Haunted Heaney

Spectres and the Poetry

Ian Hickey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367645281
• eBook ISBN: 9781000416817
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire anglaise

Haunted Heaney: Spectres and the Poetry looks at the ghosts and spectres present within the poetry of the Nobel Prize winning poet Seamus Heaney. Covering Heaney's work from his first collection, Death of a Naturalist, to his final collection, Human Chain, this volume analyses Heaney's poetry through the lens of hauntology as presented by Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx. This book presents spectres and ghosts not in the conventional sense, as purely supernatural, physical manifestations haunting a place, but instead as having a non-physical presence. In this sense past cultures, societies, texts, poets, and memories are examined as having a spectral influence on Heaney's writing. His work is indebted to hauntedness as the past in all its forms sutures itself within the present of his thinking and writing, and our reading of the poetry. Topics for discussion include the Norse spectres in the early poetry; British colonialism and its haunting influence on the poet; a renewed look at the bog poems as being influenced by the spectral; the classical influence of Virgil and Dante; and a reading of 'Route 110' that incorporates the major instances of Heaney's career into a singular poem. The book also incorporates Heaney's prose work and interviews into the discussion and uses these works as a metacommentary to the poetry offering a deeper insight into the mind of one of Ireland's greatest writers.

1 Derrida, Hauntology, and the Spectre

Much of Jacques Derrida’s work has been circulating around the ghostly and the spectral since his early writings in the 1960s. In works such as Writing and Difference and Of Grammatology we can see that while Derrida may not have been purposely focusing on the spectral he does seem to be focusing in on the sense of language as being haunted, as language having the ability to offer a plurality of meanings outside the initial concept of what may have been implied. We see this regarding the concept of deconstruction which destabilizes any form of unitary meaning and creates new forms of meanings that have trace elements of the older version still remaining within the new interpretation, or the ‘center’ as Derrida terms it in relation to structurality. Later, in works such as Memoires for Paul de Man, The Ear of the Other, Specters of Marx, The Gift of Death, Of Hospitality, and Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, as well as in many interviews such as those collected in Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews with Bernard Stieglar, we see a more sustained and overt move towards the discussion of ghosts, spectres, and the hauntological. These texts not only demonstrate Derrida’s interrogation of the ghostly in terms of the living presence that remains after death but also a prolonged engagement with the ghosts of the past in terms of literature, culture, society, history, and memory. From as early as 1985 in The Ear of the Other we can see that Derrida was beginning to probe the return of the repressed again, he had already done so in his earlier work ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’ in Writing and Difference in 1967, but the notion of the dead having an absent presence comes to the fore of his thinking on the repressed in the The Ear of the Other when he comments that ‘I cannot manage to interiorize the dead other so I keep it in me, as a persecutor perhaps, a living dead’ (1985, 58). This continues into Memoires for Paul de Man where he interrogates the return of the past through remembering the dead: ‘the death of the other, if we can say this, is also situated on our side at the very moment when it comes to us from an altogether other side’ (Derrida 1989, 39). This idea of a return of the ghostly and of the past would again undergo serious analysis in Specters of Marx when Derrida developed the notion of ‘hauntology’ which determines that ghosts of the past have a constant presence within the present moment and in the future to come. He suggests that ‘the specter’ is a non-physical entity that resides within the unconscious and has the ability to return to haunt the present at any given moment in time and notes that by returning we are unsure if it is representative of a ‘living past or to a living future’ (Derrida 2006, 123). This sense of hauntedness sees time as anachronistic instead of linear, as something which is constantly folding in on itself as the spectre brings about a ‘disadjustment of the contemporary’ (Derrida 2006, 123). In this sense, the overlapping and folded nature of time implies that trace elements of the past can be identified at different points across history, at different points in the present moment. Jodey Castricano suggests that in Derrida’s later works (like the ones I have mentioned above) that ‘spectral tropes and topoi demonstrate that the logic of haunting and the notion of the return of the living-dead are implied in “individual” being – the so-called subject – as well as in historical, social, and cultural realms’ (2001, 13–14). The individual is constantly haunted by these elements of the past and this will be teased out further throughout this chapter.

Literature and Hauntology

Texts and works of literature are bound to the spectral. The spectral inheritances that we experience when reading works of literature are indebted to the unconscious space in which writing takes place. To encounter a work of literature is to encounter the ghosts that make up that piece of work. In this study, I see hauntology and the spectral as relating to the historical and to the author’s own background in terms of culture, society, literature, and memory and I look at how these elements of the past that make up and influence the present lurk as spectres within Seamus Heaney’s poetry. In the wider context of literature and the ability of ghosts to reside within it, we can look upon a text, poem, or image as something that is neither dead nor alive, something which has a spectral trace of the past within it and is identifiable in a contemporary context. Julian Wolfreys comments on the spectrality of literature and suggests that:

texts are neither dead nor alive, yet they hover at the very limits between living and dying. The text thus partakes in its own haunting, it is traced by its own phantoms, and it is this condition which reading must confront.

(2002, xii)

Not only is the text haunted, but if the reader is exposed to a text then a conversation begins between the reader and the spectres that dwell within it, we encounter the spectral other. In Of Hospitality Derrida has written of the need to welcome the other, to confront and accept what they may have to say. He comments that in order for absolute hospitality to take place then it ‘requires that I open up my home and that I give to not only the foreigner … but to the absolute, unknown, anonymous other’ (2000, 25). In overview, these ideas generally apply to Derrida’s thinking and demands on the spectre; that we must be open to their arrival, welcome them as the other, and never fully be able to identify them – many ghosts are but the ghosts of ghosts that are reanimated and repetitious throughout time. In Of Hospitality Derrida aligns the figure of the foreigner with that of an arrivant, one who arrives, which further connects with the spectral expounded in Specters of Marx as Derrida constantly refers to the spectre as an arrivant and suggests that the arrival of the arrivant is the ‘very place of spectrality’ (2006, 81–82). In linking the Other with the spectre here, we are able to see the points of crossover which are intrinsic to understanding the role of the reader and the author in terms of being haunted by foreign elements that exist outside the realm of the self. In terms of spectrality I am not linking the figure of the foreigner as Derrida sees it in Of Hospitality with a physical entity but rather with the spectre as something like a foreign body, an outside influence that is transmitted through the text. The transmission of spectres through writers and onto readers is as important to understanding hauntology in relation to literature as it is in understanding that the spectre operates as a liminal figure between the past, present, and future. Through literature, and therefore language, the spectral past begins to suture itself within the present. The interweaving of the past and present through spectres of the past makes the present difficult to distinguish as being totally original. It can instead be looked upon as a sort of simulacrum, a copy of a copy which has inaugurated something new that has trace elements of the past within it. I would argue that all writing is this – a haunted body through which a multitude of voices speak at the same time. Peter Buse and Andrew Stott note that ‘literature has always been a more accommodating place for ghosts, perhaps because fiction itself shares their simulacral qualities: like writing, ghosts are associated with a certain secondariness or belatedness’ (1999, 8) and, indeed, the ghosts that reside within a text may never be immediately identifiable upon reading, or re-reading, as they spring forth from the text. Their absent presence may not be immediately explicit but rather contained in language, the etymology of words, traces of culture and identity, the personal history of the author, the author’s literary inheritances, or the historical context of the period when writing. A probing of these areas must take place within literature to conjure the spectres that lurk beneath the surface of the text. When a text is interrogated in this manner then newer, broader, more elemental interpretations are brought forward. In an act of performing what I would term here as ghostly deconstruction on a text the spectres that reside within it are conjured and brought to the surface. Ghostly deconstruction is the act of forming new interpretations and new structures within a novel, poem, play, or piece of art through interrogating and conjuring the spectres that reside within the work. Colin Davis has similarly drawn us towards the link between spectrality and deconstruction when he comments that ‘Derrida’s spectre is a deconstructive figure hovering between life and death, presence and absence, and making established certainties vacillate’ (2007, 11). In ‘Spectographies’ Derrida reinforces the notion of inheriting from the Other that has come beforehand, from the past, and which has powers of deconstruction: ‘the spectral logic is de facto a deconstructive logic. It is the element of haunting that deconstruction finds the place most hospitable to it, at the heart of the living present’ (2002, 117). Hauntology is a performance that endures and this performance between the spectre and its host, the spectre and the text, and the spectre and time links everything together in a web of hauntings. Spectres collide and clash when reading and formulate new meanings and ideas, and by extension of this reveal new spectres with Jodey Castricano suggesting that when we engage with literature ‘what calls to us in secret always takes the form of (a) haunting, especially as it concerns the other “in us” living on – so to speak – as a spectral effect of the text’ (2001, 4). Spectres may be from the past, but they are of the present and Derrida points towards the limitless number of spectres that may inhabit a piece of writing. The spectral nature of reading and writing also means that we bring our own spectres to the table when we engage with a text and we must sift through them to gain deeper meaning. In Specters of Marx Derrida comments that ‘everything begins before it begins’ (2006, 202) as spectres reside everywhere, they have an absent presence within the present and cannot be conjured away. Existence is a trace of hauntings and literary texts are no different as all writing is a reproduction of sorts, a translation of other texts and ideas that co-mingle and create an original reproduction. Here, I would argue, translation does not simply relate to the process of changing one language into another but translating one idea into another with Mark Wigley commenting that ‘the very sense of something original is but an effect of translation, the translation actually producing what it appears to simply reproduce’ (1995, 3). In a hauntological sense, literature is simply a reproduction of ghosts – this extends to ghosts from the writer’s own memory, culture, and national history as well as to ghosts encountered within literary works and the spectres that a reader brings with them. To write is to produce a ghost, to encounter the other that dwells within, but it is never the same ghost that is conjured that is visible on the page. The spectre that returns from the past is amalgamated and fused with the writer’s spectres and so is now a distorted repetition of the past, a simulacrum that is identifiable but which signals a new venture. This new body of the spectre of the past is of the present, is recognisable in the present, and offers a new vision of the contemporary but contains trace elements of the past. Derrida comments that the text that returns to haunt is ‘never an echo … that comes back … or, if there is, it’s always distorted’ (1985, 158). The return of the spectre distorts any ontological certainty and the present can be seen to simply be distortions and reproductions of the past – there can be no original present since the present moment is purely inhabited by absence, the spectral. Mark Fisher suggests that time is given to ‘anachronism and inertia’ (2014, 6) as we encounter lost futures. What Fisher means here is that time is breaking down as the past folds in and inhabits the present. This constantly reoccurring slippage of time suggests that new, original futures are impossible since the present moment constantly inherits from and reproduces the past. Writing is driven by the spectral and the ghosts that reside within us and by extension of that the implication is that reading also performs this ghostly process. To engage with literature is to be haunted by it and Derrida is well attuned to this in Specters of Marx when he notes that ‘everyone reads, acts, writes with his or her ghosts’ (2006, 174). The spectral is always a part of the imaginative process and holds a formative space within literature as we are given to reproducing spectres in the act of writing.

Derrida and Hauntology

To experience a haunting is not totally given to the supernatural but is in fact an everyday occurrence in our lives. To be haunted is not only to witness supernatural beings which one would associate with Gothic literature, for example, but is something much more intrinsic to our sense of self and how we experience and interpret the world around us. We are haunted by the past in both a personal and historical sense and the ghosts that reside within the past return to influence the present and future. In Hauntology: The Presence of the Past in Twenty-First Century English Literature Katy Shaw suggests that ‘the experience of being haunted is one of noticing absences in the present, recognizing fissures, gaps and points of crossover’ (2018, 2). The points of crossover which Shaw aptly suggests as being a cornerstone of hauntedness is intrinsic to hauntology as a mode of interrogating the reality of the present moment as certain instances and characteristics of the present signify elements of the past. The spectral indebtedness to the past that the present holds is not one that is bound up in the belief that ghosts reanimate in the present but rather that we are in constant conversation with the ghosts of our lives in terms of memory, culture, literature, and the societal. To be haunted is to speak with these ghosts and call forth a new inherited knowledge from the brink of the shadowy past in order to recognise, or perhaps further understand, the present and future to come. Shaw further suggests that these ghosts represent ‘the visibility of the invisible: but also raises questions of time and chronology’ (2018, 6). Time as a linear historical construct is abandoned in thinking on the hauntological as elements of the past that do not have a physical presence in the present moment may return and repeat themselves in a different guise – time is anachronistic. Thinking on the ghostly forces us to engage with absence as much as it does with presence and by interrogating and unearthing these absences (the gaps and fissures which Shaw has pointed out) we can come to a better understanding of our present moment and the future to come. The unknown nature of the future runs parallel to the unknown ghosts of the past that return and Avery Gordon has pointed towards the lack of control we have over which ghosts come to haunt us. Gordon suggests that ‘reckoning with ghosts is not like deciding to read a book: you cannot simply choose the ghosts which you are willing to engage’ (2008, 190) and that ‘haunting is part of our social world and understanding it is essential to grasping the nature of our society, and for changing it’ (2008, 27). So, what role do ghosts play in the present moment and how influential are they? What are their origins and where do they come from? Can they ever be banished and where, if anywhere, do they reside? Jacques Derrida attempted to answer some of these questions in Specters of Marx and coined the term hauntology which is bound up in thinking on the spectral and ghostly inheritances that shape our lives.

Derrida first presented his notion of hauntology in 1993 at the ‘Whither Marxism’ colloquium held at the University of California, Riverside. Here speakers gave their thoughts...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Derrida, Hauntology, and the Spectre
• 2 Norse and British Spectres of Colonialism
• 3 The Haunted Bog: Spectrality and the Bog Poems
• 4 Wider European Hauntings: Virgil and Dante
• 5 Looking Backwards into the Future – ‘Route 110’
• Index