Grzegorz Czemiel Instytut Anglistyki Wydział Neofilologii Uniwersytet Warszawski Limits of orality and textuality in Ciaran Carson’s poetry praca doktorska napisana pod kierunkiem prof. dr. hab. Jerzego Jarniewicza Warszawa, 2012 Table of contents Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 4 Chapter One – The dialectics of orality and textuality ....................................................... 18 I Aspects of orality in The Irish For No ............................................................................ 18 The turn ........................................................................................................................... 18 The revival of the oral tradition .................................................................................... 19 The dialectic .................................................................................................................... 21 The Irish For No ............................................................................................................. 23 The ends of discourse ..................................................................................................... 28 Locality and the reservoir .............................................................................................. 32 The image of speech ....................................................................................................... 34 Ying-yang, I-Ching and politics .................................................................................... 37 II Aspects of textuality in The Irish For No ..................................................................... 42 The scene of writing ....................................................................................................... 42 The human spoor and the typing machine ................................................................... 47 The webs of discourse .................................................................................................... 52 The Smithfield labyrinth ............................................................................................... 57 III Reversed dialectics in First Language ......................................................................... 64 The tower of Babel ......................................................................................................... 64 The Second Language? .................................................................................................. 70 Carson’s archi-writing .................................................................................................... 72 Tak – yes .......................................................................................................................... 77 The Rhizomatic Underground ...................................................................................... 82 The answers and the contract ....................................................................................... 87 Chapter Two – The three mazes: city, memory and history .............................................. 96 I City .................................................................................................................................... 96 The Belfast flâneur ......................................................................................................... 96 The transient city ............................................................................................................ 99 Mapping out .................................................................................................................. 102 The rhizomatic map ..................................................................................................... 106 The urban neurosis ....................................................................................................... 107 Playing with the panopticon – Carson as psychogeographer ................................... 109 The mouth of the poem ................................................................................................ 116 The poetics of loss and junk ........................................................................................ 117 The Belfast Ballad ........................................................................................................ 121 II Memory ......................................................................................................................... 126 Obsession ....................................................................................................................... 128 Proust’s souvenir involontaire ..................................................................................... 130 Bergson’s expansions ................................................................................................... 135 Deleuze’s boxes ............................................................................................................. 139 Phenomenological memory .......................................................................................... 141 The aura and its geology .............................................................................................. 143 The textile garden of memory ..................................................................................... 146 III History ......................................................................................................................... 150 The breakdown of History ........................................................................................... 154 Storyteller’s dissemi(nation) ........................................................................................ 165 The War Correspondent from Belfast ....................................................................... 171 2 Chapter Three – The limits of knowledge and the space of the poem ............................. 178 I Revision of epistemology in For All We Know ............................................................. 178 The subject of the book ................................................................................................ 179 The architecture of the book ....................................................................................... 181 Strangers, doppelgangers and identity ....................................................................... 184 Linguistic mediation ..................................................................................................... 190 Time ............................................................................................................................... 192 The Art of Fugue .......................................................................................................... 194 Signs and the limits of language .................................................................................. 197 Love ............................................................................................................................... 199 Causality ........................................................................................................................ 202 II Approaching the subject of death in On The Night Watch and Until Before After . 205 The great shortening of the line .................................................................................. 205 From in Behind ............................................................................................................. 210 The language of Being .................................................................................................. 218 The death-poem ............................................................................................................ 223 Poetic dwelling .............................................................................................................. 233 Homecoming ................................................................................................................. 240 Radical alterity – Emmanuel Levinas ........................................................................ 244 Until Before After – the coda ........................................................................................ 247 Conclusions ........................................................................................................................... 259 Bibliography ......................................................................................................................... 265 Streszczenie ........................................................................................................................... 274 3 Introduction In the beginning was the Word. John 1:1 The trace must be thought before the entity. The (pure) trace is différance. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology How things are named by any other name except themselves, thereof I meant to speak. Ciaran Carson, “Whisky” Literary scholarship, as any other field of research, looks into its subject matter from two perspectives: that of present day issues and themes, and the historical point of view which regards the development of literature itself and a theoretical reflection on it. Any literary theory whose ambition is to grasp the phenomenon of literacy in general cannot allow itself to reduce any of the two perspectives to a single one, but faces the difficult task of combining the two into