THE APOLLONIAN
A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies (Online, Open-Access, Peer-Reviewed)
Vol. 2, Issue 3 (December 2015) || ISSN 2393-9001
Chief Editor: Girindra Narayan Roy
Editors: Subashish Bhattacharjee & Saikat Guha
Research Article:
‚All these presences‛: Haunting Memory in
Post-Independence Irish Poetry
Madeleine Scherer
Find this and other research articles at: http://theapollonian.in/
The Apollonian 2.3 (December 2015) 125
‚All these presences‛: Haunting Memory In
Post-Independence Irish Poetry
Madeleine Scherer
University of Warwick, UK
Michael Longley is a 20th century Northern Irish poet known in particular for writing
about both his personal life and the Troubles through using classical and
mythological allusions. Longley's poetry has suffered in part from comparison with
Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon, two much more overtly political poets to emerge
from the North of Ireland in the 1960s. Compared with theirs, Longley's work has
been less widely and enthusiastically recognised. To offer a few instances, Longley is
not included in either Terence Brown and Nicholas Grene's Tradition and Influence in
Anglo-Irish Poetry (1989) or Richard Kearney's Transitions: Narratives in Modern Irish
Culture (1988), and is only briefly mentioned in Robert F. Garratt's Modern Irish
Poetry: Tradition and Continuity from Yeats to Heaney (1989) and Dillon Johnston's Irish
Poetry after Joyce (1997).
Longley was taught Latin and Greek from an early age (McSweeney 135),
which goes some way to explaining the proficiency of his later translations of
classical source-materials. Longley went on to study Classics at university and
revealed an enduring interest in classical literature, especially the Odyssey, in his first
volume of poetry entitled No Continuing City (1969). Occasional classical references
are present in Longley's next three volumes, but the description of Longley as a
classicist has seemed particularly appropriate in the last two decades, as Gorse Fires
(1991) and The Ghost Orchid (1995) demonstrated an extended engagement with such
classical texts as the Iliad, the Odyssey, and Ovid's Metamorphoses (Broom 94).
Longley's engagement with the Underworld and its spirits has been long-sustained.
The Apollonian 2.3 (December 2015) 126
Perhaps the most famous example for Longley's reception of both the classics and its
ghosts is his poem ‚Anticleia‛. As it constitutes one of Longley's most famous and
most important pieces of classical reception, it will be quoted in full:
If at a rock where the resonant rivers meet, Acheron,
Pyriphlegethon, Cocytus, tributary of the Styx, you dig
A pit, about a cubit each way, from knuckles to elbow,
And sacrifice a ram and a black ewe, bending their heads
Towards the outer darkness, while you face the water,
And so many souls of the anaemic dead come crowding in
That you hold them back with your bayonet from the blood
Only to recognise among the zombies your own mother,
And if, having given her blood to drink and talked about home,
You lunge forward three times to hug her and three times
Like a shadow or idea she vanishes through your arms
And you ask her why she keeps avoiding your touch and weep
Because here is your mother and even here in Hades
You could comfort each other in a shuddering embrace,
Will she explain that the sinews no longer bind her flesh
And bones, that the irresistible fire has demolished these,
That the soul takes flight like a dream and flutters in the sky,
that this is what happens to human beings when they die? (Longley 183)
The poem describes Odysseus' encounter with his dead mother, Anticleia, which
takes place in Odyssey XI. Therein, he conducts a νεκυομαντεία, a consultation of
ghosts at the Entrance to Hades, not to be confused with a physical journey into the
Realm of the Dead. The Journey to Hades is prescribed for Odysseus by Circe who
explains that before he can leave her island for his native Ithaca he must first journey
to Hades to consult the soul of Teiresias (Odyssey 10.490-492). In order for him to
achieve this, Circe provides Odysseus with instructions on how to summon the
blind seer's ghost, some of which Longley echoes directly in his poem. The poem
copies that Odysseus digs a βόθρος, a pit, where he makes appropriate animal
sacrifices to the dead. Similarly, the descriptions of the dead are the same as in the
ancient sources; lured in by the blood, the phantoms appear, unable to think or
speak unless they are first given a taste of blood.
Another similarity lies in Odysseus's focus on Anticleia herself. Although in
the original Odyssey, Odysseus's is main task is to consult Teiresias, the abrupt
transition from Teiresias to Anticleia's ghost shows Odysseus' eagerness to talk to his
The Apollonian 2.3 (December 2015) 127
mother (Clark 45). Despite three attempts to embrace his mother's ghost, Odysseus is
unable to do so, a literal empty gesture that signifies the recognition of her nonexistence in the empirical world. The discrepancy between visual appearance and
tactile reality is made explicit between the visible eidolon and the reality that his
mother is permanently lost to him (Rutter and Sparks 151). Longley copies this scene
exactly, down to even the number of attempted embraces, whereby the detail he
transfers into his poem from the ancient source outline his familiarity with this scene
and its effects.
Longley's description of the landscape, however, takes the significance of his
reception into an Irish context. Like the original Odysseus, Longley's Odysseusfigure can only talk to his mother's ghost at a very specifically described spot in the
landscape, which implies that his memory of her is tied to the landscape itself.
Longley's poem, however, sets this landscape into an Irish modernity through
mentions of a ‚bayonet‛ and the modern term ‚zombies‛. A modern version of a
physical place to summon the dead's presences qualifies it as a memorial, which
have, especially during the Troubles, have been increasingly present in the Irish
landscape (McDowell and Braniff 56; Viggiani 39). While the poem is mostly
concerned with the possibility of engaging with the dead, the focus on place through
the intricate descriptions of the landscape imply that Longley was also interested in
the potential of place for commemoration in the context of the Irish debates around
memorials1.
Further along the lines of his own interest in commemoration, there is strong
evidence that Longley uses the tragedy of the ancient material in part to engage with
the loss of his own mother, Constance Longley, through mythic structures, as he has
done with the loss of his nurse through ‚Eurycleia‛ and of his father through
‚Laertes‛. Longley himself, however, calls ‚Anticleia‛ a ‚more difficult poem than
'Laertes'‛(Quoted in Brearton 172). The most obvious difficulty is already visible in
the poem's structure: it is an 18-line poem, poised by a single conditional sentence
which also functions as a question. This leaves the poem infinitely suspended, as
Anticleia herself repeatedly evades both the grasp of Odysseus and the reader.
Similarly, the whole poem depends on the 'If' with which it begins; but the line's
length and sustained sentence encourage a forgetfulness in the process of reading
itself. This, of course, reflects the forgetting which takes place in Hades, affecting
most shades to the point where they do no longer remember their earthly existences.
However, Brearton rightfully notes that although its grammatical permutations give
the illusion of vanishing, the poem itself is also a vessel which contains that loss
The Apollonian 2.3 (December 2015) 128
(Brearton 173). Longley here, then, constructs a complicated interrelation between
forges of remembrance and forgetting, framing the encounter between son and
mother, present and past.
Longley's use of the conditional form in "Anticleia", together with the rhyme
in the last two lines in an otherwise unrhymed poem therein enforce a sense of his
personal emotions being woven into Homer's story, as Longley, like Odysseus,
attempts to cope with the loss of a parent. The personal dimension of the poem
becomes especially clear when the limp of Longley's own mother is reflected in the
poem's ending (Broom 105). The memory of her handicap is then starkly contrasted
with the Platonic representation of the mother leaving the physical constraints of
one's body behind for a purely spiritual existence, evidently happier than the earthly
one, allowing her soul to ‚flutter‛ through the sky. However, I would argue that
Longley's poem both contextually and structurally questions whether this is really
what will happen after death.
In fact, going beyond the purely autobiographical significance, this poem
deals more broadly with the question of how elegy can allow for authentic
memorialisation. This makes the Odyssey fitting source-material for Longley's
concerns, since it largely explores how the past is remembered in the present.
Odysseus' memories of his family motivate his desire to return home, and this
orientation persists even after his arrival in Ithaca (Seider 15). In ‚Anticleia‛ Longley
paints a similar scene to Eavan Boland's ‚The Journey‛ in which a group of nameless
and mute women in the Underworld ultimately find their stories and selves
memorialised through a voiceless communal experience retained within memory
rather than a written body of history. However, this poem's structural and
contextual elusiveness paints a more pessimistic picture, even more so than the
original Odyssey. In the Homeric epic, Odysseus is able to communicate with his
mother, whereas here his question itself is only indirectly posed in a conditional
sentence and the reader waits in vain for a response from the dead. While in
Underworld of the Odyssey the dead are omnipresent and the living are constantly
reminded of both their existence and their messages2, here their presence is as
evasive as the poem's structure itself. Similarly, while the theme of recognition, in
Aristotle's term anagnorisis, is central to the Odyssey, the elusiveness of Longley's
poem makes it impossible to truly know anything about his mother.
While
Longley's early work, especially No Continuing City was about recognising ‚This
new dimension, my last girl‛, thereby traversing the ‚no man's land between one
The Apollonian 2.3 (December 2015) 129
human being and another‛ (Brearton 170), this poem makes it clear that the past is
not resurrectable and the Hades is a no man's land which is truly impassable.
The inability of Odysseus to embrace his mother is thus used as the final
symbol for the elusiveness of not only Anticleia's ghost but of the access to the past
she represents. The poem's broader concerns with representing the past are made
clear when the child and mother of this poem resurface, for instance in Longley's
holocaust poem ‚Ghetto‛ (Brearton 174). The question of what happens to human
beings after they die is, in fact, echoed throughout this entire volume of poetry, as
well as the question of how to engage with and memorialise the dead if we do not
and cannot know anything about them. In Haunted Subjects Davis recognises that
more terrifying than the return of ghosts may be the prospect that there is nothing to
return, no survival, no resurrection, and no commanding voice from beyond the
grave; as Žižek puts it, ‚it is not sufficient to say that we fear the spectre- the spectre
itself already emerges out of a fear, out of our escape from something even more
horrifying: freedom‛ (91). Death is an interruption of the production of meaning; it
curtails our dialogue with the deceased as it removes their ability to speak to us.
Along similar lines, both in Spectres of Marx and The Work of Mourning, its
unofficial sequel, Derrida's spectres are as silent as Longley's Anticleia. In The Work
of Mourning, for instance, Derrida places himself amidst his own ghosts, a growing
throng of dead colleagues and friends. He addresses them, quotes and calls on them
to maintain a dialogue, knowing that they cannot. He seems to suggest that speaking
to the dead, like speaking to the living, entails adopting a secret language to which
others, and perhaps even the speakers themselves, do not have full access.
Throughout The Work of Mourning, the issue of what there is to be said about the
deceased is always bound up with the problem of enunciation: who is speaking to
whom, and how can one speak of the singular other in a public discourse? Finally,
the dead are killed again as the text ceaselessly rehearses its desire and its inability to
make them speak, to draw them into a successful exchange (111-138).
We can read ‚Anticleia‛ through Žižek and Derrida's conceptions of the silent
spectre. The Odysseus-figure is unable to touch her essence or to discover the secret
language through which to talk to her. Like Longley seems to be indicating
especially through the poem's elusive structure, for him it is impossible to represent
the past accurately through poetic language, he can only hint at it through silence
and elusiveness. Through this inability of representing Anticleia, he ultimately kills
Odysseus's and his own mother again.
The Apollonian 2.3 (December 2015) 130
While in ‚Anticleia‛ Longley focuses largely on the autobiographical to deal
with questions of how to commemorate the dead, ‚The Butchers‛ is more overtly
political. It again receives part of the Odyssey, more specifically the events of
Odysseus' return to Ithaca when he slaughters Penelope's suitors and the disloyal
housemaids (Longley 194). The historical context of this poem is manifold. Its title is
evocative of the Shankill Butchers, the loyalist gang who tortured and murdered
many Catholics through the 1970s and 1980s. The close of the poem, which brings
the souls of the suitors ‚to a bog-meadow full of bog-asphodels‛, hibernicises the
myth3, a tactic which brings to mind Northern Ireland's many revenge killings, the
competition for territory in Ireland more generally, and the concomitant urges to
‚cleanse‛ certain areas of certain people (Brearton 176).
Longley focuses on the afterlife awaiting the dead suitors and housemaids in
some detail, depicting Hades as the place ‚where the residents are ghosts or images
of the dead.‛ The dead, in other words, are constructed as only images of their living
selves. Comparing this to an ancient Greek context, the image, the εἴδωλόν of
another is always described as inferior to the original. For instance in Euripides'
Helen, Helen's εἴδωλόν is dissolved upon direct confrontation with her. Similarly, in
Plato's philosophy, an image takes one further from one's ultimate goal, the original
form. Images thus convey connotations of imperfection and inferiority. Hufstader
argues that through condemning the men after their deaths to become ‚images of the
dead‛, Longley posthumously wreaks revenge on them, as the Odysseus-figure had
done more literally within the poem itself (Hufstader 104). However, I would
expand on this argument further and suggest that Longley's depiction of the dead as
images of themselves implies a conviction that a linguistic way of memorising both
the victims and perpetrators of violence is bound to fail and will reduce them to
mere shadows.
Through terming all the dead ‚images‛ Longley seems to reflect on issues in
modern philosophy surrounding ideas about images in which it has become
increasingly difficult to distinguish between the real and what Jean Baudrillard
refers to as simulacrum. Baudrillard calls simulation ‚the generation by models of a
real without origins or reality: a hyperreal‛ (Simulations 2). In the realm of the
hyperreal, the distinction between simulation and the ‚real‛ implodes; the ‚real‛
and the imaginary continually collapse into each other. The result is that reality and
simulation are experienced as without difference, allowing simulations to be
experienced as more real than the real itself (Baudrillard Amérique 208 ff.; Baudrillard
Symbolic Exchange and Death 50-60; Storey 152). One of the effects of this instability
The Apollonian 2.3 (December 2015) 131
between the real and the image is an attempt to compensate for this loss through
nostalgia; Ward suggests that:
When the real is no longer what it used to be nostalgia assumes its full
mewling. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of
second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity. (70)
History is thus used to provide comfort for present anxiety, even though this most
likely involves turning the past into an unstable simulacrum. It is exactly this
practice which Longley uses his poetry to criticise. On the one hand, the existence of
a poem engaging with so many political conflicts seems to indicate that the author
believes that dealing with these events is important. However, on the other hand,
Longley makes it clear that he sees no possibility of befittingly memorialising the
dead without reducing them to less than they were.
I now contrast Longley's use of the underworld with a selective but hopefully
representative portion of Seamus Heaney's poetry. Heaney, who hardly needs a
general introduction, has been fascinated with the underworld and descent
narratives for a large part of his career. He claims to have a personal relationship
with particularly Virgil's Aeneid VI: First exposed to it as a boy in primary school, he
describes how ‚*a+ll through my life, then, I thought, 'Book Six.' And of course it’s
irresistible, once you read it‛ (Hass and Heaney 319). For Heaney Book VI and
especially the communication with its ghosts will be shown to centre around
maintaining relationships with the dead. Heaney himself describes the classical
κατάβασις as a vehicle to ‚go down to the underground to see *my father+.‛ (Van
Dyk 12)
I start with a discussion of ‚Personal Helicon‛. Written as a homage to
Michael Longley, the poem adopts many themes common to Longley; classical
reception, the intersection of Irish and the classical landscapes and the establishment
of a relationship with poetic memory. The poem describes the myth of Narcissus
which dramatises the outcome of self-reflection, as Narcissus sees his own mirrorimage in the river Helikon, falls in love with it and finally drowns himself as he
cannot stand to be separated from it. In this poem Heaney intersects the landscape of
his childhood with elements of the classical myth: The wells of Heaney's childhood
in Mossbawn become the springs of the Muses' mountain of Helikon, which were
sources of inspiration for anyone who drank there.
A similar image of inspiration set into the childhood world is one of
circularity and reflexivity: the wells of Mossbawn ‚had echoes, gave back your own
call/ With a clean new music in it‛ (Heaney OG 15), where the echo returns one's call
The Apollonian 2.3 (December 2015) 132
but also transforms it into something different (Corcoran 11). The darkness leading
into the earth is once more filled with memory, classical characters and tales whose
contexts transmute whatever the poet rhymes when it returns to him as an echo. In
the poem, the word ‚Darkness‛ (Heaney OG 15) once more alludes to the well
leading into an underworld-like space, filled with memory hidden within the bowels
of the earth, confined there unlike openly accessible history, since it is inaccessible as
a whole from the world of the living. Only fragments of memory are able to come to
the surface, in echoes and calls rather then full-fledged histories, which the newlyformed poet can then use to find his own voice. The poem seems to promote a
relationship to one's literary ancestors, as Heaney compares himself to Narcissus
who visited the sacred mountain Helicon in Greece, where poetic inspiration was
said to flow from the Fount of Hippocrene (Pratt 262-3). Heaney, unlike Narcissus,
derives inspiration rather than self-destruction from the reflectiveness of the water.
Thereby, the water's nourishment is portrayed as worth pursuing especially for
young poets, despite the risks of losing one's own voice by literally drowning in
tradition.
In "The Sense of Place" (1977), Heaney underlines the importance of place for
this access to poetic traditions and inspirations, claiming that the "nourishment
which springs from knowing and belonging to a certain place [...] is of special
interest in Ireland "because of the peculiar fractures in our history, north and south,
and because of the way that possession of the land and possession of different
languages have rendered the question particularly urgent.‛ (Heaney ‚Sense of
Place‛ in Preoccupations 136) The way Heaney places memory directly into a watery
landscape, accessible through entering certain spaces leading underground
conceptualises memory as associative, whereby locations serve as triggers for the
release of ancient memories. Here, these memories are portrayed as accessible and,
more importantly, audible, directly contrasting Longley's representation of the
silence of the dead in ‚Anticleia‛. The importance he sees in memory as a way to
restore the ‚fractures in our history‛ can be seen as a first indication towards his
motivation of portraying memory in this way.
Heaney's engagement with the underworld remains steady and sustained,
until in a much later poem, ‚The Riverbank Field‛ he rewrites a section from the
Aeneid, taking place after Aeneas fails three times to embrace the shade of his father
Anchisis in Book VI. Hereby, he chooses not to focus on the sense of inherent
distance between the living and the dead, as Longley had in ‚Anticleia‛. Instead, the
poem focuses on the ensuing conversation between Aeneas and his father, in which
The Apollonian 2.3 (December 2015) 133
Aeneas sees a group of spirits crowding around a river and asks Anchises why they
gather there. Anchises answers that they are souls ‚to whom second bodies are
owed by fate.‛(Aeneid 6.713-14, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough) However, in his poem
Heaney only hints at the rebirth of the spirits, choosing instead to focus mainly on
the loss of the shades' memories as they had to drink from the river Lethe
[s]o that memories of this underworld are shed
And soul is longing to dwell in flesh and blood
Under the dome of the sky. (Heaney Human Chain 47)
Through emphasising the longing of the souls of the dead to be reborn after,
or perhaps as Anchisis implies in Aeneid VI because, their memories have been
‚shed‛, Heaney closes the poem by hinting at a possible union of the living and the
dead, where they are connected in a common wheel of death and rebirth. He
presents a more optimistic fate for the memories of the dead than Virgil in the
original, however. While in the Aeneid, the memories of the dead are irretrievably
lost, here they are merely ‚shed‛, removed from the dead themselves but still
present, perhaps still retrievable.
This optimistic sentiment is emphasised by the fact that he chooses to focus
on the successful communication between father and son instead of their
unsuccessful attempt to embrace. This communication then allows the son acquires
more knowledge about both his past and his future. Van Dyk, one of the few to write
on his piece, echoes this sentiment, noting that it is as though Heaney does not want
Aeneas’ inability to connect with his father to cloud the message of the remainder of
his connecting with the past - so Heaney opts to begin after that moment of missed
connection in Virgil (20). Heaney’s catabasis creates a sense of optimism by ending in
the wheel's phase of rebirth which is unusual in contemporary poetry about the
underworld. The poem ending in an image of birth furthermore emphasises its
overarching function of enabling a communication with the past and giving it a
voice in the present.
In conclusion, we have seen how Longley's elegiac relationship with the dead
is shaped by feelings of loss and incomprehension; for him a successful κατάβασις
in relations to the acquisition of knowledge is not possible. The dead cannot
communicate their stories or plight to the living, and thus for him, Anticleia always
remains silent, elusive and, ultimately, a hollow simulacrum. Heaney, on the other
hand, can throughout his entire poetic opus but particularly towards its end be seen
to reject the somewhat prevalent attitude in postmodernism to construct κατάβασις
as ambiguous or even ultimately pointless, in favour of a more optimistic reunion
The Apollonian 2.3 (December 2015) 134
between the living and the dead. Via a mythical mnemonic archive located within an
underworld which is often placed within the Irish landscape itself, Heaney sees the
possibilities of accessing traditions which bestow upon him the foundation of his
poetic voice and which grant him access to cultural wisdom and knowledge which is
inaccessible otherwise.
The reasons for such vastly differing attitudes towards the underworld, and
therein the representation and accessibility of memory, can be much speculated on.
Taking an autobiographical route, it is possible that while Longley's more personal
experiences of the Troubles, having continually resided in Northern Ireland, led him
to experience the violence in Ireland more directly. This could have created a more
fragmented experience of both reality and the construction of history, which he later
struggled to re-assemble. On the other hand, Heaney's comparative distance from
events could have enabled him to take a more optimistic view on the potential of
memory and history and their ability to bestow knowledge and wisdom on later
generations.
However, purely autobiographical speculations are of course only a startingpoint for such complex cases. Their differences are more productively found in
philosophical disagreement: While both are clearly somewhat preoccupied with
Nietzsche's notion of the ‚eternal return‛, Heaney seems more inclined to take a
Deleuzian stance on this repetition and endless recurrence, seeing it as a guarantee
of opportunity and of difference, wherein the only hope for mankind is a
revolutionary becoming (Deleuze 171). The concept of a radically different temporal
scheme, one that allows for traffic or even synthesis between past and present, living
and dead, is particular to Ireland, where it predates the modern revivalist period by
well over one thousand years (Fionn
20). However, the desire to enter
into direct dialogue with the dead is still witnessed in the necromancy and various
spiritualist proclivities of Yeats and other figures associated with the Celtic Twilight.
Both Heaney and Longley were writing at a time when the influence of the
revivalism of the Celtic Twilight was particularly prominent. At the core of this
revivalism lay the attempt to reconnect with the lost legacy of previous generations
and to create an intergenerational synthesis or continuity where this has been
disrupted. It is likely that the prominence of revivalism led to Heaney and Longley
to comment on whether and how one could in such a revivalism forego the naturally
observed boundaries of time, and specifically the impossibility of truly learning from
dead generations. In an Ireland whose history was fragmented by the legacies of
colonialism, the Troubles and a mythologised revival of folklore, memory showed
The Apollonian 2.3 (December 2015) 135
itself to the two poets as an important factor to consider within the rewriting or
reassessment of Irish history, whether this engagement was optimistic or pessimistic.
Ultimately, this comparison and contrast has enabled me to demonstrate an
example for the various attitudes towards memory which have been expressed
through the use of descent literature, particularly in Irish post-independence. This
will hopefully encourage further engagements with descent literature and its variety
of uses, as well as further exploration of its connection with post-independence
nations.
ENDNOTES:
1.
For further reading on debates around Ireland and Memorials, see: King ‚Material Religion‛ 132;
Frawley and O'Callaghan ‚Memory Ireland‛; McBride ‚History and Memory‛ 230-231; Lawther
‚Victims‛ 49
2.
For instance, Circe repeats Teiresias' prophecy to Odysseus after he returns to her island. This
has led some critics to question the authenticity of the Teiresias-encounter, arguing that it was
added to the Odyssey at a later point than its original conception. In his ‚Beiträge zur Nekyia‛,
Van der Valk discusses both introduces both the foundations for such doubts and convincingly
refutes them through his discussions of particularly the two Nekyiai.
3. ‚bog meadow‛ evokes the west of Ireland, but ‚Bog Meadows‛ is also the name for an area in
West Belfast
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AUTHOR INFORMATION:
Madeleine Scherer is doctoral researcher and seminar tutor at the University of
Warwick. Her articles appeared in such journals as degenere, Warwick Exchanges
and Durham PG Journal. Her areas of interest include classical reception, memory
studies, postcolonial Literature and hauntology.