The Poetics of Memory – The Public Role of Seamus Heaney after 1995 Joanne Piavanini April 2017 A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The Australian National University. © Copyright by Joanne Marie Piavanini 2017. All Rights Reserved 2 I certify that this thesis is my original work. To the best of my knowledge, all sources have been acknowledged in the text. No part of it has been submitted for a higher degree at any other university or institution. Joanne Marie Piavanini April 2017 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to acknowledge the people who made this thesis possible. Firstly, I would like to acknowledge the invaluable contribution of Associate Professor Rosanne Kennedy, the chair of my supervisory panel, for her guidance and support. I would also like to thank Dr Ned Curthoys, who supported my PhD application and served as the chair of my panel for the first twelve months. I have benefited from the expertise of a number of readers. I would like to acknowledge my supervisory panel at the Australian National University: Professor Will Christie, Dr Russell Smith, and Professor Gillian Russell. I would also like to thank Emeritus Professor Elizabeth Minchin for her advice on Antigone. I would like to thank the College of Arts and Social Sciences at The Australian National University for the Australian Postgraduate Award. This scholarship made it possible to take a break from full-time work and focus my attention on research. Thanks to Fergus Armstrong for proof reading. Finally, I would like to thank my family and friends for their support. 4 ABSTRACT This thesis deals with what it means to be a ‘public’ poet in national and transnational contexts. Because Seamus Heaney’s ‘Irishness’ has shaped the critical response to his work, what has been effaced is detailed critical attention to the interplay between the national and transnational dimensions of his poetry. What is most evident in his later work is a type of border-crossing transcultural solidarity, and an openness to alternate views and other cultures becomes increasingly important. To speak of Heaney’s cosmopolitanism is not to dismiss the significance of the national, but to indicate multiple allegiances and identifications. In addition to considering Heaney as a cosmopolitan poet, this thesis uses approaches and concepts from memory studies to draw out the significance of Heaney’s work in a transnational literary space. While critics have long asserted the importance of memory in his poetry, it has most often been treated as a peripheral rather than central idea. While some criticism obliquely deals with collective or cultural memory in his work – for example by discussing the representation of myth or tradition in his bog poems – there has been little sustained attention to this aspect of his work. This project is focused on how public memory is shaped in collections and major translations published after 1995. Memory is a helpful lens to look at Heaney’s late work, in particular, because of the importance of the interplay of past, present and future in these works. In his later work the dynamic plays out in interesting ways: in the construction of a collective memory of the Troubles in works written in the 1990s; in the use of the elegy to commemorate the passing of important contemporary poets; in his writing on events with transnational significance, such as 9/11; and in the slippages between past and present in poems about his family. Another way that Heaney explores memory is through the literary afterlives of texts – specifically, his appropriation of canonical classical texts. His adaptations of Sophocles, Horace and Virgil collapse the distinctions between past, present and future. In his late work Heaney actively shapes collective memory through a pattern of reprising and revising imagery and ideas from his earlier work and through the translation and adaptation of texts from classical antiquity. The thesis concludes with a coda which examines the commemorative practices which have emerged since his death in 2013 and, particularly, how an individual can function as a site of memory. 5 Table of Contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .......................................................................................................... 3 ABSTRACT................................................................................................................................... 4 INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................................ 7 ‘Famous Seamus’ ................................................................................................................................ 7 The Troubles ........................................................................................................................................ 9 The Public Role of Writers ........................................................................................................... 11 Heaney’s Public Commentary during the Troubles .......................................................... 14 Heaney’s Troubles Poetry ............................................................................................................ 17 Why Heaney’s later work? ........................................................................................................... 21 Chapter Outlines .............................................................................................................................. 23 CHAPTER 1: SEAMUS HEANEY AS A POET OF MEMORY – BETWEEN THE NATIONAL AND TRANSNATIONAL ................................................................................... 26 A National, Transnational, Cosmopolitan Poet ................................................................... 27 Significant Monographs and Emerging Trends in Heaney Scholarship .................... 34 Memory Studies: Concepts and Methods .............................................................................. 41 CHAPTER 2: MEMORY AND COMPLICITY IN THE SPIRIT LEVEL AND BEOWULF50 Memory and Complicity ............................................................................................................... 52 The Nobel Effect............................................................................................................................... 55 Responsibility-in-complicity – ‘Every now and then, just weighing in / Is what it must come down to’ ....................................................................................................................... 58 Refusal of Complicity – ‘When, for fuck’s sake, are you going to write something for us?’.................................................................................................................................................. 62 The complicity of the witness in ‘Mycenae Lookout’ – ‘No such thing as innocent bystanding’ ........................................................................................................................................ 66 Foldedness – ‘Ourselves again, free-willed again, not bad’ ............................................ 76 Beowulf and Complicity: ‘the long times and troubles they’d come through’ ........ 78 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................................... 83 CHAPTER 3: THE BURIAL AT THEBES AS ‘PORTABLE MONUMENT’ ...................... 85 Ethics of Commemorating the 1981 Hunger Strike: ‘Sacred Drama’? ....................... 87 Transnational memory and ‘portable monuments’ .......................................................... 89 Irish and transnational Antigones: ‘our own special allegory’? ................................... 91 War on Terror: ‘Whoever isn’t for us / Is against us in this case.’ .............................. 95 Lamentation and the burial of Francis Hughes: ‘No keening, no interment, no observance / Of any of the rites’ .............................................................................................104 Memory of the 1981 Hunger Strike: ‘What are Creon’s rights / when it comes to me and mine?’ .................................................................................................................................106 From page to stage – ‘Mixing Bush with Beowulf’ ...........................................................116 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................118 CHAPTER 4: ELEGIES FOR POETS: ‘BREAKING BREAD WITH THE DEAD’ ....... 120 Elegies and memory .....................................................................................................................122 Establishing a pattern in ‘Elegy’ for Robert Lowell – ‘The way we are living … will have been our life’ .........................................................................................................................126 Elegy for Joseph Brodsky: ‘Do again what Auden said / Good poets do: bite, break their bread’ .........................................................................................................................131 Elegy for Ted Hughes – ‘Passive suffering: who said it was disallowed / As a theme for poetry? ..........................................................................................................................139 Communion with Czeslaw Milosz – ‘Light has gone out but the door stands open’145 6 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................153