occurred a cataclysmic
event, far more dramatic than anything that happened in
England, a very short geographical distance away. That was
of course the famine in Ireland - a disaster without
comparison in Europe. Yet if we consult the two maps of
either the official ideology of the period or the recorded
subjective experience of its novels , neither of them extended
to include this catastrophe right on their doorstep, causally
32
connected to socio-political processes in England.26
It is significant that English fiction of the nineteenth century and the
corresponding literary criticisms have omitted what by many accounts
would be the most significant aspects of the period. The tendency
instead was to engage themes that privileged national experience,
since the Famine was not a national experience in the direct sense, it
is absent from most English versions, literary and historical.
The theme was taken up by Terry Eagleton in his collection of essays
entitled Heathcliffe and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture.
He holds that the British have long used Ireland as the
depository of their fantasies. His interpretation of Wuthering Heights
is based on an analogy between Emily Bronte’s text and The Great
Famine in Ireland in December 1840’s - Heathcliffe is seen as an
abandoned Irish child of the ‘hungry forties’ who speaks the
incomprehensible Irish language and grows up to be a threat to the
‘orderly’ Thrush cross Grange. In Eagleton’s view, he stands in the
English mind as the emblem of Ireland, the force of nature that
England cannot tolerate and so must sublimate or destroy, an “other”
26 Bruce Robbins. “Telescopic Philanthropy Professionalism and Responsibility in Bleak House”, Source www.questia.com
33
whom England has long regarded as hostile and odd. In Eagleton’s
version, it is Heathcliffe as an embodiment of the Irish who is
ascribed the role of the threatening colonial presence inserting itself
into the shapely schemas of historical chronology as the disruptive
temporality of nature.
David Lloyd in Anomalous states: Irish writing and the
postcolonial moment also suggests a need for a reappraisal of the
traditional paradigms of postcolonial theory in understanding Irish
literature. He takes the "deracination" of Irish culture at the hands of
the English as the first issue, which he links with the resultant
insistence with which the question of identity has been posed
historically in Ireland. He refers to the “founding moments” of Irish
cultural politics, those within which the aspirations of Irish identity
and nationality are framed again and again with striking consistency:
Young Ireland, the Irish Literary Revival, the immediate post colonial
period, and the more recent continuing anti-colonial struggle in
Northern Ireland. He speaks quite pertinently of the “theme of
identity” as the central one in Irish culture, to the extent of “saturating
the discursive field, drowning out other social and cultural
34
• • • • 27 ,possibilities”. The lack of and consequent pursuit and definition of
national identity becomes then the master theme of Irish literature.
Nation, Individual, culture, politics mesh with each other at every step
in the task of nation building whether politically or artistically.
The concept of Cultural nationalism is also cited as a valid
approach to a further understanding of the Irish national experience.
Benedict Anderson’s theoretical construct of “Imagined Communities”
in his classic text Imagined Communities: Reflections on the origin
and spread o f Nationalism is particularly relevant. In this highly
acclaimed book, Anderson suggests that “nation - ness” is the most
universally legitimate value in the political life of our time, able to
“command profound emotional legitimacy”. In what is by now a
classic definition he states:
In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following
definition of the Nation: it is an imagined political
community, and imagined as both inherently limited and• 28 sovereign.
27 David Llyod. Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post colonial Movement. Quoted in Post colonial theory and English Literature: A Reader (Ed.). Peter Childs, Edinburgh: Cromwell Press, 1999, p 88-89.
28 Benedict Anderson. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread o f Nationalism. Quoted in Post colonial theory and English Literature: A Reader (Ed.), Peter Childs, Edinburgh: Cromwell Press, 1999. p 316.
35
The “imagined” community therefore allows for imaginary constructs-
such as “national character” or national identity and values to be
reified, which in turn makes it possible for patriotic sentiments and
identifications to attach themselves to such reified constructs. This
process entails “imagining” the nation which Homi Bhabha calls
“Writing the nation”29: it involves writing out or erasing difference
and the realities of pluralistic and culturally diverse peoples to
establish an essentialized national character. Such a totalizing
movement was very much behind the Irish Nationalist construction of
an Irish / Celtic National Character post-independence particularly in
the formative years of Irish cultural nationalism, 1910 to 1930.
Seamus Deane in his essay “National Character and National
Audience : Races , Crowds and readers”, shows how the leading
nineteenth century Irish authors including Thomas Davis, Yeats,
Synge, Joyce, Douglas Hyde et al in trying as Yeats put it “ To write
for my own race”30 tried repeatedly to imagine (both for their subject
matter and as their ideal audience) “Imagined” communities which
they defined as the Irish nation and race, with all the desired “national
29 Homi Bhaba. Nation and Narration. Quoted in Post colonial theory and English Literature: A Reader (Ed.), Peter Childs, Edinburgh: Cromwell Press, 1999, p 318.
30 Seamus Deane. National Character and National Audience: Races, Crowds and Readers. Source www.questia.com
character” and radical uniqueness which each one fantasized and
endowed their writing with. In other words Irish writers could be duly
credited with “imagining” and therefore validating Ireland truly.
Declan Kiberd in his illuminating and lucid study of Irish literature,
Inventing Ireland, the literature o f the Modern nation, comes close to
this idea of a forcefully imagined community coming into its own by
literary and cultural means.
Commenting on the lack or absence of a full blown native
tradition with which the Irish writer could align, he says “The Irish
were not so much bom as made.”31 Or “Ireland after the famines of
the mid - nineteenth century was a sort of no where, waiting for its
appropriate images and symbols to be inscribed in it.”32 The
“national” poet most responsible for providing Ireland its “images and
symbols” would be W. B Yeats.
Declan Kiberd interestingly suggests that:
Most nation - states existed, so to speak, before they were
defined, and they were thus defined by their existence, but
states emerging from occupation, dispossession or denial had
31 Declan Kiberd. Inventing Ireland. The Literature o f the Modern Nation. Cambridge and Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995, p 120.
32 Ibid., p 126
37
a different form of growth.33
Literary and Cultural revivalists from Yeats onwards, but especially
Yeats hence had no indigenous national grand narrative to draw upon.
Yeats’ becomes then a particularly heroic effort at “inventing” an
“Idea of Ireland” on which to base his subsequent themes as well as
technique. The English literary Tradition (which was available to
him) could clearly provide scant material for the stupendity of the task
at hand - national reconstruction .The new material that was available
to the poet was Ireland, “awaiting its shaper like wax upon a table.”34
Such is the extreme demand for identification with the nation
that nationalism imposes upon the Irish Writer. David Lloyd
elaborates on this issue:
Irish cultural nationalism has been preoccupied throughout its
history with the possibility of producing a national genius
who would at once speak for and forge a national identity.
The national genius is to represent the nation in the double
sense of depicting and embodying its spirit - or genius. The
national genius not only presents examples to a people not
yet fully formed by or conscious of their national identity, but
33 Declan Kiberd. Inventing Ireland. The Literature o f the Modern Nation. Cambridge and Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995, p 116.
34 Ibid., p i 17.
38
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) is the first Irish author from whom
a whole tradition can be derived. Seamus Deane points out the
particular relevance of a “foundational text” in his case:
A foundational text is one that allows or has allowed for a
reading of a national literature in such a manner that even
chronologically prior texts can be annexed by it into a
narrative that will ascribe to them a preparatory role in the
ultimate completion of that narratives plot. It is a text that
generates the possibility of such a narrative and lends to that
narrative a versatile cultural; and political value.36
Although Deane places Edmund Burkes “Reflections” as the primary
foundational text of Ireland, this status can simultaneously be claimed
for Swift’s Pamphlets and his bitter attack on English administrative
failure in Ireland, as also for W.B. Yeats poem like Easter 1916, or
more recently Seamus Heaney’s Digging.
Swift’s activism on Ireland’s behalf is usually dated from 1720,
when the first of his anticolonial pamphlets appeared in print. A habit
that would find expression in poets after him, Swift too in his “The
song of the Injured Lady” speaks of Ireland as the “Ravished / raped
virgin bride” and England as the male oppressor:
36 Seamus Deane. Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790. Clarendon Press, 1997. Source www.questia.com
40
I was undone by the common Arts practiced upon all easy
credulous virgins... when he had once got possession, he soon
began to play the usual part of a too fortunate lover, affecting
on all occasions to show his authority, and to act like a
conqueror.37
Drapier’s Letters (1724) was written in Dublin against a proposed
debasement of the coinage. His question about the victim - culture
status of his country would reverberate:
Am I a free man in England or do I become a slave in six hours by crossing the channel?38
A Modest Proposal (1729) recommends with grotesque logic that
Irish poverty can be solved by the breeding up their infants as food for
the rich or as food for English tables.
In these writings and other equally attacking diatribes that
Swift wrote, he gave Irish nationalism a trenchant expression. The
slogan “bum everything English except their coal” is an adaptation of
one of Swift’s phrases.
The centrality of W. B Yeats (1865-1939), to an appraisal of
37 Quoted in Thomas Kinsella. The Dual Tradition: An Essay On Poetry and Politics. Carcanet, 1995. Sourcewww.questia.com.
38 Quoted in Thomas Kinsella. The Dual Tradition: An Essay on Poetry and Politics in Ireland. Carcanet, 1995, p 35.
41
the Irish literary lineage is undoubted. Yeats is the figure who is most
credited with the ‘founding’ of the Irish national identity. Thomas
Kinsella, himself an important Irish poet writes:
An Irish poet has access to the English poetic heritage
through his use of the English language, but he is unlikely to
feel at home in it... if he looks back at his own heritage, the
line must begin... with Yeats.39
Literary Studies since the 1980’s onwards have established that the
political questions raised by Yeats poetry are inseparable from
aesthetic ones and his early symbolist aesthetic too is inseparable
from the politics of cultural nationalism .Prominent among these are
studies by Edward Said : Yeats as a poet o f National liberation, Jahan
Ramazani: Is Yeats a Postcolonial Poet? Rajeev S. Patke: Post
Colonial Yeats. Declan Kiberd Inventing Ireland: The Literature o f
the Modern Nation.
Edward Said first pertinently points out Yeats’ affiliation with
Eurocentricism and his canonical ‘white’ status:
William Butler Yeats has now been almost completely
assimilated into the canon as well as the discourses of
39 Rajiv S. Patke. “Post Colonial Yeats”. W. B. Yeats: Critical Assessments. David Pierce (Ed.). London: 2000, p 819.
42
English literature and European high modernism.40
However, there is another aspect to Yeats:
That of the indisputably great national poet who during a
period of anti - imperialist resistance articulates the
experiences, the aspirations and the restorative vision of a
people suffering under the domination of an offshore41power.
His poetry abounds in explicit as well as covert attempts to articulate
a vision or aesthetic which finds its primary grounding in the trope of
nationalism. In a bid to deanglicize his nation, Yeats’ poetry hearkens
back to the pre-colonial and pre - Christian stories and myths of
ancient Ireland. Said shows how Yeats used poetry as a weapon to
liberate his people and his choice of subject matter was used as a
deliberate breaking out from the Eurocentricism in which the
indigenous colonized culture had been subsumed. And he credits
Yeats with forming part of the resistant culture which always
develops as a response to imperial domination. In this respect, Yeats
is likened by Said to poets elsewhere, writing from dispossessed
cultures, especially Palestine. Accordingly to Said, Yeats is strikingly
40 Edward W Said. “Yeats and Decolonization”. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage, Random House, p 265.
41 Ibid., p 265.
similar to poets like the Palestinian Mahmound Darwish, in his
impulse to remap and rename the desecrated home land.
Jahan Ramazani places Yeats within a post colonial paradigm
too to “help renew attention to a poet who is often charged with
antifeminism and reactionary politics.”42 But he makes a distinction
between Yeats’ early or pre-independence poems which are explicitly
nationalistic and his politically skeptical post independence poems. A
poem like Easter 1916 becomes in truth, the foundational poem of the
emerging Irish nation state.
But Ramazani prefers the term anticolonial to postcolonial for
Yeats since Yeats’ denunciation of the British imperial devastation of
Ireland as expressed in his poems sometimes reaches “treasonable
lengths".
Ramazani states:
In his anti-colonial denunciations of Britain’s efforts to
exterminate the Irish and to obliterate its indigenous culture,
to quash heroic resistance and to lay to waste Ireland
churches and houses, Yeats is no less “postcolonial” than
Achebe or Kamau Brathwaite, who chronicle the survival of
42 Jahan Ramazani. “Is Yeats a Post Colonial Poet?” IV. B. Yeats: Critical Assessments. David Pierce (Ed.). London: 2000, p 795.
44
African gods in the new world despite colonial efforts to
wipe them out.43
For Declan Kiberd too, Yeats is the Irish Whitman, the writer most
responsible for “Inventing” Ireland. The relationship between the
writer and the society is expressed in the following terms:
We call certain minds creative because they are among the
moulders of their nation and not made upon its mould.44
The Irish concept of the self, according to Kiberd, was not a given but
a “project”; and “its characteristic text was a process, unfinished,
fragmenting”.45
It is in this sense that Irish literature presents a more
challenging task both to writer and reader, in so far as the literary
forms are constantly being created and evolved. “Style” becomes an
agent therefore at reconstituting a poetics afresh. To write a
deliberately new style was to seize power for new voices in literature.
According to Declan Kiberd:
Whenever Yeats raised the question of Style, it was as if he
43 Jahan Ramazani. “Is Yeats a Post Colonial Poet?” W. B. Yeats: Critical Assessments. David Pierce (Ed.). London: 2000, p 798.
44 Declan Kiberd. Inventing Ireland: The Literature o f the Modem Nation. Cambridge and Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995, p 120.
45 Ibid.
45
saw in it the promise of an antidote to Anglicization. Style
before became an enabling technique to Yeats, the surest
basis for intelligent self-scrutiny.46
To Yeats, Joyce, and later Heaney too, the fascination with style
persists. The word style denoting something much more expansive
and demanding than the usual inferences drawn from the word. To all
Irish writers, style was potentially redemptive, charged with the
power to lift the fallen material of the given world to a new world, to
a new plane of consciousness. Clearly, no such model was available
in the English poetic tradition. Through their efforts, poet like Yeats
have turned an otherwise supine Ireland into a living, vibrant even
awe-inspiring “Imagined community”. In this case then, Artistic
form not only military might or political movements defines and
defends the national imaginary .
Yeats is thus a nationalist and perhaps postcolonial writer in the
strong sense of nation maker. In the weak sense of nationalism as
reflecting the majoritarian views of the nation or as supporting the
state, Yeats is less creditably nationalist.
46 . Declan Kiberd. Inventing Ireland: The Literature o f the Modem Nation. Cambridge and Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995, p 123.
46
This needs some clarification. Yeats famous artistic ‘ambivalence’,
that of a wavering sensibility not ready to uphold any one single
generalizing idea has been demonstrated aptly in his poems.
Paradoxically, his intense nationalistic poem Easter 1916 provides a
case in point (as do many others). Declan Kiberd comments:
[Easter 1916] enacts the quarrel within his own mind
between his public, textual duty...and his more personal urge.
The poem speaks correspondingly with two voices, and
sometimes exacts in single phrases (terrible beauty) their
contestation.47
This ability at self - doubt or ambiguity is a common motif in Irish
poetry. To Yeats, the question was one of aligning himself with his
duty as national bard or to define artistic autonomy in items of a self -
expression. To Declan Kiberd “[Yeats] was abandoning the rather
programmatic nationalism of his youth for a more personal version of
Irish Identity”. This attempt at a liminal position is what will later
attract Yeats poetic successor by decades - Seamus Heaney. The
Yeatsian model was particularly useful for Heaney for its peculiar
blending of the communal and the individual and its capacity for
47 Declan Kiberd. Inventing Ireland: The Literature o f the Modern Nation. Cambridge and Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995, p 213.
48 Ibid., p 213.
47
imaginative transcendence through linguistic innovation. For Yeats as
well as for Heaney, Irish nationalism is best understood as a
dialectical interplay between the various historical and cultural forces
that have determined the turbulent history of the nation. His view in
this regard is illuminative of the dialogic nature of identity in the post
colonial Irish context:
All literature in every country is derived from models, and as
often as not these are foreign models, and it is the presence of
a personal element alone that can give it nationality in a fine
sense, the nationality of its maker. It is only before
personality has been attained that a race struggling towards
self-consciousness is the better for having, as in primitive
times, nothing but native models, for before this has been
attained. It can neither assimilate nor reject. It was precisely
at this passive moment, attainment approaching but not yet
come, that the Irish heart and mind surrendered to England;
and Irish patriotism, content that the names and opinions
should be Irish was deceived and satisfied. It is always
necessaiy to affirm and reaffirm that nationality is in the
things that escape analysis.49
Declan Kiberd calls this powerful and penetrating paragraph “one of
49 Declan Kiberd. Inventing Ireland: The Literature o f the Modem Nation. Cambridge and Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995, p 165.
48
the first Irish articulations of the dialectics of postcolonial
liberation.”50 Seamus Heaney’s poetics too bases itself on such an
awareness of the intersection of voices in the Irish context. In a
Yeatsian manner, he refuses any bondages to a monocular vision of
Ireland.
To view the novels of James Joyce (1882-1941) as merely
‘avant garde’, ‘modernist’ writing is to be poorly equipped for a total
understanding and enjoyment of his works. This approach has the
draw back of missing out the political and cultural vibrancy in texts
like the Portrait o f the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. Speaking
of Ulysses “as a supreme instance of the postcolonial text”,51 Declan
Kiberd suggests that the ‘modernist’ masterpiece has at its heart the
issue of the dispossession of a race at the hands of colonization:
The Irish, through the later nineteenth century, had become
one of the most deracinated of peoples; robbed of belief in
their own future, losing their native language, overcome by
feelings of anomie and indifference, they seemed rudderless
and doomed. Though Ulysses is set on a day in 1904, it is
necessarily a portrait of the late-Victorian Ireland which went
50 Declan Kiberd. Inventing Ireland: The Literature o f the Modern Nation. Cambridge and Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995, p 165.
51 Ibid., p 329.
49
into its making and, as such, a remarkable outline of colonial
torpor.52
Consequently, the question of Irish identity will be posed aggressively
throughout his novels:
What does it mean to be Irish? Who qualifies as Irish? What
is Ireland? What is a nation?53
These are crucial questions which Bloom’s mental observations about
himself invoke, they form a key subtext of Ulysses, especially in the
‘Aeolus’ and ‘Cyclops episodes’. There is nothing like Ulysses in the
tradition of the English novel; the point is, there cannot be, for
Ulysses, A Portrait o f the Artist as a Young man and even the
‘fragmentary’ Finnegans Wake draw their sustenance from the
foundational myth of Irish nationalism.
Joyce as Irish post colonial writer “writes back” in the most
potent way he can - through defamiliarization. The norms of Standard
English are by passed and his usage is marked by dialect words,
Irishisms and “place names”. Linguistically speaking, Joyce
52 Declan Kiberd. Inventing Ireland. The Literature o f the Modern Nation. Cambridge and Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995, p 329.
53 Quoted in Eugene O’ Brien. Seamus Heaney: Searches For Answers. Pluto Press, London: 2003, p 17.
50
foregrounds this issue in A Portrait O f The Artist As A Young Man,
thereby embodying in different ways in his work a consciousness of
“linguistic otherness”: a sense of unease with the imperial, alien
English language. The classic quote from the novel which illustrates
this is in the final section of the novel when Stephen Dedalus has an
interview with his English Dean at the university. During their
conversation, Stephen uses the word ‘tudish’ where the dean would
use ‘funnel’. Stephen’s introspective analysis is worth quoting for the
clear colonial ramifications of the language issue in Ireland often
quoted as central to Irish literary studies:
The little word seemed to have turned a rapier point of his
sensitiveness against this courteous and vigilant foe. The
language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine.
How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his
lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without
unrest of sprit. His language, so familiar and so foreign will
always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or
accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul
frets in the shadow of his language.54
(Years later, Raja Rao would express a similar predicament in his
54 James Joyce. A Portrait o f the Artist as a Young Man. Wordsworth Suffolk, 1992, p 189.
51
acclaimed postcolonial text Kanthapura) James Joyce converts the
humiliation of this history into a linguistic triumph, sanctioning a new
pride in the language now known by linguists as Hibemo - English.55
In Ulysses, and finally in Finnegan’s Wake, Joyce pursues a kind of a
subversive revenge on the English language by radically destabilizing
its lexicon in a promiscuous riot of pun and word play. In these
novels, the authority of English language is constantly undermined by
its exposure to numerous other languages, with etymology becoming
the agency of an antagonistic politics. Stan Smith sees this ‘tundish’
episode as central to Irish literary studies and a crucial episode in
Heaney’s developing attitude towards the legacy of the English
language. Quoting Heaney’s essay “Among School Children”, he
points out the formers comment:“Stephen, in that famous passage
feels inadequate when he hears the English Jesuit speaking English”.56
The differences between them, according to Heaney are of cultural
and geographical placing, in the oral register, ‘on his lips and mine’,
of a difference within a shared ‘language, so familiar and so foreign’.
In the same lecture, analysing Stephen’s discovery of his linguistic
55 A variant of the English language made up of Irish elements and Standard English, immortalized by Joyce in his novels.
56 Quoted in Stan Smith. “The Distance Between”, Seamus Heaney: New Casebooks. Michael Allen (Ed.) Hampshire and London:1997, p 245.
52
displacement as a mark of triumph, Heaney’s comment is significant:
What had seemed disabling and provincial is suddenly found
to be corroborating and fundamental and potentially
universal. To belong to Ireland, to speak its dialect, is not
necessarily to be cut off from the world’s banquet because
that banquet is eaten at the table of one’s own life, savoured
by the tongue one speaks. Stephen now trusts what he calls
‘our own language’ and in that trust he will go to encounter
what he calls ‘the reality of experience’. But it will be his
own specific Dublin experience, with all its religious and
historical freight, so different from the English experience to
which he had heretofore stood in a subservient
relationship.”57 In his encounter with the ghost of Joyce at the
end of Station Island, the poet will return to this episode,
referring to it as “The Feast of the Holy Tundish”,
“canonising it among his stars as Stephen had turned it into a
governing myth in his diary”.58
Thomas Kinsella too places Joyce as central to the ‘healing’ of the
rupture in the divided Irish psyche and calls him “the first major Irish
voice to speak for Irish reality since the death-blow to the Irish
language”.59
57 Quoted in Stan Smith. “The Distance Between: Seamus Heaney”. SeamusHeaney: New Casebooks, Michael Allen (Ed.) London: Macmillan, pp 245-46.
58 Ibid., 246
59 Quoted in A Companion to Twentieth -Century Poetry, Neil Roberts (Ed.)London: Blackwell Publishers, 2001, p 354.
53
Providing a psychological understanding of the postcolonial
condition in Ireland, Christine van Boheeman-Saaf gives a fascinating
interpretation of Joyce’s postcoloniality. Arguing for the “cultural-
historical importance of James Joyce’s modernity” and its extreme
importance for his novels, she explains the “peculiarly traumatizing
and uncanny effect of Irish historical experience on its writers”,60
Joyce in particular. She sees the Irish writer “separated from an
original mooring”61 and hence it becomes the task of Irish literature to
mourn the gap that divides himself or herself from the possibility of
“interiority and self-presence”62 that might have been had history
been different. Growing up with the oppressor’s language, the Irish
artist can only allude allegorically to what can never be voiced with
immediacy. Hence the “obscurity” of a text like “A Portrait o f the
Artist as a Young Mari’’. Central to this argument is the idea that
Joyce’s encryption of an “ontological void” opened up an “extra-
communicative” but “non-articulable” dimension within literary
discourse, making it possible to honor and enshrine the “presence” of
60 Christine van Boheeman-Saaf. Joyce, Derrida, Lacan, and the Trauma o f History: Reading, Narrative, and Postcolonialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, p 1.
61 Ibid., p 2.
62 Ibid.
54
the non-articulated story that cannot be told in so many words - the
“story” of the oppressed, the muted, and the ignored. This hollowness
of the native culture as a direct result of imperial strategy is brilliantly
borne out by this perspective, hailing all Irish literature as a “mimesis
of loss”.63
One of the commonest tendencies of Revivalists like W.B.
Yeats had been to create a myth of the Irish nation as primarily a rural
one. Nationalist writers created a highly idealized version of the Irish
pastoral - where the piety of the land was often viewed through a
haze of sentiments and nostalgia. Such revivalist tendencies, though
important in many ways, would be challenged by revisionary
historians who would revise the default nationalistic narrative of Irish
history as a monological historical narrative, bringing out instead the
fissures and pluralities of the issue, making among other things, the
gender-based (Ireland as suffering female vs. England the male
oppressor) nationalist mythography suspect. An important poet whose
work opposed this tendency to over - idealize the nation was Patrick
Kavanagh (1907-1967). Kavanagh is of prime importance in the
63 Christine van Boheeman-Saaf. Joyce, Derrida, Lacan, and the Trauma ofHistory: Reading, Narrative, and Postcolonialism. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1999, pp 6-9.
55
cultural tradition of Ireland. First, for his fierce anti- pastoral vision of
rural Ireland, secondly, his bold departure in making poetic themes
out of rural occupations. His great poem The Great Hunger is an
uncompromising exercise in the anti-pastoral, combining in it an
evocation of the local and the communal. Kavangah is important also
because he would eventually provide a strong poetic impetus to
another Irish poet grappling with forging an aesthetic out of his
particular condition and place, Seamus Heaney.
Seamus Heaney confessedly derives inspiration from Patrick
Kavanagh’s habit of encompassing his domestic world within his
poetry and thereby to effect a sense of continuity with his community
and establish his relationship to his origins. Kavanagh’s famous
distinction between the ‘provincial’ and the ‘parochial’ was
illustrative to Heaney of the way the future of writing in Ireland was
going to be if it was to be authentic. A provincial, he writes, “is
always trying to live by other peoples lives, but a parochial is self -
sufficient.”64 A parochial writes of the “fundamentals” and by that
very virtue, is more universal. The ‘parochial’ for Kavanagh, is
distinct from the ‘provincial’ mindset, the latter defining itself solely
64 Quoted in Seamus Heaney. Andrew Murphy. Northcote House Publishers,Devon: 2000, p 19. ,
56
in relation to ‘the metropolis’.
The parochial mentality on the other hand is neVer in any
doubt about the social and artistic validity of his parish. All
great civilizations are based on parochialism-Greek, Israelite,
English. In recent times we have had two great Irish
parishioners-James Joyce and George Moore.65
A parochial writes of the “fundamentals” and by that very virtue, is
more universal. Kavanagh here comes closest to the mapping of an
indigenous Irish aesthetic with himself as seer.
Heaney clearly sums up Kavanagh’s importance:
If The Great Hunger did not exist, a greater hunger would,
the hunger of a culture for its own image and expression. It is
a poem of its own place & time, transposing the griefs of the
past...into the distress of the present, as significant in the
Irish context as Hardy’s novels were in the English...66
The above discussion of four major Irish writers was done first, in
order to establish the development, however complex, of the Irish
Literary tradition in English, which finds genuine representative
voices in each succeeding generation. Secondly, this tradition is to be
65 Quoted in A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry. Neil Roberts (Ed.) London: Blackwell Publishers. 2001, p 352.
66 Seamus Heaney. Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978. London: Faber and Faber, 1980, p 126.
57
viewed not merely as a matter of echoes and influences and so on but
a sort of mutuality among the writers, an interdependence which we
call a tradition. Further, the nature of Irishness and the problem of
identity are obsessive themes for each of these literary artistes.
In the second half of the twentieth century, a representative
voice in this tradition has been that of Seamus Heaney (b.1939) - a
contemporary voice which grapples with the continuities and
discontinuities that invigorate and define his poetic development.
Heaney insistently draws on this impressive lineage, not simply as a
matter of self-consciousness but more importantly, with a view
towards an artistic self-definition and the need to carve out poetry’s
destiny in an increasingly volatile world. Seamus Deane places
Heaney in this direct line of succession in Irish literature: “... Heaney
is very much in the Irish tradition in that he has learned, more
successfully than most, to conceive of his personal experience in
terms of his country’s history ... .”67
To have a recognizable set of paradigms is an enabling tool for
a poet, but can easily fall into stereotyping themes and pre
occupations. The peculiar contribution of Heaney lies in the way he
67 Quoted in Seamus Heaney in conversation with Karl Miller, London, BetweenThe Lines, 2000, p. 104.
58
manages to write a poetry whereby he becomes not merely the
transmitter and re-invigorator of his native tradition but almost
provides a remarkable culmination to the efforts of his literary
predecessors, writing as he does in the modem or even postmodern
world. In this respect, Heaney’s contribution to Irish poetry is colossal.
What makes Heaney’s status in Irish poetry monumental is the
way that he has constantly renewed his thematic concerns throughout
his poetic career. His prose writings or criticism pose fundamental
questions about the nature and role of poetry, the function of the poet
and the precarious balance between politics and poetry, the aesthetic
and the ethical, art and life, fundamental queries the answers to which
his serious artistic endeavors constantly demand. His prose writings
have been much acclaimed which form a kind of manifesto or
declaration of poetic technique and poetic intent and at the same time
have a force and brilliance of their own when read apart from the
poetry.
It would be pertinent to discuss next, his critical discussions.
59