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

Heaney's center, unlike Yeats, is personal and as Deane qualifies, "fictive," to which we will return in the concluding section. Fictive in that it the poetic function which is fundamentally interpretive, and not based any real world social situation or phenomena although it is catalyzed by them. What Yeats sought to find by imbuing Ireland with the latent, ancient powers of lore, Heaney attempts to find by orbiting the silent, ahistorical self through poetry.²¹ Without wandering into an interpretation of Yeat's cryptic The Second Coming, Yeats, Berlant, and the majority of thought throughout the past century of war would agree that the center found in the social dimension is fragile and unstable. Deane and Heaney, on the other hand, use poetry and literature to give voice to the silent, elusive self through words. In doing so, they locate the "center" not in the social framework, but in the transitory self.

Deane's Reading in the Dark, orbits around this same essential paradox beginning with the opening line: "On the stairs, there was a clear, plain silence."²² The narrator, is at first obsessed with discovering the "true" story behind his own identity to find an immovable center. Once he discovers it, he finds the narrative to be not only elusive, but unfulfilling, and instead must lean on his own capacity of self-possession by not allowing his narrative to be given or proscribed by sources other than himself. Deane says of Reading in the Dark, "One way of coming into self-possession, of overcoming any kind of oppression, colonial or otherwise, is to take charge of interpretation yourself, not to allow yourself to be interpreted by others."²³ For Deane, the nature of this self-possession is rooted primarily in the power to represent the essential self. This gestures toward, however, the paradox found in both Foucault and Berlant—when the prevailing social narratives offered are unsatisfactory, how does one detach without "providing tacit permission for the world to reproduce itself as such?"²⁴

The novel ends on an ambiguous note—not with the sudden availability of a center once he has discovered the story as one might expect. Rather, by the end of the story, he watches his parents who have come full circle in this wrestling match with the silent dark:

Was nothing ever said, in all those years afterwards, as we grew up, as their marriage mutated slowly around the secrets that she kept in a nucleus within herself and that he sensed, even though he also thought he was free of the one secret he knew, since he had told us, false as it was?²⁵

The narrator finds solace in his mothers stroke, because once and for all, the secrets that haunted him would now be "sealed in her silence," and he would "seal it all in too."²⁶ The reader is left asking along with the narrator, has he fully discovered the secrets? Would it have made a difference if he did? The closure that the novel offers, in this way, is to acquiescence to the essential nature of the silence that lies at the base of the self and search for belonging. He cannot discover a narrative which will possess him— he must possess himself. Deane elaborates:

It's the kind of narrative that is natural to a generation that, because of education, had become much more, or somewhat more, secular, but, because of the formality of that education, was liable to think facts are coincident with truth. Then, on the other hand, there was the previous generation, uneducated, who derived their stories from folklore, from legend, and these stories are very subtly coded ways of dealing with trauma and difficulty. He doesn't recognize at first how these stories actually deal with the very thing that he was trying to pursue.²⁷

This is the driving question shared by Heaney and Deane's aesthetics (and consequently, their attempts to proceed from the technologies of self proffered by early 20th century artists like Yeats). How are "facts" coincident with the "truth?" More accurately, how are events coincident with an understanding of the self? It is the self—its history, its future, its desires, its meaning—that was "the very thing that he was trying to pursue" in Reading in the Dark.

More than two decades before Reading in the Dark, Dean published his first collection of poetry Gradual Wars, and the poem "Knowing It:"

The silence holds a power and freedom—a freedom from others, and a free unto simply being. Berlant writes of silence:

Performative silence is therefore not simply political speech that might as well be spoken. It is also really silence, by which I mean noise: that circulating, transpersonal, permeating, viscerally connective affective atmosphere that feels as though it has escaped "the filter" to indicate, for good or for ill, a sensorium for a potential social world now lived as collective affect, or a revitalized political one.²⁹

As she indicates, there is something radical about the power of silence in a world that demands not only our attention but our complicity in its ongoing social and political maintenance. By saying that he is "all love / For nothing," Deane denies that love requires an object, and instead is made alive through the freedom of being in silience, unaffected by any outsider. In this poem, Deane locates the genetics of Berlant's "circulating, transpersonal [...] affective atmosphere that feels as though it has escaped 'the filter'" the power of individual silence. For Deane, as well as Heaney, the power of poetry lies in its power as (what Foucault calls) a technology of self in the midst of a normative political scenario which offers no roles for them to play that are desirable or effective.³⁰

What Foucault develops as a "technology" of fiction and narrative, is rooted in the power of "bringing-forth" through poetic enframement which Heidegger draws out in his essay "The Question Concerning Technology:"

It is of utmost important that we think bringing-forth in its full scope and at the same time in the sense in which the Greeks thought it. Not only handicraft manufacture, not only artistic and poetical bringing into appearance and concrete imagery, is a poesis. [...] Bringing-forth brings out of concealment into unconcealment.³¹

Poetry enframes the self by through ordering the phenomena of experience, and placing it back upon the person.³² "Technology is a mode of revealing," because it takes what is concealed by nature and unconceals it.³³ This a conceptual territory in which we locate Deane, Heaney and Berlant with regard to the function of art and poetry as having the capacity for providing meaning and place for both the artist and those who partake of the art.

In "Personal Helicon," Heaney explores the myth of Narcissus. Having decided that the archetype of finding the self in reflections is childish, he instead turns to poetry: "I rhyme / To see myself, to set the darkness echoing."³⁴ The self, for Heaney, is not uncovered in the darkness by poetry as an illumination, but rather, through its power to make the darkness resonate. As he concludes in "Bogland," "The wet centre is bottomless."³⁵ The "digging" that Heaney does through poetry is into a silent, bottomless self.³⁶ Elsewhere in the eighth movement of "Clearances," Heaney writes, "I thought of walking round and round a space / Utterly empty, utterly a source [...] Its heft and hush become a bright nowhere, / A soul ramifying and forever / Silent, beyond silence listened for."³⁷ Poetry, in this way, is the echo from the silent center that resonates, but can never be heard in itself. It is Heidegger's unconcealing of the concealed in order to place it back on the poet as an ordering structure of life. For Heaney, it is the job of the poet to "keep striking / inwards and downwards" never to reach the source, but shake it and capture its reverberations in poetic verse.

In the opening piece of Gradual Wars, Deane concludes movement one of "Fourteen Elegies:"

Deane's aesthetic in this poem, embodies the challenge that is inherent in the poetic enterprise of self-possession. It is a groping in the dark for a center that is concealed, until one makes it resonate through poetry and can capture its echoes through the poesis of the words on the page. "Yet the quest for a center," Dean writes, "for what [Heaney] calls an 'omphalos,' is darkly stimulated by his recognition that the idea of a center is fictive."³⁸ This fictive, Joycian image of the omphalos, foregrounds the creative function of poetry in spite of the power of Heaney and Deane's tropes of the memory and the past.

The digging is not simply an uncovering, nor an unearthing, it is creation —not merely exposition. A memory, or the past, or nostalgia might serve as an instigation, but the poetry's beginnings—not unlike life—are fundamentally aleatory like Joyce's epiphany.³⁹ It is the creative, and recreative power which the poet attempts to harness spurred on by the "radiance" of an event, or memory.⁴⁰ Heaney harps on this subject while talking to Rose:

I would make a distinction between, if you like, the totally– the radiance of inner Catholicism as a child and the sense of eternity and the sense of grace and God-filled space. [...] [T]he older I get, the more important I think that inner expansiveness of consciousness and the actual supernatural sense of a universe drenched in, in radiance, you know?"⁴¹

Particularly in Heaney's later work, we uncover a reimagined power of the poetic to enchant the world and life the subject between heaven and the ground. The poem being a reverberating echo of the self, is buttresses with the earlier discussion of poetry as "political noise" or "ambient citizenship." The connection between the role of poetry as self-possession and as political noise, is the creative essence of poetry which has the capability of inciting and overcoming the depressing normativity of the political.