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Compare How Heaney And Friel Depict Tribalism In ‘north’ And ‘translations’
Pre-U (A-Level) English Personal Investigation / Irish Literature
Date : 30/04/2020
Author Information
Uploaded by : Sebastian
Uploaded on : 30/04/2020
Subject : English
Seamus Heaney and Brian Friel shared concerns over the state of British and Irish conflict, writing during the 70 s and 80 s - the apex of violence during The Troubles. Although for both writers, the decision to address the issues was an obvious one, the angle they took in their works differed vastly. The word tribal refers to a group of people who live together, share the same language, culture and history, but whose lifestyle is stunted in the past, often resulting in moments of savagery. The tribalism conveyed in `North` depicts the state of Ireland during the Troubles through referencing the victims of Iron-age killings in order to exemplify how that type of violence hasn`t changed and is present in Ireland during Heaney s writing. Friel s presentation of tribalism, by contrast, depicts a small community that lives a predominantly basic lifestyle. However, when the English intrude into this space, the play takes a violent turn that witnesses the disappearance and supposed murder of an Englishman. Butterworth s The Ferryman and McDonagh s The Lieutenant of Inishmore depict the nature of Irish culture, rooted in mythology and conflict. Above all, they both explore the theme of recurring violence - something characteristic of tribal behaviour. Butterworth creates atmosphere by using a hybrid form of realism and the supernatural. The violence emerges as he allows the dialogue and the intrusion of the IRA visitors to fester, resulting in a violent climax of built-up conflict. The critical angle of this essay will be to address the varying literary techniques that each writer employs, looking at more specifically structure, form, language and the use of mythology to present tribal situations in naturalistic settings.
Seamus Heaney, one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, often used the form of a love poem in order to explore other themes, for example, in Digging , Heaney expresses his admiration for his father and grandfather, yet the poem moves towards how Heaney views himself as a writer. In Love and Punishment in the poetry of Seamus Heaney , Luke McBratney refers to this technique as mixing genres . Heaney evidently uses this in North as in the Bog Poems , he weighs up the beauty of the preservation of the iron-age victims (preserved by peat), with the guilt he feels about aestheticising such human tragedy.
This movement towards love that Heaney employs in his poems falls under one of the two primal emotions in the human being , the other being fear. The inescapability of these two primal emotions is what Heaney taps into throughout the collection, which creates a certain unease about the tribal nature of the poems. Although fellow Irish writer and subject to this essay, Martin McDonagh, raises the issue of tribalism in a more head-on manner, with extreme moments of excessive violence throughout his play The Lieutenant of Inishmore , Heaney steers away from the actual physical acts that can be attributed to the conflict during The Troubles, and focuses in on his own psychology. McDonagh, however, according to critic Aleks Sierz, also tap[s] into more primitive feelings , the effect of McDonagh s in-yer-face drama. His excessive use of violence fleshes out the primal and tribal nature that man attempts to hide in most situations. However, given the circumstances of living in Ireland, especially during The Troubles, this primitive side is more easily exposed.
From North , Heaney emerges as a self-conscious poet, who constantly battles with himself the dilemmas of the art form , with regards to creating something beautiful from something so horrendous, such as the fate of the bog-body victims. Heaney s own self-conflict on the matter is addressed, with references to the dying gaul , in The Grauballe Man , that compares the beautiful ancient sculpture of a soldier dying on his shield, with Heaney s own poeticising of the bog body found preserved, with a slit throat in Jutland. Heaney, like Friel, knew full well that his work would attain little to no reception had it been written in Gaelic, therefore in North , he attempts to use the language of the oppressor, English, to push back through dictions and conquer Britain in their own language. What Heaney intended to do was to reject the traditional British form of a sonnet through his lexical decisions, and to use instead an Anglo-Saxon form, focusing on heavy stresses and creating rhythm through alliteration.
Heaney, in Viking Dublin: Trial pieces , actually reverses the traditional English form as he references Shakespeare s Hamlet by writing I am Hamlet the Dane , yet without the iambic pentameter so frequently used by Shakespeare. In an interview in 1982, Heaney explained that the melodious grace of the English iambic line was some kind of affront, that it needed to be wrecked . It is pointed out that this was used to disrupt the smoothness of English lyric in a way appropriate to the violence of their [the poems ] material , suggesting that the natural flow of the traditional English line was something that Heaney wanted to invert, illustrating the harsh reality of tribal violence, as well as undermining the British in a way similar to that of Robert Lowell, who practiced violences upon the English sonnet . The free association of part IV of the poem literally shifts the original Iambic pentameter into a sort of free indirect discourse whereby Heaney s thoughts drift, and we enter into his mind, observing the self-conflict over his poetry - self-conflict relating to that of Hamlet s, in not being able to make his mind up over what actions to take.
The further type of conflict that Heaney feels, concerns his lack of direct political involvement with the sufferings of his tribe . The politically and socially unstable environment that Heaney found himself in during The Troubles was heightened by the fact that he was a poet. As Neil Corcoran writes in The Poetry of Seamus Heaney , the fact of being a poet, especially in a time of war puts him/her under pressure to say something, to take sides , which Heaney simply struggles to accept. Corcoran admits this dilemma to Heaney, who during the times of conflict, found himself as somewhat of an outsider to any tribe. McDonagh found himself in a similar situation, as Graham Whybrow observes that he (McDonagh) writes both within a tradition and against a mythology . This disparity of passing on the historical convention attributed to the Irish greats, such as Yeats, Joyce, Friel and Heaney, whilst going against the mythology that plays a key role in the greatness of those leading literary figures incapsulates McDonagh s stance on the issues between England and Ireland. He himself being born in England creates an uneasy mix of both nationalities which puts him as a sort of outsider to either side, or tribe.
Although the nature of belonging is not the predominant factor in North , it becomes a consequence of the collection, and can be found in the character of Yolland , in Brian Friel s play Translations . Yolland, an Englishman, finds himself falling in love just as much with Maire, an Irish girl, as the country of Ireland itself. The implied tragic fate of Yolland suggests that to translate to another tribe is merely impossible - it is necessary to choose either one or the other, or to reiterate Corcoran s point to take sides . Often receiving passive-aggressive demands from the IRA for the writing of a poem that would praise their cause pushed Heaney into a corner whereby he understood that both tribes involved in the conflict were equally to blame for the eruption of violence. In the poem North , Heaney finds his solution, that is, through the longships swimming tongue that tells him to lie down in the word-hoard [and] burrow . Here, Heaney presents the opposite of an epiphany - instead of seeing the light, he is going to burrow down into the ground and root out the physical bog-bodies, and observe what they bring with them. This poem, although not the first of the collection, sets up the reader for what Heaney will do throughout, that is, to delve back into history and ancient mythology using the Anglo-Saxon verse-form to depict an inevitability of human violence and tribal behaviour.
Friel s Translations , by contrast, takes the form of a play in order to address the issue of Irish conflict. His depiction of tribalism attacks the problem from a completely different perspective to that of Heaney, as he focuses in on a small, fictional town called Baile Beag , an Irish-speaking community in County Donegal in 1833. The advantage of using a play as an outlet for Friel s view on the matter at hand was that he could use characters of which the audience can relate to, making the drama of the conflict all the more real. By focusing on actual people, Friel is able to visually and audibly convey the physical and linguistic nature of tribalism in a naturalistic way - something lacking in poetry. Whilst the form of a poem is advantageous in that it allows for more lexical freedom of expression, it cannot concentrate on the ways of the tribe, demonstrated in Friel s insightful play. McDonagh s The Lieutenant of Inishmore and Butterworth s The Ferryman also take the form of a play, allowing them to enter a community and portray characters that the audience can empathise with.
The structure of a poem is used as a linguistic tool by Heaney, whereby he can assemble the poems in a way that visually depicts history being entered. For example, in Bone Dreams and Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces , Heaney uses a skeletal structure of short quatrains to pin-point significant moments and historical artefacts ( antler combs, bone pins, coins longship ) in time. The skeletal structure that Heaney uses on the page visually conveys what he was seeing - the thin body of a bog-body and thus more profoundly affects the reader who is now able to envisage the savagery of tribal violence. As the reader reads down the page, they are taken further back in time. Heaney drew this comparison from reading P.V. Glob s book The Bog People , which studied the way in which the peat in Jutland preserved the iron-age bodies, victims themselves of savage killings. After reading this and also discovering that there were bog-bodies in his own country, Heaney s idea was that wherever you go in Ireland, you are standing upon the sheer brutality of history, and that by entering it, much like entering a sondage (a small, square archeological test pit), there is a sort of rebirth that, to Heaney, seemed to encapsulate the state of violence in Ireland during The Troubles. Jez Butterworth s The Ferryman has a similar allusion to this idea, though in the form of a play. Butterworth presents the character of Quinn Carney, a former IRA militant, who, after the murder of his brother, Seamus, has changed his occupation to work the land. The similarities between North and The Ferryman are evident as Quinn s past comes back to haunt him when he starts to dig into the land. The implication of this is such that Quinn is forced back into his violent past, linking to Heaney s exploration of the tribalism of mankind as a whole.
The structure of The Ferryman is very much similar to that of Heaney s poem Bog Queen , as they both become progressively more violent and a sense of tension slowly builds throughout. In The Ferryman , Butterworth frequently uses the pinteresque stage directions Pause and Beat , which aid the play in slowly building the tension towards the climactic ending that demonstrates the violence attached to tribalism, this being Quinn s killing of Muldoon and Magennis. Likewise, Bog Queen presents the first-person narrative from the perspective of a female bog body victim, who [lies] waiting between turf-face and demesne wall . The poem occupies both a physical and lexical space, though a liminal space, in which the Bog Queen belongs to neither the wall , nor the bog. This suggests that there is something waiting to be reborn, in this case for the purpose of exacting revenge, which concludes in the final stanza with the Queen [rising] from the dark . Heaney, throughout the collection, creates a link between the Iron-age bog body victims and the victims of conflict in Ireland during The Troubles. The peat that preserves the bodies stands as a metaphor for the preservation and escalation of violence that comes into full flow between 1968 and 1998 - an inevitable thirty year war that had been building since the Norman invasions between 1169 and 1536. The theme of revenge attributed to tribal behaviour can also be found in the final moments of The Ferryman , where Butterworth s mythological employment of banshees becomes real to the story. Butterworth s use of the intrusion of the supernatural into a naturalistic setting creates a sense of invasion, a consequence of the opposing tribe of the IRA entering the Carney household.
The structure of Friel s Translations follows a different line - one that takes the audience on more of an emotional journey. Friel plays with the readers hopes for a happy ending. In the first act (before it is revealed what the true intentions of the British are), Friel creates a sense that the intrusion of the British in Baile Beag is perfectly innocent, and that despite the language barrier between Yolland and Maire, there is still a chance that they can transcend the tribal differences and find love. However, Friel pulls this hope away, as Yolland s disappearance suggests that exogamein , as mentioned by Jimmy, i.e. marrying out of the tribe, is impossible. The conventional structure of having three acts divides the play into three varying levels of action. Act one establishes the characters and depicts the situation of the play Act Two further develops this conflict and we witness the misdemeanour of Maire and Yolland s kiss Act Three demonstrates the consequences of having an inter-tribal relationship. Friel employs symbolic dramatic signposts amongst the linear development of the play, contained within this structure which is framed by the birth and death of Nellie Ruadh s baby . The birth symbolises hope and happiness for Ireland, but Friel again takes this hope away with the death of the baby. The toying with the audience s hope is not only found in Yolland and Maire s relationship, but also in the loss of the Gaelic language, represented by Hugh s forgetting of the classical world in the final line of the play (P.90-91). Moments like these are interwoven into the episodical structure of the play, which looks into The past, via mythology The present (1833), showing the history of Irish/British conflict, and The future, depicting the origins of The Troubles with the aid of hindsight. It follows, then, that the play can be seen as a visual depiction of the vast history of a tribe, attempting to resist inevitable colonisation. A sort of pessimism follows this and is adopted by all three writers (Heaney, Butterworth and Friel) that suggests that there is simply too much conflict in the history between the opposing tribes of Britain and Ireland for recuperation. This differs from McDonagh s The Lieutenant of Inishmore , as he concludes the play with a sort of harmonisation, despite the truly horrific violence of the play, with Davey questioning so all this terror has been for absolutely nothing? . For McDonagh, even tribalism as a deeply-rooted emotion can be overcome and perhaps he, having the luxury of perspective (writing after the Good Friday Agreement that put an end to The Troubles), is right. Looking past the excessive violence of his play, we can observe that unity between tribes can be a success, and this is exemplified by the political, social and economic prosperity of Ireland in recent years.
Whilst the Gaelic language still lingered at the time of Heaney and Friel s writing, it had practically disappeared at the time of Butterworth and McDonagh s. A similarity, therefore, was drawn upon both by Heaney and by Friel, who were conscious of the fact that to gain any recognition for their writing, it would have to be in English, the language of the oppressor. Despite this, they both went about writing in a way that would linguistically undermine English, and subsequently defeat the British at their own game , so to speak. Heaney emerges with a comparison of the two languages, that Neil Corcoran distinguishes as two species of language one natural, rooted in the soil the other arbitrary, male, alien . The invasion of the British is therefore not only a physical colonisation, but a linguistic one. The word alien that Corcoran uses highlights the fact that both sides of the conflict saw the other as an opposing, vastly different, alien tribe.
Language not only conveys meaning, but also holds history, culture and identity within it, and the loss of Gaelic is the loss of those said elements. To salvage the language, Heaney had to use a relic of verse form from before the Norman invasion, employing harsh plosive sounds ( slashed and dumped ). However Translations , The Lieutenant of Inishmore , and to a lesser extent The Ferryman , use Hiberno-English, employing Irish colloquialisms ( feck , Cripes ) to maintain Irish identity and blend the two in a way that becomes a revised language of Ireland itself - a product of British colonisation that Heaney compares to as a raping in Act of Union . Neil Corcoran points out that just as Bog Queen is the poem in which it is Ireland who speaks, here it is England . Act of Union inhabits the British voice in order to address the political un ion of 1800 between England and Ireland, from the outsiders perspective. The poem itself sexualises the politics between the two nations by presenting a metaphorical sexual assault - an assault that gives birth to an aggressive Northern Ireland, with parasitical / and ignorant little fists . The imagery that Heaney presents conveys the idea of an aggressive disease that spreads with no treaty [to salvage] the big pain .
The Anglo-Saxon stress-verse that Heaney employs consists of four heavy stresses per line, which allows him to add an extra fifth stress on certain lines (e.g. A gash breaking open the ferny bed ), which lexically creates an intrusion of an extra stress, suggesting the subsequent intrusion of the British into Ireland. For Heaney, the mere involvement of the British in his poems changes the language and structure in a way similar to that of Friel s Translations . When explaining the purpose of the English presence in Baile Beag, Owen tells the Gaelic-speaking characters that they are there to map out the land and create new place-names. Just as Heaney s writing is intruded by the extra stress, Owen explains that where there s ambiguity, they ll [the place-names] be Anglicised , depicting the destructive nature of the British as Poetry is dependant on linguistic ambiguity to function, and the English are there to remove that ambiguity thereby removing poetry. Friel uses this calibration to show how the Anglicisation was the modern way of invading a country, through words. This type of colonisation, therefore, can be seen as no more than a sophisticated, linguistic invasion.
Friel s presentation of the English as linguistically sophisticated, though the language itself being particularly suited for the purposes of commerce alone, differs from Butterworth s portrayal of the only English character in The Ferryman Tom Kettle. Tom Kettle seems to have translated from his original English tribe, to his current Irish one - the Carney family. Unlike Heaney, who explores the linguistic effect of British colonisation, Butterworth gives an insight into the reversal of positions amongst two opposing tribes through the line here I brung some windfalls actually . Much like Yolland in Translations , Tom Kettle has translated himself to the Irish side, the opposing side of the English from where he is originally from. The grammatical incorrectness of brung audibly conveys how he s lost his language, and despite his English origins, has become Irish. This is also evident in the Irish colloquialisms that Tom Kettle employs, such as aye - a word foreign to the English people who speak English.
What all four texts have in common is closely tied to what Butterworth summarises in an online interview: the pain of disappearance . Heaney focuses on the disappearance of the Gaelic language whilst addressing the disappearance of violent history into the ground beneath. Friel and Butterworth present it in a way that parallels the fate of informers at the hands of the IRA during The Troubles, often being kidnapped and murdered. McDonagh differs from all three, by focusing his play on the disappearance of a cat, something of seemingly little significance, which stands to heighten the excessiveness of human violence. Though these writers use different methods, the effects of the disappearances remain the same, with outbursts of intense violence. Heaney, in his own words, stands as an artful voyeur to the horrific sight of the Windeby Girl , reiterating his standpoint as merely a spectator. The tribal violence of Ireland is something that all four writers refuse to condone, despite presenting the historical causes for such violence, which in most circumstances, stemmed from British aggression.
A nation of people under threat from a larger country will inevitably result in the desensitisation of those people, fleshing out the tribal and primitive nature of mankind. Friel s depiction of this is more subtle and due to the timing in which Translations is set. He makes the audience able to see the peace we should aim for in the future, by presenting the past to stand as an example so that we don t make the same mistakes. Heaney s self-consciousness throughout the poems in North makes for a more controversial read. His own self-conflict is projected onto the reader who is, just like Heaney, gaining pleasure from something so terribly tragic. The questions that Heaney poses to himself raise further questions of whether Heaney himself has been desensitised by the sheer violence in Ireland. He himself understands the tribal revenge that encapsulates his collection, therefore it is difficult to deny that Heaney is complicit in the violent nature of man. McDonagh presents a truly shocking scene with unimaginable violence throughout. The effect of this is that he is able to satirise the stereotypes of the Irish people in order to flesh out their faults whilst maintaining a comedic atmosphere. Butterworth, on the other hand, focuses in on a more detailed depiction of a family in rural life. All four texts explore the nature of what it means to be Irish - how Irishness came to be, and how the major events of Ireland s history will shape it in the years to come. The vastly different ways in which the writers go about depicting the wonderful yet tribal culture of Ireland illustrates the sheer power of literature as a medium of perspective and education, which tragically, at the same time conveys, as Heaney s North delves into, how human tragedy provokes beauty. In Ireland s case, the tragedy is violence, and the beauty This resource was uploaded by: Sebastian
Seamus Heaney, one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, often used the form of a love poem in order to explore other themes, for example, in Digging , Heaney expresses his admiration for his father and grandfather, yet the poem moves towards how Heaney views himself as a writer. In Love and Punishment in the poetry of Seamus Heaney , Luke McBratney refers to this technique as mixing genres . Heaney evidently uses this in North as in the Bog Poems , he weighs up the beauty of the preservation of the iron-age victims (preserved by peat), with the guilt he feels about aestheticising such human tragedy.
This movement towards love that Heaney employs in his poems falls under one of the two primal emotions in the human being , the other being fear. The inescapability of these two primal emotions is what Heaney taps into throughout the collection, which creates a certain unease about the tribal nature of the poems. Although fellow Irish writer and subject to this essay, Martin McDonagh, raises the issue of tribalism in a more head-on manner, with extreme moments of excessive violence throughout his play The Lieutenant of Inishmore , Heaney steers away from the actual physical acts that can be attributed to the conflict during The Troubles, and focuses in on his own psychology. McDonagh, however, according to critic Aleks Sierz, also tap[s] into more primitive feelings , the effect of McDonagh s in-yer-face drama. His excessive use of violence fleshes out the primal and tribal nature that man attempts to hide in most situations. However, given the circumstances of living in Ireland, especially during The Troubles, this primitive side is more easily exposed.
From North , Heaney emerges as a self-conscious poet, who constantly battles with himself the dilemmas of the art form , with regards to creating something beautiful from something so horrendous, such as the fate of the bog-body victims. Heaney s own self-conflict on the matter is addressed, with references to the dying gaul , in The Grauballe Man , that compares the beautiful ancient sculpture of a soldier dying on his shield, with Heaney s own poeticising of the bog body found preserved, with a slit throat in Jutland. Heaney, like Friel, knew full well that his work would attain little to no reception had it been written in Gaelic, therefore in North , he attempts to use the language of the oppressor, English, to push back through dictions and conquer Britain in their own language. What Heaney intended to do was to reject the traditional British form of a sonnet through his lexical decisions, and to use instead an Anglo-Saxon form, focusing on heavy stresses and creating rhythm through alliteration.
Heaney, in Viking Dublin: Trial pieces , actually reverses the traditional English form as he references Shakespeare s Hamlet by writing I am Hamlet the Dane , yet without the iambic pentameter so frequently used by Shakespeare. In an interview in 1982, Heaney explained that the melodious grace of the English iambic line was some kind of affront, that it needed to be wrecked . It is pointed out that this was used to disrupt the smoothness of English lyric in a way appropriate to the violence of their [the poems ] material , suggesting that the natural flow of the traditional English line was something that Heaney wanted to invert, illustrating the harsh reality of tribal violence, as well as undermining the British in a way similar to that of Robert Lowell, who practiced violences upon the English sonnet . The free association of part IV of the poem literally shifts the original Iambic pentameter into a sort of free indirect discourse whereby Heaney s thoughts drift, and we enter into his mind, observing the self-conflict over his poetry - self-conflict relating to that of Hamlet s, in not being able to make his mind up over what actions to take.
The further type of conflict that Heaney feels, concerns his lack of direct political involvement with the sufferings of his tribe . The politically and socially unstable environment that Heaney found himself in during The Troubles was heightened by the fact that he was a poet. As Neil Corcoran writes in The Poetry of Seamus Heaney , the fact of being a poet, especially in a time of war puts him/her under pressure to say something, to take sides , which Heaney simply struggles to accept. Corcoran admits this dilemma to Heaney, who during the times of conflict, found himself as somewhat of an outsider to any tribe. McDonagh found himself in a similar situation, as Graham Whybrow observes that he (McDonagh) writes both within a tradition and against a mythology . This disparity of passing on the historical convention attributed to the Irish greats, such as Yeats, Joyce, Friel and Heaney, whilst going against the mythology that plays a key role in the greatness of those leading literary figures incapsulates McDonagh s stance on the issues between England and Ireland. He himself being born in England creates an uneasy mix of both nationalities which puts him as a sort of outsider to either side, or tribe.
Although the nature of belonging is not the predominant factor in North , it becomes a consequence of the collection, and can be found in the character of Yolland , in Brian Friel s play Translations . Yolland, an Englishman, finds himself falling in love just as much with Maire, an Irish girl, as the country of Ireland itself. The implied tragic fate of Yolland suggests that to translate to another tribe is merely impossible - it is necessary to choose either one or the other, or to reiterate Corcoran s point to take sides . Often receiving passive-aggressive demands from the IRA for the writing of a poem that would praise their cause pushed Heaney into a corner whereby he understood that both tribes involved in the conflict were equally to blame for the eruption of violence. In the poem North , Heaney finds his solution, that is, through the longships swimming tongue that tells him to lie down in the word-hoard [and] burrow . Here, Heaney presents the opposite of an epiphany - instead of seeing the light, he is going to burrow down into the ground and root out the physical bog-bodies, and observe what they bring with them. This poem, although not the first of the collection, sets up the reader for what Heaney will do throughout, that is, to delve back into history and ancient mythology using the Anglo-Saxon verse-form to depict an inevitability of human violence and tribal behaviour.
Friel s Translations , by contrast, takes the form of a play in order to address the issue of Irish conflict. His depiction of tribalism attacks the problem from a completely different perspective to that of Heaney, as he focuses in on a small, fictional town called Baile Beag , an Irish-speaking community in County Donegal in 1833. The advantage of using a play as an outlet for Friel s view on the matter at hand was that he could use characters of which the audience can relate to, making the drama of the conflict all the more real. By focusing on actual people, Friel is able to visually and audibly convey the physical and linguistic nature of tribalism in a naturalistic way - something lacking in poetry. Whilst the form of a poem is advantageous in that it allows for more lexical freedom of expression, it cannot concentrate on the ways of the tribe, demonstrated in Friel s insightful play. McDonagh s The Lieutenant of Inishmore and Butterworth s The Ferryman also take the form of a play, allowing them to enter a community and portray characters that the audience can empathise with.
The structure of a poem is used as a linguistic tool by Heaney, whereby he can assemble the poems in a way that visually depicts history being entered. For example, in Bone Dreams and Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces , Heaney uses a skeletal structure of short quatrains to pin-point significant moments and historical artefacts ( antler combs, bone pins, coins longship ) in time. The skeletal structure that Heaney uses on the page visually conveys what he was seeing - the thin body of a bog-body and thus more profoundly affects the reader who is now able to envisage the savagery of tribal violence. As the reader reads down the page, they are taken further back in time. Heaney drew this comparison from reading P.V. Glob s book The Bog People , which studied the way in which the peat in Jutland preserved the iron-age bodies, victims themselves of savage killings. After reading this and also discovering that there were bog-bodies in his own country, Heaney s idea was that wherever you go in Ireland, you are standing upon the sheer brutality of history, and that by entering it, much like entering a sondage (a small, square archeological test pit), there is a sort of rebirth that, to Heaney, seemed to encapsulate the state of violence in Ireland during The Troubles. Jez Butterworth s The Ferryman has a similar allusion to this idea, though in the form of a play. Butterworth presents the character of Quinn Carney, a former IRA militant, who, after the murder of his brother, Seamus, has changed his occupation to work the land. The similarities between North and The Ferryman are evident as Quinn s past comes back to haunt him when he starts to dig into the land. The implication of this is such that Quinn is forced back into his violent past, linking to Heaney s exploration of the tribalism of mankind as a whole.
The structure of The Ferryman is very much similar to that of Heaney s poem Bog Queen , as they both become progressively more violent and a sense of tension slowly builds throughout. In The Ferryman , Butterworth frequently uses the pinteresque stage directions Pause and Beat , which aid the play in slowly building the tension towards the climactic ending that demonstrates the violence attached to tribalism, this being Quinn s killing of Muldoon and Magennis. Likewise, Bog Queen presents the first-person narrative from the perspective of a female bog body victim, who [lies] waiting between turf-face and demesne wall . The poem occupies both a physical and lexical space, though a liminal space, in which the Bog Queen belongs to neither the wall , nor the bog. This suggests that there is something waiting to be reborn, in this case for the purpose of exacting revenge, which concludes in the final stanza with the Queen [rising] from the dark . Heaney, throughout the collection, creates a link between the Iron-age bog body victims and the victims of conflict in Ireland during The Troubles. The peat that preserves the bodies stands as a metaphor for the preservation and escalation of violence that comes into full flow between 1968 and 1998 - an inevitable thirty year war that had been building since the Norman invasions between 1169 and 1536. The theme of revenge attributed to tribal behaviour can also be found in the final moments of The Ferryman , where Butterworth s mythological employment of banshees becomes real to the story. Butterworth s use of the intrusion of the supernatural into a naturalistic setting creates a sense of invasion, a consequence of the opposing tribe of the IRA entering the Carney household.
The structure of Friel s Translations follows a different line - one that takes the audience on more of an emotional journey. Friel plays with the readers hopes for a happy ending. In the first act (before it is revealed what the true intentions of the British are), Friel creates a sense that the intrusion of the British in Baile Beag is perfectly innocent, and that despite the language barrier between Yolland and Maire, there is still a chance that they can transcend the tribal differences and find love. However, Friel pulls this hope away, as Yolland s disappearance suggests that exogamein , as mentioned by Jimmy, i.e. marrying out of the tribe, is impossible. The conventional structure of having three acts divides the play into three varying levels of action. Act one establishes the characters and depicts the situation of the play Act Two further develops this conflict and we witness the misdemeanour of Maire and Yolland s kiss Act Three demonstrates the consequences of having an inter-tribal relationship. Friel employs symbolic dramatic signposts amongst the linear development of the play, contained within this structure which is framed by the birth and death of Nellie Ruadh s baby . The birth symbolises hope and happiness for Ireland, but Friel again takes this hope away with the death of the baby. The toying with the audience s hope is not only found in Yolland and Maire s relationship, but also in the loss of the Gaelic language, represented by Hugh s forgetting of the classical world in the final line of the play (P.90-91). Moments like these are interwoven into the episodical structure of the play, which looks into The past, via mythology The present (1833), showing the history of Irish/British conflict, and The future, depicting the origins of The Troubles with the aid of hindsight. It follows, then, that the play can be seen as a visual depiction of the vast history of a tribe, attempting to resist inevitable colonisation. A sort of pessimism follows this and is adopted by all three writers (Heaney, Butterworth and Friel) that suggests that there is simply too much conflict in the history between the opposing tribes of Britain and Ireland for recuperation. This differs from McDonagh s The Lieutenant of Inishmore , as he concludes the play with a sort of harmonisation, despite the truly horrific violence of the play, with Davey questioning so all this terror has been for absolutely nothing? . For McDonagh, even tribalism as a deeply-rooted emotion can be overcome and perhaps he, having the luxury of perspective (writing after the Good Friday Agreement that put an end to The Troubles), is right. Looking past the excessive violence of his play, we can observe that unity between tribes can be a success, and this is exemplified by the political, social and economic prosperity of Ireland in recent years.
Whilst the Gaelic language still lingered at the time of Heaney and Friel s writing, it had practically disappeared at the time of Butterworth and McDonagh s. A similarity, therefore, was drawn upon both by Heaney and by Friel, who were conscious of the fact that to gain any recognition for their writing, it would have to be in English, the language of the oppressor. Despite this, they both went about writing in a way that would linguistically undermine English, and subsequently defeat the British at their own game , so to speak. Heaney emerges with a comparison of the two languages, that Neil Corcoran distinguishes as two species of language one natural, rooted in the soil the other arbitrary, male, alien . The invasion of the British is therefore not only a physical colonisation, but a linguistic one. The word alien that Corcoran uses highlights the fact that both sides of the conflict saw the other as an opposing, vastly different, alien tribe.
Language not only conveys meaning, but also holds history, culture and identity within it, and the loss of Gaelic is the loss of those said elements. To salvage the language, Heaney had to use a relic of verse form from before the Norman invasion, employing harsh plosive sounds ( slashed and dumped ). However Translations , The Lieutenant of Inishmore , and to a lesser extent The Ferryman , use Hiberno-English, employing Irish colloquialisms ( feck , Cripes ) to maintain Irish identity and blend the two in a way that becomes a revised language of Ireland itself - a product of British colonisation that Heaney compares to as a raping in Act of Union . Neil Corcoran points out that just as Bog Queen is the poem in which it is Ireland who speaks, here it is England . Act of Union inhabits the British voice in order to address the political un ion of 1800 between England and Ireland, from the outsiders perspective. The poem itself sexualises the politics between the two nations by presenting a metaphorical sexual assault - an assault that gives birth to an aggressive Northern Ireland, with parasitical / and ignorant little fists . The imagery that Heaney presents conveys the idea of an aggressive disease that spreads with no treaty [to salvage] the big pain .
The Anglo-Saxon stress-verse that Heaney employs consists of four heavy stresses per line, which allows him to add an extra fifth stress on certain lines (e.g. A gash breaking open the ferny bed ), which lexically creates an intrusion of an extra stress, suggesting the subsequent intrusion of the British into Ireland. For Heaney, the mere involvement of the British in his poems changes the language and structure in a way similar to that of Friel s Translations . When explaining the purpose of the English presence in Baile Beag, Owen tells the Gaelic-speaking characters that they are there to map out the land and create new place-names. Just as Heaney s writing is intruded by the extra stress, Owen explains that where there s ambiguity, they ll [the place-names] be Anglicised , depicting the destructive nature of the British as Poetry is dependant on linguistic ambiguity to function, and the English are there to remove that ambiguity thereby removing poetry. Friel uses this calibration to show how the Anglicisation was the modern way of invading a country, through words. This type of colonisation, therefore, can be seen as no more than a sophisticated, linguistic invasion.
Friel s presentation of the English as linguistically sophisticated, though the language itself being particularly suited for the purposes of commerce alone, differs from Butterworth s portrayal of the only English character in The Ferryman Tom Kettle. Tom Kettle seems to have translated from his original English tribe, to his current Irish one - the Carney family. Unlike Heaney, who explores the linguistic effect of British colonisation, Butterworth gives an insight into the reversal of positions amongst two opposing tribes through the line here I brung some windfalls actually . Much like Yolland in Translations , Tom Kettle has translated himself to the Irish side, the opposing side of the English from where he is originally from. The grammatical incorrectness of brung audibly conveys how he s lost his language, and despite his English origins, has become Irish. This is also evident in the Irish colloquialisms that Tom Kettle employs, such as aye - a word foreign to the English people who speak English.
What all four texts have in common is closely tied to what Butterworth summarises in an online interview: the pain of disappearance . Heaney focuses on the disappearance of the Gaelic language whilst addressing the disappearance of violent history into the ground beneath. Friel and Butterworth present it in a way that parallels the fate of informers at the hands of the IRA during The Troubles, often being kidnapped and murdered. McDonagh differs from all three, by focusing his play on the disappearance of a cat, something of seemingly little significance, which stands to heighten the excessiveness of human violence. Though these writers use different methods, the effects of the disappearances remain the same, with outbursts of intense violence. Heaney, in his own words, stands as an artful voyeur to the horrific sight of the Windeby Girl , reiterating his standpoint as merely a spectator. The tribal violence of Ireland is something that all four writers refuse to condone, despite presenting the historical causes for such violence, which in most circumstances, stemmed from British aggression.
A nation of people under threat from a larger country will inevitably result in the desensitisation of those people, fleshing out the tribal and primitive nature of mankind. Friel s depiction of this is more subtle and due to the timing in which Translations is set. He makes the audience able to see the peace we should aim for in the future, by presenting the past to stand as an example so that we don t make the same mistakes. Heaney s self-consciousness throughout the poems in North makes for a more controversial read. His own self-conflict is projected onto the reader who is, just like Heaney, gaining pleasure from something so terribly tragic. The questions that Heaney poses to himself raise further questions of whether Heaney himself has been desensitised by the sheer violence in Ireland. He himself understands the tribal revenge that encapsulates his collection, therefore it is difficult to deny that Heaney is complicit in the violent nature of man. McDonagh presents a truly shocking scene with unimaginable violence throughout. The effect of this is that he is able to satirise the stereotypes of the Irish people in order to flesh out their faults whilst maintaining a comedic atmosphere. Butterworth, on the other hand, focuses in on a more detailed depiction of a family in rural life. All four texts explore the nature of what it means to be Irish - how Irishness came to be, and how the major events of Ireland s history will shape it in the years to come. The vastly different ways in which the writers go about depicting the wonderful yet tribal culture of Ireland illustrates the sheer power of literature as a medium of perspective and education, which tragically, at the same time conveys, as Heaney s North delves into, how human tragedy provokes beauty. In Ireland s case, the tragedy is violence, and the beauty This resource was uploaded by: Sebastian