Seamus Heaney’s Regions

Chapter One: The Development of Northern Irish Regionalism

Chapter One The Development of Northern Irish Regionalism As John Wilson Foster has recently observed,“Many college students of Irish Literature, clamoring to write their essays on Seamus Heaney and ‘the North,’ apparently believe that Northern Irish literature began ab ovo with the publication of Death of a Naturalist in 1966. . . . But then, only recently (say in the past quarter-century) did serious criticism discover that there were Irish writers of the Revival other than Yeats, Synge, O’Casey,and Joyce who merited extended discussion,so the understandable small tyranny unwittingly exerted by the Major Figure may also be in play.”1 Notwithstanding the outstanding scholarship by Foster himself and other critics who place Heaney in the proper context of Northern Irish literature and culture, there are many examples of Heaney criticism that, besides a perfunctory invocation of Kavanagh or Hewitt, treat his work to the exclusion of his regional literary influences. While the current study centrally concerns the Major Figure of Heaney, this chapter treats the flourishing of a heterogeneous Northern Irish regionalism in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century in the theater and especially through a variety of small magazines. In his invaluable history of the Irish literary periodical from 1923 to 1958, Frank Shovlin argues that“there continues to exist a relative 41 critical neglect of Irish literature in the first forty years after Partition. Neglect of that period’s literary magazines has been especially acute.”2 While many of these movements and journals were short-lived, in aggregate they helped create the conditions for the foundation of Northern Irish writing that was crucial for the development of the justly more famous writers such as Heaney who emerged from Philip Hobsbaum’s Belfast Group. Scholars of Irish literature have been considerably reluctant until very recently to admit or discuss the existence of something called “Northern Irish literature,”by and large for very good reasons. Primary among these is probably the desire to assert Irish literature as a distinct entity over against British literature, a natural desire given the centuries of Britain’s domination over Ireland and given the past tendency by British and American scholars to term “British” such authors as Yeats and Joyce. Northern Irish literature, with its plurality of styles and cultural implications, complicates the picture of “Irish”literature fruitfully, but this possibility is seldom admitted and it is treated as a special, disturbing center of literary activity: Irish literary scholars tend to suspect that literature from the political province of Northern Ireland is linked inextricably with the conflict there and that once the conflict peters out so will the literature.As this chapter demonstrates , however, Northern Irish literature has a deep-rooted existence that easily antedates the current conflict and should eclipse it. Although it is difficult to say when a Northern Irish literature began, it is tempting to start with partition in 1920. However, it is dangerous and simplistic to try to plot a trajectory of something as varied and organic as Northern Irish literature on a linear history of the province. The articles and editorials drawn from journals and collections that emerged from the province often, but not always, anticipate qualities evident in Heaney’s poetry : a deep and affectionate, though sometimes cynical, attachment to either the historic or the political province of “Ulster,”a fidelity to the imagination , and a surprising receptivity to a mixture of political, cultural, and religious affinities, rather than an unquestioning acceptance of the unifying bonds of a particular community. By far the most visible institutional proponent of a regionalized identity in the North was the Ulster Literary Theatre (ULT). Eugene McNulty’s book-length treatment of it, The Ulster Literary Theatre and the Northern Revival, has become essential reading for anyone interested in appreciat42 SEAMUS HEANEY’S REGIONS ing this regional counterpart to the much better known Abbey Theatre and Irish Literary Revival. As McNulty has argued,“Many at the heart of the Ulster Literary Theatre saw it as a forum for realigning the cultural life of the North in order to break down some of the political divisions that had grown stronger in the years of Home Rule. . . . [It] took as one of its central goals the combating of . . . cultural bigotry; in its place its members hoped to discover in the theatre unifying codes for a society defined by boundaries of one sort or another (class, religious, political).”3 Moreover, as Laura E. Lyons has persuasively argued, the ULT o...