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Language and Identity in the Contemporary Irish Literature

Language and Identity in the Contemporary Irish Literature. Brian Friel and Seamus Heaney English cultures and literatures Bődy Edit 2014/2015. Seamus Heaney (1939–2013). Born in Northern Ireland Poet, playwright, essayist, also lectured at Harvard and Oxford

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Language and Identity in the Contemporary Irish Literature

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  1. Language and Identity in the Contemporary Irish Literature Brian Friel and Seamus Heaney English cultures and literatures Bődy Edit 2014/2015

  2. SeamusHeaney (1939–2013) • Born in Northern Ireland • Poet, playwright, essayist, also lectured at Harvard and Oxford • First collection of poems: Death of a Naturalist (1966) • 1995: Nobel Laureate

  3. In exile • 1970: he leaves Northern-Ireland • An Open Letter, 1983 • His poetry is changing: more personal • Important themes: text being formed and language. • 1972: Wintering Out – language(s), places, place names • Eg. Toome, Anahorish, Broagh • Less direct, more abstract • New ways to express identity • English and Irish (people and languages): not necessarily in binary opposition

  4. Heaneyabout the Northern Irish poets “strain of being in two places at once, of needing to accommodate two opposing conditions of truthfulness simultaneously.” Each person in Ulster lives first in Ulster of the actual present, and then in one or other Ulster of the mind.” (Place and Displacement, Heaney 2003: 125–126)

  5. Heaney: “Broagh”(bruachabhana) Riverbank, the long rigs ending in broad docken and a canopied paddown to the ford.The garden mouldbruised easily, the showergathering in your heelmarkwas the black Oin Broagh,its low tattooamong the windy boortreesand rhubarb-bladesended almostsuddenly, like that lastgh the strangers founddifficult to manage. “the immediate subject was (…) our farm in the townland of Broagh on the banks of River Moyola in County Derry, but its purpose was to bring the three languages (…) – Irish, Elizabethan English and Ulster Scots – into some kind of creative intercourse…” (Burns’s Art Speech, Heaney 2003: 382)

  6. Broagh “Whitehall ministers would have called the place Broa, but they have been wrong. (…) But everyone native to Northern Ireland, Protestant or Catholic, Planter or Gael, whatever their separate myths of linguistic exile from Irish or Ulster Scots – every one of them could say Broagh’ (…) I wanted to suggest, therefore, that it was this first level of utterance that the foundations of a common language were to be sought. I think in other words that we can prefigure a future by reimagining our pasts. In poetry, however this prefiguring is venturesome and suggestive, more like a melodic promise than a social programme.” (Heaney 2003: 383, emphasis added)

  7. The Other Side I lay where his lea slopedto meet our fallow,nested in moss and rushes,my ear swallowing his fabulous, biblical dismissal,that tongue of chosen people.When he would stand like thaton the other side, white-haired, swinging his blackthornat the marsh weeds, he prophesised above our scraggy acres,then turned away (Heaney 1998: 59)

  8. The Other Side Then sometimes when the rosary was draggingmournfully on in the kitchenwe would hear his step around the gablethough not until after the litanywould the knock come to the doorand the casual whistle strike upon the doorstep. "A right-looking night,"he might say, "I was dandering byand says I, I might as well call." But now I stand behind himin the dark yard, in the mourn of prayers.He puts his hand in a pocketor taps a little tune with the blackthornshyly, as if he were party to lovemaking or a strangers weeping.Should I slip away, I wonder,or go up and touch his shoulderand talk about the weatheror the price of grass-seed? (Heaney 1998: 60)

  9. The OtherSide • Early example of poetic border-crossing • Wintering Out • Recollection: Protestant neighbour • "the two sides of the divided community in Northern Ireland (…) The poem, however ended up suggesting that a crossing could be attempted, that stepping stones could be placed by individuals who wanted to further things.” (Heaney 2003: 61) • Differences between ways of speech, languages

  10. Station Island Saint Patrick’s Purgatory in Lough Derg, Donegal

  11. The Actual Station Island • since the Middle Ages, • (3-day) pilgrimage • confess sins, repent them, receive penitence.

  12. Heaney’s Station Island (1984) • Dante’s Divine Comedy: - themes (sin, repentance, penitence, redemption) and structure - and intertwines the personal, political and spiritual-transcendent motives • Two levels: - Realistic scene: the island, and also realistic figures in the background. The frame is the traditional 3-day pilgrimage. - The realistic scenery is peopled by visions: - Ghosts of the speaker’s own past or publically known ones appear in visions - They charge, sympathize, listen, give redemption.

  13. Heaney’s Station Island 12 parts in different kinds of format: • Simon Sweeney, the Sabbath-breaker • William Carleton, 19th c. Irish novelist (The Lough Derg Pilgrim) • Childhood acquaintance • Young missionary from his village who died in South America • His school master, Barney Murphy

  14. Heaney’s Station Island 6. Childhood friend 7. A shop owner murdered by two mysterious men (IRA?) 8. Tom Delaney, an archaeologist 9. One of the IRA hunger strikers from 1981 (Bobby Sands?) 10. Old memory: theatre troop visiting his village 11. Situation: confession and penitence: to translate one of the poems of Juan de la Cruz (16th c. Spanish mystic)

  15. Heaney’s Station Island 12. A mysterious figure offering redemption, help and giving good advice (cf. Virgil in Dante) “for the tall man in step at my side Seemed blind, though he walked straight as a rush Upon his ash plant, his eyes fixed straight ahead.”

  16. Station Island • References to Joyce, his works (Finnegan’s Wake; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) • Loneliness, being an artist (Stephen Dedalus) • “The English language / belongs us.” • Not: a radical change in his political views: it is an individual reconciliation, redemption. • Acceptance: in Ireland English will be spoken and his works will be written in this language cf. Friel’s Translations. • It does not mean that he will be unable to express his identity.

  17. Heaney, Something to Write Home About I once said in a poem – a poem called “Terminus” – I grew up in between. I grew up between the predominantly Protestant and loyalist village of Castledawson and the generally Catholic and nationalist district of Bellaghy. (…) On a border between townlands and languages, between accents (…)The Moyola wasn’t the only boundary that entered into me when I was a youngster… between the two doorsteps I crossed the border between the ecclesiastical diocese of Derry and the diocese – or more properly the archdiocese – of Armagh.” (Heaney 2003: 53–57)

  18. Terminus When I hoked there, I would find An acorn and a rusted bolt. If I lifted my eyes, a factory chimney And a dormant mountain f I listened, an engine shunting And a trotting horse. Is it any wonder when I thought I would have second thoughts? • Hoke: “ to rootabout and delve into and forage for and dig around, and that is precisely the kind of thing a poem does as well.” • “with so much divisionaround, people are forever encountering boundaries that bring them up short” • “in Northern Ireland they have attained a special local intensity.” (Heaney 2003: 54)

  19. Termimus When they spoke of the prudent squirrel’s hoard It shone like gifts at a Nativity. When they spoke of the mammon of iniquity The coins in my pockets reddened like stove-lids. I was the march drain and the march drain’s banks Suffering the limit of each claim. March:“to be close, to lie alongside, to border upon. It was a word that acknowledged division, but contained a definite suggestion of solidarity as well.” (Heaney 2003: 55)

  20. Terminus Two buckets were easier carried than one. I grew up in between. My left hand placed the standard iron weight. My right tilted the last grain in balance. Baronies, parishes met where I was born. When I stood on the central stepping stone I was the last earl on horseback in midstream Still parleying, in earshot of his peers. (Heaney 1999: 272–273)

  21. Terminus “The River Moyola flows southeast from a source in the Sperrin Mountains down through County Derry and enters Lough Neagh just a few miles from where I grew up (…) and a trail of big stepping-stones led across from one bank to the other, linking the townland of Broagh to the townland of Bellshill. (…) and I always loved venturing out from one stepping-stone to the next, right in the middle of the stream. (…) Suddenly you were on your own. You were giddy and rooted to the spot at one and the same time. Your body stood rock still like a milestoneor a boundary mark, but your head would be light and swimming from the rush of the river at your feet and the big stately movement of the clouds in the sky above your head. Nowadays when I think of that child rooted to the spot in midstream, I see a little version of the god the Romans called Terminus, the god of boundaries (… )all boundaries are necessary evils and that the truly desirable condition is the feeling of being unbounded, of being king of infinite space.” (Something to Write Home About, Heaney 2003:51)

  22. Terminus “Both men were alone and exposed to the consequences of their actions; O’Neill was already regarded as a traitor, and Essex, by agreeing to a truce with him at this moment, was going to be seen as a betrayer of the Queen and in fact before the end of the year would be executed for treason. O’Neill’s ultimate defeat lay ahead also, in a couple years’ time. But for the moment, the balance trembled and held, the water ran and the sky moved silently above them. (…) They were at the terminus, in the extreme sense of that word.” (Heaney 2003: 59)

  23. Translations Poetic-linguistic border-crossing • Buile Suibhne ↓ Sweeney Astray (1983) • Beowulf(1999) • Robert Henryson ( from medieval scots): The Testament of Cresseid (2004)

  24. The Settle Bed “Indeed, every time I read the lovely interlude that tells the minstrel singing in Heorot juts before the first attacks of Grendel, I cannot help thinking of Edmund Spenser in Kilcolman Castle, reading the early cantos of The Faerie Queene to Sir Walter Raleigh, just before the Irish burned the castle and drove Spenser out of Munster back to the Elizabethan court. Putting a bawn into Beowulf seems one way for an Irish poet to come to terms with that complex history of conquest and colony, absorption and resistance, integrity and antagonism, a history which has to be clearly acknowledged by all in order to render it even more ‛willable forward / Again and again and again.’” (Heaney 2000: xxxiv)

  25. The Settle Bed “It belonged to a distant cousin of my father’s, an old cailleachin County Derry, Biddy Carmichael, who left it to me in her will. A big, high-backed, fold-out, wooden box-bed, as heavy as a piano: vernacular furniture with a capital V. (…) It was, as the poem says, the given that can always be reimagined.”(O’Driscoll 2008: 326, emphasis added)

  26. The SettleBed • Seeing Things (1991) • Heritage and reimagining certain things. • Everyday object which is transformed into something symbolic, something abstract, and even universal. • The “willable forward” bed links generations of the family, • A witness of Ulster’s history as well.  • “un-get-roundable weight”. • reimagining the inheritance, the past by not abandoning, but rethinking, reshaping, accepting it.

  27. The Settle Bed Again and again and again, cargoed withIts own dumb, tongue-and-groove worthinessAnd un-get-roundable weight.But to conquer that weight, Imagine a dower of settle beds tumbled from heaven Like some nonsensical vengeance come on the people, Then learn from the harmless barrage that whatever is given Can be always reimagined, however four-square, Plane-thick, hull-stupid, and out of its time It happens to be. You are free as the lookout, That far-seeing joker posted high over the fog, Who declared by the time that he had got himself down The actual ship had stolen away from beneath him. (Heaney 1998: 321)

  28. The SettleBed • Also indicates a “new-found sense of freedom” (O’Brien 102) because of the revelation. • Gentle irony: this freedom may be only an illusion, a joke, self-mockery (the lookout simile). • The inheritance can be reimagined but cannot be abandoned, left behind. • Still, it can be made more bearable. • In poem-writing: possibility to dissolve the old antagonisms between the two islands

  29. The poet’s role • “the successful achievement of a poem could be a stepping stone in your life” (Feeling into Words 1974, Heaney 2003: 18) • “A good poem allows you to have your feet on the ground and your head in the air simultaneously.” (Something to Write Home About, Heaney: 2003: 52) • in-betweeness”

  30. Crossings, XXXII (SeeingThings) Running water never disappointed.Crossing water always furthers something.Stepping stones were stations of the soul.A kesh could mean the track some called a causeyRaised above the wetness of the bog,Or the causey where it bridged old drains and streams.It steadies me to tell these things. AlsoI cannot mention keshes or the fordWithout my father's shade appearing to meOn a path towards sunset, eyeing spades and clothesThat turf-cutters stowed perhaps or souls cast offBefore they crossed the log that spans the burn.

  31. Sources • Kiberd, Declan, Inventing Ireland • Deane, Seamus, Introduction” to Nationalism, Colonialism and LiteratureUniversity of Minnesota Press. Minneapolis. 1990, 3–23. • Sheeran, Patrick, “The Irish Sense of Place • Morrison, Andy,“TheHistorical and Colonial Context of Brian Friel’s Translations” • Greer, Sammye Crawford , “Station Island and the Poet’s Progress” • Said, Edward W., Yeats and Decolonization • Heaney, Seamus, Beowulf • Heaney, Seamus, Burns’s Art Speech. In: Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971–2001. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003, 378–396.

  32. Heaney, Seamus, Burns’s Art Speech. In: Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971–2001. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003, 378–396. • Heaney, Seamus, New Selected Poetry 1966–1987 • Heaney, Seamus, Something to Write Home About. In: Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971–2001. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003, 51–63. • Friel, Brian, Translations • O’Brien, Eugene, Seamus Heaney: Creating Irelands of the Mind. Dublin: The Liffey Press, 2005. • O’Driscoll, Dennis, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.

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