PART ONE
HEANEY AND DEATH
lifetime, then the deathtime: reticence
Keeping us together when together,
All declaration deemed outspokenness.
âSeamus Heaney, âThe Liftâ
CHAPTER ONE
SURVIVING DEATH IN HEANEYâS HUMAN CHAIN
Andrew J. Auge
On Easter Saturday, April 11, 2009, as part of RTĂâs celebration of Seamus Heaneyâs seventieth birthday, the radio presenter Marian Finucane interviewed Heaney. Over the course of the program, she questioned him about what thoughts of death had arisen in the aftermath of his stroke in 2006. After initially demurring, Heaney preceded to indicate that he no longer accepted the traditional Catholic beliefs in the particular judgment and an eternal heavenly reward and that he believed that death meant âextinctionâ (Waters 2010, 116). Those offhand comments sparked outrage from the Irish cultural commentator John Waters. After acknowledging the potential nuances of this position, Waters ultimately insisted that Heaneyâs response was intentionally provocative, that he had leveraged âthe weight of his poetic âofficeâ to make a reinforcing point on behalf of the prevailing culture ⊠denying something that for many people is of momentous importance: the idea of eternal lifeâ (2010, 118). Waters then mocked Heaney for the superficiality and incoherence of his thinking on this topic and on the general role of religion in contemporary Irish society. Whatever guarded praise of Heaneyâs poetry Waters offered in this essay was offset by its title, which consigned the Nobel Prize winnerâs oeuvre to âthe poetics of nothingnessâ (2010, 115).
Such fulminations might have been avoided had Waters taken the trouble to read the full expanse of Heaneyâs poetry or, in lieu of that, his prose reflection on the poetâs responsibilities with regard to the subject of death, âJoy and Night: Last Things in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and Philip Larkin,â collected in The Redress of Poetry (1995). There he would have found that his accusation that Heaney is a purveyor of âthe poetics of nothingnessâ not only misrepresents Heaneyâs thoughts on mortality but also anachronistically ignores the realities of modern secularity, where, as Heaney paraphrases the Catholic poet CzesĆaw MiĆosz, âNo intelligent contemporary is spared the pressure exerted ⊠by the void, the absurd, the anti-meaning.â Facing death, the modern poetic imagination is, Heaney asserts, always caught in a âstalemate between the death-mask of nihilism and the fixed smile of a pre-booked place in paradiseâ (RP, 153). For Heaney, merely dwelling within the tensions of this dialectic is not sufficient: the poetâs task is to negotiate a settlement that at least tentatively enacts an âoutfacing [of] the inevitableâ rather than a hopeless acquiescence to it (RP, 147). He delineates these alternatives by pitting the facile negation of Larkinâs âAubadeâ against the hard-wrung affirmations of Yeatsâs âA Cold Heavenâ and âMan and the Echo.â It is the later poem, written when Yeats was on the cusp of death, which for Heaney manifests the transformative power of poetry, its ability to hew a shard of meaning from a stony silence. However, despite the sense of creaturely sympathy evoked at the end of Yeatsâs poem by the cry of a stricken rabbit, the confrontation with death staged in âMan and the Echoâ is, as the title suggests, solitary. In that regard if not others, it typifies Yeatsâs quest in his late poems to cultivate a hard-edged masculine aloofness that outfaces deathâs nullity (Ramazani 1990, 145â50). Here, as elsewhere, the contrast between Heaney and his precursor is illuminating. In Heaneyâs last published book of poems, Human Chain (2010), it is not heroic self-sufficiency but human connectionsâthe bonds of care and love linking the living and the deadâthat allow death to be faced, withstood, and survived.
To understand this difference better, we might consider Yeatsâs resolute grappling with mortality in light of the most significant modern philosophical analysis of the role of death in human existence. In book 2 of Being and Time, Martin Heidegger establishes death as foundational for human existenceâas Daseinâs most integral and intimate possibility. When mortality is no longer regarded as a distant terminus but is accepted to be ever-present as the fatal condition that occasions all of the selfâs projects, it becomes a bounding line that gathers human being into an individualized totality. In Heidegger-speak, this being-toward-death means embracing mortality as the âownmost nonrelational possibility not to be bypassedâ (Heidegger 1996, 232). That is to say, the human being who authentically confronts death recognizes that it âdoes not just âbelongâ in an undifferentiated way to oneâs own Da-sein [being], but it lays claim on it as something individualâ (1996, 243). Jahan Ramazani discerns in what he calls Yeatsâs âself-elegiesâ something akin to this Heideggerian posture: an unflinching approach to death that triggers a process of self-recapitulation and thereby consolidates the self into a distinctive âaesthetic wholeâ (1990, 163â64). It is precisely this narrow emphasis on being-toward-death as an individuating project that has disturbed some of Heideggerâs more recent philosophical interlocutors, most notably Simon Critchley and Jacques Derrida. Their correctives to Heidegger deserve further attention, since, as I hope to show, they point toward something distinctive in Seamus Heaneyâs approach to death in Human Chain.
In characterizing death as ânonrelational,â Heidegger asserts that we never truly participate in the death of others but are merely off-stage spectators of their ordeal. Certainly, the deaths that we witness, especially of those closest to us, remain fundamentally enigmatic, closed off to any efforts to comprehend them. However, Heidegger pushes this too far when he claims that âwe do not experience the dying of others in a genuine sense⊠[but] are at best always just âthereâ tooâ (1996, 222), or so Simon Critchley suggests when he insists, pace Heidegger, âthat death is first and foremost experienced in a relation to the death or dying of the other and others, in being-with the dying in a caring way, and in grieving after they are deadâ (2008, 144). Derrida in Aporias makes the same point more succinctly when he insists that being-toward-death ultimately means acknowledging âthe death of the other in âmeââ (1993, 76). For Derrida, this experience of bearing traces of dead others and bequeathing traces of our passing selves to others constitutes the act of survival. Like the related Derridean motif of the specter, survival undermines the familiar binary oppositions of self and other, presence and absence, life and death, being and not-being. Perhaps for that reason, Derrida in one of his last public statements identified survival as âan originary concept that constitutes the very structure of what we call existenceâ (2007a, 50). In that final interview he insisted that life is nothing more, nothing less than survival, literally the act of âliving onââ that is, living upon the remnants of other lives as well as living through the remnants of ourselves incorporated by others (2007a, 26). Survival is then manifested, not just through mortality, but in mundane acts of departure or passing on. For instance, the act of writing whereby oneâs own words are ceded to others signifies for Derrida âat once my death, either to come or already come upon me, and the hope that this trace survives meâ (2007a, 32). Yet mortality remains for Derrida the boundary by which survival is ultimately defined. The traces of the dead survive only if those who remain are willing âto carry both the other and his world, the other and the world that have disappearedâ (2005, 148). This unappeasable responsibility exceeds the traditional Freudian notion of mourning, whereby the death of the loved one is eventually resolved through the âidealizing introjectionâ of the lost other into the self. The melancholy that prohibits this and that Freud identifies as pathological is regarded by Derrida as ânecessary,â for it acknowledges that these lingering traces of the dead can never be fully assimilated or subsumed but will continue to haunt the survivors who carry them (2005, 160â62).
The extent to which these contrasting philosophical approaches to death parallel the differences between Seamus Heaneyâs and W. B. Yeatsâs culminating responses to morality is strikingly evident in Heaneyâs revision of one of Yeatsâs privileged figures for death: the image of the empty coat upon a hanger. That image anchors Yeatsâs late poem âThe Apparitions,â where each stanza concludes with the refrain: âFifteen apparitions have I seen; / The worst a coat upon a coat-hangerâ (1965, 352; italics in original). This skeletal simulacrum encountered in solitude elicits from the aging poet an intensification of mood, a meditative self-concentration: âWhen a man grows old his joy / Grows more deep day after day, / His empty heart is full at length.â An earlier variant of this figure in âSailing to ByzantiumâââAn aged man is but a paltry thing, / A tattered coat upon a stick, unless / Soul claps its hands and singsâ (Yeats 1965, 193)âepitomizes the solitary soulâs power to override mortality through artistic creation. Heaney humanizes this image by restoring it to its actual mundane context. In âThe Butts,â the empty coat is his fatherâs suit jacket hanging in the wardrobe. Whereas in the past it was raided for the loose tobacco left in its pockets, in more recent times it yielded ânothing but chaff cocoonsâ (HC, 13). Those husks of detritus serve as a metonym for the frailty of the fatherâs body, in his last days carefully tended by his children, who must reach beneath
Each meagre armpit
To lift and sponge him,
One on either side,
Feeling his lightness,
Having to dab and work
Closer than anybody liked
But having, for all that,
To keep working.
(HC, 13)
This move from a generic empty coat on a hanger to the unclothed body of oneâs father marks the distance between Yeats and Heaney on this crucial issue. It is the difference between a poet who confronts death in the solitary recesses of his own consciousness and one who addresses it through an intimate encounter with the dying other. While the unnerving task of washing a moribund parent lacks the grandeur of Yeatsâs staged confrontations with his own imagined cadaver, Heaney invests this act with a matter-of-fact dignity. He casts the process of âbeing-with the dying in a caring wayâ and âgrieving after they are dead,â to quote Critchley again, as strenuous labor. It is precisely this hard work that makes death, and its survival, tangible.
The title poem of Human Chain sharpens this insight by rendering death as a physical jettisoning of the body that paradoxically binds us to others, by forging from the discarded mortal coil a link that connects even the most distant members of the human race. This point is made deftly through a sequence of three loosely concatenated scenes: the all-too-familiar televised image of sacks of flour being passed by aid workers to a starving Third World crowd; the poetâs recollection of lugging bags of grain during the harvests of his rural youth; the shuffling off of the body in death. Heaney reverts here and frequently throughout this volume to the twelve-line structure that he first employed in the Squarings sequence of Seeing Things, capitalizing once more upon this formâs fluidity and its drift toward a culminating flash of insight. Beyond a shared sense of a sudden unburdening, the scenes each spotlight the human bodyâs vulnerability. And the hyphenated phrasesââhand-to-hand,â and âeye-to-eyeâ (HC, 18)âdescribing the close coordination involved in conveying the bags of grain stress how those corporeal limits necessarily connect us to one another. While the passage of the bags of grain yields something substantive, that is not the case with the passing on of the human body itself. The poemâs conclusion evokes that difference through the abrupt sundering of syntax.
Nothing surpassed
That quick unburdening, backbreakâs truest payback,
A letting go which will not come again.
Or it will, once. And for all.
(HC, 18)
The stanzaic enjambment implies that only an abyssal emptiness awaits human beings as they pass beyond life into death. But the subsequent chiasmic rime riche, the kind of aural flourish so characteristic of Heaney, casts the âunburdeningâ of the body in death in more ambivalent terms: as both welcome release from and meager recompense for the pain endured in life. It is the final caesura, though, that justifies this poemâs position as the volumeâs signature work, for it augments deathâs finality by gesturing toward the binding power of its universality.
Several other poems from Human Chain echo the figuration of death established in the title poem, employing the well-worn trope of death as release into an unfathomable domain. Heaney has always wielded such elegiac motifs with an ambidextrous flexibility that balances âthe claims of both consolation and skepticism, transcendence and realismâ (Ramazani 1994, 358). However, here, even more than he had previously done, Heaney imbues them with a provocative open-endedness. Consider, for instance, the volumeâs last poem, âA Kite for AibhĂn,â an adaptation of âLâaquilone,â by the fin de siĂšcle Italian poet Giovanni Pascoli. Heaneyâs version concludes by paralleling the departure of the human spirit in death with the ascent of a kite that eventually breaks free from its string:
the kite a thin-stemmed flower
Climbing and carrying, carrying farther, higher
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Until string breaks andâseparate, elateâ
The kite takes off, itself alone, a windfall.
(HC, 85)
What is most striking about Heaneyâs adaptation is how it radically rearranges the original to fashion this conclusion. In the more precise translation of Pascoliâs poem that Heaney produced for an Italian colleague, a variant of the above passage appears near the middle of the poem, where the âyouâ addressed is subsequently identified with a schoolmate of the Italian poet who died young, with his childlike notions of death intact: âYou over whom I shed my tears and prayed, / You were lucky to have seen the fallen / Only in the windfall of a kiteâ (Morisco 2013, 42). The conclusion of Heaneyâs adaptation garners even more significance when it is juxtaposed with his midcareer poem âA Kite for Michael and Christopherâ (SI, 44), where the anticipated collapse of the kite in the woods signals deathâs eventual felling of the body. In âA Kite for AibhĂn,â Heaney employs the equivocal word windfall to present death not as exclusively destructive, as he had done in the earlier poem, but also as a bit of good fortune, a blessing. That attitude is no longer tarnished by naĂŻvetĂ©, as in Pascoliâs original, but is invested through its culminating position with the mature poetâs authority.
In two of the formal elegies that appear in Human Chain, Heaney elaborates on the postmortem realm into which the dead are delivered, deepening its penumbra of mystery. âThe Door Was Open and the House Was Darkâ is dedicated to David Hammond, the Belfast musician and media impresario who was one of Heaneyâs oldest friends. As the poemâs speaker ventures into the now abandoned house of his dead friend, its silence nearly overwhelms him until he ac...