-
4. Signs of encounters in Medbh McGuckian’s Poetry
- Cork University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
4 Signs of encounters in Medbh McGuckian’s Poetry ELIN HOLMSTEN 84 All speaking is an enigma. – Emmanuel Levinas, Basic PhilosophicalWritings, eds. Adriaan T. Peperzak, et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 73. And what is a sign? Is it a signal? Or a token? A marker? Or a hint? Or all of these and something else besides? – Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. Albert Hofstadter (NewYork: Harper & Row, 1982), p. 61. The complex issues of the nature of signs, speaking or representation generally , as commented on by Heidegger and Levinas above, have been extensively debated in contemporary philosophical discourse and aesthetic practices. In this respect, Medbh McGuckian’s poetry is no exception, since many of her poems deal with representational acts such as writing and painting. This feature has been much discussed by critics of McGuckian, especially with regard to her departure from rational, conceptual representation or, as Eileen Cahill puts it, her ‘concern with dismantling the letters’.1 A common argument suggests that McGuckian’s poetry is engaged in a linguistic rebellion which is motivated by post-structuralist sensibility or feminist intentions, and critics frequently compare her work to that of theorists in these areas. Susan Porter, for instance, argues that ‘there are similarities between her poetry and the writing of the contemporary philosopher Jacques Derrida’,2 and Thomas Docherty proposes that McGuckian’s poetry is ‘aligned with the postmodern thinking of Deleuze, Baudrillard and others’.3 Another suggestion is that her poetry is propelled by French feminist zeal, since, as Cahill suggests, it ‘approximates both Hélène Cixous’ parler femme and écriture féminine, achieving a female langage-parler’,4 and ‘resonates the feminist linguistic theory of Luce Irigaray’.5 Signs of encounters in Medbh McGuckian’s poetry 85 It cannot be denied that there are features in McGuckian’s works that are similar to ideas about language expressed in post-structuralist and French feminist theory. I believe, however, that there is more to McGuckian’s concern with representation than a wish to ‘disrupt structures of meaning’ and ‘fragment the linguistic order’.6 The often quoted comment by McGuckian on dismantling the letters, for instance, runs in its entirety:‘Language has been devitalized by advertising and news; poetry must almost dismantle the letters.’7 This comment suggests that one of the driving forces behind McGuckian’s style is not a wish to take the letters apart for the sake of sabotage, but for the sake of revitalising language in order to make it say more than the everyday chatter of advertising and news.Thus, this chapter will examine the meta-representational poems by McGuckian in a wider context, and suggest that the ‘dismantling of letters’ allows for speaking differently , which opens towards encounters with otherness.To this end, I will examine how McGuckian’s poetry brings the spatial and temporal gaps of language to the fore, and suggest that it is through these gaps that otherness is allowed to enter.The post-structuralist and French feminist perspectives on language will be used as points of reference to see how the view of language in McGuckian’s poetry complements or contrasts with these perspectives. The Hotel of Language One poem which illustrates the strong concern with language and representation in McGuckian’s poetry is ‘Hotel’.8 O’Connor sees this poem as part of McGuckian’s project to ‘upturn syntactic conventions’ by being ‘deliberately obfuscating’.9 Indeed, this poem can be said to unsettle conventions, but such unsettling widens the frame of meaning rather than simply ‘obfuscating’ meaning.A deconstructive impulse can be seen already in the first stanza: I think the detectable difference Between winter and summer is a damsel Who requires saving, a heroine halfAsleep and measurably able to hear But hard to see, like the spaces Between the birds when I turn Back to the sky for another empty feeling. (VR 36) These lines clearly show an insistence on difference located in the inbetween , which is a favoured site of feminists and post-structuralists alike.10 The idea of difference presented in ‘Hotel’, however, differs from post-structuralist theories, since it goes beyond the formal concept of difference as a structural abstraction, which, as Derrida expresses it,‘is not a present-being [34.204.196.206] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 21:35 GMT) 86 Elin Holmsten [. . .] in any form’.11 In contrast to Derrida’s presentation of difference as non-presence, difference takes on concrete form as a ‘damsel, / who requires...