Northern Irish Poetry and Domestic Space

Adam Hanna

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137493699
• eBook ISBN: 9781137493705
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Northern Irish Poetry and Domestic Space explores why houses, in some ways the most private of spaces, have taken up such visibly public positions in the work of a range of prominent poets from Northern Ireland, examining the work of Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon and Medbh McGuckian.

1

Seamus Heaney: Neighbours and Strangers

Part One: Uncertainty at the threshold

The word ‘neighbour’ consistently exudes a sense of menace in Seamus Heaney’s poetry. ‘Funeral Rites’ in North (1975) contains a reference to ‘each neighbourly murder’; in the same volume, in ‘Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces’, Vikings are described as ‘neighbourly, scoretaking / killers’.¹ Later, when Heaney has a vision of the nineteenth-century novelist William Carleton in Station Island (1984), the ghost raves of ‘yeomen on the rampage, and his neighbour / among them, hammering home the shape of things’.² Heaney relocates Carleton’s experience of being intimidated by neighbours to his own home-parish of Bellaghy in County Derry and brings it into the twentieth century by telling the ghost of the novelist that he, too, has seen ‘neighbours on the roads at night with guns’.³ More recently, in District and Circle (2006), ‘The Nod’ features ‘Neighbours with guns, parading up and down’, while the young Heaney’s first taste of tobacco in ‘A Chow’ results in the metaphor ‘the roof of my mouth is thatch set fire to / At the burning-out of a neighbour’.⁴ In Heaney’s last volume, Human Chain (2010), an armed neighbour is glimpsed in the moonlight, patrolling the highway outside the Heaneys’ farm in ‘The Wood Road’.⁵ Even in poems in which neighbours from across the religious divide come to his family’s threshold in friendship, Heaney never depicts them crossing over into the house itself.⁶ In Heaney’s lexicon, the friendly and co-operative connotations of the word ‘neighbour’ are complicated and distorted, and its mere appearance in his poetry is enough to alert the reader that an encounter is in the offing that is more ambiguous, and potentially threatening than might be expected in a less politicised environment.

The accounts Heaney wrote, during the years of the Troubles, of Protestant neighbours coming to the house are always, to some extent, accounts of double feelings, and convey a mix of friendship and threat, intimacy and distance, and the possibility of amity and enmity across the sectarian divide. In each of the poems in which a Protestant neighbour approaches his family’s house, Heaney detects uncertainty in others or admits to some uncertainty of his own. This self-questioning relates both to the difficulties of cross-community relations, and to his knowledge of his own role as a responsible, yet conflicted, participant in the cultural arena. This, as I shall discuss, has all been registered in previous criticism of these poems, but what have been less commented on are the awkwardnesses, aporias and indecisions that form a part of the responses of the protagonists of each of these works. But these hesitancies are key: it is during these moments, when the poems’ protagonists do not seem quite certain of what to do, that Heaney most acutely questions himself and the place of his work in relation to the politics of Northern Ireland.

The domestic threshold is the crossing point on the border between the private space and the public one, and as such is a powerful image of the meeting of the individual and social. A framework for understanding the doorstep as a place of political decisions, negotiations and possibilities, is provided by Jacques Derrida’s Of Hospitality (2000), a work which is, in part, an anatomisation of the tensions and contradictions that arise from the act of crossing a threshold.⁷ Derrida argues that the act of crossing a threshold creates a guest and host and that the proprietorship and control that hosting make necessary are assertions of power. Correspondingly, by virtue of the consideration and politeness that must be shown towards him or her, the guest exerts another type of power over the host. This admits the destabilising possibility that the exercise of the guest’s power might call into question the proprietorship on which the act of hospitality is based. The host and guest, then, are locked into an uncertain relationship that would not have existed had they met on neutral ground, one that is reliant for its proper functioning on the adherence to accepted codes by both parties. As Scott Brewster points out, ‘at the crossing-point of the outer door the subject is both hôte – host and guest – and otage – hostage, with the mixture of vulnerability and responsibility that this entails’.⁸ Derrida discusses the threshold as a place where this ambiguous relationship, with all its possibilities for friendship and menace, overture and rebuff, is entered into, and where questions about the nature of the relationship that exists between the participants take on a peculiar urgency.⁹ These considerations help explain why, despite the ostensible friendliness of visits between neighbours in Heaney’s poems, hospitality and the inhospitable appear uneasily alongside each other in them.

The house’s threshold is a significant place where relationships are assessed and determined in ‘The Other Side’ (Wintering Out, 1972). At the beginning of this poem, the threshold of the house is not in view as the Heaneys’ Presbyterian neighbour approaches the family’s fields and, speaking in ‘patriarchal dictum[s]’, is mildly disparaging about the Heaneys’ land and their religious practices (saying, among other things, that ‘Your side of the house, I believe / hardly rule by the book at all’). At this point in the poem, sectarian and familial differences are drawn in black and white. At its end, however, as the threshold of the house comes into view, the attitude of the neighbour might be characterised as one of cautious amity. The change that comes over the neighbour as he approaches the house itself through the dimness (a level of light that recurs frequently in Wintering Out) suggests that the poem’s title is as much a reference to the other side of the neighbour’s personality as it is about societal difference, as qualities which he has failed to show in this poem up until this point (like tolerance, respectfulness and tact) become more evident at the crossing point between the familial territory and the outside world:

Then sometimes when the rosary was dragging

mournfully on in the kitchen

we would hear his step round the gable

though not until after the litany

would the knock come to the door

and the casual whistle strike up

on the doorstep. ‘A right-looking night’,

he might say, ‘I was dandering by

and says I, I might as well call.’¹⁰

The unspoken inter-sectarian consideration in the neighbour’s not knocking on the door of the praying family indicates the power of the threshold. The respectfulness that the domestic threshold compels is redolent of a more live-and-let-live approach to intercommunal relations in Northern Ireland than would have been evident from the news headlines in 1972, the year of its publication.¹¹ Perhaps because of this divergence from the expected, certain critical readings do not address the neighbour’s metaphorical change of approach, from insensitivity to cautious tact, that accompanies his literal one from field to threshold. Instead, several critics have identified superficiality and a sense of estrangement in the neighbour’s words.¹² However, what may appear to be the wordiness of embarrassment (‘I was dandering by / and says I, I might as well call’) might be a realistic rendering of a typical greeting in that area, or the overstatement of someone who is lonely and does not wish to admit it. Guardedness is just one aspect of the meeting with which the poem ends – another is openness. Both of these facets of the image of the threshold are in play at the close of the poem.

The threshold is a site of uncertainty: it is both a marker of where two territories are divided and the point at which this division can be crossed over. This metaphor applies to the poem itself, which has the potential to be read as a meliorative intervention into Northern Irish affairs as much as one that underlines notions of sectarian difference.¹³ ‘The Other Side’ was written in response to ‘The Hill-Farm’ by John Hewitt, a poem in which a house represents a world that is closed off to its speaker. In this poem, the speaker stands listening at the door of the farm of a Roman Catholic family as they recite the rosary, an act ‘alien to [his] breed and mind’.¹⁴ The speaker’s sense of solitude and exclusion are paramount: ‘the door was shut’, he notes; he ends the poem by thinking of himself ‘here in the vast enclosing night / outside its little ring of light’. Hewitt’s speaker’s position is unambiguous; Heaney’s speaker’s is less certain. The ability of the threshold to be a site of both shutting out and welcoming in is reflected by Heaney’s speaker’s pose of hesitating indecision at the poem’s end.

The speaker, in a mysterious warp of time and place, appears to have crossed the threshold by the end of the poem, going from the praying family circle to the dark, exposed space outside. It is as if he is going out to break the isolation of the speaker of Hewitt’s poem:

But now I stand behind him

in the dark yard, in the moan of prayers.

He puts a hand in a pocket

taps a little tune with the blackthorn

shyly, as if he were party to

lovemaking or a stranger’s weeping.

Should I slip away, I wonder,

or go up and touch his shoulder

and talk about the weather

or the price of grass-seed?¹⁵

There is a double hesitation here, in which both participants are caught between competing impulses to create and to shy away from intimacy. This brings a pressure of expectation to bear on the final line to offer a resolution, and the positioning of this line across the held breath of a stanza break perhaps points up its significance. The image it contains, of grass-seed and what it might cost, has powerful generative possibilities. There is the earthy suggestion of conciliation in the common agricultural interests of farming people, and also the wavering promise of the growth of harmonious co-existence. The idea of discussing its price suggests, in a sidelong fashion that is in keeping with the poem’s dim setting, an oblique acknowledgement of the mutual costs of forging a new kind of relationship.

In depicting the speaker standing behind a neighbour who is listening to ‘the moan of prayers’, Heaney seems to be trying to imagine what is familiar to him from the perspective of one for whom it is alien. This attempt to inhabit the consciousness of another, to see the world through their eyes and hear it with their ears, is an attempt at the impossible. Nevertheless, this leap between his own consciousness and that of another is tried in the poem’s concluding section. The speaker is included in the ‘we’ who were part of the family circle reciting the rosary; later he is also the ‘I’ who is outside listening to the ‘moan of prayers’ indoors. Has the speaker somehow escaped and got ‘behind’ the neighbour (a position that is faintly threatening and at the same time suggests the possibility that he supports this cross-sectarian overture)? Perhaps the action at the end of the poem takes place at a time when its speaker is no longer included in the family’s rituals, or perhaps (in a reading that would add a further meaning to the title ‘The Other Side’) Heaney pictures the speaker as being both a physical and a spectral presence in the poem, in two places at once.

Liminality and ghostliness are linked conditions, Victor Turner points out in his seminal anthropological work The Forest of Symbols.¹⁶ In his chapter on the properties of liminal status, Turner describes initiates who are undergoing ritual rites of passage that mark the transition between one social position and another as ‘interstructural beings’ who enter a condition ‘of ambiguity and paradox, a confusion of all the customary categories’.¹⁷ People undergoing these rituals, Turner continues, are often disguised or hidden, and the shadowy status of these initiates expresses an underlying truth: that they are neither one thing nor another. Turner describes these liminal periods as times of vulnerability for the initiate, writing that during this period the person undergoing the transition is ‘naked unaccommodated man’.¹⁸ However, he also sees the power that lies in this state, describing the ‘interstructural’ human as ‘that which is neither this nor that, and yet is both’.¹⁹ Both the vulnerability and the power that Turner sees in people in transitional states are attributes of the speaker in ‘The Other Side’ when he is standing behind the neighbour at the end of the poem. The power that inheres in this shadowy state is not lost on Heaney. After all, approaching someone in the dark and signalling your presence by touching that person on the shoulder, while it might be a sign of friendship, is a good way of making that person jump out of their skin.

Interviews with Heaney suggest that, at the time of writing the poems that would become Wintering Out, he was at the threshold of a new phase in his poetry. He told James Randall that ‘certainly Wintering Out and North were attempts to go on from a personal, rural, childhood poetry, attempts to reach out and go forward from a private domain and make wider connections, public connections’.²⁰ It appears that it was Heaney who was moving to ‘the other side’ at this point, someth...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction: Politicised Houses and Poets
• 1 Seamus Heaney: Neighbours and Strangers
• 2 Michael Longley’s Home Away from Home
• 3 Derek Mahon: Rented Home
• 4 Medbh McGuckian: Interior Designs
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index