The Treachery Of Wetness

Irish Studies, Seamus Heaney and the politics of parturition1

Bibliographic Data

ID8089570
AuthorsMoynagh Sullivan (0000-0002-1702-9024, corresponding author)
Year2005
Volume13
Issue4
Pages451-468
Publication date2005-10-06
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueIrish Studies Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0967-0882 • E-ISSN: 1469-9303
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/09670880500304527
OpenAlexW1569440557
LanguageEN
Citations received6
References cited16

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Many thanks to Selina Guinness, Gerardine Meaney and Clíona Ó Gallchoir for their careful reading of this article and for their many insights. 2. CitationKiberd, Irish Classics, 620. 3. CitationConnolly, ‘Theorising Ireland’, 301. 4. CitationGraham, Deconstructing Ireland, x. 5. See CitationConrad, ‘Fetal Ireland’, 153–74, for a persuasive argument regarding the expression and assertion of Irish nationalism and the management of female reproduction in the Irish Republic and in Northern Ireland. 6. CitationKelleher, ‘The Field Day Anthology and Irish Women's Literary Studies’, 84. 7. Elizabeth Butler Cullingford's essay on Seamus Heaney is a notable exception to this, and brings together questions of nation and gender in the same space. See CitationButler Cullingford, ‘Seamus and Sinead’, 43–62. See also CitationButler Cullingford, Ireland's Others. 8. CitationHeaney, ‘Exposure’, 143–44. 9. CitationHeaney, ‘Exposure’, 143–44. 10. Vendler, ‘Echo Soundings’, 173. 11. Brown, ‘A Northern Voice’, 25–39. 12. The one essay that deals with the abundance of feminine imagery positively, CitationGreen's ‘The Feminine Principle in Seamus Heaney's Poetry’, 143–53, treats the feminine principle as an unpoliticised archetype, and resists unpacking the gendering of body and voice in such mythopoeia. 13. Parini, ‘The Ground Possessed’, 97. 14. Parini, ‘The Ground Possessed’, 111. 15. CitationMaxwell, ‘Heaney's Poetic Landscape’, 19. 16. Brown, ‘A Northern Voice’, 26. 17. Bloom, ‘Introduction’, 9–10. 18. Brown, ‘A Northern Voice’, 27. 19. Bloom, ‘Introduction’, 2. 20. Bloom, ‘Introduction’, 4. 21. CitationHeaney, Preoccupations, 47. 22. Bloom, A Map of Misreading, 16. 23. CitationHeaney, North, 43. 24. In his acceptance speech for the Man Booker Prize 2003, the author D. B. C. Pierre compared himself to the alpha ‘sperm’ that has beaten all the other sperms in the race to the egg. This speech seemed odd and sat awkwardly with the audience, but taken in the context of the metaphors of creative conversion that dominate literary theory it was indeed perfectly fitting. 25. Bloom, A Map of Misreading, 10. 26. See chapter 21, ‘Fathers and Sons’, 380–95, in CitationDeclan Kiberd's Inventing Ireland for a detailed analysis of self-fathering in the modern nation. 27. CitationIrigaray, The Irigaray Reader, 39. 28. CitationIrigaray, The Irigaray Reader, 39. 29. CitationIrigaray, The Irigaray Reader, 39. 30. For instance, William Bedford writes that ‘the language [is] almost physically struggling to assert a mastery of form and metaphor over experience’. CitationBedford, ‘To Set the Darkness Echoing’, 11. 31. Parini, ‘The Ground Possessed’, 109. 32. Coughlan, ‘Bog Queens’, 105. 33. Coughlan, ‘Bog Queens’, 90. 34. CitationBloom, ‘Editors Note’, in CitationBloom, Modern Critical Views, viii. 35. Parini, ‘The Ground Possessed’, 119. 36. Parini, ‘The Ground Possessed’, 103. 37. CitationBloom, ‘Introduction’, 2. 38. CitationBloom, ‘Introduction’, 2. 39. CitationHeaney, The Place of Writing, 23. 40. Heaney, The Place of Writing, 30. 41. Heaney, The Place of Writing, 24. 42. Heaney, The Place of Writing, 47. 43. Heaney, The Place of Writing, 24. 44. Heaney, The Place of Writing, 29. 45. Heaney, The Place of Writing, 36. 46. Heaney, The Place of Writing, 29. 47. CitationButler Cullingford, ‘The Unknown Thought of W. B. Yeats’, 228. 48. W. B. Yeats as quoted in CitationHeaney, Preoccupations, 74. 49. Heaney, Preoccupations, 75. 50. W. B. Yeats as quoted in Heaney, Preoccupations, 75. 51. Irigaray, Reader, 41–42. 52. Brown, ‘A Northern Voice’, 4. 53. CitationBloom, A Map of Misreading, 10. 54. Christopher Bollas describes ‘the Sophoclean tragic vision’ as a ‘violent action that breaks things up, followed then by reflection, seeing and sizing up what's occurred. This Sophoclean vision, cast in Oedipal terms, is of devastation, and involves the realisation of the unwitting dimensions of the devastation.’ Christopher Bollas in interview with CitationAnthony Molino, Freely Associated, 13. 55. CitationLloyd, Anomalous States, 69–70. 56. Padraic Pearse's ‘Mise Eire’ and ‘Mathair na Piarsaigh’ explicitly express this desire to ‘mother’ the nation. My thanks to Gerardine Meaney for alerting me to Ruth Dudley Edwards' relaying of Pearse's transvestism. 57. Bedford, ‘Darkness Echoing’, 16. 58. Garber, ‘Cross-dressing, Gender and Representation’, 165. 59. Cited in Marjorie Garber, ‘Cross-dressing’, 167. 60. CitationHeaney, The Place of Writing, 51. 61. Garber, ‘Cross-dressing’, 172. 62. Brown, ‘A Northern Voice’, 33. 63. CitationHeaney, Opened Ground, 143–44. 64. Garber, ‘Cross-dressing’, 172. 65. Coughlan, ‘Bog Queens’, 91. 66. Coughlan, ‘Bog Queens’, 91. 67. Moreover, various psychoanalytical accounts of creative experiences and processes suggest that some sort of experiential return to the womb forms an important part of creativity. The problem is not with this semiotic understanding of creativity but rather with how such experience is cut off from physical source, made mystical and dehistoricised, which means that women have to be de-authenticated as creative subjects, and their work kept out of the historical body of creative works. See, for example, CitationEhrenzweig, The Psychoanalysis of Artistic Vision and Hearing; CitationBollas, Being a Character; and CitationBollas, Cracking Up. See also CitationCoquillant, ‘A Male Poetics’, 223–38, for a detailed discussion of the way in which Rousseau's deployment of self-birthing practice and its powerful cultural legacy discriminates against women as cultural creators. 68. CitationKristeva, ‘A New Type of Intellectual’, 296. 69. Helen Vendler writes that ‘these poems [‘Sweeney Redivivus’ from Station Island] form a dry and almost peremptory autobiography, stunningly different from the warm-fleshed account given in Heaney's early books’. CitationVendler, ‘Echo Soundings’, 176. 70. Helen Vendler writes that ‘these poems [‘Sweeney Redivivus’ from Station Island] form a dry and almost peremptory autobiography, stunningly different from the warm-fleshed account given in Heaney's early books’. Vendler, ‘Echo Soundings’, 173. 71. Helen Vendler writes that ‘these poems [‘Sweeney Redivivus’ from Station Island] form a dry and almost peremptory autobiography, stunningly different from the warm-fleshed account given in Heaney's early books’. Vendler, ‘Echo Soundings’, 171. 72. Bedford, ‘Darkness Echoing’, 16. 73. CitationParini, ‘The Ground Possessed’, 101. 74. Parini, ‘The Ground Possessed’, 103. 75. Bedford, ‘Darkness Echoing’, 16. 76. Bedford, ‘Darkness Echoing’, 12. 77. Brown, ‘A Northern Voice’, 37. 78. Brown, ‘A Northern Voice’, 37. 79. The ‘act’ is successful for it meets the requirements of artistic creation set out by Rousseau, when ‘one part of him [the creative artist] impregnates the other and the result is a work of art’. Coquillant, ‘A Male Poetics’, 236. 80. Parini, ‘The Ground Possessed’, 106. 81. CitationCoughlan, ‘Bog Queens’, 100. 82. CitationFrazier, ‘Anger and Nostalgia’, 19. 83. CitationHeaney, ‘Anahorish’, 21. 84. CitationHeaney, ‘Personal Helicon’, 9. 85. Bedford, ‘Darkness Echoing’, 16. 86. Irigaray's description of the unthought corresponds to Christopher Bollas's description of ‘the unthought known’, that which he also calls the ‘maternal aesthetic’, in which ‘the knowledge derived from the dialectic of the infant's true self and the subtle syllogism of maternal and paternal presence and care constitutes part of what will later be known but not thought’. CitationBollas, The Shadow of the Object, 52. 87. See CitationKristeva, Powers of Horror, for a discussion of the abjection of the female body as a liminal space. 88. The sensory presence of the pre-Oedipal father, whom Bollas calls the ‘textural father’, is also lost to representation. Bollas, The Shadow of the Object, 52. 89. CitationGodwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 109. My thanks to Clíona Ó Gallchoir and Graham Allen for bringing this to my attention. 90. Irigaray, Reader, 41. 91. Irigaray, Reader, 40. 92. CitationBrown, ‘A Northern Voice’, 27–28. 93. CitationGarber, ‘Cross-dressing’, 166. 94. Brown, ‘A Northern Voice’, 34. 95. Brown, ‘A Northern Voice’, 35. 96. Brown, ‘A Northern Voice’, 33. 97. CitationDurant, Ezra Pound, Identity in Crisis, 23. 98. Ezra Pound wrote the following poem to describe the appearance of The Waste Land and it very specifically situates Eliot as the mother of the poem that Pound himself delivers, making Eliot the mother of poetic high modernism, and Pound his midwife: 99. Irigaray, Reader, 41. 100. Brown, ‘A Northern Voice’, 26. 101. Bloom, ‘Introduction’, 9–10. 102. Irigaray, Reader, 40. These are the poems of Eliot By the Uranian Muse begot; A Man their Mother was, A Muse their Sire. How did the printed Infancies result From Nuptials thus doubly Difficult? If you must needs enquire Know Diligent reader That on each Occasion Ezra performed the Caesarean Operation ... Pound quoted in CitationDocherty, After Theory, 162. 103. Irigaray, Reader, 41. 104. Bloom, ‘Introduction’, 9. 105. CitationWhitford, Luce Irigaray, 81. 106. CitationWhitford, Luce Irigaray, 81. 107. Heaney, ‘Act of Union’, in North, 43–44. 108. Heaney, ‘Act of Union’, in North, 44. 109. CitationMeaney, ‘Landscapes of Desire’, 238–51

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