[In the following essay, Docherty assesses McGuckian's poetry in terms of its concern with ritual, its “ idealist” subjectivity, and its links with surrealism.]

McGuckian's poetry is pointless, in a sense akin to the way in which Molly Bloom's soliloquy is without point, unpunctuated or unpunctual. A typical sentence meanders around a point, apostrophically veering from it whenever it seems to be about to touch ground, so to speak:

                              You call me aspen, tree of the woman's
Tongue, but if my longer and longer sentences
Prove me wholly female, I'd be persimmon,
And good kindling, to us both.(1)

It has become fashionable to read McGuckian as a poet whose language, grammar and syntax all serve to question masculinism, and to see her as a poet in a literary lineage deriving from Joyce's Molly. There may be some truth in this, but at the outset it might be worth suggesting that the lines from “Aviary” just quoted provide strong circumstantial evidence for a hunch one has while reading McGuckian. Like another predecessor aligned with a feminist poetic, Emily Dickinson (and also like McDiarmid), McGuckian seems to be a keen reader of the dictionary. The OED, for instance, under ‘aspen’, gives an etymology linking the word to ‘asp’ and offers, as an example of a particular usage of the word, ‘aspen tongue’, meaning ‘the tongue of a woman’. It looks more than likely that these lines were dictated not by any specifically feminist intention preceding the poem, but rather by a reading of the dictionary.

The verse often reads as if the language itself, a language devoid of a consciousness, were directing it:

Asleep on the coast I dream of the city.
A poem dreams of being written
Without the pronoun ‘I’.(2)

Often it is difficult to locate any single position from which the poem can be spoken. In philosophical terms, we have a kind of ‘blank phenomenology’: the relation between the speaking Subject or ‘I’ and the Object of its intention is mobile or fluid. It reads as if the space afforded the ‘I’ is vacant: instead of a stable ‘persona’, all we have is a potential of personality, a voice which cannot yet be identified. The poetry becomes a poetry of ‘villainy’:

This house is the shell of a perfect marriage
Someone has dug out completely; so its mind
Is somewhere above its body, and its body
Stumbles after its voice like a man who needs
A woman for every book.(3)

A recurring feature of McGuckian is an ‘untimeliness’, the sense of a gap between what is said and the voice which says it. There is a fractured ‘unpunctual’ consciousness here. That ‘untimeliness’ is consonant with a current in contemporary philosophies of the postmodern. Deleuze, for instance, often relates his philosophy to the notion that ‘the time is out of joint’, and he considers a Nietzschean untimeliness to be inherent in anything which can be genuinely called ‘thinking’. Similarly, Lyotard indicates that the postmodern art-work exists in a ‘future anterior’ tense and is always contaminated by the artist's own unreadiness for it. If the ripeness or readiness is all, then the artist and philosopher is she or he who is never ‘ripe’:

work and text … arrive always too late for their author, or, what amounts to the same thing, their being put into work always begins too soon.⁴

In the present essay, I argue for a postmodern McGuckian. She offers the availability of a poetry which is not defined by its relation to a tradition or place; rather, her writing offers a way of breaking away from the ‘place-logic’ which is central to the formulation of a national culture, tradition or lineage.⁵

The three major collections construct a specific trajectory. The Flower Master (1982) is an initiatory collection. Many of its poems are concerned with different kinds of initiation rites and with the transgressions of borders or boundaries. These borders, however, are not the expected geographical border (though that one is here too), but are more symbolic borders, such as the boundary between infancy and adulthood; the border between an Edenic garden and a secular world, and so on. A concern for our secular (‘fallen’) condition is apparent from the earliest poems such as “Problem Girl” with its Eve-like girl, eating her apple; or “Lychees” delineating a degeneracy from religious life into secularity. From these and other poems, it becomes clear that McGuckian's real Flower Master is none other than the nineteenth-century poet of diabolism, Baudelaire, whose “Fleurs du mal” ghost this text.

Venus and the Rain (1984) has as its dominant trait a concern for space, both inner and outer. The ‘inner space’ is that of the vacuous Subject of the blank phenomenology; the outer space that suggested by the planetary turn of the title poem. Here, one finds traces of another French thinker, the mathematician, philosopher and Catholic Pascal, whose pensées were both thoughts and flowers (pansies), and whose writings interlace in the same fragmentary fashion as McGuckian's poetry, with overlaps from one text into the next. Pascal, of course, was a man terrified by “Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis”.⁶

One might immediately be tempted to think of On Ballycastle Beach (1988) as McGuckian's “North,” for its title refers to a geographical location at one of the northernmost points of Ireland, in County Antrim. But once again, if the reader searches here for the kind of explicit or mythic politics found in other contemporary Irish poets, she or he will be disappointed. These poems are organised around a ‘French-born’ idea, le temps perdu. Temps, meaning both time and weather, allows McGuckian a trope which organises poems obsessed with seasonal change. Here, it is as if the rituals which interest her are the pagan rites which have been latent in all her writing. There is also here a governing figure of ‘seduction’ or temptation, as if the texts were written by a Lilith figure, and as if the texts were an attempt, or essay, at constructing a literary lineage deriving from Eve and her apples.

The present argument falls into three sections. Firstly, I chart some ‘initiations’, to demonstrate McGuckian's concern for ritual and artifice and to probe the resulting idealism in the writing. Secondly, I ‘take the temperature’ or temper of the verse, exploring the ethos of McGuckian's blank phenomenology, her vacuous ‘idealist’ Subjectivity. Thirdly, I link her writing to surrealism and superrealist movements, and through this describe a politics of her postmodern questioning of the real.

1. INITIATIONS

A prevalent conception of art is that it occupies a different order from the secular world. Many, following an Arnoldian argument, subscribe to the notion that art is a substitute for religion and that it therefore sets up an opposition between the secular and the sacred. In its crudest forms, this is pure idealism; yet, as Eliade and Girard argue, with some sophistication, there is a sense in which the ritualisation of everyday life is crucial: societies require rituals as markers of time's passage. A simple unmarked flow of time would be difficult to understand as time at all. Time and history have to be narrativised; and narratives organise themselves around temporal markers such as birthdays, funerals, anniversaries, solstices and so on. Kermode argues that the endings of narratives cast sense retrospectively upon them; but these endings are moveable feasts.⁷

McGuckian is concerned with two such deictic moments. The first is that we call puberty, a shift from infancy into adulthood, from ‘non-speaking’ (infans) into a voice. Hence the first initiation rite is one concerned with sexuality and with language, the acquisition of a voice, the possibility of ‘being listened to’. The second such instant, often located within the first, is a mythic moment of a beginning or birthing of sorts. She often writes of maternity or pregnancy; but these are related to another beginning, the mythic biblical beginning in the fall from grace. This second initiation moment, then, is the moment of the entry into history as such. Both moments of initiation are tantalisingly implicated with each other in the opening poems of The Flower Master.

“That Year” opens with a description of a young woman's discovery of some aspects of her body:

That year it was something to do with your hands:
To play about with rings, to harness rhythm
In staging bleach or henna on the hair,
Or shackling, unshackling the breasts.

A memory, linking “that year” with another, earlier one, follows, introducing the two colours which are important here:

I remembered as a child the red kite
Lost forever over our heads, the white ball
A pin-prick on the tide, and studied
The leaf-patterned linoleum, the elaborate
Stitches on my pleated bodice.
It was like a bee's sting or a bullet
Left in me, this mark, this sticking pins in dolls,
Listening for the red and white
Particles of time to trickle slow …

The memory, linking a moment of childhood play with “that year”, hinges on a red kite and a white ball like a pin-prick. The girl looks at her own body with its elaborate—or laboured—stitches. Then there is the wait for “red and white / Particles”. Given the suggestion in “Slips”⁸ that poetry operates partly by metaphor and partly by euphemism, it becomes impossible—if we ‘listen’—to miss the allusion here to red and white corpuscles, and hence the suggestion that what is being awaited is a menarche. The ritual nature of this moment, “that year”, is hinted at in the linking of the menarche with magic, the voodoo of “sticking pins in dolls”. Yet there is, of course, also that other year being hinted at: the later year of a birthing, as suggested in those laboured stitches on the bodice, themselves ‘slips’ for a Caesarian birth. The poem closes with the image of a curtained, cushioned woman, brought to bed.

This pubescent initiation is reiterated in “Tulips.” Here is the first tacit appearance of a ‘master’, who is not, as might be expected in this poem, the Wordsworth whose daffodils are tacitly alluded to by the poem's description of flowers dancing “ballets of revenge”. Rather, the second stanza offers an elaborate intertextual weaving into Henry James's novella, The Turn of the Screw, itself a thoroughly ambiguous tale of frustrated sexuality and of a young woman's relations with a ‘Master’. The governess in James was ‘raped’ or ‘carried away’ in London at the Master's house; but this sexual overtone, apparent in the tale as in the poem, is also linked to a linguistic issue. The word ‘metaphor’ means ‘carrying across’ or ‘carrying away’: the sexual initiation is also a linguistic initiation, as here in “Tulips,” another poem in which the reader must listen for the slips.

The poem constantly displaces its reader, and is difficult to read due to the elongation of its sentences and the resulting complexity of syntax. The first part of the first sentence (lines 1 to 6) tempts the reader to come to syntactic and semantic rest some seven times, as she or he searches more desperately for the ending of the sentence (its “that year”) which will enable the retrospective making of sense. The tulips have the presence of mind to defend themselves against the unwanted intrusion of rain which falls into the daffodil. If McGuckian is a reader of the dictionary, she might be aware that the OED offers a definition of ‘tulip’ alongside its meaning as flower with phallic stem: a ‘tulip’ is “a showy person; one greatly admired”—a kind of flower-master, in short. The poem, with this allusion to James's novella, enables the reader to hear the difficult phrase “grocery of soul” as an echo of Mrs. Grose, whose own “grossery of soul” is that she is illiterate: the one character in the James text who cannot read and yet also the one who knows what's going on. Letters—mislaid, stolen, intercepted or unread—form the focus of The Turn of the Screw, a text whose raison d'être is the paralysis of interpretation, the stymying of understanding, as has been argued by Felman and Brooke-Rose.⁹ The same difficulty arises here, and one suddenly has to read the letters which constitute the poem differently.

Its opening phrase, “Touching the tulips was a shyness”, is an odd phrase as it stands; yet, if one listens to the flower, one can also make a different sense: touching the two-lips was a shyness. Heard in this ‘American’ inflection (à la James), one has the image of a speaker demonstrating her shyness by actually touching her finger to her lips. But, at this point, and given the “absence of mirrors”, one can also begin to hear the feminist input into this dense, complex poem.

Irigaray, especially in Speculum and in This Sex Which Is Not One, has proposed that the entire history of Western thinking has been inescapably masculinist for the primary reason of its prioritisation of the specular gaze and of the sense of vision. If we replace this with tactility, she suggests, we might be able to counter the inevitability of masculinist thinking, which is complicit with a denial of subjectivity and a denial of the voice to woman. Irigaray argues that while men require some external effect to articulate their sexuality (woman, hand, object of sorts), women are always in touch with themselves, for their genitals are formed by two lips in continual tactile arrangement. It is the intrusion of the male tulip-like stalk of the phallus which arrests auto-erotic pleasure and self-presence (or present-mindedness). Given the absence of mirrors in “Tulips,” one might realise that the tactile overcomes the visual here. But now, “touching the tulips/two-lips” is thoroughly ambiguous. On the one hand, touching the tulips might suggest an obvious touching of the phallus; but on the other, it also suggests the woman touching her own lips, both mouth and vagina. The poem thus becomes one of covert masturbation, a “womanliness of tulips”.

The feminist problematic is that of “not being listened to”¹⁰. Hence the necessity for circumlocution or ‘slips’, most obviously in the euphemistic language of flowers deployed by other unheard women such as Ophelia or Perdita. In “Tulips,” the touching of the fingers to the oral lips describes the woman as silenced. But, listening to the slips here, the availability of a “womanliness of tulips”, a womanly voice, can be discovered. To hear this voice is the critical task. This poem simply describes the moment of a ritual transgression in which the poet loses infancy in the articulation of sexuality (literally: for sexuality is articulacy, literacy, here).

Initiation, and with it linguistic and gendered authority, implies a rite of passage or transgression of a boundary. This symbolic boundary in McGuckian replaces the geo-political border in other poets' work. She thinks the boundary symbolically, which is conventional enough, deploying a Christian mythology of the expulsion from a paradise into history, the theme which dominates On Ballycastle Beach where the sands of time replace the gardens implied by The Flower Master, after the journey through space in Venus and the Rain. But the symbolic geography opens another issue which haunts the poetry: the construction of an ‘economy’ or law of the household.

This begins in the first collection, where it is as if “Admiring the Furs” gets too close to the political situation for comfort. The passage across the checkpoints in this poem brings to the speaker's mind her “measurements at nine”, a memory of a pre-pubertal state. But this is related to the furs in the window and the violence which brings them there for human warmth and comfort. The animal skin—our own covering—is produced through an act of violence; and in this poem, it is as if the ‘preoccupation’, as Heaney would think it, causes a pain, the pain which “tells you what to wear”.¹¹ The Irish state, bifurcated on a boundary, is an agonising death, a wounded skin which has to be sloughed off. The checkpoint is, like the window-pane, a boundary which serves to cover the presence of pain, that pain which is the wounding of Ireland, the killing of Ireland through the act of partition.

The transgression of this very political boundary is rare in McGuckian. More frequently the boundary to be transgressed takes on a more ritualised and sacral aspect, and operates under a symbolism of domesticity. One example is “Mr. McGregor's Garden,” which alludes—as do all gardens in this poetry—to a primal garden, an Edenic state once lost and always remembered with nostalgia.¹² The more immediate allusion—to Beatrix Potter—gives a more ambivalent character to the garden here, and appropriately so, as I will show. The poem starts darkly, with “Some women save their sanity with needles”. On one hand, this might be an item from a domestic lexicon, suggesting knitting-needles used with the pin as in the “pin-prick” of “That Year.” But there is a darker side to this, with the hint of a witch-like injection, and hence the idea of saving sanity through drugs. Attention immediately turns to the mode of saving sanity proposed by the speaker:

I complicate my life with studies
Of my favourite rabbit's head, his vulgar volatility.

This “Bunny” becomes her furry comforter later in the poem. But the “vulgar volatility” is the essential issue here. The rabbit's head, of course, is classically used in theories of visual perception to demonstrate a particular boundary in the way we see. The drawing of a rabbit's head is also a drawing of a duck, depending on how we choose to view it. It is impossible to see both at once, yet it is also impossible to see the volatility, the shift as the rabbit crosses the threshold of perception to become a duck.

Perception, sight itself, involves us in a transgression of the very same kind of boundary which caused the pain in “Admiring the Furs.” Here is an articulation of those Irigarayan theories which acknowledge the pain caused to women by perception as we think it, by the prioritisation of the visual as the determining element of modern western culture. McGuckian answers this directly in “Painter and Poet” where she seems to favour not the replacement of vision with tactility as in Irigaray, but rather the replacement of vision with words, language, poetry.

This perceptual transgression operates in much of her domestic imagery, where doors and windows are forever being opened and closed, indicating a threshold boundary which invites danger. Similarly, letters frequently go unread, whether the envelope remains whole or is violently torn open. It is as if the act of reading her letters were itself an act of violence or transgression, an act of the same kind of initiatory violence which causes the personal pain described in “That Year.” Such windows and doors appear, for fine examples, in “The Sofa” or “The Sitting.”

But the window, as Bachelard might say, produces the house.¹³ The threshold which is a doorway immediately implies not just a threatening outside, but also a domestic interior, of the kind described in “The Flitting” (which also “has cost me” much discomfort) or throughout the poetry in incidental references to domestic scenes, furniture, the architecture of rooms, beds and so on. This becomes of some importance in “The Sun-Trap.” In the greenhouse whose hygroscope says “orchid”, the flower associated with testicles (from the Greek orkhis = testicle), the speaker is:

                              touched by even the strange gesture
Of rain stopping, your penetration
Of my mask of ‘bon viveur’, my crested notepaper,
My lined envelopes. From your last letter
I construed at least the word
For kisses, if not quite a kindred spirit.

Reading this last letter, then, there is the suggestion firstly of the “penetration” of the envelope, a transgression of a lining, together with the idea of a sexual relation in those kisses. However, something is not quite right in that the letter cannot easily be deciphered: it is misread, and the reader is searching for a “kindred spirit” while finding only the “word / For kisses”. The letter clearly brings disturbing news, of “the magically fertile German girl / Who sleeps in the bunk above you”, and who

                              seems
To me quite flirtatious
Though you say she's the sort of girl
You'd rather have as a daughter.

This reminds the speaker of some previous “near-tragedy” of a weekend spent with a “cousin once-removed”. And at this moment, three things coalesce. Firstly, the trapping of the sun, its capturing within the space of the house, and hence its transgression of a boundary, produces the warmth of an interior set against the sickly rain and threatening weather of the outside: the house, thus, as a site of a mutation or transformation. Secondly, this relates to the search for a ‘kindred spirit’, with its hint of some familial or domestic relation. Thirdly, the near-explicit references to incest, in the idea of the German girl as the flirtatious daughter sleeping in the same room (actually, technically the same bed) as the correspondent, and the unspoken event between speaker and cousin once-removed. Transgression, then, involves the building of a house as a ritual or sacral space called the family which exists as an apotropaic warder-off of death and history. But the production of the house and its interiorised space, together with the necessity of sexual relations as the mode of initiation which makes the house possible in the first place, produces what Freud well knew about, the taboo of incest.

The domestic poems of McGuckian are contaminated thus by the dark and guilty question of endogamy; and it is the guilt associated with this tribal sectarianism which brings The Flower Master more clearly into line with Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal, a collection also dotted with domestic imagery, but a book which was gothically obsessed with the revelation of an evil which lay behind—and indeed founded—the decorous nature of a bourgeois existence. In McGuckian's case, there is a link between the necessity of transgression (sexual initiation and entry into secular history) and the inevitability of an evil introspection, an ‘endogamous’ looking inwards towards a guilt perceived in the space ‘within’, the interior produced by the transgression and its threshold. “Look within” urged the modernist Woolf, famously; and when McGuckian does, she sees guilt. The much-vaunted erotics of her writing are all tinged with the sense of a maleficence, a diabolism, and with the need to find a pure genealogy, but one which in its purity would be uncontaminated by this taboo of interiority, this incestuous thinking and introspection.

A postmodern sublime lies available here. We have the necessity of a transgression, the idea of a breakthrough across some threshold of perception, together with the recalcitrance which that transgression provokes: this is the pleasurable pain of interpretation in McGuckian. It is like the seduction of a letter unread, a letter which remains tantalisingly visible beneath or within its envelope; but the tearing open of the envelope reveals that the letter is not there after all: what we thought was a meaningful missive turns out to be a pattern on the envelope. Throughout the verse, it is precisely at the moment of taking root, or of finding a single place from which to understand a poem, that it melts away again into ambivalence and ambiguity. “A newly-understood poem will melt / And be hard again”.¹⁴ And even the point of transgression, the threshold, cannot be properly or adequately identified: “The point when I sleep is not known / By me, and words cannot carry me / Over it”.¹⁵

The reader of McGuckian is in the position of the person who moves from the state of being awake to that of being asleep; either she is awake or asleep, and it is impossible to locate her at the precise moment of the change between the two. The ‘checkpoint’, in this way, magically is made to disappear, in something of the same sophisticated way in which death is made disappear in Augustine or Wittgenstein or Camus.¹⁶ Yet, of course, the checkpoint undeniably exists: this hovering uncertainly between existence and non-existence is its ‘sublimity’. It is both there and not there, like Venus herself who is described like a Malevich painting: “White on white, I can never be viewed / Against a heavy sky”¹⁷ precisely the heavy sky which dominates the “sickly Irish weather”.¹⁸

The letter in McGuckian, the text or poem as well as its very constituent letters, is the site of this refusal of representation. Each poem is, as it were, a threshold inviting the initiation of its reader into some meaning; yet it also denies that meaning at the very instant of its perception. This is McGuckian as Malvolio, a McGuckian who does not play ducks and drakes so much as ducks and rabbits. Initiation promises change; and it is the precise moment of initiation which McGuckian wants to locate. Yet, because of its very characterisation as the site of mobility and mutability, as a point of transgression or change, the locus of initiation cannot properly be identified, represented or described. It is, as it were, immaterial, invisible as Venus in the rain. The point of initiation, the ‘checkpoint’, is itself pointless.

2. TEMPERS

One neat mutation central to McGuckian is the linguistic slippage between ‘tempt’ and ‘temporal’. In Christian mythology, Eve, eater of the apples that figure so widely in McGuckian, tempted or tried or tested the apple and Adam's resistance to it. This temptation by and of the woman provokes the fall into temporality, the condition in which McGuckian must now write what Stevens would have called ‘The Poems of our Climate’: that is, poems in which she takes a secular ‘temper’ or temperature, measuring the flow and sequence of the seasons which coordinate or order secular life. But, due to the ‘blank phenomenology’ of her writing, she is condemned to live in a kind of temporal absence. She is always—temporally and temperamentally—at odds with herself: the poems chart a dislocation in their speaker, who always occupies some different temporal moment from the moment actually being described in the poem. There is a gap, a différance, between the moment of the enunication and the moment of the enunciated. As in Heidegger, the poet is always living alongside herself. She is like the character who lives in a cold climate in “Minus 18 Street”:

I never loved you more
Than when I let you sleep another hour,
As if you intended to make such a gate of time
Your home.(19)

As a being-in-time, and one living that time as a gate or threshold of transgression, the poet is never present-to-herself. Caught in a late-or neo-romantic predicament, her voice is always temporally out-of-step with what it says. Her time, like that of Hamlet, is “out of joint”.²⁰

On Ballycastle Beach, despite its parochial title, is among the more exotic of McGuckian's collections, delighting in words derived from Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia as well as the more domestic kinds of detail expected after her earlier work. But it is worth starting closer to home, in the poem “Not Pleasing Mama,” whose only ‘foreign’ phrase is the French “à la belle étoile”, meaning “under the open sky”. This poem opens with the odd suggestion that the weather is unsure:

If rain begins as snow, then the weather
Has slipped down as between walls, is not
To be trusted any more
Than any other magic.(21)

This weather is out of its proper place.²² The French speaker who interjects might hear an interlingual pun here: temps as both weather and time. This text, thus, is not to be trusted for it is the site of another ‘slipping’ between meanings, between languages and countries, between cultures. If the weather is misplaced, it is also—to the French voice of the text—a temps perdu; and this opens the text to its interrelation with Proust, whose text begins not only with not pleasing Mama but also with not being pleased by the Mama who withholds the goodnight kiss. Proust, if he is about anything, is about the loss or waste of time, about a time out of joint.

“Not Pleasing Mama,” with its tempting apple, is a key poem: it casts retrospective light on the opening poems of the collection, “What Does ‘Early’ Mean?,” “Staying in a Better Hotel,” “Apple Flesh” and “Grainne's Sleep Song,” all texts which share the Proustian and Wordsworthian seduction by time and weather.

“What Does ‘Early’ Mean?” It means “before the proper or appointed time”. The poem describes a temporal displacement in which a house is out of step with the season: “Yet I think winter has ended / Privately in you”.²³ This is related to McGuckian's own writing, which is equally “untimely”:

None of my doors has slammed
Like that, every sentence is the same
Old workshop sentence, ending
Rightly or wrongly in the ruins
Of an evening spent in puzzling
Over the meaning of six o'clock or seven …

“Early” is a deictic term, depending for its meaning upon a situation: “six o'clock” is not by definition early. Hence the meaning of the term is itself untimely, as if the meaning of the word resided elsewhere or in a different time from that of the word's actual articulation. It also demands a relation between at least two times: to be “early” implies an appointment; yet it also demands a disappointment, a failure of correspondence between the two or more elements destined to coincide at the proper moment. To be early is to be out of place as well as out of time: it is to be ‘flitting’, to be on the nomadic move, between situations. No echoes of Hardy ghost this verse.²⁴

Moreover, “early”, in its implication of (dis)appointment, also demands narrative, for it demands a link to be forged in the plotting of two disparate moments. The narrative of “early” is produced in “Grainne's Sleep Song,”²⁵ in which untimeliness is directly related to “a novel rough to the touch”, presumably the narrative referred to later, that “Uncompleted story, something sterile / I contracted fourteen years ago on the beach, / Entitled ‘Wild without Love’”. The speaker steps out of this narrative, a past moment, to enter a present relation; but the temporal relation between the fourteen-years-old narrative and the situation of “The day that I got up to” is fused and confused. The narrative is incomplete, as the meaning of the poem is also incomplete, falling back to “initials” or beginnings. The sleep-song, then, is once more about the temporal relation between beginning and end; the sleep is a mediation or meditation between the two states or two times, and mutability or uncertainty becomes the order of the day.

It is this which makes McGuckian's poetry a ‘critical poetry’, in the same senses as Kant's philosophy was a ‘critical philosophy’ or Frankfurt School political theory is a ‘critical theory’. All are formulated in a mode of proleptic difference. Deleuze offers the most succinct description of what is at stake here in Kantian and post-Kantian (for which read postmodern) thinking:

Time is out of joint, time is unhinged … As long as time remains on its hinges, it is subordinate to movement: it is the measure of movement, interval or number. This was the view of ancient philosophy. But time out of joint signifies the reversal of the movement-time relationship. It is now movement which is subordinate to time. Everything changes, including movement.²⁶

Movement, the movement of transgression across the ‘door’ hinged by time, is what McGuckian was after in earlier poems. Here, she has discovered the reversal which makes movement itself subordinate to time, secularism. An allegorisation of this in terms of the political scenario—if one is needed—might run like this: there will be no movement over the border so long as time remains on its hinges—so long, that is, as a particular relation to secularity is maintained whereby the secular is but a pale shadow of the eternal or sacred. Movement will not come so long as Ireland remains ‘pre-critical’ or ‘pre-historic’. A critical reversal of priorities is needed which acknowledges that movement over the border will only be possible if such movement becomes subordinate to time—that is, if the being of people on both sides of the border becomes a being-in-time, a being determined by historicity and not by fixed, eternal or transcendental claims upon a true identity, a ‘chosen ground’ for a chosen people. The poetry is a call to a critical historicism: not just an awareness of time past, but an awareness that one must ‘disappoint’ the history or narrative seemingly determined by that time past: time past must be misplaced, perdu.

3. THE FORCE OF SEDUCTION AND THE PLAY OF SURREALISM

The crudity of that allegory of politics in McGuckian does not do justice to the force of her poetry, which finds more indirect—but, I shall argue, more powerful—ways of intervening in the political culture in which she writes. As might be expected in any literature which might be called a literature of decolonisation, there is in much contemporary Irish poetry a concern with power: the ambivalent desire for an autonomous national power even in the very instant when the culture is striving to escape the legacy of a suffering caused by such a power. Mastery, in The Flower Master, is the shape this takes in early McGuckian; but this quickly comes under speculative pressure in the writing.

Power, like temporality, depends upon relation and narrative: power is, as it were, shaped deictically. Specifically, it depends upon ‘under-standing’; yet it is precisely understanding that McGuckian mistrusts. She replaces understanding, with its inherent notion of the availability of stable positions of ‘mastery’ (she who speaks enigmatically) and ‘subjection’ (she who would understand and subscribe to the master), with a notion of mere interrelation. The form this takes is one of seduction. Seduction here is taken in a sense close to that proposed by Baudrillard: it is not simply a sexual event; rather, it describes a state of relation between powers or forces, and one which explicitly excludes production. Production would here mean the end of seduction. Seduction is, for instance, the play of forces which keeps the planets in mutual interrelation: one subject of Venus and the Rain.

“Venus and the Sun”²⁷ describes the pull which the Sun exerts on Venus, and an opposing pull, in the opposite direction, exerted by Mars. Seduction is the play of forces, attraction and repulsion, which enables such relation. The resulting tension produces the entity we call ‘Venus’, or that we call ‘Mars’ and so on. In other words, to identify something as ‘Venus’ is artificially to arrest the play of forces: to make a fiction from a “mécanique des fluides”.²⁸ The important thing is that the forces come first; there is no essence of ‘Mars’, ‘Venus’ or the ‘Sun’ which generates a specific force: those names are but the effect of a configuration of forces. To stabilise them with such a name or identification is a fictive arresting of time itself; McGuckian reverses the priorities of ‘modern’ thinking.

To put things this way, of course, is to add the corollary to the Kantian revolution described by Deleuze. In conventional thought, there already exists a mass called the Sun which exerts a force on other stable and identifiable masses called the various planets. This enables a belief in the stability and identity of ‘Venus’, ‘Mars’ and so on; and by extension, a belief in some essential ‘meaning’ for all the elements of the universe, some intrinsic nature. But McGuckian, whose writing is properly aligned with the postmodern thinking of Deleuze, Baudrillard and others, reverses this set of priorities. There is no Venus without Mars; there is no Sun without these and the play of forces by which they are constituted. Rather than subscribing to some desire to identify what is produced, McGuckian prefers to work at the level of the seduction itself. This way, she questions the modern belief in the availability of identity. The arrangement of matter we call ‘Venus’ is, as it were, the taking root or forming an earth of a play of forces which McGuckian wishes to keep in play and in place; the arrangement of matter may appear stable, but it is invisible (“white on white’); by extension, of course, North would also have no intrinsic meaning, nor would ‘Ireland’, nor would ‘McGuckian’ and so on. “Le monde n'est qu'une branloire perenne.”²⁹

‘Venus’, then, is held together, instant by instant, only through a kind of stasis, internal dissent and tension or civil war. This kind of seductive attraction depends upon gravity, or mass. Much of McGuckian's imagery is drawn from the pull she feels towards a Christian iconography and lexicon. But it is a corollary of her post-Kantian poetry that her aesthetic world must be guided not by a Christian onto-theology, but rather by a pagan consciousness. Paganism, of course, is not atheist, but prefers a heterotheology, a multiplicity of forces called ‘gods’ which activate the world.

A number of poems reveal this paganism and relate it to a hieroglyphic questioning of the letter. “Vanessa's Bower”³⁰ is a poem with a misunderstood letter, specifically the letter “E”:

… Dear owner, you write,
Don't put me into your pocket: I am not
A willow in your folly-studded garden
Which you hope will weep the right way:
And there are three trains leaving, none
Of which connects me to your E-shaped
Cottage. Alas, I have still the feeling,
Half fatherly, half different, we are
Travelling together in the train with this letter,
Though my strange hand will never be your sin.

This E-shaped cottage is like a railway station, from which there run three parallel lines of flight. Seduction here is the gravitational pull away from the cottage and its folly-studded Edenic garden with its weeping tree. That journey is taken with “this letter”, meaning both a missive (the poem, perhaps) and also the letter “E”. Interestingly, the Hebrew letter, which looks like an E on its side, is pronounced ‘sin’. This letter in Hebrew, the language of the Bible, provokes the weeping. But another intertext appears here. Erasmus, in In Praise of Folly, describes this Hebrew letter and its pronunciation in a passage demonstrating the folly of a belief in an original or God-given language (the Word, the logos).³¹ We are always in flight—or in multiple lines of flight—from such a language, always out of step with it in time and space. It is not the case that the apple-laden language of woman is folly or madness; rather, what is folly is the garden itself and the belief that there ever was one pure or original language of sanity, one Word which was there in the beginning and which was God.

Frequently in her poems, McGuckian makes a turn towards nomadism, towards a chosen ground which is, strictly speaking, nowhere in particular. The nomad simply moves around, with no specific home except a ‘Querencia’,³² the idea of a home, occupying whatever space is needed and available at any given moment. This attitude clearly marks McGuckian off from other Irish poets, like Deane, Montague or Heaney, who have questioned the geography of Ireland as a specific and historically-determined plot of earth or rough field. McGuckian is more interested in symbolic space and in the occupation of a language or a voice. Always in flight, her poems—like her own voice and identity—are never fixed in historical time or geographical space: their meaning is always untimely, never present-to-themselves, and hence never ‘available’. In this way, her text is always ‘temperable’, marked by a promiscuous mingling of different meanings held together in a play of internal forces which allows her never to lose her ‘temper’.

Given this difference from her contemporaries, it becomes apparent that if one were to look for predecessors for McGuckian, it would be an error to search among the Irish poets of the twentieth century. In terms of linguistic styles, she has more in common with both nineteenth-century decadence and with twentieth-century surrealism, both internationalist movements. Much of her imagery could be derived from Neruda or Aragon rather than from Clarke or Kavanagh. Yet there is one way in which she overlaps with a thematics of flight which dominates much Irish writing this century. Yeats, for instance, starts by looking west, then makes successive leaps eastwards to Greece and Byzantium for the sources of his poetry; Joyce and Beckett, famously, exile themselves; Heaney begins from an archaeology of Irish soil, and then, like Yeats, makes a symbolic geographic move eastwards in his alignment of himself with the dissident poets of Eastern Europe. Heaney also leaves the soil in another sense, becoming ‘Mad Sweeney’, the bird among the trees which Yeats had also dreamt of becoming.³³ It is this ‘line of flight’ which McGuckian adopts, and in her it becomes a structural determinant of the language and syntax of her writing.

There is an exoticism in McGuckian, very apparent in the vocabulary of On Ballycastle Beach for instance, which literally “unsettles” the text and its readers. The predominantly Latinate and Anglo-Saxon vocabulary of the first two collections is interrupted here by words like “Ylang-Ylang” (Malaysian), “vetiver” (from African languages), “Mazurka” (Polish), “Querencia” (Spanish), “balakhana” (Persian) and so on. McGuckian here reiterates some of the symbolic geographical manoeuvres of Yeats, Heaney and others; but its effects are different.

‘Querencia’, for instance, suggests a kind of ‘land of heart's desire’, or desired homeland; but it is odd that an Irish poet should use a Spanish word to describe this. The word is actually used in Spanish to describe the terrain of the bull in a bull-fight: it is the ‘stamping-ground’ of the threatening and dangerous animal. The term thus provides her with an ambivalent word describing her relation to ‘home’, a home which is ‘elsewhere’, a home riven by stasis or dissent, a home which is desired but which also threatens. “Balakhana” is the word describing the upper storey of a Persian house, the room in which nomadic travellers would be put to pass the night. This balakhana (a near homonym for Ballycastle, of course) is not a stable home either, but a nomadic place of encampment, a temporary abode.

This kind of language works to suggest an alienation in McGuckian's own relation to her language. Like her, the reader has to become a reader of dictionaries in the endless search for meaning, and the language is thus always at odds with the mouth speaking it, always untimely, always a blank phenomenology. There is no single governing Logos, no monotheology of Truth here, no originary language: McGuckian, like the ‘character’ in Christine Brooke-Rose's ‘novel’, Thru, lives increasingly in the space between languages. She does not live between English and Gaelic, but between English and the languages of Europe, Asia, Africa. This linguistic internationalism contributes to the instabilities which enable her work to be characterised as late surrealist.

In the present century, surrealism has had a chequered history. Initially an art dedicated to revolution, it became more and more explicitly reactionary. Yet it has always served one critical purpose well: it always questions the nature of the real. In its later development into superrealism, it is not so much the nature of reality so much as the very principle of ontological reality which is questioned. A superrealist painting, say, proposes the question: ‘which is more real—object or image?’ The postmodern simulacrum, as Baudrillard points out, can question the very principle of reality itself by its parodic duplication; and this is its potentially most radical function. McGuckian is close to this, though her means of achieving it are not through the ‘more perfect than perfect’ mimesis of superrealism, but rather through the contortions of surrealism. Reality in her writing constantly slips away, leaving a reader to puzzle where she or he stands. Her sentences meander from étrangeté to bizarrerie, dislocating metaphor and being ‘easily carried away’ in this language which is dictated by no consciousness, and leaving a reader stranded in flight from multivalent realities. The early writing is concerned with a fall into temporality or secularity; the later with finding a means to cope with that ‘fall’ not by fleeing history but rather by fleeing the principle of a monotheological Reality, which is seen to be imprisoning. All here is image: there is no presence, only representations. It is worth remembering that, in Ireland, there are two Ballycastles.

Notes

1. Medbh McGuckian, ‘Aviary’, Venus and the Rain. OUP, 1984, p. 21.

2. McGuckian, ‘Harem Trousers’, On Ballycastle Beach. OUP, 1988, p. 43.

3. McGuckian, ‘The Villain’, Venus and the Rain, p. 19. It is as if a Cartesian ‘cognito’ here has been replaced by a ‘loquor’ as the subject of the voice. For a fuller argument documenting this as a trait in contemporary writing, see my Reading (Absent) Character (Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 34-6, 87-123 and passim.

4. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 81. Cf. for instances, Gilles Deleuze, Kant's Critical Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) (hereafter KCP), and Nietzsche and Philosophy (Athlone Press, 1983).

5. On ‘place-logic’ in the thinking of Rudolph Agricola, see Walter J. Ong., Ramus: Method and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), p. 121. The present essay characterises such place-logic as ‘modernist’. For an argument describing the modifications of space and time in postmodernity, see David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).

6. Blaise Pascal, Pensées Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1963), p. 528, no. 201.

7. See, for examples, Mircea Eliade, Le mythe de l'éternel retour (Paris: nrf, 1949); René Girard, passim; Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, 1956); Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967).

8. McGuckian, ‘Slips’, The Flower Master, OUP, 1982, p. 21.

9. Shoshana Felman, ‘Turning the Screw of Interpretation’, in Felman, ed., Literature and Psychoanalysis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), pp. 94-207; Christine Brooke-Rose, A Rhetoric of the Unreal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 128-187

10. McGuckian, On Ballycastle Beach, p. 51.

11. McGuckian, Venus and the Rain, p. 40.

12. This poem works in the tradition of the ‘garden-poem’ which dates at least from the Renaissance.

13. See Gaston Bachelard, La Poétique de l'Espace (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1957).

14. McGuckian, ‘Mazurka’, On Ballycastle Beach, p. 22.

15. McGuckian, ‘A Dream in Three Colours’, ibid., p. 44.

16. See Augustine, City of God (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), pp. 519-20; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6, 4311; Albert Camus, Le mythe de Sisyphe (Gallimard, Paris: nrf, 1942), pp. 29-30.

17. McGuckian, ‘Venus and the Rain’, Venus and the Rain, p. 31.

18. McGuckian, ‘The Sun-Trap’, The Flower Master, p. 24.

19. McGuckian, On Ballycastle Beach, p. 19.

20. In Romanticism itself, of course, this predicament was that of idealism. The poet typically desires an ontological empathy with the world of the natural which—it is claimed—was enjoyed by the rustic; but the poet, blessed or cursed (or both) with consciousness can enjoy, at best, an epistemological empathy with nature, an empathy gained, however, precisely at the cost of her or his ontological alienation from that world. The autobiographical impetus is thus produced from a project in which the subject aims temporally to coincide with itself, a project doomed, as Sterne had clearly prefigured, to a sublime failure. For an argument characterising this as also a ‘modernist’ predicament, see my ‘Anti-Mimesis’, in Forum for Modern Language Studies vol. 26, no. 3 (1990) pp. 272-281.

21. McGuckian, On Ballycastle Beach, p. 20.

22. The French voice which interjects in this text might hear the Rabelaisian joke, “Between walls” is between ‘mur’ and ‘mur’. Rabelais: “ou mur y a et devant et derrière, y a force murmur, envie et conspiration mutue”; see François Rabelais, Gargantua in Oeuvres complètes, tome 1, ed. P. Jourda (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1962), p. 189.

23. McGuckian, On Ballycastle Beach, p. 11.

24. Hardy's poetry, especially in the famous instance of ‘The Convergence of the Twain’, is about keeping an appointment with fate; cf. Beckett, whose characters in Waiting for Godot pride themselves on keeping their appointment, but an appointment which is, by the play's formal definition, necessarily a disappointment.

25. McGuckian, On Ballycastle Beach, p. 16.

26. Gilles Deleuze, op. cit. (note 4), vii.

27. McGuckian, Venus and the Rain, p. 9.

28. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One (New York: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 106-118.

29. Michel de Montaigne, Essais in 3 vols (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1969), vol 3, 20.

30. McGuckian, Venus and the Rain, p. 10.

31. Desiderius Erasmus, In Praise of Folly, in John P. Dolan, ed., The Essential Erasmus (New York: Mentor Books, 1964), pp. 151-2.

32. McGuckian, On Ballycastle Beach, p. 25.

33. For a more detailed argument making this point, see my After Theory (Routledge, 1990), pp. 173-190.