The Nobel Committee awarded the 1995 prize for Literature to Seamus Heaney âfor works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.â While the Nobel Prize was a personal milestone, it was also contemporaneous with the peace process in Northern Ireland. This period marks a clear distinction between Heaneyâs early work and later work. After Heaneyâs death in 2013 the Irish Taoiseach, Enda Kelly, delivered a speech to the Dail Eirann1 to pay tribute to the poet. He describes Heaneyâs poetry encompassing a range of experience, from âpeeling potatoes with our motherâ to becoming part of âa new family of Europeans.â Kelly claims: âFor him, it was only all and ever about memory and âthe state of us.ââ2 The premise of this book is that the shaping of cultural memory is one of Heaneyâs major contributions as a poet.
By the time he won the Nobel Prize in 1995, Heaney had already been the recipient of a number of literary awards and honours. He had an established place in the canon and the academy. He had served as the Professor of Poetry at Oxford and held Boylston chair at Harvard, later serving as the Ralph Waldo Emerson Poet in Residence. He had delivered the T.S. Eliot Memorial Lecture in 1986 and won the Lannan Literary Award in 1990. In 1993 he was made a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. These awards and honours helped to define his public profile as a âmajorâ poet. Seamus Deane observes that some of his peers in Ireland believed that the Nobel Prize had âfinishedâ Heaney because it was âtoo early.â3 Despite these concerns, Heaney published some of his most important work after winning the prize. Some of the concerns of his late work can be seen, in some ways, as parallel to developments in memory studies across the same period, especially in the shift from a predominantly national to a transnational perspective.
By the late 1990s and early 2000s Heaney was one of the most popular poets in the English-speaking world. At around this time, an apocryphal statistic emerged: two thirds of all poetry collections sold in the United Kingdom were by Heaney. The source is probably an Arts Council report of 2000 which showed that he and Ted Hughes accounted for 60 percent of poetry sales in the previous year (in no small part due to the recent release of Hughesâs Birthday Letters to Sylvia Plath and Heaneyâs Beowulf ). This statistic re-emerged at the time of his 70th birthday, in 2009, and was repeated in obituaries after his death in 2013. The truth of this rather astonishing claim seemed beside the point.4 It was recirculated across the globe through a range of media because it seemed plausible. When the statistic was first circulated, Heaney had recently won the Nobel Prize, followed by the Whitbread Book of the Year in 1997 and 2000. By the mid-1990s his work was ubiquitous on school curricula. The publication and recirculation of this statistic is an indication, more than anything, of Heaneyâs public profile in the last 20 years of his life. I am interested in how this public profile allowed him to play a part in the creation of cultural memory.
While memory, particularly personal or autobiographical memory, has been identified as a thematic concern in Seamus Heaneyâs work, approaches from memory studies have seldom been adopted in the analysis of these works. This seems an omission, given the centrality of personal and collective memories since his first collection was published in 1966. Approaches from memory studies can illuminate certain aspects of his late work by showing how Heaney is actively involved in the construction of cultural memory. By drawing on work by a number of scholars working in memory studies, I aim to show how Heaneyâs poetry creates personal, familial, regional, national and global memories that âtravelâ across and beyond borders and time periods, oscillating between these different frames of memory. Approaches from memory studies demonstrate how a poet can shape and mediate shared memory and can also provide fresh insights into Heaneyâs late poetry.
Heaney and Cultural Memory
Because the basis of memory studies is the interplay between past, present and future, it is a particularly appropriate lens for examining Heaneyâs work. In his late work this dynamic plays out in interesting ways. In the 1990s, this was in the construction of a collective memory of the Troubles. In her essay âNorthern Irish Poetry and the End of History,â Edna Longley reports that after the Irish Republican Army (IRA) ceasefire of 1994, foreign journalists visiting Belfast would ask writers, âWhat are you going to write about now?â5 She observes that the poetry of Northern Irish poets had never been exclusively focused on the Troubles, but had frequently alluded to other histories and other wars because âodds and ends of battles long ago are still active within communal mentalities.â6 Heaneyâs work can be seen as part of a broader project in which Northern Irish poets look beyond the borders of the province and into the past to find parallels for the sectarian violence. In his attempt to move beyond the sectarian division, Heaney contributes to the shaping of the collective memory of the Troubles.
The interconnection of past, present and future can also be seen in his use of the elegy to commemorate the passing of important contemporary poets and in his writing on events with transnational significance, such as 9/11. Heaney shapes public memory by modifying and reprising his own work and by adapting and translating canonical texts. In an interview conducted in 1999 he reflected upon the relationship between the âliterary deep pastâ and âthe historical presentâ: âThe movement between a deep past and what is going on around us is necessary, I think, if we are to hold onto ourselves as creatures of culture ⊠That is one way for the inner and outer to get into some type of alignment, for some kind of coherence to get established, some stay against confusion.â7 The movement between the deep past and the present is also seen in the temporal slippages in poems about his family.
Memory studies is an interdisciplinary field which is concerned with how we understand, shape and are influenced by the past. It crosses a range of disciplines (including psychology, anthropology, history and literary studies) and encompasses a broad range of methodological approaches. âCultural Memoryâ is a term which has emerged from the field of memory studies. It can also be described as âcollectiveâ or âsocialâ memory. Astrid Erll describes cultural memory as âbroad spectrumâ which ranges from âindividual acts of remembering in a social context to group memory (of family, friends, veterans, etc.) to national memory with its âinvented traditions,â and finally to the host of transnational lieux de mĂ©moire such as the Holocaust and 9/11.â8 She explains that in âculturalâ or âcollectiveâ memory the concept of ârememberingâ is âmetaphorically transferred to the level of culture.â9 This form of memory that we describe as âa nationâs memoryâ or âa literatureâs memory.â10 Aleida Assmann argues that this type of memory does not come into existence of its own accord, but âhas to be created, established, communicated, continued, reconstructed, and appropriated.â11 This form of shared, or collective, memory is conceived of as a dynamic process: the past is remade in the present. In Heaneyâs late works, memory is multi-layered and complex. For this reason, concepts and approaches from memory studies provide a productive framework for the analysis of Heaneyâs late work.
The revival of interest in memory studies in the 1980s was driven by approaches that viewed collective memories in terms of nation or culture. Pierre Noraâs influential work on lieux de mĂ©moire described a strong linkage between memory and the formation of group identity. He argued that social groups created a shared past and used memory to build solidarity. Noraâs focus upon French sites of memory presents memory as national memory. As influential as Noraâs work was, critics such as Astrid Erll and Jeffrey Olick have identified limitations in his co...