The End of Art is Peace: Finding Self, Creating Place

In their collective literary repertoire, both Heaney and Deane engender an exploration of being-in-the-world (more specifically, being-in-the-state) that disowns the political melodrama which has delineated the characters and mise-en-scène of Northern Ireland. The traditional castings of Northern Irish identity have been not only destructive, but left the society in a stalemate: a mode of discursive arrested political development, so to speak, where the identities and narratives available to the public are circumscribed by an essential impasse in their relationship to each other. Heaney and Deane, through both the content and manner of their art, depict a character with a new identity, who not only thrives in the unraveling melodrama, but also prefigure the world to follow, and is consequently, the hero of political liminality and depression.

In Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant explores the affective mechanisms of attachment and optimism. Building on Jürgen Habermas' notion of the public sphere in past works, Berlant opts to conceptualize of body publics as "affect worlds" in which affect is the gravitational force around which publics are constructed and therefore orbit. What she calls "cruel optimism," as she exposits it vis-à-vis the political, is continued attached to normative political systems despite the clear impression to the individual that whether they engage in traditional rituals or disengage, they give tacit permission to what is ineffectual normativity to maintain its ongoing recreation. To overcome this, Berlant looks at forms of art as a type of "ambient citizenship," which attempt to retain the desire for the political, without engaging in the pre-determined modalities of discourse or engagement which are "a foregone conclusion."¹ This, then, is a helpful frame in which to place Deane and Heaney, and the analysis will begin by putting Berlan into discussion with the writers, to draw out the essence of Dean and Heaney's "ambient politics." By reading Berlant slightly against the grain, this analysis hopes to also offer a way of widening what she considers "ambient art."

Through their poetry and literature, Heaney and Deane construct an identity which imagines life in a post-industrial, post-colonial scenario. Their high priority on personhood, in this way, finds its genealogy in archetypal Irish poets like Yeats. Unlike Yeats, however, they depict a modern, ahistorical person who discovers their narrative in neither the land nor history alone (and consequently, neither in institutions which are inexplicably tied to the land i.e. the hegemonic territorial state).² But rather, through the discovery and possession of the self through poetry, and the resonance of self with and through intimate public spheres (as opposed to normative political discourse). Their poetry is not, however, an exercise in sentimental escapism or fantasy. Instead, they gesture toward an aesthetic personalism, that when extrapolated across a body politic, depicts a Northern Irish public can grope at peace because of each individual's unique self-possession of their narrative. This bypasses personal identities which are constructed through traditionally Northern Irish narratives of political identity (i.e. sectarianism), and creates new political norms.

Despite their historical groundedness, this analysis will avoid addressing Deane and Heaney as uniquely "Irish" writers, in part because of their admitted struggle to "refuse the limited destiny of place" (that is Ireland) and write as persons who have the simple authority of being human. As Deane writes and is worth quoting at length:

In Ireland, where the place has been invested with such political energy, this is a difficult problem. In one sense, it is the struggle to become a writer rather than an Irish writer. You can't be one without the other; yet to be too self-consciously Irish might rob one of the freedom to be a writer, an author. These poets, [Heaney, Kinsella, Montague, Mahon and Muldoon], have to authorize their Irishness by giving primacy to author-ity; only then will the place of Ireland become real. Otherwise it is merely a stereotype, a place that is given, not found.³

This quote serves as valuable point of departure for this analysis, will be given new life with the concluding remarks of the power of " author-ity" in the creation and finding of real places. Both Deane and Heaney seek a way out of the social identity crisis of Northern Ireland in the latter half of the 20th century by side-stepping the existing modes of discourse and discovering a new path forward. The challenge to this, as Deane so aptly puts it here, is that so long as Ireland (as a place and society) is given by prevailing frameworks of discourse and identity, it cannot be found. The narrative is pre-determined and therefore circumscribed by political action taken within it.

Our center of gravity will be Berlant's concluding chapter in Cruel Optimism titled "The Desire for the Political."⁴ The goal is to show how both Deane and Heaney prefigure Berlant's conclusions within the confines of affect theory, as to how a constituent in an ineffective political system goes about satisfying their desire for the political, without perpetuating the system through circumscribed modes of engagement (or disengagement.) From here, Deane's Reading in the Dark, as well as choice poetry of Deane and Heaney, will foreground the role of self-possession in taking creative authority of one's narrative. Here, their poetic tropes about echoes from a silent center of self contour well with Berlant's notion of ambient citizenship. This ambience from the center of self can return to intimate public spheres through collective affectivity. In conclusion, we will locate Deane and Heaney's aesthetics within the context of Berlant's "double-bind" of cruel optimism. Together, all three promote an individual ethic which has the power to resonate through a constellation of self-possessed autonomous persons who are creating a new collective ordinary, outside the norms of prefigured political engagement.