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‘No Such Thing as Innocent Bystanding’: Memory and Complicity in The Spirit Level and Beowulf

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Cultural Memory in Seamus Heaney’s Late Work

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Abstract

This chapter draws on recent work in memory studies which deals with the relationship between memory and complicity, examining how members of a community, even those who are not victims or perpetrators, can be been implicated in violence. The chapter addresses three different types of implication in The Spirit Level and in Heaney’s translation of Beowulf: the role of witnesses and spectators who are not empowered to change the outcome, the ways Heaney is implicated as a Northern Catholic and the responsibility of a writer. This analysis of The Spirit Level and Beowulf is informed by work on memory and complicity by Debarati Sanyal, Mark Sanders and Michael Rothberg.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Attributed to British Labour MP and Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Mo Mowlam.

  2. 2.

    Astrid Erll, ‘Travelling Memory,’ Parallax 17, no. 4 (2011): 9, doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2011.605570

  3. 3.

    Ibid., 8.

  4. 4.

    It would not be until 2010, in the ‘Route 110’ sequence of Human Chain , that Heaney would be able to write about the death of Mr. Lavery, asking ‘what in the end was there left to bury/Of Mr. Lavery, blown up in his own pub’ (ll. 98-9) and contrasting this with the honours accorded to the volunteers who are laid ‘in war graves with full honours’ and ‘fired over on anniversaries/By units drilled and spruce and unreconciled’ (ll. 106–8). Seamus Heaney, Human Chain (London: Faber & Faber, 2010).

  5. 5.

    Carson, ‘Escaped from the Massacre?’; Edna Longley, ‘North: “Inner Emigre” or “Artful Voyeur”?,’ in The Art of Seamus Heaney, ed. Tony Curtis (Bridgend: Seren Books, 1982; reprint, 1994).

  6. 6.

    Seamus Heaney, Beowulf (London: Faber & Faber, 1999), xxiii.

  7. 7.

    Debarati Sanyal, Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 2.

  8. 8.

    Ibid., 1.

  9. 9.

    Ibid., 9.

  10. 10.

    Michael Rothberg, ‘Trauma Theory, Implicated Subjects, and the Question of Israel/Palestine,’ (Paper presented at 2014 MLA convention, Chicago). https://profession.commons.mla.org/2014/05/02/trauma-theory-implicated-subjects-and-the-question-of-israelpalestine/

  11. 11.

    Ibid.

  12. 12.

    Rothberg, ‘Trauma Theory.’

  13. 13.

    Mark Sanders, Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002), Kindle edition, Introduction.

  14. 14.

    Ibid.

  15. 15.

    Ibid.

  16. 16.

    Ibid.

  17. 17.

    Ibid.

  18. 18.

    James Simmons, ‘The Trouble with Seamus,’ in Seamus Heaney: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Elmer Andrews (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992) 61.

  19. 19.

    Ibid., 62

  20. 20.

    Desmond Fennell, Whatever You Say, Say Nothing: Why Seamus Heaney Is No. 1 (Dublin: ELO Publications, 1991), 17.

  21. 21.

    Ibid., 21.

  22. 22.

    Ibid., 39.

  23. 23.

    Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (London: Faber & Faber, 2009), Kindle edition, 341.

  24. 24.

    Ibid., 111.

  25. 25.

    Lawrence Pollard, ‘Seamus Heaney, Poet,’ BBC World Service, Podcast Audio, 18 Jan, 2010, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p005rwnv

  26. 26.

    Seamus Heaney, ‘Cessation 1994,’ Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001 (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2002), 48.

  27. 27.

    Ibid., 49.

  28. 28.

    Ibid.

  29. 29.

    Ibid., 50.

  30. 30.

    Henri Cole, ‘Seamus Heaney: The Art of Poetry No. 75,’ The Paris Review, 144, https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1217/seamus-heaney-the-art-of-poetry-no-75-seamus-heaney. Accessed 20 January 2020.

  31. 31.

    Seamus Heaney, ‘Crediting Poetry.’ In Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996. London: Faber & Faber. Kindle edition.

  32. 32.

    Ibid.

  33. 33.

    Ibid.

  34. 34.

    Sanyal, Memory and Complicity, 17.

  35. 35.

    Seamus Heaney, ‘Nobel Lecture: Crediting Poetry.’

  36. 36.

    Sanders, Complicities, Introduction.

  37. 37.

    Cole, ‘Seamus Heaney: The Art of Poetry.’

  38. 38.

    Ibid.

  39. 39.

    Ibid.

  40. 40.

    Richard English, Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), Kindle Edition, chap. 7.

  41. 41.

    Eugene O’Brien, Seamus Heaney: Searches for Answers (London; Sterling: Pluto Press, 2003),

  42. 42.

    Jahan Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 52.

  43. 43.

    O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones, 257-8.

  44. 44.

    Ibid., 258.

  45. 45.

    The ‘Ugolino’ sequence, a translation from Dante’s Inferno, published in Field Work.

  46. 46.

    O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones, 258.

  47. 47.

    Cole, ‘Seamus Heaney: The Art of Poetry No. 75.’

  48. 48.

    O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones, 259.

  49. 49.

    Sanyal, Memory and Complicity, 13.

  50. 50.

    O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones, 351.

  51. 51.

    Ibid., 350.

  52. 52.

    Cole, ‘Seamus Heaney: The Art of Poetry’

  53. 53.

    Anne Devlin, ‘Seamus Heaney and the Mantle of Aeschylus: The Aftermath of the War,’ The Irish Review 49, no. 49-50 (2015): 185.

  54. 54.

    Ibid., 188.

  55. 55.

    Helen Vendler, ‘Seamus Heaney and The Oresteia: “Mycenae Lookout” and the Usefulness of Tradition,’ Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 143, no. 1 (1999): 118.

  56. 56.

    O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones, 466.

  57. 57.

    Edith Hall, Greek Tragedy: Suffering under the Sun (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), Ebrary version, 8.

  58. 58.

    Now known as ‘Windeby I.’ In 2006 Professor Heather Gill-Robinson used DNA testing to prove that the ‘Windeby Girl’ was a boy.

  59. 59.

    Edna Longley, ‘North: “Inner Émigré” or “Artful Voyeur”?,’ in The Art of Seamus Heaney, ed. Tony Curtis (Bridgend: Seren Books, 1982; reprint, 1994), 78.

  60. 60.

    Ciaran Carson, ‘Escaped from the Massacre?,’ The Honest Ulsterman 50 (1975), 185.

  61. 61.

    Ibid.

  62. 62.

    Helen Vendler, Seamus Heaney (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), Kindle edition, chap. 2.

  63. 63.

    Nell McCafferty, ‘Derry’s Soldier Dolls,’ in Vintage Nell: The McCafferty Reader, ed. Nell McCafferty and Elgy Gillespie (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2005), Kindle edition, 33.

  64. 64.

    One victim, Martha Doherty, had been engaged to a British soldier stationed in Derry since before the beginning of the troubles. Another had attended a dance run by British soldiers. Ibid.

  65. 65.

    McCafferty, ‘Derry’s Soldier Dolls.’

  66. 66.

    Sanders, Complicities, Introduction.

  67. 67.

    Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, ‘“Mycenae Lookout,” Seamus Heaney,’ Irish University Review 39, no. 2 (2009): 360.

  68. 68.

    Vendler, ‘Seamus Heaney and the Oresteia,’ 116.

  69. 69.

    Ibid., 120.

  70. 70.

    Lunday, ‘Violence and Silence in Seamus Heaney’s “Mycenae Lookout,”’ 118.

  71. 71.

    Ibid.

  72. 72.

    Sanyal, Memory and Complicity, 9.

  73. 73.

    Seamus Heaney, ‘From Feeling into Words,’ in Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001 (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2002), 25.

  74. 74.

    O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones, 352.

  75. 75.

    Seamus Heaney, ‘Further Language,’ Studies in the Literary Imagination 30, no. 2 (1997): 10, http://search.proquest.com.virtual.anu.edu.au/docview/198091420?accountid=8330

  76. 76.

    Seamus Heaney, ‘The Irish Poet and Britain,’ in Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001 (New York: Farrer, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 414.

  77. 77.

    Seamus Deane argues that Field Day’s analysis derives from the conviction that it is, above all, a colonial crisis. Seamus Deane, Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 6.

  78. 78.

    Joseph McGowan, ‘Heaney, Caedmon, Beowulf,’ New Hibernia Review 6, no. 2 (2002): 37, doi:https://doi.org/10.1353/nhr.2002.0035

  79. 79.

    Heaney, Beowulf, xxiii.

  80. 80.

    Ibid., xxiv.

  81. 81.

    Conor McCarthy, ‘Language and History in Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf,’ English 50, no. 197 (2001): 149, doi:https://doi.org/10.1093/english/50.197.149

  82. 82.

    Heaney, Beowulf, xxv.

  83. 83.

    Ibid., xxvii.

  84. 84.

    Eugene O′ Brien, ‘The Ethics of Translation: Seamus Heaney’s Cure at Troy and Beowulf’ in ‘Kicking Bishop Brennan Up the Arse’: Negotiating Texts and Contexts in Contemporary Irish Studies (Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang UK, 2009), 43.

  85. 85.

    Howell Chickering, ‘Beowulf and “Heaneywulf,”’ The Kenyon Review 24, no. 1 (2002), http://www.jstor.org/stable/4338314?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents; Nicholas Howe, ‘Scullionspeak – Beowulf: A New Verse Translation,’ The New Republic (2000); Thomas McGuire, ‘Violence and Vernacular in Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf,’ New Hibernia Review 10, no. 1 (2006): 82, doi:https://doi.org/10.1353/nhr.2006.0027

  86. 86.

    Howe, ‘Scullionspeak,’ 34.

  87. 87.

    McCarthy, ‘Language and History in Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf,’ 152.

  88. 88.

    Ibid.

  89. 89.

    Craig Williamson and Tom Shippey, The Middle Ages Series: Beowulf and Other Old English Poems (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), Ebrary edition, 70.

  90. 90.

    Michael Alexander, Beowulf (London and New York: Penguin, 2003), Proquest edition, 3.

  91. 91.

    J.R.R. Tolkein, Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, ed. Christopher Tolkein (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2014), 13.

  92. 92.

    McGuire, ‘Violence and Vernacular in Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf,’ 82.

  93. 93.

    Hugh Magennis, Germanic Legend and Old English Heroic Poetry (Blackwell Reference Online, 2010), Blackwell ebook.

  94. 94.

    Howe, ‘Scullionspeak,’ 34.

  95. 95.

    Heaney, Beowulf, xiii.

  96. 96.

    Ibid.

  97. 97.

    Seamus Heaney, ‘Feeling into Words,’ Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978 (New York: Faber & Faber, 1980), 44.

  98. 98.

    Sanyal, Memory and Complicity, 14.

  99. 99.

    Heaney, Beowulf, xxx.

  100. 100.

    Ibid.

  101. 101.

    O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones, 466.

  102. 102.

    Ibid., 235.

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    Joanne Piavanini

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Piavanini, J. (2020). ‘No Such Thing as Innocent Bystanding’: Memory and Complicity in The Spirit Level and Beowulf. In: Cultural Memory in Seamus Heaney’s Late Work . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46927-6_2

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