The bog body as mnemotope: nationalist archaeologies in Heaney and Tournier - Seamus Heaney, Michel Tournier - Critical Essay

Style, Spring, 2002 by Anthony Purdy

The breakthrough in Heaney's efforts "to make a congruence between memory and bogland and, for the want of a better word, our national consciousness" did not come until 1969, when the resumption of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland brought poetry face to face with new and urgent problems (5455). Embarked upon "a search for images and symbols adequate to our predicament," the poet felt challenged to find a "field of force" in which "it would be possible to encompass the perspectives of a humane reason and at the same time to grant the religious intensity of the violence its deplorable authenticity and complexity" (56-57). Some possible answers were suggested by Heaney's reading that same year of Glob, in whose evocations of Iron-Age human sacrifice he glimpsed "an archetypal pattern" connecting events far removed in time: "And the unforgettable photographs of these victims blended in my mind with photographs of atrocities, past and present. in the long rites of Irish political and religious struggles"(57- 58). The result was the loose grouping of poems that would become known collectively as the bog-poems.

From the very first of these poems, "The Tollund Man," the debt to Glob is clear:

Some day I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head,
The mild pods of his eye-lids,
His pointed skin cap.

Aarhus, with its punning echo of "our house" (Staliworthy 179), becomes a site of pilgrimage, the shrine where the "saint's kept body" now reposes and the spiritual home to which the poet will return. But, from the familiar territory of physical detail, the motif of the last meal and the eroticized relationship between the sacrificial victim and the goddess, all of which can be found in Glob, the poem moves in the second section to a hypothetical prayer of intercession: the saint might be asked "to make germinate/ The scattered, ambushed/ Flesh of labourers,/ Stockinged corpses/Laid out in the farmyards," and the mutilated remains "Of four young brothers, trailed/For miles along the lines" in the 1920s. The juxtaposition of distant past and present or recent past, a distinctive feature I would argue of the bog-body mnemotope, is disturbing herein the context of the Ulster Troubles and has inevitably led to charges that Heaney uses Glob to mythologize history and aestheticize political violence. Such misgiving s are not likely to be dispelled by the further erosion of the distance between tribal ritual killing and modern sectarian violence as the poem's third and last part projects a wandering poet in a state of inner exile, driving the country roads around Silkeborg, seeking directions from folk whose language he does not know:

Out there in Jutland
In the old man-killing parishes
I will feel lost,
Unhappy and at home.

The dilemma lived by Heaney in the early seventies is well captured by Eileen Cahill: "The poetry of Seamus Heaney articulates an inner world, a private landscape, an intimate voice. Yet his particular situation as a Catholic Nationalist living in Belfast during the worst of the Troubles challenges his lyricism as precious and superfluous. Heaney clearly suffers the tension between his personal dedication to a reflective art and his public responsibility towards political action" (55). If the poet's first three books had been largely well received, the publication of North in 1975 elicited heated debate and a fair measure of vituperative criticism. Since I cannot hope to do justice here to either side of a complex argument, I will confine my comments to Heaney's use of the bog-body mnemotope in two particularly contentious poems. In "The Grauballe Man," a highly imaginative and controlled figural language matches the aesthetic preservation of the body to its chemical preservation by the peat. Embalmed in lang uage, even the horror of the cut throat is transcended by a medico-aesthetic attraction that draws us into the wound and the body itself: