Seamus Heaney’s five towers of Irish identity

As the 1916 commemorations progress, issues of who should, or should not, be commemorated have become quite a topic of debate. Should we commemorate the 1916 rebels, the dead citizens and civilian casualties, the Irishmen who were in the British army or the RIC? At a deeper level, issues of identity are at the core of this debate.

Who are the "real" Irish who deserve commemoration; what is the truth of Irish identity? To answer this question, perhaps what is needed is a more ethically open definition of identity and, to this end, it is worth considering some of the ideas of Seamus Heaney.

Heaney is universally known as a Nobel Prize-winning poet, but he has also published a significant number of essays, lectures and chapters on issues of aesthetics, ethics and culture. His approach could be termed “poetic thinking”, as he attempts to access areas of knowledge and truth that are often occluded in the discourse of politics and the media.

In an interview with Denis O’Driscoll, Heaney is asked the telling question: “what has poetry taught you?” and he answers that it has taught him that: “there’s such a thing as truth and it can be told – slant”. This term is borrowed from Emily Dickinson, and in Heaney’s thinking, access to truth needs to be oblique, as full understanding is very often beyond our capability, given that we are situated within language, thought and culture, and a transcendent position is all but impossible to achieve, unless we opt for oversimplification of issues.

I would describe him as a poetic or aesthetic thinker, and as someone who was all too aware of the dangers of reducing complicated issues to simplistic slogans. For Heaney, poetry was the discourse par excellence of a type of knowledge that was always attuned to the complications and contradictions of human endeavour. In The Redress of Poetry, Heaney contends that poetry has to be “a working model of inclusive consciousness. It should not simplify”, and in his thinking on Irish identity, his model of inclusive consciousness was given a clearly defined shape.

Heaney’s The Redress of Poetry develops a visual image of this complicated poetic truth of Irish identity in his diagrammatic structure called the “quincunx”. It is a “diamond shape”, a structure of five towers, with one in the centre, and the other four forming a diamond shape. Heaney equates these towers with different incarnations of Irishness. The central one represents the native Irish tradition, the round tower of pre-invasion, insular dwelling. Around this, he imagines a diamond with towers in the north, south, east and west. These stand for Louis MacNeice’s Carrickfergus Castle in the north, representing the Protestant tradition; Edmund Spenser’s colonising presence in Cork in the south, representing the colonising English tradition; Yeats’s magical and mythical tower in the west, representing the Celtic revival tradition and Joyce’s Martello tower in the Dublin, representing a modernist approach to Irishness. Each represents a different type of Irish identity and a different relationship with Irishness.

In this complex structure, he is deconstructing the usual paradigm of Anglo-Irish relationships, which has always seen an overwhelmingly binary logic at work: we speak of Anglo-Irish, of British-Irish, of English-Irish, of Irish-English relations. In political terms, Irish history has been dogged by this collateral binarity of focus: for unionists, it is the connection with England that defines their position; for nationalists, it is the sundering of this connection, best encapsulated in the monosyllabic slogan “Brits Out” that was coined by the Provisional IRA, which is their main defining credo. It is the logic of either/or: one either commemorates the rebels or the forces loyal to the British government at the time.

In the quincunx, Heaney is offering a visual representation that traces a far more inclusive and plural interaction of Britishness and Irishness. More significantly, it is not the towers per se that interest him, but rather their multi-perspectival interaction with each other as processes from which different levels of meaning can be generated, and through which different sub-relationships can be enunciated. From the vantage point of each tower, the other towers look different, but all are Irish, if we expand the term to include the different incarnations present in the quincunx.

He sees these as polysemic points of reference, which validate different, but mutually informing, perceptions of Irishness in all of its complexity – a complexity that has all too often been simplified by various political and cultural agendas. To transpose this cultural analysis to the sphere of politics, to be an Irish man in the British army, fighting in the first World War at the behest of the elected Irish Party is as inclusive a part of Irish identity as an Irish man or woman fighting in the GPO for a different notion of Ireland. In an intriguing analysis, Heaney talks about how each tower faces the other towers and looks at the resonances that accrue from this interaction.

By attempting to create new intellectual structures to validate more complex and inclusive forms of identity, Heaney, I would strongly argue, sits comfortably in the European intellectual tradition of thinkers and writers on issues of politics, ethics and aesthetics, such as Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida and Maurice Blanchot, all of whom stress the importance of literature and poetry as an enabling form of discourse about society.

Therefore, Heaney’s slant on the truth of Irish identity is very much a complex one – there are different fields of force involved, and one might possibly parallel this fluid and interstitial view of Irishness with that of another literary speaker, a Jew, Leopold Bloom, who is questioned about his sense of Irish identity:

– What is your nation if I may ask, says the citizen.

– Ireland, says Bloom. I was born here. Ireland.

The two “Irelands” in the last line are not the same; they are transformed by the birth of a Jew whose father was Hungarian, whose mother was an Irish Protestant, but who was born in this country. The point is that the second “Ireland” is transformed by his birth, and the notion of Irishness must expand to include him. Once again, literature is offering a model to politics in its slanted way, and one feels that Heaney would have approved of Leopold Bloom’s inclusive and plural perspective on Irish identity.

Eugene O’Brien is director of the Mary Immaculate Institute for Irish Studies, and head of the Department of English Language and Literature. His latest book, Seamus Heaney as Aesthetic Thinker, has just been published by Syracuse University Press, and will be reviewed soon in The Irish Times by Bernard O’Donoghue

http://syracuseuniversitypress.syr.edu/spring-2016/seamus-heaney.html