Williams, Kirsty (2003) Structures of Belonging: the Poetry of Seamus Heaney

Williams, Kirsty (2003) Structures of belonging: the poetry of Seamus Heaney. PhD thesis. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/1748/ Copyright and moral rights for this thesis are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Glasgow Theses Service http://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] STRUCTURES OF BELONGING: THE POETRY OF SEAMUS HEANEY A thesis presented for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English Literature at the University of Glasgow, May 2003 by Kirsty Williams BA (Hons). Abstract This thesis is divided into three parts - Word, Body and Transubstantiation. Collectively these are the central motifs of Catholicism's Eucharist. According to Scripture, Christ is the word made flesh. The Eucharist recalls his words and actions at the Last Supper when he shares bread and wine with his disciples and tells them that they are his body and blood. In the Catholic faith partaking of wine and bread during the communion of mass is believed to be a partaking of the real presence of Christ. By consuming the body (bread) and blood (wine) of Christ, the participating community symbolise their collective belonging in and to Christ. The Catholic Eucharist consequently explodes difference in a utopic leap of faith whereby transubstantiation conflates and reconciles language and physical being, sub specie etemitatis. Whilst it is a religious formation, a relationship between word and body and their overlap also maps into preoccupations in recent philosophical and cultural theory which bear on Seamus Heaney's poetry. Rather than converging word and body through a utopic leap of faith (transubstantiation), poststructuralism (following Saussure) posits an irreconcilable interstice between signifier and signified and (in the language of Derrida) infinitely defers meaning. Psychoanalysis (following Lacan) suggests desire is a consequence of the space between signifier and signified. Anthropological and sociological body theories (following Foucault) propose a disparity between corporeality and discursive constructions of bodies. Questions of a persistent gap in secular philosophy are therefore opposed to a sacred structure (converging word and body in a utopic leap of faith) that is most clearly marked and symbolised in the Catholic Eucharist. By appropriating this religious structure and these cultural theories, an ongoing secularisation of belonging in Heaney's poetry emerges. In his endeavour to create a coherent self which can speak for a unified community, Heaney points to the universal spirit of Catholicism (which has largely been read from a liberal humanist perspective as Heaney's adherence to bourgeois values) only to refute the possibility of embodying communal belonging in and through language. What emerges in the course of this thesis is that the more clearly desire for spiritual belonging is articulated in Heaney's poetry, the more evident its failure in contemporary society becomes. This causes a pivotal ambivalence to emerge around poetry's role in contemporary society. An ongoing recognition of disparities between words and bodies demarcates literature from materiality, yet Heaney repeatedly evokes a desire for poetry to effect substantial changes to society. The poetry of Seamus Heaney thereby manifests contrary structures of belonging which work simultaneously, one emphasising a gap between word and body, and one seeking to erase that gap by embodying words. For Nicola, whose Norton Anthology first introduced me to poehy, and who, like those poems, remainsever present withinme. Table of Contents Preface 5 Acknowledgments 8 Author's Declaration 9 1. Introduction: Canon and Criticism 10 Part One: Word 2. Ambivalent Voices 32 3. Anamnestic Histories, Encoded Landscapes 48 4. Languages of Belonging 87 Part Two: Body 5. History and Union 130 6. Bog Bodies and the Aesthetics of Violence 160 7. Troubled Bodies 189 Part Three: Transubstantiation 8. Translation and Spirituality 213 9. Host Objects 235 10. The End of Art is Peace? 266 11. Conclusion 290 Poetry Index 295 Bibliography 301 5 Preface Each part of this thesis will address a different aspect of a dialectic between material reality and its representation in Heaney's poetry. The majority of Heaney's critics have hitherto read him through a framework extracted from his critical writing, or in a frame which finds what is extracted from his prose alien. This thesis proposes a third ground: a redressing of his poetry that chooses as its critical framework what seem to be the implicit drives and sympathies of the poems themselves - the relationship between word and body. Before beginning this rereading, the dominant critical tendencies from which Heaney is approached will be considered. Thereafter, 'Word'will address language's mediatory role in relation to people, history and the material world. Poetry analyses in this part will look at ways Heaney engages with ambivalence within speakers' voices, irresolvable gaps between language and history, and history and its representations. Heaney's concern with gaps between signifier and signified will be read as emphasising ways in which language constructs senses of reality and is, consequently, pivotal to ideas of identity and belonging. Rather than reading Heaney as a poet of universal emotions or critiquing him for upholding (bourgeois) ideological premises of universality (as the tendency has been), this part will read his poetry as recognising and displaying ways in which language helps to transmit ideological principles that imagine status quo social conditions as natural. The first chapter of 'Body' will chart Heaney'searly representationsof bodies in poems that address gender relations, marriage, history and violence. Subsequently, 'Body' will focus on absences of corporeality consequent to representation and examine inscriptions of power on bodies. The middle chapter will address Heaney's bog people poems, from North, and will read them as foregrounding a tension between a subsumption of bodies within 6 processes of legitimating and displaying power, and bodies as individual sensory systems. Rather than uniting word and body, representation continually occludes the corporeality of existence. Language thereby serves to conceal physically oppressive conditions that participate in the formation and performance of state and counterstate power. A movement between political and personal suffering in body poems subsequent to North will be emphasised in the final chapter of 'Body'. This will reflect back upon Heaney's developing response to the Troubles and will look towards issues of guilt and complacency that are addressed in 'Transubstantiation'. The poems analysed in 'Transubstantiation' are largely drawn from Heaney's later works. In the first chapter, usage of Christian motifs to evoke desires for translation, transfiguration and transubstantiation in literature and the material world will be analysed to show how this is a continuing, yet impossible, drive in Heaney's poetry from 1984 onwards. Drawing on interpretations of themes surrounding words and bodies from previous parts of this thesis, 'Transubstantiation' will display how Christian symbolism in Heaney's poetry no longer embodies possibilities of communal transcendence, and is instead bound by its own discursive form. This will be demonstrated in the middle part through analyses of 'object' poems. In opposition to Catholicism's host objects that transubstantiate into Christ's body and blood, objects in these poems embody their speakers' communal, political and social desires, all of which are undercut by their enunciation in language. A developing tension between feelings of guilt and ineffectuality and feelings of complicity in Heaney's poetry will be read as part of a desire to transcend discursive and corporeal reality. However, this desire is constantly undercut by a secularisation of the spiritual structure which enacts such a transubstantiation. Poetry can never resolve the tension between corporeal and discursive realities (between word and body), and it is this realisation which Heaney's work unfolds. Yet, paradoxically, his 7 desire to resolve this tension recurs, ensuring that belonging remains perpetuallyambivalent in the poetry of SeamusHeaney. In the following text initial capitals in prose quotations are altered to lower cases (as indicated with square brackets) so as not to disrupt sentences. This is not done with poetry quotations which maintain their original cases throughout. Unless explicitly given a female gender, speakers in poems are discussed as male. References to Heaney's poetry, unless otherwise stated, are to individual collections rather than to selected or collected editions of his work and page references are to the start of each poem or group of poems; capitalisation and punctuation also correspond with these initial publications. Because this text adheres to the MHRA's author-date referencing system this indicates a rough chronological movement in the thesis itself which it is important to maintain. An index of cited Heaney poetry precedes the bibliography.

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