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What is the relation between poetry and violence in Irish culture? Too close for the comfort of most revisionist historians. Conor Cruise O’Brien, during his term as Minister in the coalition government of 1973-77, had rebel songs banned from RTE; and, in an article for The New Review, he argued that the overlap between poetry and nationalism was an unhealthy intersection, signposting the way to carnage.
Dr. O’Brien did not entertain the notion that those who sing such songs may discharge a potentially murderous aggression into the relatively less lethal energies of art, that for every rendition of “Sean Ó Duibhir an Ghleanna” there may have been one less bullet fired on the field of battle. Nor did he countenance the idea that such lyrics are most often sung by life’s losers, compensating for defeat with the best songs. That it is the victims, even more than the exponents, of violence who are celebrated in nationalist culture was not considered.
As always, however, Dr. O’Brien’s polemic had an element of truth. The forces that impose a culture are - because they have to be - more forceful and brutal than those upon whom their culture is imposed. Ireland, as Kevin O’Higgins conceded, has always been held by the gun, though the ruling class can never admit its own violence as such and must displace it to the level of official culture. This is what Walter Benjamin meant by his claim that every document in the history of culture was also a document in the history of barbarism. For example, the Big House of Ireland, built on stolen land with block hewed and ferried by the dispossessed natives, were documents of enduring beauty, whose seemingly eternal shapeliness was intended to soothe Anglo-Irish fears of a limitation to their Ascendancy. The Anglo-Irish were, quite literally, the first ‘Provisionals’. Yeats conceded as much in the ‘Ancestral Houses’ section of Meditations in a time of Civil War, but much of his other poetry also attempts to come to terms with the inseparability of ‘greatness and violence’, of terror and beauty, especially at moments of foundation of a tradition. The same paradox underlay Synge’s Hiberno-English dialect, which fed without scruple off the dying body of the Irish language, as surely as Synge’s hero Christy constructed a career on the apparently murdered body of his father.
There is, moreover, an even deeper level at which Benjamin’s thesis is true, in the sense that conscience-stricken diagnoses of the barbarism at the heart of culture may themselves be complicit in the barbarity. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness which has the reputation of being an honest exposure of Belgian brutality in the Congo may also be an example of that barbarism, yet another of Benjamin’s narratives being written by a victorious white man, albeit one toying in this case with his own scruples. Certainly, the book in which the toying takes place may now be set alongside the diamonds and copper as part of the plunder brought back from the expedition.
In such a context, the limitation of Cruise O’Brien’s position becomes apparent. His attempt to separate nationalism and poetry - understandable in the immediate context of a bombing campaign - may be nothing other than a futile attempt to deny the symbiotic relationship between culture and violence, a denial of the very basis of culture-as-necessary-repression outlined by Freud. If conservative nationalism seeks a false aestheticisation of violence and politics, then the shrewder response may not be a denial of that connection, but rather a Benjaminite redeployment of its terms, so that instead there is a politicisation of art.
From the outset, the poetry of Seamus Heaney has been a major contribution to that debate. Some critics believe that his Ireland is a merely nationalist zone in which political violence is subsumed into the glamorous realms of art. Others hold that he is a foremost critic of such evasions. Is his Ireland held by the gun or the pen?
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
There, certainly, the equation is as blatant as that made by Patrick Pearse when he rewarded a poetry-contest winner at St. Enda’s with a gleaming new rifle. But Heaney, of course, does not sustain the equation, opting instead to parody it as a B-movie pose. The entire poem, having taken out this ironic insurance, will rehabilitate the old cliché about pens being mightier than swords, reading the conflict between the two modes in the specific terms of class. All this is famously based on a moment when the boy Heaney, on his way to Anahorish primary school, was told by a tired road worker: “Aye, the pen’s easily handled. It’s a lot lighter than the spade”.
What exercises the poet is that he will, unlike his ancestors, earn a living by mind rather than body; and in a culture where the land is traditionally female, this has clear implications: Under my window, a clean rasping sound when the spade sinks into the gravelly ground; My father digging. I look down ... The poet is already what he will only later admit, an artful voyeur:
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away,
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
In Gaelic tradition, a man was seen as married to the land which was fertile if he was, literally, upright; and the sexual innuendo is deliberately sustained in a way which licenses the spade/gun transformation. The dignity of the farmer’s work comes - as in ‘At a Potato Digging’ - from the fact that it is mindless, a matter of nature marc than culture, compared to which the pen’s movements seem masturbatory.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
On the surface level, however, this jaunty triumph of conclusion celebrates transcendence by mind of the grossness of the body, accession to the cultural codes of the middle class. In a brilliant article (‘Pap for the Dispossessed. The Poetry of Seamus Heaney’, [in] Boundary 2) David Lloyd has astutely noted the removal of the image of violence, “snug as a gun”, from the repeated final stanza. This too could be the tell-tale sign of a class which lives off a violence which it can never afford to concede as such.
The overt trajectory of the poem is to disguise the real meaning of labour in the fields by seeing it as rehearsal for the act of writing, agriculture giving way to pure culture; yet the poet is haunted by the physical mastery which he flouts and so his sub-texts indicate a fear that he has chosen a merely masturbatory mode, a metaphor rather than a real thing.
The attempt of Death of a Naturalist (1966), Heaney’s first full volume, was to translate violence into culture, its success apparent to many British critics like C.B. Cox who wrote of its evocation of the “colourful violence” of farm life. But Heaney was never so easily convinced by his own PR machine. The poems, when reread, pronounce themselves repeatedly appalled by the way in which violence insinuates itself into everyday activity. His farm becomes a Stalinist colony filled with purges of unwanted kittens, and his thrust is to mock attempts by self-deceiving literary townies to convert this carnage into pastoral. In the book, the naturalist dies but death is not yet unnatural: ‘Prevention of cruelty’ talk cuts ice in town Where they consider death unnatural,
But on a well-run farm, pests have to be kept down.
Still, written by a member of one Northern minority, that last line has an ominous ring to it. Though years were to pass before poems directly confronted the political crisis, there is a sense in which the relation between poetry and violence was always a preoccupation - something the poet acknowledged retrospectively in his fourth volume North (1976) with ‘The Betrothal of Cavehill’
Gunfire barks its questions off Cavehill
And the profiled basalt maintains its stare South;
proud, protestant and northern, and male.
Adam untouched before the shock of gender.
They still shoot here for luck over a bridegroom.
The morning I drove out to bed me down
Among my love’s hideouts, her pods and broom,
They fired over my car the ritual gun.
Here one notes the easy elision of sex and violence, and the pervasive conceptual cliché of male Protestant Anglo-culture versus female Catholic Irish tradition, the latter ravished by the former, as the open feminine vowels of Ireland are “buIled” by the harsher masculine consonants of English alliterative tradition. This is, of course, Celticist nonsense, essentialist thinking mocked as such in Lloyd’s essay and by Elizabeth CuIIingford in the keynote lecture at the 1988 Yeats Summer School.
O’Casey’s Covey famously insisted that a nation is never a glib poetic abstraction but a matter of molecules and atoms, accidentally conjoined. Indeed, just weeks before the Easter Rising Eoin Mac Neill took his Volunteers to a meeting in Rathfarnham at which he gravely told them that there was no such person as Cathleen ni Houlihan or a poor old woman, merely the reality of a land and people which they might soon want to die for. Even he, more than seventy years ago, objected to the way the land, like the female body, had been not just colonised but metaphorised, feeding a noxiously patriarchal notion of passive wilting maiden and thrusting, masterful male. Yet Heaney persists with the trope in poems like ‘Act of Union’, despite the fact that the Provos themselves have debunked that entire tradition.
This none-too-convert sexism explains the fetishising of landscape (especially the lost landscape of the Derry childhood) which can give an almost pornographic quality to many of Heaney’s poems, in which land is reduced to a mere symbol, and a part loved in the name of the whole, just as a macho male will often fetishise an aspect of female anatomy.
Yet, there is finally a sense in which these recent and radical critiques, some quite ferocious, miss out on the deepest workings of the poems. There is in Heaney a tremendously developed ethical sense which will always lead him to question his own evasions. The worst his critics can say of him has already been said, by himself, in the poems. So, when the Provos tar and feather a woman for fraternising with British soldiers, he is reminded not just of the parallel case of the Danish girl sacrificed to the land in a fertility rite, but also of the more accusing parallel between the Provos and himself, since both are guilty of reducing woman to mere cultural totem. ‘Punishment’ is as much about pornography as it is about violence, because Heaney knows that pornography is yet another of those ambiguous zones where violence and culture conspire. His poem sees what Susan Sontag would later say; that the logical consummation of the pornographic imagination is death.
The bog, as Heaney has said, preserves not just bodies but consciousness, every layer telling its own history by means of geography. In ‘Punishment’, the girl is paradoxically preserved by the very weight of all that culture and earth which suffocated her. The poet partakes in that duplicity of culture, on the one hand sympathising with her plight and worshipping her, as he worshipped the Tollund Man, as saint - but, on the other hand, repeating his characteristic sin of fetishing those beaded nipples like a cheap voyeur, a voyeur moreover whose sin is traceable directly to his art. This sin may indeed be a more serious offence than is his connivance in the tribal revenge on a woman who has walked out with an ‘enemy’ soldier.
Whatever way you read them, the bog-poems do have the effect of distancing the contemporary violence. Some would say that this is done to dramatise the weird fact that newspaper readers, innured to photographs of daily atrocity, can feel more for the ancient than the modem victim. Others hold that, on the contrary, our feelings about the contemporary carnage are too acute for control, and that Heaney shrewdly achieves some control through the correlative victims of a sacrificial cult to an earth goddess not unlike Mother Ireland. With the distancing comes aestheticisation and, inevitably, another conceptual cliche, the ‘bog-Irish’ - though in this case it is handled with an unexampled complexity. Cullingford complained of the sexism of the bog poems in their portrayal of woman-as-victim, but in fact the most graphic one of all is ‘The Tollund Man’. Here the male victim is described as naked, except for the cap, noose and girdle, as he couples with the goddess.
Those dark juices working
Him to a saint’s kept body.
He is a kept man in the sexual, as well as archaeological, sense; and on that basis, his body too can be fetishised and prayed to.
Denis Donoghue has argued that the bog-poems provide a myth of consolation, a reminder, that, however terrible the current violence, it has its part in a wider European cycle, and that the poems “release the reader’s mind from the immediacy of the experience” to “the consolation of hearing that there is a deeper, [inner] life going on beneath the bombing and murders and torture”. This is just a fancy way of saying that violence can be prettified by art. Both ‘Punishment’ and ‘The Tollund Man’, aware of the danger of such readings, return us in their closing sequences to the contemporary atrocity, which somehow refuses to be contained by the rnythologising structure Heaney has devised for them. There is, in Heaney, a real scruple which saves his poems (despite their considerable winsomeness) from becoming too pleased with the conclusions they propose, Yet there is also the scruple which wants the poem to save the reader from political condemnation of a violence which has not yet been imaginatively understood.
The fear is that such understanding may seem like forgiveness, or, at least, [tolerance]. It is interesting, in that context, that Heaney used the word connive alongside the phrase “civilised outrage” in ‘Punishment’, to mediate his sense that there are no easy solutions to the poetic, as well as political, problems posed by the North.
Despite this, as Ireland’s Number One bard, he is somehow expected, whenever he appears on television, to dispense political wisdom. He has insured as best he can against charges of neo-Provoism by signing the book of condolences at the British Embassy after the murder of Ambassador Ewart Biggs; but such gestures have merely prompted revisionists like Jim Kemmy to sneer, in a Hibernia review, that the poet would make an ideal Fianna Fail town councIllor.
In these areas, too, Heaney turns out to have been his own most searching critic. In the ironically-titled ‘Exposure’, he accuses himself of the kind of ambivalence alleged by Kemmy, a two-facedness masquerading as artistic even-handedness. This poem was written after he had resigned his lectureship in Belfast (followmg death-threats from loyalist paramilitaries). He had taken up residence in the woods of Wicklow, like the northern king Sweeney who, after going mad in battle, fled the field to face a different kind of exposure - to nature, to the poetic quarrel with the self rather than the political quarrel with others. Here, too, there is ambiguity, for in describing himself as a “woodkern: escaped from the massacre”, the poet uses the very term employed by English officers for those Irish rebels and rapparees who sought protection in the woods. As in Yeats’ civil war sequence, there are two kinds of guilt here - guilt at [glorifying in] poetry the brutal actions of others, and guilt at failing to partake in such action himself.
In Station Island, his sixth full volume published in 1984, Heaney finally tired of his pose of scrupulous neutality and intermittent empathy. The poet who had once boasted of being neither internee nor informer now offered empathy to all, smiters and smitten. A different kind of even-handedness permits all Northern voices to be heard, but the poet no longer professes to speak for [even] them. Instead, they are allowed to talk at him, often accusmg him of giving. too much relief by winsome images, of soothing the necessary pain by describing it too beautifully. His shot cousin complains
The Protestant who shot me through the head /
I accuse directly, but indirectly you ..
Who saccharined my death with morning dew.
This is, of course, a versified version of Cruise O’Brien’s charge against the nationalist poetic - that it confers a spurious glamour on dirty deeds, much as Yeats in his plays had done for the fighting Cuchulainn.
The artist who had most fully explored this tension before Heaney was, of course, Synge. In The Playboy his women seem for the first two acts incapable of thinking of poetry except in terms of violence, incapable of thinking of violence except in terms of poetry. Pegeen welcomes Christy for his poet’s talking and bravery of heart, while discarding Shawn Keogh who has neither ‘savagery’ nor ‘fine words’. The implied equation causes the Mayo villagers to make a fearful mistake - to think that they are admiring violence when in fact they are beguiled by poetry. It is left to Pegeen, in the final act, to dismantle the equation, when she witnesses a real act of violence before her eyes and comments sourly on the gap between a gallous story and a dirty deed. Synge’s own answer to the hyperaestheticisation of violence which he found in Yeats was not to dismantle the equation as Pegeen did, but to heighten rather than soften the focus on that violence. In the Preface to his own poems, Synge said poetry would have to become brutal again if it was ever again to be fully human. The saccharine of morning dew and Celtic mist must be removed from the skinny shee, and winsomeness seen for the temptation it is.
That is indeed the point to which Heaney comes in Station Island, a book whose poems are often as raw and open as a wound, a book which rejects the distancing effect of bog-poems for a more immediate messiness. Here the landscapes are filled with a technology only half returned to the earth. The author himself becomes an awkward Christy Mahon, half-ashamed of his own facility with words:
And there I was, incredible to myself, among people far too eager to believe me and my story, even if it happened to be true.
Heaney’s own self-image has never been as high as you’d expect of an author who regularly sells over 20,000 copies of an edition. Now in his fiftieth year, he has won all the prizes with poems which combine awesome complexity and mass popularity in ways which have left some, but especially himself, suspicious. He has, at various times, likened himself to Hamlet the Dane, hand-wringing over graves, dithering, blathering; but like Synge, that other skull-handler, he knows that art is carrion, a barbarian’s booty, steeped in a violence it must nevertheless seem to deplore. As he says of Sweeney’s first flight
I was mired in attachment until they began to pronounce me a feeder off battlefields ...
In other words, a reluctant beneficiary of a violence which he can neither fully condemn nor condone. Conor Cruise O’Brien, to judge by his recent articles, would doubtless say that this makes Heaney the logical bard of the SDLP. And, as a classmate of John Hume’s, the poet might sigh and say ‘so be it’.
The poet who wrings hands and toys with scruples does so - like Conrad in Heart of Darkness - only after the event. He has his cake, he eats and enjoys it, and then he says that, really, eating cake is not a completely moral activity when you think about it. David Lloyd complains that Heaney can accuse himself of voyeurism in poem after poem, while nevertheless making as subject of those poems the insights which only such voyeurism can generate. This, too, is a serious accusation; but Heaney, again, made it first when he wrote of the split within himself between the artist who takes risks without forethought and the knowing coroner-in-the-brain who seeks always the certainty of a post-mortem. Heaney obviously likes the former a lot more than the latter, but he knows that the task which remains for him as a poet is to bring the two a little closer together. There are signs in The Haw Lantern that he has begun to do just that.
Heaney is one of the very few modem poets who have managed to write poems that are fully political and, nonetheless, fully poems. The strain, at times, has shown in his sometimes glib formulations about sex-as-violence; but he has given the fullest and subtlest account of the relation between poetry and violence in the Ireland of his own generation, and at a time when that analysis has been simplified by others into mere polemics. [End] |