Ana-; or postmodernism, landscape, Seamus Heaney

Thomas Docherty

pp. 206-222

in: Michael B. Allen (ed), Seamus Heaney, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1997

Abstract

"Back-up-again"; or, in Greek, "ana-, ana-, ana-". "The Grauballe Man", ostensibly about a man who is "back up again", is an exercise in what I shall call "anagrammatology": it is a writing elaborated in various modes of this "ana-": anamnesis, anagogy, anamorphosis and analysis. In the present essay, I will show the poem as a writing which occurs as an event in these four modes. This status of the writing, as an event and not a work, nor even a "text" in the conventional sense, is important. "Eventuality" opens writing to a postmodernism, as an anachronic or untimely meditation, countering the "punctuality" of the Modern, which is concerned to map two points in time as if they were two stable points in space. Eventuality releases the interior historicity of those 'spots of time". To think this writing as event enables an analysis which will be, literally, a setting free of its elements into a movement of emancipation. A philosophy of postmodernism will raise the stakes of the poem, disabling the conventional reading of it as a neo-Modernist exercise in myth-making and replacing the usual banal reading of its politics with something literally more compelling. Three elements construct the argument: the issue of historicity; an exploration of the poem's cinematism; and a consideration of the poem as an engagement with the issue of justice, judgement and criticism: a "cutting" which attempts to trancher la question.

Cited authors

Heaney Seamus