Whatever You Say, Say Nothing: Why Seamus Heaney Is No. 1

by Desmond Fennell

good condition, some light soiling to covers, (designed by Robert Ballagh) small tape reair to base of spine,

43 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

Reviews

[Differengenera · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked Desmond Fennell's pamphlet on Seamus Heaney up from the library system because his Hegelian critique of Irish historical revisionism available in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing was flawed in a reasonably interesting way. From the title I could also tell it was produced by an informed hater, which is a condition I always aspire to.

In addition to an antipathy to foreign commentators, an important line of attack is Heaney's reticence, the fact that none of his poems advance a consistent world-view and are therefore intellectually weak. Foremost for Fennell is the colonial question and the legitimacy, comprehensibility, and continuity of the Provisional IRA's campaign against British occupation of the six counties, as opposed to the imperialist self-representation as an honest broker attempting to keep the peace between two warring tribes, whose differences are endogenous / confessional. For Fennell there is a right and a wrong here, one side of this revels in the supremacist power the state exerts on their behalf, the other is oppressed. This straightforwardly anti-imperialist position is not one Heaney abides by; insofar as they were explicit during his lifetime it was with the constitutional nationalism of the SDLP. In the book length interview Stepping Stones Heaney differentiates between his formative experiences growing up in a rural townland peacefully coexisting with Protestant neighbours versus Seamus Deane's early life in Derry town: 'where the RUC were bigoted bastards and that was it'. Even if Heaney's experiences militates against the drawing up of battle lines, events in the long war appear only obliquely. Cf. Thomas Kinsella's Butcher's Dozen, which put him definitively beyond the pale for the London-based poetic establishment or Tom Paulin's statements on Israeli settlers (seriously, look these up).

The national question though is secondary to Fennell's populist line, that Heaney writes poems in which the aesthetic effects are calculated and hermetic, where the unusual language and archaisms culminate in expressionism or abstraction. Fennell never disputes that Heaney is a very competent poet, that he has the ability to concretise and materialise objects in language itself, rather this seems to be part of the problem. Within this competence is a repudiation of musicality in favour of the modal rhythms of the natural world. Viewed as such, Heaney is a practitioner of poetic field recording, an idea I find, perhaps in spite of Fennell's intentions, interesting and will definitely be bringing to my next read-through when I pick up the Collected. In any case this is why Fennell argues that Heaney is not generally quoted, he is a writerly, not a readerly poet.

Fennell does seem to grant that at an earlier stage of his career there was a clarity and an appeal to the everyday but Heaney's canonisation has led him to prioritise those readers who will bring their substantial amounts of learning to writing commentaries. This is a self-reinforcing cycle, as no-one reads poetry anymore poets no longer concern themselves with 'common types of feeling'; as Fennell points out 25 of the 34 included in The Faber Book of Contemporary American Poetry are employed in an academic institution. This is a normative model which prioritises an idea of the value of direct communication that isn't really parsed out. I don't want to be an apologist for academicisation of poetry, or indeed the bloated masculinist tradition which I would say is of far greater importance to Heaney's shortcomings such as they are, but I don't know what an aesthetics of access or presence outside the academy would look like. Perhaps I'm too close to that world but I can't say that I've really had my head turned by any self-publishing populist poets I've taken the time to check out.

Helen Vendler, the New Yorker’s poetry critic and prominent champion of Heaney's work in the US, is the villain here, and by quoting those instances - freighted in the faux-technical terminology of contemporary literary criticism - in which Vendler is effectively saying ‘this poem is good and I like it’, Fennell conveys that Vendler celebrates poetry which offers an insight into a poet's personal sensibility over the presentation of ideas or history. This is a criterion of value we will be familiar with from New Criticism, the hegemonic means of engaging literary art in the American academy. It emerges from and provides the ecology of reception for the literature of the early twentieth century. T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats, what these authors have in common is the notion that appearances do not represent the whole story, there is a deep anthropological or mythological structure which literature should be attentive to. History isn't absent, but it's just one system of meaning within this aristocratic world-view. John Crowe Ransom is an important figure here and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he is in possession of an explicit nostalgia for the pre-war antebellum South, nor that Gertrude Stein, Eliot, Pound and Yeats were, to varying extents, collaborators. This is a digression: I obviously don't think Heaney's a fascist, rather it is indicative of where you can end up with you celebrate mind for itself, Yeats' tower, Pound's gold standard, Heaney's bog. This is why modernism is the paradigmatic literary instance, it is the best teaching aid in that they speak to the formative social convulsions of our time, there's a neat narrative story - things were realistic and then they weren't - and in both senses they address the trajectories of critical and social theory. This was the case when I was at college anyway, when I was tutoring YA or pop-cultural iterations of the canon had made pretty substantial inroads.

Fennell's big sociological theory beyond all this therefore begins with New England and the history of puritanism, arguing that after the failure of the sixties, the rejection of a secular reality went into 'movements for healthy food, real ale, organic farming, unchlorinated water, clean air, smokeless lungs and slim figures - with slimming, jogging, aerobics, squash and marathons supplying the requisite pain. Its antipathy to sex and sectional lodgements in radical feminism and homosexuality, Political Correctness, guaranteed purity of mind to intellectuals'. This is all aul lad nonsense (reminded me that Angela Nagle was championing Fennell there at one stage actually) and I don't find it completely clear what relationship it bears to Fennell's dismissal of the self-referential poem which is architecturally sophisticated but self-referential. Rather I think his strongest moment comes through in a bit of close reading, picking apart a quote from Heaney's 1984 Pete Laver memorial lecture:

''Pure' poetry is perfectly justifiable in the earshot of the carbomb, but it still implies a politics, depending on the nature of the poetry. A poetry of hermetic wit, of riddles and slips and self-mocking ironies, while it may appear culpably miniaturist or fastidious to the activist with his microphone at the street corner, may be exercising in its inaudible way a fierce disdain of the amplified message, or a distressed sympathy with it'.

Fennell: 'This seems to mean that a poetry which says nothing about contemporary social events may be doing something relevant to them silently'.