Ep. 14 - Panel 3B - Part 1 - Digging up specters - Ian Hickey (MIC, Limerick)

NPPSH Conference

This paper seeks to examine the haunting function of the bog in the poetry of Seamus Heaney through the theoretical lens of Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx. The paper argues that the present and future are influenced by spectres of the past through what Derrida would term hauntology with Derrida himself noting that ‘a ghost never dies, it always remains to come and to come-back’ (Derrida 2006, p.123). In the bog poems Heaney uses the bog as a way of viewing contemporary violence from a wider, older, Northern European perspective. Similarities are drawn between contemporary Northern Ireland and that of Scandinavia in the poetry and it is the circular, repetitive nature of history that enables the poet to locate a plateau, outside his primary world, to view the events of his present world. The spectres voice influences and guides the unconscious of the poet and society in a manner that makes history repeat itself, albeit under a different guise with Derrida noting that ‘we inherit the very thing that allows us to bear witness to it’(Derrida 2006, p.68). The function of the bog in the poetry will be traced through the poems ‘Bogland’, ‘The Tollund Man’ and ‘Punishment’ in order to show how the spectres voices escalated to coincide with the violence during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Ian Hickey is a Ph.D research student under the supervision of Dr. Eugene O’Brien in Mary Immaculate College, Limerick. His current field placement is in Mary Immaculate College as a departmental assistant in the Department of English Language and Literature. He is interested in Modern Irish poetry and fiction, Irish theatre, hauntology and literary theory.