Finders keepers : selected prose, 1971-2001

by Seamus Heaney

  The attainment of this new level of psychological development includes a certain degree of '. . . detachment from one's emotions. One certainly does feel the affect and is shaken and tormented by it, yet at the same time one is aware of a higher consciousness looking on which prevents one from becoming identical with the affect, a consciousness which regards the affect as an object, and can say "I know that I suffer." '

  All this, Storr is the first to admit, is very general. No example is given by Jung of the 'insoluble problem' which must be outgrown or resolved at a symbolic level but, had he sought one, Jung might have found in Wordsworth's Prelude a working model for that evolution of a higher consciousness in response to an apparently intolerable conflict. The last books of the poem worry and circle and ruminate in an effort to discover what had happened in the 1790s when Wordsworth's passion for liberty and human regeneration, awakened by the outbreak of the French Revolution, came into conflict with other elernents of his make-up founded upon the land and love of England. When England declared war on Revolutionary France, Wordsworth experienced a crisis of unanticipated

  intensity which he sought to allay first by addressing himself to the higher reality of Godwin's philosophy and, when that failed, by recourse to a renewed and deepened myth of nature and the human heart. But the crisis itself is described with dramatic and anecdotal power:

  And now the strength of Britain was put forth

  In league with the confederated host;

  Not in my single self alone I found,

  But in the minds of all ingenuous vouth,

  Change and subversion from this hour. No shock

  Given to my moral nature had I known

  Down to that very moment—neither lapse

  Nor turn of sentiment—that might be named

  A revolution, save at this one time:

  All else was progress on the self-same path

  On which with a diversity of pace

  I had been travelling; this, a stride at once

  Into another region. True it is,

  'Twas not concealed with what ungracious eyes

  Our native rulers from the very first

  Had looked upon regenerated France;

  Nor had I doubted that this day would come—

  But in such contemplation I had thought

  Of general interest only, beyond this

  Had never once foretasted the event.

  Now had I other business, for I felt

  The ravage of this most unnatural strife

  In my own heart; there lay it like a weight,

  At enmity with all the tenderest springs

  Of my enjoyments. I, who with the breeze

  Had played, a green leaf on the blessed tree

  Of my beloved country—nor had wished

  For happier fortune than to wither there—

  Now from my pleasant station was cut off,

  And tossed about in whirlwinds. I rejoiced,

  Yes, afterwards, truth painful to record,

  Exulted in the triumph of my soul

  When Englishmen by thousands were o'erthrown,

  Left without glory on the field, or driven,

  Brave hearts, to shameful flight. It was a grief—

  Grief call it not, 'twas any thing but that—

  A conflict of sensations without name,

  Of which he only who may love the sight

  Of a village steeple as I do can judge,

  When in the congregation, bending all

  To their great Father, prayers were offered up

  Or praises for our country's victories,

  And, 'mid the simple worshippers perchance

  I only, like an uninvited guest

  Whom no one owned, sate silent—shall I add,

  Fed on the day of vengeance yet to come!

  The Prelude (1805), Book X, 230—74

  The good place where Wordsworth had been nurtured and to which his habitual feelings were most naturally attuned has become, for the revolutionary poet, the wrong place. Life, where he is situated, is not as he wants it to be. He is displaced from his own affections by a vision of the good located elsewhere. His political, Utopian aspirations displace him from the beloved actuality of his surroundings so that his instinctive being and his appetitive intelligence are knocked out of alignment. He feels like a traitor among those he knows and loves. To be true to one part of himself, he must betray another part. The inner state of man is thus shaken, and the shock waves in the consciousness reflect the upheavals in the surrounding world. Indeed, the whole passage is like a textbook illustration of another of Jung's underlying notions, namely, that the trauma of individual consciousness is likely to be an aspect of forces at work in the collective life, past or present, since, for Jung, Hamlet's exclamation 'O my prophetic soul' has the force of a truism.

  It is another truism that the achievement of a work of art is salutary in these circumstances, and we can easily see how the

  composition of The Prelude was, in itself, part of the symbolic resolution of a lived conflict. Wordsworth admits an inner dialogue between those inclinations and hopes which landed him in the impasse he describes. The poem is diagnostic, therapeutic and didactic all at once. It throws, in a prefiguration of modernist procedures, 'the nerves, as 'twere, in patterns on a screen'. It obeys the modern demand for psychological realism, and while it often conducts its investigations in a diction that is ornate and elevated, it does go in fear of abstractions, concentrating instead upon the story of feelings and aspirations within an individual life, at a certain place and a certain time. Wordsworth's case is symptomatic of the historical moment, but it is not paraded as being representative: the pressure of the poem's occasion launches it beyond allegory and exemplum. Its principle of development and its structural and rhetorical life are to be found not in any designs he has upon a readership, not in self-exculpation or self-dramatization, but in the autonomous habits of the poet's mind and practice. The T of the poem is at the eye of the storm within the T of the poet.

  The extreme of this kind of writing was to come more than a hundred years later, in The Waste Land, another work where the expression of an acute personal predicament can be read as an expression of the age, and one which enforced a new way of reading poetry. It taught us to sound the image for its cultural and psychological import, to ponder the allusion for its critical rather than its decorative weight and to look for the poet's imaginative signature in the texture of the work, to listen in for the intrinsic poetry rather than look out for its explicit meaning. The Waste Land, we now know almost too patly, is the resolution at a symbolic level of conflicts within the consciousness of the poet, but we are free to read it as a refraction of pressures in the world of postwar Europe, because we have absorbed Jung's insights quite naturally into our way of thinking about art.

  Like the disaffected Wordsworth, the Northern Irish writers I wish to discuss take the strain of being in two places at once, of needing to accommodate two opposing conditions of truthfulness simultaneously, and at times their procedures are every bit as cautious and oysterish as those of Eliot. They belong to a place

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  that is patently riven by notions of belonging to other places. Each person in Ulster lives first in the Ulster of the actual present, and then in one or other Ulster of the mind. The nationalist will wince at the Union Jack and 'God Save the Queen' as tokens of his place in the world; he will withhold assent from the solidarities implicit in those emblems rather as Wordsworth withheld assent from the congregation's prayers for the success of the English armies. Yet, like Wordsworth among his patriotic neighbours, the Northern nationalist conducts his daily social life among unionist neighbours for whom those same emblems have pious and passionate force and to whom his nationalist principles, his hope for a different flag and different anthem, are as traitorous as Wordsworth's revolutionary sympathies. The fountainhead of the unionist's myth springs in the Crown of England, but he must stan
d his ground on the island of Ireland. The fountainhead of the nationalist's myth lies in the idea of an integral Ireland, but he too lives in an exile from his ideal place. Nevertheless, while he has to concede that he is a citizen of the British state, the nationalist can take comfort in the physical fact of his presence upon the partitioned Irish island, just as the unionist can take comfort in the political reality of the United Kingdom even if he must concede that Ireland is his geographical home.

  The condition is chronic and common and not necessarily terminal. It was fully at work in the collective life of Northern Ireland long before the present disruptions occurred. Indeed, it was more radically internalized within the Ulster personality during the years of quiet, and the typically reticent response of many Northern Irish writers to the violent conditions of the last fifteen years has much to do with this very internalization. Like other members of the population, the poets knew the score. Sectarian division, gerrymandering by the majority, discrimination in jobs and housing, all that was recognized as deplorable, and by the mid-1960s I think it would be fair to say that there were nascent attitudes in younger sections of the population, nationalist, republican and unionist, which prornised some shift in the shape of things to come. I do not mean that the Unionist Establishment would easily or willingly have changed its ways, but with a more active and

  vocal civil rights movement at work and a less blatantly tri-umphalist generation of Unionist politicians emerging, an evolution towards a better, juster, internal balance might have been expected to begin.

  I think the writers of my generation saw their very emergence as writers as a part of the leaven. The fact that a literary action was afoot was in itself a new political condition, and the writers did not feel the need to address themselves to the specific questions of politics, because they assumed that the subtleties and tolerances of their art were precisely what they had to contribute to the coarseness and intolerances of public life. When Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, James Simmons and myself were having our first books published, Paisley was already in full sectarian cry, and, indeed, Northern Ireland's cabinet ministers regularly massaged the atavisms and bigotries of Orangemen on the Twelfth of July. Nothing needed to be exposed: rather, it seemed that conditions had to be outstripped, and it is probably true to say that the idea of poetry was itself that higher ideal to which the poets unconsciously had turned in order to survive in the demeaning conditions—demeaned by resentment in the case of the Nationalists, by embarrassment at least and guilt at best in the case of the Unionists. In fact, that passage from Jung which I quoted earlier does fit the typical if not fully self-conscious position of the Ulster poet in the 1960s:

  One certainly does feel the affect and is shaken and tormented by it, yet at the same time one is aware of a higher consciousness looking on which prevents one from becoming identical with the affect . . . which regards the affect as an object.

  In our case, we might apply Jung's term 'the affect' to the particular exacerbations attendant on being a native of Northern Ireland, since this 'affect' means a disturbance, a warp in the emotional glass which is in danger of narrowing the range of the mind's responses to the terms of the disturbance itself, refracting everything through the warp. Things had advanced when this 'affect' was observed by a new consciousness that perceived it to be the re-

  suit of different history, heritages, cultural identity, traditions, call it what you will. These words provided a perspective on the surge of disruptive feelings which sprang too readily in the collective life, rebellious on the nationalist minority side, overbearing and punitive on the majority side, those unindividuated responses of day-to-day social and political experience.

  For a moment, the discovery and deployment of this language allowed us to talk of Planters and Gaels rather than Protestants and Catholics, to speak of different heritages rather than launch accusations and suspicions at one another, to speak of history rather than the skullduggery of the local government. It was a palliative, true in its way, salutary in that it shifted the discourse into a more self-diagnosing frame of reference, but as everyone, including the poets, knew, not true enough. To locate the roots of one's identity in the ethnic and liturgical habits of one's group might be all very well, but for the group to confine the range of one's growth, to have one's sympathies determined and one's responses programmed by it was patently another form of entrapment. The only reliable release for the poet was the appeasement of the achieved poem. In that liberated moment when the lyric discovers its buoyant completion, when the timeless formal pleasure comes to its fullness and exhaustion, in those moments of self-justification and self-obliteration the poet makes contact with the plane of consciousness where he is at once intensified in his being and detached from his predicaments. It is this deeper psychological compulsion which lies behind the typical concern of Northern Irish poets with style, with formal finish, with linguistic relish and play. They knew the truth of Yeats's affirmation that the 'rhetorician would deceive his neighbours,/The sentimentalist himself, while art/Is but a vision of reality'. In other words, politically, topographically and artistically, they knew their place, and it is no accident that Paul Muldoon's first pamphlet, published in Belfast in 1971, was called, in fact, Knowing My Place, a punning title which is at once humble and arrogant, slyly allusive to what was expected of the minority to which he belonged and genuinely in sympathy with the idea that everything had its place—art, love, politics, local affections, cultural heritage and, for that matter, the

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  place where a word doubles its meaning or where a line ends on the page.

  That is the first point I want to emphasize: the profound relation here between poetic technique and historical situation. It is a superficial response to the work of Northern Irish poets to conceive of their lyric stances as evasions of the actual conditions. Their concern with poetry itself wears well when we place it beside the protest poetry of the 1960s: the density of their verbal worlds has held up, the purely poetic force of the words is the guarantee of a commitment which need not apologize for not taking up the cudgels since it is raising a baton to attune discords which the cudgels are creating. To attune it within the pit of their own consciousness, of course, not in the arena of dustbin lids and shoot-to-kill operations.

  The second point to insist on is that the idea of poetry as a symbolic resolution of opposing truths, the idea of the poem as having its existence in a realm separate from the discourse of politics, does not absolve it or the poet from political responsibility. Nobody is going to advocate an ivory tower address for the poet nor a holier-than-thou attitude. Yet 'pure' poetry is perfectly justifiable in earshot of the car bomb, and it can imply a politics, depending on the nature of the poetry. A poetry of hermetic wit, of riddles and slips and self-mocking ironies, may appear culpably miniaturist or fastidious to the activist with his microphone at the street corner, and yet such poetry may be exercising in its inaudible way a fierce disdain of the activist's message or a distressed sympathy with it. But the reading of those political implications is in itself a political activity, separate from the processes that produced the poems, an extension or projection from the artistic endeavour—an endeavour which is not obliged to have any intention beyond its own proper completion.

  The poet is stretched between politics and transcendence and is often displaced from a confidence in a single position by his disposition to be affected by all positions, negatively rather than positively capable. This, and the complexity of the present conditions, may go some way towards explaining the large number of poems in which the Northern Irish writer views the world from a great spatial or temporal distance, the number of poems imagined from beyond the grave, from the perspective of mythological or histori-

  cally remote characters: Derek Mahon's 'An Image from Beckett' is an amplification of earlier soliloquies from the other side, by forgers, cowards, tramps, artists, all rehearsing their fates in a note both wry and plange
nt. This kind of poem culminates in the beautifully orchestrated 'A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford', where it is not just a single life that is given voice but a whole Lethe full of doomed generations and tribes, whispering their unfulfilment and perplexed hopes in a trickle of masonry, pleading for a hearing in the great soft gestures of mushroom-growths that strain from the dark towards a guiding star of light in the keyhole:

  A half century, without visitors, in the dark—

  Poor preparation for the cracking lock

  And creak of hinges, Magi, moonmen,

  Powdery prisoners of the old regime,

  Web-throated, stalked like triffids, racked by drought

  And insomnia, only the ghost of a scream

  At the flash-bulb firing squad we wake them with

  Shows there is life yet in their feverish forms.

  Grown beyond nature now, soft food for worms,

  They lift frail heads in gravity and good faith.

  They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way,

  To do something, to speak on their behalf

  Or at least not to close the door again.

  Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii!

  'Save us, save us,' they seem to say,

  'Let the god not abandon us

  Who have come so far in darkness and in pain.

  We too had our lives to live.

  You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary,

  Let not our naive labours have been in vain!'

  This is about the need to live and be known, the need for selfhood, recognition in the eye of ^God and the eye of the world, and its music is cello and homesick. A great sense of historical cycles, of injustice and catastrophe, looms at the back of the poem's mind. At

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