Following Seamus Heaney's "Follower": Toward a Performative Criticism - Critical Essay

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2000 by John Boly

Like some lesser god, the father acts out a drama of irresistible domination. Solitude and perhaps secretiveness protect him, though were someone to chance upon this rural revelation of the god's power, he would have a ready supply of explanations. Had not the famine taught that survival depended on owning not just a patch but enough land to diversify crops and keep livestock? It was a son's duty, particularly the eldest's, to preserve the family farm. Besides, watching father plough was an honored tradition. He had done so as a child and he expected that one day his grandson would watch his son. So the father knew in advance that his actions would cast him in a defensible role, at least for the right audience of neighbors, acquaintances, and relatives. They would understand that actions instruct better than words, and that a hard world allows no pause before imposing its ways.

Yet the ploughman is unprepared for resistance from a surprising source, his son. Although the events of "Follower" are told in the language of an adult, they are shown as if through the eyes of a child. This discontinuity opens the possibility of exploring the impossible, the little boy's prelinguistic consciousness. The poem describes the toddler as "Yapping always," as producing the fluent vocables that gradually give birth to words, but still not enunciating the words themselves. If so, then it cannot be the child's language that the audience hears. He might yap in the sense of producing sounds that resemble a small dog's annoying bark, but he could not say that he was yapping. Efforts to go beyond this point, as in children's stories, simply project an adult's language into a space from which it has still to emerge. Yet as part of its brazen experiment, "Follower" does venture into this space by using its visual decoupage as a cue for an opposing performative. The poem's arrangement of scenes retraces a sequence of physical points of view through which it becomes possible to follow the actions of the ploughman's son. While the little boy cannot speak for himself, his location, focus, and selection of visual subjects can speak for him.

At first, the ploughman appears from behind and at a distance with only his back, the wide frame of the plough, and the just-turned furrow visible. As instructed, his son watches from a safe distance. The scene cuts to the earlier events of adjusting the ploughshare, visualized from a few feet away, before fading to "The sod rolled over without breaking." The line has an almost hypnotic effect with its continuous and endless motion. Together, the first three scenes suggest a child's fluid perceptions as they drift from distant impression, to close observation, to dreamlike reverie. Then abruptly, the decoupage begins to follow an orderly sequence of actions.

At the headrig, with a single pluck

Of reins, the sweating team turned round

And back into the land. His eye

Narrowed and angled at the ground,

Mapping the furrow exactly.

The son's wandering attention returns to the father who has meanwhile reached the end of the field. Though a child, he notes the precise cue that forecasts this event: a quiver in the hame rings. Once the team opens into full profile as they swing round and then recoil into a foreshortened oddity, the son shows even greater perceptiveness. He sees that the ploughman has only one eye showing. His father is now behind the draft, whose haunches might stand anywhere from 16 to 19 hands (5 feet 4 inches to 6 feet 4 inches), and even a powerful man must lean well forward to guide the heavy frame. So the ploughman is blind to whatever lies dead ahead. Moreover, the son notices that the ploughman must squint as he constantly gauges the 2-feet-square area between the breaking and the adjacent furrow. Swing wide and he loses yield, narrow and he overworks his team. The little boy consequently intuits that not only is there a considerable blind spot directly before the horses but also that his father's attention is rive ted to a tiny spot just behind their rear hooves. At this moment he gets up from his vantage point and crosses the tilled field. "I stumbled in his hobnailed wake, / Fell sometimes on the polished sod...." The ploughman's "wake" would be his most recent furrow. His son falls on ground dead ahead the landside horse.