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2-04-2015, 06:38

The Case of Seamus Heaney

In his poem ‘‘Bann Valley Eclogue’’ Seamus Heaney’s invocation is ‘‘Help me to please my hedge-schoolmaster Virgil’’ (Heaney 2001: 11-12). Heaney is from a Catholic, nationalist, and rural background and the line encapsulates the relationship between the classical tradition in Irish cultural memory, the resistance of that tradition to colonial domination by the English, and Heaney’s own use of classical texts as fields in which he can work through and revisit his cultural and political dilemmas.

Classical texts and education were rooted in Ireland via early association with continental Europe and the coming of Christianity, in advance of the successive arrivals of colonizing Normans, Elizabethans, Cromwellians, and Williamites. It is this ‘‘indigenous’’ classical tradition that particularly distinguishes the anticolonial and postcolonial use of classical material in Ireland from that of other postcolonial situations, in which classical education and its associated traditions were something brought by colonizers, even if they were sometimes embraced with aspirational enthusiasm by the recipients.

The hedge-schools to which Heaney refers were a dissenting response to the penal laws (ca. 1690-1795) imposed by the English in Ireland. These banned formal education for Catholic children. In defiance, informal schools were held in rural barns and sheds, and tradition had it that what was offered there included Greek and Latin literature. There is dispute about the historical facts surrounding the ‘‘hedge-schools,’’ but they have a symbolic force in the cultural memory that is preserved in poems such as ‘‘A Poor Scholar of the Forties’’ by Padraig Colum (1881-1972) and ‘‘Lines in a Roman School book’’ by Desmond O’Grady (born 1935), which recalls times when poets

.........kept alive

The way of life that’s ours by conversation - just as that other hedge school master talked

In his muddled marketplace under the Attic sun and paid the price extorted.

(O’Grady, in Kinsella 1986)

The language of this extract shows the way in which Greco-Roman figures were appropriated for a rural anticolonialist tradition in which a combination of subversion and martyrdom lurked just beneath the surface. Anonymous epigrams translated from the Irish in the eighteenth century attest to the role of the hedge-schools as a vigorous link between indigenous culture and classical learning (Hardwick 2000a: ch. 5). The image of the fall of Troy was used as a touchstone for resistance to English domination of Ireland, with the Irish cast as Greeks.

The descendants ofthe Trojans, the Romans, were also regarded as agents through which the Irish might use classical culture to resist colonial domination. This tradition was drawn on by Brian Friel in his play ‘‘Translations’’ (Friel 1981). This was one of the first works created for the Field Day Theatre Company of Derry, which took ‘‘translation’’ both as its central focus and as an indicator of cultural and political change. Friel’s play explored the impact on the rural Ireland of the 1830s of the Ordnance Survey that substituted English place names for Irish. It also explored the effects of the national schools that imposed English-medium education on all Irish children. The play highlighted the resistance of the hedge-school tradition and also illuminated the potential of Latin, and especially Vergil, as a cultural bridge between opposing groups who could not otherwise understand one another linguistically or culturally. Translation, literally and metaphorically, has been a crucial activity for Ireland, partly because Irish oral and written literatures developed in and through interaction between the Irish language and other European languages, including Latin, and partly because of the role of translations of various kinds in reliving and recreating symbolic stories and phases of history (Welch 1993; Cronin 1996). Retelling may point to cultural continuity and overlap; it may also highlight fracture and discontinuity (Deane 1991-2002: intro.).

Thus Seamus Heaney’s classical work is situated in a classical tradition that is unique to Ireland, derived from and associated with an early interplay in Irish cultural history between the classical and the indigenous. This interplay constantly subverted any attempts by the English to use classical culture as a means of embedding Ascendancy domination. It meant that the Irish classical tradition could use Greek and Roman texts as allegories for political debate without fatal association with the colonizers. In 1840 the activist Thomas Davis conceded in his address to the Trinity College History Society in Dublin that even though knowledge of the ancient world should give way to that of the modern and there would not be time to learn the ancient languages, nevertheless translations of key texts offered moral and political insights of value to nationalists (Deane 1991-2002: 1271-2).

The late twentieth century was a crucial time in reassessing the situation of the north of Ireland, in which even after Irish independence in 1922 and the establishment of the Irish Republic in 1948, six counties still remained part of the United Kingdom (Britain and Northern Ireland). From the 1980s there was a plethora of translations and adaptations of Greek tragedy by Irish writers both north and south of the border. Some of these focused on the power struggles in the north between nationalists (mainly Catholics) and loyalists (mainly Protestants). Others focused on other aspects of social change such as gender roles (Dillon and Wilmer 2005; Hardwick 2000a: ch. 5; McDonald and Walton 2002). The vigorously political agenda of many of these modern rewritings led to heated debate about the aesthetic and cultural justification of creating close equivalences between the themes and situations of Greek drama and those of present politics. There was concern that apparently radical work might actually have the opposite effect if it transmitted a quasi-Aristotelian acceptance of the desirability of the cathartic effects of pity and fear on the spectators. It was suggested that this might actually undermine their sense of human responsibility for shaping a better future and might encourage acceptance of the inevitability of the cycle of revenge (Richards 1995: 191-200).

These issues also lead to a related question, that concerning the political and moral engagement of the writer and the power of drama and poetry to influence and to change. Seamus Heaney has visited and revisited these debates in both poetry and prose. He has recognized the power of the poetic imagination while being cautious about attributing to poetry a capacity to change the world. In ‘‘The Frontiers of Writing,’’ he speaks of poetry as offering ‘‘a glimpsed alternative’’ (Heaney 1995: 186-203). He continues the discussion with the aspiration ‘‘To be at the same time a source of truth and at the same time a vehicle of harmony; this expresses what we would like poetry to be.’’ The language resonates with his Christian Catholic background but is also related to the crisis of identity that he faced as a nationalist poet in the north of Ireland, especially in the violence of the Troubles during the last third of the twentieth century. In terms of identity he has asserted that ‘‘my passport is green’’ (Irish); yet he was criticized both for identifying too closely with republican nationalism and for not identifying closely enough with it. The conflict within Heaney was partly about political justifications for violence and partly about the tensions between the public and the private in poetry: ‘‘whatever the possibilities of achieving harmony at a political level, I wanted to affirm that within our individual selves we can reconcile two orders of knowledge, which we might call the practical and the poetic’’ (Heaney 1995: 203). Heaney’s classical work is the crucial field for his exploration of the sometimes-conflicting pressures of the practical and the poetic at an individual level. This takes place through a process of visiting and revisiting Greek and Roman texts and forms, and in so doing he exemplifies as a postcolonial subject the process of engagement with past, present, and future.

In ‘‘Exposure,’’ which is the closing sequence to ‘‘Singing School’’ in his collection North (Heaney 1975: 66-7), he describes his internal exile in County Wicklow in the Irish Republic. The Heaneys had moved from Derry (in the north) to Glanmore Cottage in Wicklow (in the Republic) in the wake of the Bloody Sunday atrocity (January 31, 1972) in which 14 civil rights protestors had been killed in Derry by British troops. In the poem Heaney expresses his agony of mind:

As I sit weighing and weighing My responsible tristia ... I am neither internee nor informer An inner {imigre, grown long-haired And thoughtful; a wood kerne ... Escaped from the massacre.

(Heaney 1975: 66-7)

The ambivalent invocation of Ovid’s exile is combined with allusion to the disparaging reference in Edmund Spenser’s A View from the present state of Ireland (1596) to the wood kerns, the starving soldiers of Cork, driven to the hills by the English army. The stress on weighing and balancing, of being neither of two extremes and yet as a consequence always in anxiety in the hope of reaching harmony, increases Heaney’s need for further ‘‘classical ground’’ on which to work out his dilemmas. As he wrote in an early poem ‘‘Terminus’’:

Two buckets were easier carried than one I grew up in between.

... Is it any wonder, when I thought I would have second thoughts.

(Heaney 1998: 295-6, first published 1987)

Part of Heaney’s dilemma is how to reconcile the violent traditions of both the agricultural and political aspects of the rural culture in which he grew up with his desire for harmony and reconciliation. In his poetry, memory of a rural childhood is never perfectly idyllic but is expressed with what has been called ‘‘an aggressive, even militaristic diction, emphasising at once the integrity of his culture and the violence that has become part of its daily ritual’’ (Burris 1990). In his classical work Heaney grapples with this tension in the wider sphere of cultural memory and politics. In the opening sequence to ‘‘Mycenae Lookout’’ (Heaney 1996), he exploits the image in the opening sequence of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (lines 36-9) of the ox on the Watchman’s tongue. It is the ox on his tongue that prevents the Watchman from speaking out clearly about what he knows of the House of Atreus. The poem is one of the most violent of Heaney’s creations. Its language straddles the worlds of Heaney the aspiring bringer of harmony and Heaney the radical pastoral poet who uses the language of violence and strife to convey the realities of the Irish rural tradition and of human history. This recreation of the ox on the tongue sees it as like ‘‘the dropped gangplank of a cattle truck / Trampled and rattled, running piss and muck.’’ Despite the weight on his tongue, however, the Watchman is ‘‘still honour bound’’ to look beyond the limitations of his own existence, ‘‘beyond the city and the border.’’ He is a repository of knowledge about the past of the house of Atreus and about its internal workings and the way in which they will lead to future disasters. Like the poet, he comments on, but does not intervene in, the action.

Heaney develops this relationship between classical allusion and open comment in his sequence of classically based poems ‘‘Sonnets from Hellas’’ in Electric Light (2001). ‘‘The Augean Stables’’ picks up the motif from the labors of Heracles and, in an elegiac sestet, associates the cleansing of the filth of the stables (resonant with the daily work in a farmyard) with the cleansing following a sectarian murder in Ireland, where they

. . . imagined

Hose-water smashing hard back off the asphalt In the car-park where his athlete’s blood ran cold.

The volume Electric Light is also remarkable for its specific engagement with Vergil. It includes variations on Eclogue 9 and a gently ironic reflection on the poet’s internal exile in ‘‘Glanmore Eclogue.’’ ‘‘Bann Valley Eclogue’’ specifically alludes to Vergil’s ‘‘Fourth Eclogue’’ (Harrison 2007 forthcoming; Heaney 2003; Tweddie 2006). These poems have been said to exploit classical material in order for Heaney to leave behind his ‘‘roots’’ and to universalize. The implication is that by accepting his Latin education, Heaney ‘‘casts off provincialism’’ and becomes ‘‘magnificently authoritative’’ (Mackinnon 2001). Such judgments are misplaced. They miss the intertwining of the classical and the rural traditions in Heaney’s work and how his ‘‘provincialism,’’ that is, the way his poetic technique is rooted in the life-enhancing rural environment, is actually given greater authority in his dialogue with Vergil.

Heaney allied his rural ground with the Latin tradition of unidealized pastoral, a pastoral in which Vergil became the inspiration of what Richard Thomas has called ‘‘The Georgics of Resistance.’’ Thomas contrasted those who, as in eighteenth-century English poetry, transformed Vergil through ‘‘an idealisation bred of comfort and tranquillity’’ with poets like Heaney who took from Vergil the combination of recognition of troubles, in which the agrarian and the political interacted, and a guarded optimism that better things might be possible (Thomas 2001b). In ‘‘Bann Valley Eclogue’’ Heaney uses Vergil’s conversational question-and-answer technique to avert pessimism and personal and social disruption while still questioning complacency and nostalgia. ‘‘Bann Valley Eclogue’’ is not merely a cultural intertext, but also a linguistic one. Vergil’s prompts are to explore the resonances of his own words in Heaney’s contexts: ‘‘Here are my words you’ll have to find a place for: / Carmen, ordo, nascitur, saeculum, gens. Their gist in your tongue and province should be clear: Even at this stage. Poetry, order, the times.’’ The association of pollution, of blood guilt, with the reductive notion of earth is exposed: ‘‘Whatever stains you, you rubbed it into yourselves.’’ Then the breaking of the waters in the forthcoming birth of a child will, like the overflowing of the waters of the Bann, wash the valley. In the closing lines ofthe poem, the poet returns to the images and associations ofthe rural Irish ground, but this is now enhanced and liberated through its encounter with the classical. Heaney’s ‘‘classical ground’’ is the site for weighing and balancing, for redressing the sterility associated with nostalgia and for revitalizing the insights afforded by a pastoralism that is, like Vergil’s, both powerful and dangerous. He excavates Irish identity and memory via the land, from the prehistoric bogs to the twenty-first century fields, interrogated by his ‘‘hedge-schoolmaster.’’

Heaney’s process of engagement with classical texts and traditions, personal experience, and the Irish postcolonial context has been more problematic, however, in the more public area of drama. He has adapted two Greek tragedies, The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes (Heaney 1990), commissioned for touring by the Field Day Theatre Company, and The Burial at Thebes: Sophocles’ Antigone (Heaney 2004), which was commissioned to mark the celebration in 2004 of the centenary of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Both of these Sophoclean texts are resonant for postcolonial situations (Hardwick 2006a and 2006b; Wilmer forthcoming).

Antigone was a key text in addressing the political situation in Ireland in the 1980s, notably in Tom Paulin’s version The Riot Act (Paulin 1985). The play has also been adapted by the Barbadian writer Kamau Brathwaite (Odale’s Choice, first performed 1962) and the Nigerian Femi (Osctfisan ( Tegonni: An African Antigone, first performed 1994) as well as providing the central ‘‘play within a play’’ for the South African collaboration by Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona, The Island (first performed 1973), which in its many revivals has become an icon of the struggle against apartheid. Philoctetes is particularly resonant for the Irish classical tradition because of the play’s treatment of the key role of his bow in bringing about the fall of Troy, the city that early Irish poetry had identified with the power of the English.

In both his versions, Heaney followed quite closely the Sophoclean structure and the conventions of Greek drama. In Cure the vocabulary and speech rhythms of Heaney’s Irish-English locate the play in the context of the Troubles in the North of Ireland.

The figure of Philoctetes was widely read as an image of sectarian intransigence, and the Choral Odes (written in verse but spoken, not sung) alluded to the sufferings of both communities. Heaney noted that he had used verse ‘‘in order to preserve something of the formal ritualistic quality of the Greek theatrical experience’’ but had also felt free to compose some new lines for the Chorus (Programme Notes 1991). The Chorus line ‘‘where hope and history rhyme’’ was taken up by politicians in the 1990s, culminating in press headlines at the time of the Good Friday Agreement (1998; Hardwick 2003a: ch. 6). Critics found the insertion into the Choral Odes of references to the bereaved from both communities (‘‘the hunger-striker’s father’’ and ‘‘the Policeman’s widow’’) to be anachronistic, and Heaney later questioned their aesthetic value (Wilmer 1999).

Figure 21.2 Cure at Troy (Oxford Touring Company) was first directed by Helen Eastman at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, 4-30 August, 1999, followed by performances at The Old Fire Station, Oxford, 4-23 October, 1999. Eastman later co-founded Floodtide Theatre Company with which she revised Cure at Troy (Battersea Arts Centre, 19-20 August, 2003 and on tour). This photograph is from the 2003 revival production at the Battersea Arts Centre. Director Helen Eastman. Photo: Floodtide Theatre Company, courtesy Helen Eastman. The lighting in the production - dark space with cast using torches and personal head lamps - was designed to bring out the allusions to light in the Sophocles and Heaney texts.

In Burial Heaney composed the Choral Odes without direct response to modern politics. Yet the richly textured language of the play alluded to various aspects of Irish colonial history and the stages of disengagement from colonialism. In discussing the background to the commissioning of the play and his composition of the work, Heaney has commented on two strands in Irish colonial and postcolonial history. The first is the oppression of Irish people by the English colonizers, expressed in an eighteenth-century poem in Irish, Lament for Art O’Leary, by Eibhlin Dubh Ni Chonaill. This poem is a widow’s lament for her young husband, shot by the English and left to rot at the roadside, and calls for justice and revenge. Heaney took this as a paradigm for the situation in the Antigone in which Antigone demands proper burial for her brother. In interviews and program notes at the time of the production, Heaney also drew attention to a second ‘‘postcolonial’’ strand: the allusions to the 2003 invasion and the occupation of Iraq by a US-led coalition, in which the UK was also prominent. Heaney wove into Creon’s speeches echoes of the words of United States President George W. Bush in a way that suggested correspondences between Creon’s treatment of Polyneices and the ‘‘war against terror’’ (‘‘whoever isn’t for us / Is against us in this case’’; Heaney 2004: 3).

Heaney also said that he was somewhat daunted by the precedent of W. B. Yeats’s versions of Sophocles. Oedipus Tyrannos (1926) and Oedipus at Colonus (1927) were staged at the Abbey Theatre. Yeats was a cofounder of the Abbey and a moving force in Irish cultural nationalism (Said 1988b). His Oedipus plays represent another strand in the classical tradition in Ireland and, like Heaney but perhaps more loosely, Yeats had used the English translations of Richard Jebb (first published 1883-1900). Heaney described his version of the Antigone as a rewriting in his own English, and the text was widely praised as a brilliant poetic version. It ran into problems, however, when it was staged, directed by the Quebecoise Lorriane Pintal. The postcolonial aesthetics of Heaney’s idiom and the braiding of his Irish-English lost impact because the mise-en-scene transplanted the Irish tradition of classical adaptation into another context, that of a Latin American dictator, in which the flamboyant costume of Creon and the brutalist set jarred with the words. This perhaps suggests the need for directors and writers to work more closely together. In terms of the subject of this discussion, the debacle reemphasizes the distinctiveness of the relationship between the Irish national memory and the Irish classical tradition and Heaney’s development of both.



 

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