The Associate of Chinese and Comparative Literature 2024 Biennial Conference

Description

The Nonhuman and the 'Intransitive' Ecological Elegy

Across various literary periods, the ‘human’ object and its death have commonly been the focus of mourning for writers. This consistent gaze remains in place in Seamus Heaney’s work. For instance, critics often examine Heaney’s filial lamentation (‘Mid-Term Break’, ‘Clearances’, ‘Seeing Things’) and mourning for the victims of the Troubles (‘Casualty’), or poems in memory of fellow poets (such as for Robert Lowell). However, it is clear that from his middle period of poetry (1975-1984) to his final two collections, District and Circle (2006) and Human Chain (2010), Heaney’s elegiac acts put an unusual emphasis on the increasingly nonhuman subject.

This increased attention paid to the nonhuman death/body rejects any assumptions of, but puts right back into question, the act of human in-betweenness, the act of human agency for consolation itself. Heaney’s elegiac focus on the nonhuman is poised, then, upon the very question of human entitlement for the act of mourning itself. Who can mourn contemporary atrocities? From what position can voice arise without itself contributing to suffering? In what I am designating the ‘failed elegy’ in Heaney’s poems, I argue that a focus on the nonhuman elegiac object, and an embedded self-critique of earlier acts of human elegy, question the presumptive success of the historically elegiac impulse. Does the elegiac act compromise, after all, its own humanity? To put it briefly, casting a focus on the act of mourning a nonhuman object puts pressure on the limits of elegy, and its own remains.

In this paper, I discuss Seamus Heaney's mid-later career innovations in the genre of elegy. I argue that the explorations of the nonhuman object (Field Work, Station Island), the choice of elegizing the bog bodies (North), and finally the removal of human agency in what I call ‘intransitive elegies’118 (District and Circle, Human Chain), are ethical acts that develop new paths for the contemporary elegy. These ‘failed’ elegies, as this paper demonstrates, are not free from the embarrassing encounter between the living and the dead; however, they are, most of the time, built upon such significant embarrassing moments. They do not try in some superficial manner to ‘solve’ the problems of elegiac encounter; instead, they present themselves as the problem itself. Accordingly, the paper shifts its focus towards the elegiac object: the dead, and the nonhuman more generally. This shift of focus takes shape in the context of broader movements in literary studies that pay attention to objects-in-themselves. Critics have applied some of these insights to a range of issues in Heaney’s work (see Zirra 2017; Muecke 2014), but here I explore possible readings of Heaney’s elegy as a primary site for future criticism of his work.

Period	23 Jun 2024 → 25 Jun 2024
Event type	Conference
Location	Hong KongShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International