Reading Seamus Heaney‟S
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The Troubled Workings of Multidirectionality: Reading Seamus Heaney‟s Intertextualities Research Master Thesis Comparative Literary Studies Maria Zirra [email protected] 3428966 July 2012 Supervisor Prof. Dr. Ann Rigney Second Reader Prof. Dr. Paulo de Medeiros To my wonderful mother, Ioana Zirra, who introduced me to Heaney’s poetry Table of Contents Acknowledgements ii Preface: Poetry and Cultural Memory? iii Introduction: Cultural Memory Debates and their Multidirectionality 1 Chapter 1: Heaney‟s „Object Poems‟: 27 Northern Etymologies, Northern Archaeologies, and Softer Option Intertextualities Chapter 2: Picturing the Troubles: Ekphrastic Intertextualities 63 and the Intermediality of Cultural Memory Chapter 3: “The Impact of Translation”: Heaney‟s Sweeney, Heaney‟s Dante 90 Chapter 4: The Ethical Effects of Multidirectionality: 121 Complicitous Poetics and Infinite Mourning Conclusions 163 Bibliography 168 Acknowledgements First and foremost, I want to thank my mom, Ioana Zirra, for introducing me to the wonderful poetry of Seamus Heaney and literature, in general. Thank you for being the best and most attentive and instructive first reader anyone could ever wish for (this does not even begin to describe the effort, patience and guidance you have provided me with over the past few months). Thank you for spending so much of your limited time helping me. It means the world to me. I am incredibly grateful to Ann Rigney for her always inspiring comments, her endless patience with my discombobulated writing style, her constant encouragements, her perfect editing skills and the care with which she has supervised this lengthy paper. Moreover, her wonderful lectures in Cultural Memory Studies have proven to be the single most useful theoretical tool for this dissertation and the conferences she has organized were always incredibly stimulating and fascinating. Even more thanks to Stef Craps and the amazing opportunities he has gone out of his way to set up for me on my research stay in Ghent. I will always fondly remember our very stimulating and instructive conversations on multidirectional memory, aesthetics and empathy and your wonderful course. Most of all, thank you for inviting me to the Multidirectional Memory workshop where I’ve had the honour of receiving feedback on my project from Michael Rothberg himself. While we’re on the subject, I also want to acknowledge the invaluable feedback I have received from Michael Rothberg and Yasemin Yildiz on a preliminary version of what is now chapter 4 and to thank them for their encouragements. Thank you to Paulo de Medeiros for his patience and his encouragements to follow our passions no matter what, and his efforts to solve all of our problems and address all our concerns, no matter how ridiculous or naïve. A billion thanks to my beloved “Litkids” whom I feel most grateful to have spent my last two years with: You are the best geekiest friends one could wish for and make me pine for Utrecht every single day. Special gratitude goes out to Joke, Paul and Katrien for braving some of my awful chapter drafts and for always providing insightful and useful comments and much needed encouragement. A big bear hug to Ileana and Seba, the LLS linguist dream team who’ve always lent me shoulders to lean on, food to gorge on, critical views to chew on, jokes to laugh at and ears to whine in. Finally, to my long-enduring boyfriend who has not yet banished me to the 9th circle of the Inferno for being absent-minded and keeping “Away from it All” in my writing tower, except maybe in jest, like Heaney’s wife, thank you for bearing with me. Also, thank you to HSP Huygens and their generous scholarship programme for giving me the chance to receive some of the best education The Netherlands could provide. There are no words to express my gratitude and awe at this enormous chance. iii Preface Poetry and Cultural Memory? With the vertiginous rise of Memory Studies from the 1980s to the present day, it is surprising how few studies or articles have been dedicated to the manner in which poetry circulates as a genre of cultural memory. In a recent keynote address, Michael Rothberg mentioned that one of the directions that Memory Studies seems to take in the United States academia is to move towards a theorization of genres of memory and their specific means of remembrance1. Nevertheless, most of the recent studies in literary cultural memory have been using the novel as an illustration. It is obvious why this literary genre is such a fertile ground for analysis: its narrative structure and manner of organizing information makes it “stick” because it structures historical discourse into a coherent, memorable (often moral) story; it plays a major role in creating and disseminating counter-memory and alternative history ideas in the service of emerging identity groups; its unwavering popularity as a commodity and object of leisure make it a very fertile ground for the conveyance of ideas and discourses about the past; and, last but not least its portability as a cultural memory monument allows it to circulate easily across the ages or acquire an “afterlife” (Rigney “Portable” 372). In recent years, historical and political theatre has also been read as performance of cultural memory in new contexts with the proliferation of hybrid adaptations (of, for instance, classical Greek plays); additionally, a rising tide of theatre with a moral and political message in response to various postcolonial issues and global issues such as the Apartheid, the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, the 9/11 terrorist attacks makes theorization imminent. (Stalpaert 75) (Thomson 4). 1 Multidirectional Memory Postgraduate Workshop, Ghent, March 27, 2012 iv But when it comes to poetry and cultural memory merely a handful of articles address the issue. This is strange, since 20th century poetry, in particular, seems to me to also subscribe to cultural memory momentum. In relation to memory, poetry is still undertheorized for reasons that I will attempt to elucidate. As Jahan Ramazani notes in a recent seminal study, poetry is mostly read within national frameworks, and associated with the elites and specialist reading communities - its global circulation and public sphere impact tends to be neglected by theorists (Ramazani 3). But poetry does participate in the age’s preoccupation with universality and global outreach . Most of the high-modernist and postmodernist leading poetic figures contributed amazing adaptations of canonic texts and made intertextuality their major theme and technique. Owing to this surprising theoretical lacuna, I have set out to investigate how poetry participates in cultural memory circulation and discourses and what it brings to the table as a possible genre of cultural memory. I hope to remediate this gap by using what seems to me the most promising and exciting theory in the field nowadays, Michael Rothberg’s Multidirectional Memory. I will try to prove that poetry participates in cultural memory dynamics Multidirectional Memory proposes that memory be seen as inherently relational and comparative, not being particularly grounded in a nationalist isolated container, but amenable to transnational travels, modeled on imported memory discourse and shaped by dialogue with the past. Memory for Rothberg circulates and is shaped comparatively by adapting, modeling, and differentiating itself from other discourses. For Rothberg, new (traumatic) memory emerges through a process of articulation with the help of the past. Whether consciously or not memory articulation is similar to working through problematic history. The main question investigated in this dissertation will be whether the poetry of Seamus Heaney written in response to the Northern Irish Troubles can be studied through the lens of v multidirectionality in order to explain its cultural memory dynamics. Secondly, I investigate the possibility that intertextuality be associated with Rothberg’s theory as a concrete literary means of multidirectionality. Although Rothberg frequently uses intertextuality as a multidirectional clue in his inspired case studies, it is never defined as a specific tool to tell multidirectional stories. Heaney’s poetry about the Troubles is intensely intertextual and bent on adaptation and appropriation of foreign models and texts in order to articulate comprehensive responses to the bloody civil war which erupted in the late 60s in Northern Ireland and lasted close to four decades. Therefore, if Heaney’s poetry is indeed multidirectional, I would be interested in gauging the degree to which intertextuality underwrites multidirectionality, and in the types of multidirectional intertextual stories that one can detect in the poet’s oeuvre. A third aim of my study is to dissociate the idea of multidirectional memory from the Holocaust as a main term of comparison and transfer it to a different space, that of contemporary Northern Ireland. While Rothberg’s case studies are extremely interesting, his focus on how cultural memory discourse on the Holocaust was articulated and how it helped articulate other postcolonial traumatic histories is a bit too narrow for my taste. The true test for Rothberg’s theory, in my opinion, is to see how it would operate in a different context where the terms of comparison are different. Northern Ireland is an interesting case study because it was not a space of deportation, nor did it participate extensively in the Second World War. Nevertheless, as a colonial space affected by a violent guerilla war of decolonization and divided by exclusivist sectarian discourse, contemporary articulation of Northern Irish identity often requires, as an ethical practice, thinking outside the Ulster box, thinking multidirectinally. Seamus Heaney’s poetry does precisely this: it adopts and juggles various intertextual screens to analyze and articulate a multidirectionally richer response to the frequently inward- vi looking, navel-gazing, Manicheistic discourse animating the Troubles. Heaney engages in a series of cultural memory practices in his poetry ranging from translation, to citation, to adaptation and cultural memory modelling as strategies to come to terms with the Troubles.