Seamus Heaney: Northern Ireland History

Home rule – (1919) Northern Ireland receives self-government within the United Kingdom. Under the Government of Ireland Act was in some respects left to its own devices.

The first years of the new independent region were marked by bitter violence, particularly in Belfast. Many died in political violence from 1920.

The continuing violence created a climate of fear in the new region, and there was migration across the new border. As well as movement of Protestants from the Free State into Northern Ireland, some Catholics fled south, leaving some of those who remained feeling isolated. Despite the mixed religious affiliation of the old Royal Irish Constabulary and the transfer of many Catholic RIC police officers to the newly formed Royal Ulster Constabulary (1922), northern Catholics did not join the new force in great numbers.

The troubles, starting in the late 1960s, consisted of about thirty years of recurring acts of intense violence between elements of Northern Ireland's nationalist community (principally Roman Catholic) and unionist community (principally Protestant) during which 3,254 people were killed. The conflict was caused by the disputed status of Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom and the discrimination against the nationalist minority by the dominant unionist majority.

Seamus Heaney

The life and artistic career of Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney - born 13 April 1939 - is an Irish poet, writer and lecturer who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995 and the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2006.

In August 1965 he married Marie Devlin and, in 1994, published Over Nine Waves, a collection of traditional Irish myths and legends. Heaney's first book, Eleven Poems, was published in November 1965 for the Queen's University Festival.
In 1967, Faber and Faber published his first major volume, called Death of a Naturalist. This collection met with much critical acclaim and went on to win several awards, the Gregory Award for Young Writers and the Geoffrey Faber Prize. Also in 1966, he was appointed as a lecturer in Modern English Literature at Queen's University Belfast.

Identify one of Heaney's poem to share with the class.

Mid-Term Break by Seamus Heaney

I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o'clock our neighbors drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying--
He had always taken funerals in his stride--
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were "sorry for my trouble,"
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four foot box, a foot for every year.

The persona, I feel, sounds almost confused about the situation as at the beginning of the poem, the mood is set to be glum but the reasons are unsure as the emotions of the persona are not shown. It is only until the last line of the poem "A four foot box, a foot for every year." that the full impact of the poem really hits the reader. By the persona calling the body a "corpse" and feeling "embarrassed" when the "old men" shake his hand shows detachment from the situation - almost like the reader is blocking out the situation as best he can.

The Gunner's Lament

"...the Yanks and the Reds taking turns At murdering the poor," is highly satirical and this view point is shown throughout the text. The persona of the poem is mocking a number of aspects of society by the poem half-rhyming, for example in the last words in the second line - "Saigon", semi-rhymes with "man!" in the fourth line. This demonstrates innocence almost, like a child has wrote it, though the message behind it is anything but innocent. The soldier is angry at the treatment of New Zealand soldiers by the hands of their own government who tricked them into fighting in the Vietnam war.

The poem suggests that generally lower class, Maoris are fighting in the war as "a coat and a cap and a well-paid job Looked better than shovelling metal", the concept of "shovelling metal"suggests poor paying jobs and low income earners, while the extensive use of Maori language such as "whare"and "Te Rauparaha" shows that the persona is Maori himself and also, justifying the point that Maoris are a long way from home when fighting in Vietnam and it is not their place to fight.

Comparative Essay Assignment Planning: Use of memory in ULB and SOW

[Atomisation – Splitting up of an individual. Completely disintegrating]

Main Points of Essay...

1. Memory changes surround environment
   Kien
   ~ Jungle of Screaming Souls – renamed after war. Forever associated with war.
   
   Tereza
   ~ Pg160 - “The streets and buildings could no longer return to their original names”; “a Czech spa suddenly metamorphosed into a miniature imaginary Russia
   
   
2. Memory is being used as a miserable reminder to time past – “eternal return”
   Kien
   ~ “We’re prisoners to our shared memories of wonderful times together”- Phuong pg77
   ~ Kien struggles from nightmares constantly hurtling him back into wartime.
   
   Tereza
   ~ Memories of her family background keep reoccurring. In particular, the memory of her vulgar mother who enjoys humiliating Tereza. This memory forces Tereza to repulse characteristically from her mother and the thought of similarities especially physical dishearten Tereza.
   ~ Struggles from troubling dreams where she is forced to relive her worries and bad experiences from the past.
   
   
3. Memory is being used to divide the individual
   Kien
   ~ Kien cannot make sense of everything, of all his memories and pain until he has written them down.
   ~ War tints every happy memory that Kien has.
   ~ The act of remembering drives Kien into deep depression~
   ~ "It was a sadness...a pain which could send one soaring back into a pass”
   ~ “nostalgia drove him into the depths of his imagination” – writing becomes the evocation of memory
   
   Tereza
   ~ The act of remembering drives Tereza into paranoia. Example of this – Memory of infidelity with engineer haunts Tereza
   ~ The memory of abuse of her mother forces Tereza’s radical split between body and soul; as much as she rejects her body, it is her soul she gives to Tomas.

~~~~

More Ideas to Consider....

The Sorrow of War

· Kien -
~ Driven by memory and structured by vignettes.
~ Ways in which memory is described:- road [“looking back down the road of his past...”]; river
~ “The sorrow of the battlefield could not normally be pinpointed to one particular event, or even one person.”
~ The polarising effect of war: the paradox of war --- memory carries this in the book (prominent themes mindmap)

Bridging Between Two Novels: Ideas

I have found that there are two sides in the novels We and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. These sides are;

SIDE ONE...

Where sex is separate from everything. Essentially the soul does not exist and the body is used as the main instrument. With this view comes no regrets, no baggage - freedom, no eternal return and lightness. What I want to explore is the positive and negatives of this way of being. As for characters, this side is prominent in Tomas (though Tomas loves Tereza, he does not feel he has to be loyal to her sexually), Sabina and also in D-503 at the beginning of We.

Sabina portrays this (pg 265) where she is talking about her death. "She wants to die under the sign of lightness" by being cremated. It is a way of showing the superficiality that has taken a hold over her as being buried in the ground is a sign of heaviness and having a gravestone is a sign of eternal return but by being cremated the ashes remain on the surface and forever light.

Also the motion and reason behind her art has changed. Noted at the beginning of the book her art was a way of expressing her true emotions..."of course, I couldn't show them to anybody...On the surface, there was always an impeccably realistic world, but underneath...lurked something different, something mysterious or abstract....On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unitelligible truth." (pg 60) but by the end of the book, they become "kitsch" as it has become a commercial enterprise for her...."She had no trouble selling her paintings". This is an example of how lacking the belief of a soul effects your outlook as a person.

Effects of separating Soul and Body;

~ Atomization -> the splitting up of an individual by complete disintegration.

~ Superficiality

With D-503 at the beginning of We, he believes that individual freedom is "heavy" and a remains of the distant past, and that numbers, the inhabitants of the one State, live and work best in collective state of gratification rather than happiness (http://www.enotes.com/we-yevgeny-zamyatin-salem/we). The idea of "collectivism" is an example of lacking a soul that creates an identity for yourself. The bodies on Onestate are used as machines, calculators of the Benefactor and all his means. Also the concept that freedom is heaviness and therefore something to avoid relates back to Tomas and Sabina's way of life. The effects of this sort of heaviness however, is no individual thought or freedom whereas with Tomas and Sabina, it is the freedom that they impose of themselves that help to keep them lighter characters.

Quotes that help me show this concept:

"To ensure that erotic friendship never grew into the aggression of love, he would meet each of his long-term mistresses only at intervals" pg 11

"The unwritten contract of erotic friendship stipulated that Tomas should exclude all love from his life." pg 12

SIDE TWO...

Where love and sex are intertwined. The soul is definite part of the body and the two work together. However eternal return accompanies this. The characters that show this is Tereza and D-503 towards the end of the novel.

"We don't know ourselves until we are in a relationship with someone" and "To understand someone do you need to let your life intertwine with theirs?" --- These are two questions that I am also going to be exploring in the background. The relationship between Franz and Sabina and the symbol of the bowler hat, and the forbidden relationship with D-503 and I-330 also will help me to gain knowledge on this question.

Quotations;

~ "..it was the amazement of seeing her own 'I'. She forgot she was looking at the instrument panel of her body mechanisms; she thought she saw her soul shining through the features of her face."

It is passion for I-330 that leads D-503 to gain "weight" as he rebels more against what the Onestate is pushing for. Pronouns are crucial for this as "we" changes to "I". "We" for D-503 is symbolic of every body being used as one instrument and soul does not exsist whereas "I" is symbolic of self-actualisation, which the act of writing encourages. The reference "my cheeks are burning" (pg2) depicts him awakening to his emotions.

POSSIBLE ESSAY QUESTIONS

1) Comparative Essay to show the effects of separating the soul and body in contrast with the interweaving of both elements in the novels We and The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

2) Soul and Body: The analysis of two separate ways of being.