Not a thinking voice
Stephen Logan
THE GOVERNMENT OF THE TONGUE: THE 1986 T.S. ELIOT MEMORIAL LECTURES AND OTHER CRITICAL WRITINGS by Seamus Heaney
Faber, £12.95, pp.200
All the great critics, except Leavis, have been poets, though the converse is not equally true. Yet Heaney's proficiency as a critic seems oppressed by the opul- ence of his creative talent. He has an almost inexhaustible faith in the virtues of obliquity; but the metaphors that colonise his prose are not all thoroughly at home in it. They can, when integral to his percep- tion of some point, be wonderfully apt, as in his misgivings about letting 'through the eye of the lyric needle' truths independent of poetry. This not only implies that such truths, however contraband, are a sort of riches, and that lyric poetry is analogous to heaven, but also discreetly communicates the view that writing poems is an urgent spiritual discipline. Elsewhere, though, and perhaps more frequently, metaphor is used in the service of an abstract mode of thought which tempts Heaney to add superfluous background detail. A poem by the Polish poet, Zbigniew Herbert, `ostensibly demands that poetry abandon its hedonism and fluency, that it become a nun of language and barber its locks down to a stubble of moral and ethical goads'. Quite apart from the rudeness to nuns, does Heaney really want to countenance the notion that explicitly didactic poems are grotesque? The implication is at any rate hard to reconcile with his praise for Czeslaw Milosz. But the richness of the conceit conceals, apparently even from Heaney himself, an inconsistency that a plainer style of exposition would have obliged him to confront. In the prose of a poet renowned for his fidelity to sensuous experience, such a profusion of metaphor is an expectable trait. More surprising and much more disturbing, however, is a tendency towards grandiloquence. When, in addressing ideas of any complexity, Heaney does try to be explicit, his prose is apt to puff out its chest like a corporal on parade: 'The firmness of an achieved style represents a victory over subjectivity and a capacity for being pos- sessed by archetypal voice'. The solemnis- ing absence of an article before 'archetyp- al' is a portent of what follows: 'Poetry, drama and myth converge, what all humankind has known and experienced is potentially available through the ceremony of the poem. . .'. This, admittedly, is presented as Yeats's view; but the manner is too friendly with Heaney's own to pass for parody: `. . . just as the poem, in the process of its genesis, exemplifies a congru- ence between impulse and right action, so in its repose the poem gives us a premoni- tion of harmonies desired and not inexpen- sively achieved'. To paraphrase prose like that requires almost as much ingenuity as to write it. The context provides some help; but to a mind already staggering with exertion, that coy understatement, 'not inexpensively', feels like the last straw.
The root of the trouble may well be that, as Heaney confided in an interview in 1979, his 'own voice . . . is not an abstract thinking voice at all'. His attempts at sustained abstract thinking, therefore, tend either to be nudged into obliquity by unwarranted recourse to metaphor, or else hoisted into obscurity by a principled mistrust of explicitness. I say 'principled' mistrust because there are grounds for thinking that Heaney sometimes writes vaguely from compunction. His deep re- spect for East European poets like Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Pasternak, Her- bert and Milosz, who have risked their lives for the sake of their art, has made him feel that the common run of Anglo- American lyric verse is by comparison shamefully parochial. In particular, he is anxious to dissociate himself from 'the insular and eccentric nature of English experience in all the literal and extended meanings of those adjectives'. The anxiety necessarily produces a conflict, since Heaney both wants to express his solidarity with 'the poet as witness', while also maintaining an allegiance to those native traditions from which he has consistently
derived his strength. The loftiness of his prose is one expression of a strenuous effort to transcend this conflict by eschew- ing the classical, insular virtues of se- quaciousness and clarity of statement.
The scarcity of practical criticism in the book is perhaps another aspect of Heaney's disregard for the traditional prose virtues. Reading, a propos of Eli- zabeth Bishop, the rather slighting allu- sions to 'textbook prose', you might be forgiven for suspecting that Heaney was being held incommunicado on this point by modern critical theory; but since his only reference to deconstructionist methods is cautiously polite, he probably hasn't read it much. Further up the same page, more- over, there is an unequivocal and, in the circumstances, reassuring tribute to some remarks by Geoffrey Grigson on Auden's verbal technique. These, he affirms, are `the ones that count for most in the long poetic run, because they are the most intrinsically sensitive to the art of lan- guage'. About Heaney's sensitivity to lan- guage, his own insufficiently developed remarks on verbal minutiae in Kavanagh, Larkin, Irish ballads, Auden, Lowell and Plath would leave no room for doubt, were he not so tolerant towards the vagaries of his prose. When, in his previous book of essays, he showed how, in a passage from `Marina', Eliot's ear had 'incubated a cadence', he attested the critical benefits of that minute attentiveness to sound with which his poetry is everywhere inscribed. Thus on reading his proposal to examine Auden's 'poetic music', modestly defined as 'the technical means . . . by which a certain tonality is effected and main- tained', we hold ourselves in readiness for a form of critical enlightenment that Heaney is peculiarly qualified to give. It Isn't long, however, before the prose seeks out its lodging on the higher slopes of abstraction, and instead delivers from on high a series of impressionistic formula- tors: "The melody allays anxiety, the oceanic feeling of womb-oneness stirs . . .'. Sound, in these terms, is virtual- ly a metaphor, with no more specific relevance to the theme than the statement that, in reading Larkin, 'we respond con- stantly to the melody of intelligence'.
Heaney explains the ambiguity of his title as encompassing the rival claims of a will to control and an impulse to obey the forces inherent in language. To balance these claims may be the duty of the poet, engaged in the process of composition and deciding, say, whether to pursue or to ignore the implications of an unexpected rhyme. But for the critic it is reckless to Pretend that such claims are evenly ba- lanced: unless, that is he hopes to serve poetic theory by defeating the practical Purposes of prose.
Dr Stephen Logan is Pilger Research Fellow at the University of Wales, College of Cardiff.
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