Talking Ghosts, Living Traditions: Political Violence, Catholicism, and Seamus Heaney's "Station Island"

Brian Conniff Talking Ghosts, LivingTraditions: Political Violence, Catholicism, and Seamus Heaney's "Station Island" In the middle of his ? 99 c nobel prize lecture, Seamus Heaney told the story of a sectarian assassination that occurred in Northern Ireland one evening in January of 1976. A minibus full of workers, heading home for the evening, was held up by a group of masked men. After forcing the passengers to stand by the side ofthe road at gunpoint, one of the executioners said, "Any Catholics among you, step out here": As it happened, this particular group, with one exception, were all Protestants, so the presumption must have been that the masked men were Protestant paramilitaries about to carry out a tit-for-tat sectarian killing ofthe Catiiolic as die odd man out, the one who would have been presumed to be in sympathy widi the IRA and all its actions. It was a terrible moment for him, caught between dread and witness, but he did make a motion to step forward. Then, the story goes, in diat split second of decision, and in the relative cover of the winter evening darkness, he felt the hand of the Protestant worker LOGOS 2:2 SPRING 1999 POLITICAL VIOLENCE AND SEAMUS HEANEY S STATION ISLAND next to him take his and squeeze it in a signal that said no, don't move, we'll not betray you, nobody need know what faith or party you belong to. All in vain, however, for the man stepped out ofline; but instead offinding a gun at his temple, he was pushed away as the gunmen opened fire on those remaining in the line, for these were not Protestant terrorists but members, presumably, of die Provisional IRA. Heaney calls this story "one ofthe most harrowing in the whole history ofthe harrowing ofthe heart in Northern Ireland."2 1 begin with it for several reasons. Most basically, when Heaney uses this story to account for the historical situation and the social value of poetry—that is, as the title of the Nobel lecture would have it, to find a way of"crediting poetry"—he highlights the most enduring and, I think, the most crucial problem ofhis own career: the apparent tension between a life spent in the service of art and the desire to participate actively in history.At the same time, Heaney's repeated treatment of such events in his poetry provides a way of understanding his most compelling use ofcontending literary and cultural traditions, a brief experiment in which Catholic sources and devotional practices figure prominently. Finally, as Heaney seems to be half aware throughout the Nobel lecture, these stories provide a way ofaccounting for the larger trajectory ofhis poetic career over the past fifteen years or so: a disappointing retreat from the historically grounded examinations of moral conscience that, from the later 1970s through the early 1 980s, informed his greatest work. In his Nobel lecture, Heaney's ostensible purpose in telling the story of the 1976 mass assassination is to show how difficult it can sometimes be "to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir."3 He goes on to recite a litany ofrecent abattoirs: Ulster, Israel, Bosnia, Rwanda. In these "wounded spots on the face of the earth," it is difficult to believe that human nature provides much in the way of"creative potential"—let alone that poetry can accomplish anything.4 But to recognize the difficulty ofrepressing a 119 l2oLOGOS thought is not the same as believing it, especially in Heaney's writing . Even in the immediate aftermath ofthis harrowing story, he is not quite ready to abandon his hope that poetry can find meaning in history's darkest moments. So, in his next breath, he turns to the examples ofwriters who have somehow managed to respond to the worst horrors ofmodern history with a kind of literary innovation driven by moral principle. For instance, he mentions "Celan's stricken destiny as Holocaust survivor and Beckett's demure heroism as a member of the French Resistance."5 The examples of Celan and Beckett—and in his recent poetry and criticism Heaney has similarly used Eastern European writers like Anton...