[In the following essay, Boly applies speech act theory to construct multiple modes of meaning and layers of reality for the main persona in Heaney's poem “Follower.”]

Readers of Seamus Heaney's poetry may remember the scene in “Follower” when the father, hard at work with spring ploughing, interrupts his task to reach down, pick up his little boy, and set him on his shoulders. It is an intimate detail made poignant by the speaker's point of view; now an adult, he recollects a moment in childhood shared with a father who has passed away.¹ Composed altogether of nine such scenes, the poem serves as a funerary monument. The father and horse plough appear first, much as would the central figure of a classical frieze, and then supporting scenes encircle them: the father adjusting the coulter, pivoting the team, striding about the farm with his son following. As would be expected from the shallow depths of a bas-relief, there is no background. Though set in the bloom of an Irish spring, the poem makes no mention of wildflowers, birdsongs, the rich odors of wet steel, freshly turned earth, and weathered tack. Instead, a sculptural austerity prevails. A few clicks of the ploughman's tongue and the massive draft surge against the traces. The thick clay, doubtlessly sodden from winter rains, curls with an effortless grace. As if to defy the mystery of death, a raking light captures each detail so it is possible to feel the ploughman's eye squint as he lines up his next pass, or his son's slender arm stiffen as he dreams of one day driving the team himself.

The scene provides an ideal opportunity for poetic melancholy. The child, grown up, discovers like the creator of another cold pastoral that he may never enter the world of his beholding. Yet the tone of “Follower”'s initial persona suggests something different from longing or regret: relief, maybe even accomplishment. Homages to the dead can also serve the interests of the living, and it is not unusual for such reminiscences to become a means of containment. As René Girard notes in Violence and the Sacred, “With death a contagious sort of violence is let loose on the community, and the living must take steps to protect themselves against it. So they quarantine death …” (255). The cliché about speaking no ill of the dead may present itself as an act of reverence for the deceased, but it also protects the living. The well-groomed anecdotes and recollections found in funeral genres help to edit painful memories and displace ugly secrets. It might even be possible to construct a correlative index. The more intense an effort to enshrine the dead (to seal, fix, finish them), the greater their threat. If so, the danger in “Follower” would be considerable because the initial persona resorts to one of the most powerful of mythemes to contain his father. The illud tempus, or “those times,” commemorates the timeless moment when creation moved in perfect harmony with the gods. After the war between heaven and earth, historical beings were forever barred from revisiting this condition, except in the symbolism of sacred ritual (Eliade 80). It is to this forbidden place that the son transports his father, to become one of the ancient giants who towers over the mortals of subsequent ages. This mythical parent acquires the might of a Titan whom creatures, wind, and the earth itself obey. The events of his life unfold with the solemn inevitability of a sacred rite. There is no mention of his thoughts, for all is arranged in accordance with the eternal rhythms of nature. Such mastery cannot exist within human experience, and that is the point. The father, securely entombed in a timeless self-sufficiency, will never climb down from his stone monument.

Or at least that would be the case were it not for the poem's last lines. As with many of the poems in Death of a Naturalist, “Follower” does not end; it interrupts itself with the beginning of a completely different poem.

                    But today
It is my father who keeps stumbling
Behind me, and will not go away.

A new world emerges. Sudden shadows overtake the scene and a hitherto idealized being turns demonic. The lurching father suggests a voodoo zombie dug up by some malevolent Pedro loa and set to work in the plantations of Haiti. With no will of his own, the heroic ploughman loses control of his own limbs. There is no hint of what conjures this apparition from the father's sculptural repose, nor any indication of its subsequent actions. Unless, that is, this bare plot fragment is itself an act of conjuring in that it opens the way to so many counterplots.² Does the father wish to accuse, judge, punish, forgive, or thank the son?³ The silent, grim, and reeling shadow offers no answers. For whatever reason, “Follower” ends with the dead awakened from the spell of illud tempus and returning to a “now” forever poised at the threshold of human time.

What unspoken summons leads to this unconcluding interruption? Although the poem probably has but one speaker, this dramatic character in turn comprises at least two different personas. Poetic speakers readily play distinct roles within the same work, even when the poem is a monologue. In “Follower,” however, the text withholds the information needed to understand the inner conflict that generates the speaker's separate roles. The last persona might be heard as assigning blame with an insistent “It is my father who keeps stumbling / Behind me, and will not go away.” But an imaginative reader could also hear the lines in a way that indicates surprise, resignation, terror, guilt, or even satisfaction. A reader is put in the situation of an outsider unexpectedly caught up in a family feud, perhaps recruited by the warring parties but given no explanation of their conflict. One interpretive move would be to rely on social convention. Suppose the second persona begrudges the harmless compliments paid by the first? What would be so wrong with glossing over memories from childhood? Did the horses lag at field's end, or the ploughshare veer to one side, or the father sometimes need to rest? Assuming that the first persona's remarks were sanitized, would that be so terrible in a reminiscence of the dead, particularly of one's father? If called upon, social convention delivers its usual swift judgment, in this instance by pronouncing the second persona to be irrational, horrid, distracted, or deeply troubled, with the choice depending on a preference for normalization, projection, displacement, or denial. But few responses are more suspect than the reflexes of social convention, however gratifying it may be to join in communal outrage.

If there are no direct connections between the speaker's beautiful memories and his puzzling self-interruption, and if a moralizing judgment is not the answer, then readers must turn to other resources. Some concepts from speech act theory may be useful here in that they distinguish otherwise simultaneous aspects of a locution. In How to Do Things with Words, John Austin quickly moves beyond an initial distinction between constatives (which assert something to be true or false about a state of affairs) and performatives (which accomplish social actions such as reassuring, misleading, belittling, inspiring, etc.).⁴ Yet his earlier formation still has considerable value for critical practice. The speaker in “Follower” clearly provides the constatives of the poem's fictional “information.” At the same time, he also enacts a series of performatives, each of which plays out a drama in brief. While his constatives are restricted, his performatives are not. There is only so much information available in the poem. But how many different performatives are there? In the last lines of “Follower,” for example, does the persona lament that he did not become a farmer, unearth a repressed experience, interject a screen memory that actually conceals something else, wreck a belated revenge on a tyrannical parent, shrewdly enlist one of numerous possible tactics for eliciting his listeners' sympathy, etc.? With face-to-face communications, human beings commonly identify performatives on the basis of contextual cues. “I will see you” might be a promise to someone in love with the speaker, a deliverance to someone caught in a tedious conversation, or a threat to someone who owes the speaker money. Notwithstanding the confidence many people have in their judgment, the process of identifying performatives is notoriously perilous. In the case of imaginative literature, matters are even worse. Literary works oblige readers to identify performatives mainly on the basis of internal cues, yet they deliberately omit, ambiguate, and overload such markers.⁵ To tell if an acquaintance were evening scores with a less-than-perfect parent, a listener might refer to factors such as the speaker's intonation, the nature of the occasion, their prior encounters, the genre (letter, casual remark, retort), etc. But if the only access to a speaker's performatives potential meanings quickly outpace calculation. Necessarily, to interpret the purely textual and thus unrestricted performatives of a literary text requires a departure from the conventions of understanding ordinary speech acts. A literary text asks its readers to consider whether its performatives include some that are unintended by a speaker, or even at odds with one another. Nor is this a strictly modern preoccupation. Shakespeare's plays offer a great many scenes in which characters sincerely believe in their benign constatives, yet enact bloodthirsty and cynical betrayals. And they virtually consist of utterances whose leading metaphors portray the cast and setting of a coherent action, yet at the same time bear within themselves a medley of divergent and even contradictory dramas.

Literary criticism has much to learn about the various elements that cue a performative, or the complex interactions that may occur among multiple performatives.⁶ One matter, though, is clear. Some performative cues are relatively apparent in that they consist of familiar generic and stylistic elements. Other cues, however, may consist of more subtle markers: a gap in narrative continuity, a shift in physical perspective, a slight discrepancy within a metaphor's source domain. As with Austin's other distinctions, the various performatives of a literary text cannot be neatly divided into so many discrete textual segments, for they are simultaneous. A passage within a work of fiction, or lines within a poem, may contain an array of performative cues. And each of these may bring into being the cast and conflict of a different social world. As a heuristic, however, the performatives of any given passage may be roughly divided between a primary set signaled by familiar and apparent markers, and a secondary set signaled by less commonly noted and thus less conspicuous markers. Adapting a term from Foucault, the performatives of these secondary markers can be considered as heterotopias. In his essay “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” Foucault describes a heterotopia as a space that potentially connects to any other space, yet whose internal relationships “halt, suspend, or invert” conventional relationships (350). As well as its main drama, then, a literary work's performatives may further enact a series of heterotopias or spaces of decoding. By patiently tracing these spaces of the other, it becomes possible to delve into the tacit history of a locution, even should that history be entombed within a protective funerary art.

The framing drama of “Follower” suggests an amiable scene, perhaps a pub or other informal gathering. The conversation has perhaps turned to a harmless rivalry. Whose family and kin were closest to the land? The audience is probably a small group rather than an individual, for grandiloquence such as “His shoulders globed like a full sail strung …” would be too great a risk with just one person.⁷ Its members do not know the speaker well, otherwise they would not need to be told he is talking about his own father. Most likely the audience consists of outsiders unfamiliar with the husbandry skills that were common prior to the use of farm tractors. Were they locals they would be unimpressed by the initial flourish of rural argot: “shafts,” “wing,” “sock,” “headrig.” Interestingly, the speaker draws on this lexicon for only the first two quatrains. Each term occurs once, after which he returns to a more standard diction. His brief and well-placed display of verbal expertise leaves the impression of someone, perhaps an outsider himself, who mimics a ploughman's language just long enough to assume the role. Whatever his intentions, the initial persona plays several trumps in this conversational game. His ancestors belong to a tradition of survival that reaches back to fifth-century BC tillers of millet, and his diction confers an expert's knowledge and authority. Put simply, he pulls rank.

In different circumstances, even casual companions would grow suspicious and maybe resentful. But “Follower” also conducts a ceremony for honoring the dead, a eulogy, which tightly restricts an audience's responses. Anyone within earshot of a eulogy is supposed to listen respectfully. Doing so is a social obligation because the dead, if not put to rest, may wreak havoc anywhere. Those in attendance must furthermore take the speaker at his word, lest irony or innuendo begin to unravel the pall of reverence. Eulogies are usually announced well in advance so that participants can arrive well prepared to play their attentive and supportive roles. Yet “Follower”'s band of mourners find themselves inducted without benefit of either prior notice or situational cues, so they could not possibly anticipate the consequences of the subtle net in which they are caught. Only a gradual accumulation of past tenses hints that the father has passed away, and even this remains an inference, not a fact. The eulogy's restrictions of the audience insinuate rather than announce themselves. Perhaps the father is still alive, but who would dare ask? By the time the listeners understand the drama in which they have been cast, it is too late. They have no choice but to play their assigned role.

But what about the restrictions on the speaker? Some generic codes are relevant here. A eulogy is not an encomium, which requires emotional warmth from the speaker; or a panegyric, which requires richly elaborated praise; or a tribute, which requires both profound grief and a substantial memorial, preferably one that involves heavy expense. Eulogies instead tend to be set pieces, delivered by commissioned rhetors, who do not know the deceased well, if at all. In a busy world, a eulogy offers a ready-made and convenient template, complete with fill-in blanks. All the initial persona of “Follower” need do is follow the numbers.

• 1. Put the deceased at center stage, but describe general features common to a role rather than specific details about an individual.
• Anyone working a horse-drawn plough must adjust the share depth and angle of the moldboard according to the soil conditions, keep a solid grip on the lurching handles, turn the team at field's end, and match the furrows so as to waste neither time nor tillage. These are also the major events of the poem.

• 2. Keep it safe and shallow.
• The two-dimensional ploughman appears entirely from the outside, just like his draft horses. The audience learns nothing of the father's thoughts, dreams, or disappointments, not even those that would be risk-free truisms such as his great love of the land or deep concern for his family.

• 3. To heighten the reality effect, and keep disharmonious memories at bay, weave several different occasions into a single memorable episode.
• The eulogy forsakes the splays and tangles of historical time for the tight inevitability of a plot. It creates an unbroken thread, but at a high cost of exclusion.

• 4. End with a contrast between the ennobled past and the dismal future.
• There can be no doubt concerning the difference between the father's manly prowess and the son's childish mimicry.

I wanted to grow up and plough,
To close one eye, stiffen my arm.
All I ever did was follow
In his broad shadow round the farm.
I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,
Yapping always.

While such dogged adherence to generic convention would make sense for a professional, especially one who is rushed or underpaid, for a son it raises questions about the purpose of his performative. Is its primary objective to conduct an act of homage to the dead? Or is this only a tactical means to another end, namely to exercise inescapable power over a conscript and submissive audience? It is a curious issue to raise, were it not for the even more curious absence of either emotion or understanding of son for father.

Yet if it is power the initial persona seeks, the stakes would surely need to be higher than the pleasure of manipulating a few docile and credulous tourists. When performatives are so ill-matched to their occasion, it may indicate that a speech act performs a surrogate function. In “Follower” the audience is an anonymous collective, previously unknown to the speaker and unlikely to have any further dealings with him; hence they might serve as ready substitutes for the social Other, the faceless “they” whose imagined gaze locks each individual into a self-enforced normality. What better justice for this outrage than forcing the Other into the very powerlessness it inflicts? To that end, the eulogy tosses off a number of insolent innuendoes about the father. He follows the team, and by extension follows the caprice of weather, illness, and blight. Other innuendoes are more pointed. The father's “one eye” casts him as an uncivilized Cyclops, that perambulating phallus whose vision narrows to the care of herds and crops. Plagued by relentless duties, he sinks to a drunken “sod.” His “hobnailed wake” reveals a friendless man whose perfunctory mourners do not even bother to change their work boots. Such innuendoes are not important because they are true or false but because they enact an opposing performative. Within the eulogy's main drama, they undertake an entire judicial process. Indictment, trial, sentence, and punishment transpire in a single word. Yet there is little risk for the persona because innuendoes are well shielded by their deniability. Anyone foolish enough to notice any of these veiled insults would be informed that such thoughts were far from the speaker's intentions, and thus arise from the protestor's malicious intent. In this way the innuendoes of “Follower” exact a retribution from the despised social Other by splitting the audience into distinct groups. One group, the obligingly obtuse, either are or pretend to be incapable of detecting the innuendoes. The other group, the resentfully silent, understand them well enough but also recognize the meager rewards of objecting. Of the two responses, the latter is doubtless the more gratifying as there is little pleasure in outwitting the witless. But to have one's listeners gradually discover that they are being duped, to watch as their sympathy turns to resentment, and to know that they know their Hobson's choice is compliance, that would be a fine revenge on the imagined Other, which holds human freedom in bondage.

Each unfolding consequence of a performative, however, only leads further into the poem. Why does the initial persona harbor such a subtle rage for strangers? It remains to trace the history from which the poem's main drama emerges, a history that somehow demands redress. As noted, the range of performative markers from which that history might commence is considerable. A single metaphor may invoke an earlier drama. A shift in topic may precipitate an ideological collision, an unusual word rekindle a bitter feud, a change in physical perspective signal a new belief system. Or, as in the case of “Follower,” a stylistic commonplace may bring into being a series of fragmentary narratives. As is appropriate for his informal setting, the speaker adopts a loose or running style throughout the poem. The lack of transitions in the resulting parataxis quickens the pace, but at the cost of straining cohesion. A quiet depth gathers at the end of each sentence, sometimes of each phrase. Despite the relaxed pace, these remaining gaps eventually demand notice. To what further tales might a succeeding phrase have led? Imagine hearing the lines of the second quatrain as a series of introductions:

An expert …
The sod rolled over without breaking …
At the headrig …

In a fundamental conflict between constative force and performative possibility, the assuring parataxis itself begins to serve as a resistant marker of performatives that potentially contradict its simple narrative. As the silences become more resonant, “Follower”'s plot slowly drifts into multiple narratives, any one of which might provide the entry point for an opposing drama.

The eulogy tells not only of a father's skill but also of the child who watches him plough. Obedient to its rule of exclusion, however, the eulogy leaves out a host of implicated events. The poem's abrupt beginning. “My father ploughed. …” leaves out the circumstances of how the son got to the field. Whose idea was the expedition? Possibly a small child would be eager to leave his mother's side for the company of a parent later remembered only as a shape seen from behind, a “broad shadow.” And possibly a mother would commend her little boy to the care of a husband distracted by back-breaking labor that required his full attention. But what if she knew nothing of this? Even if she did consent to her son's watching the father rig the plough and harness the team, how likely is it she would approve of his accompanying the father into the field? His uncertain legs could not manage the journey on their own, so the father would have to carry the toddler on his shoulders. Was this fatherly affection, or an abduction? Once arrived, the father no doubt put his son to one side and, with a busy adult's obtuseness, told him to keep out of the way. With little else to draw his attention, the child would be effectively enrolled as a captive audience and left to study the performative that was in turn enacted before him. Looking at the horses, he may have seen that the world is ruled by will and cunning, since their massive strength still left them in servitude. Or thinking of prior events, he may have grasped that at any instant he could be plucked from safety. Or the son may have learned that he had no place in the exercise of power. Not merely unable to plough, he is unable to be taught.

Like some lesser god, the father acts out a drama of irresistible domination. Solitude and perhaps secretiveness protect him, though were someone to chance upon this rural revelation of the god's power, he would have a ready supply of explanations. Had not the famine taught that survival depended on owning not just a patch but enough land to diversify crops and keep livestock? It was a son's duty, particularly the eldest's, to preserve the family farm. Besides, watching father plough was an honored tradition. He had done so as a child and he expected that one day his grandson would watch his son. So the father knew in advance that his actions would cast him in a defensible role, at least for the right audience of neighbors, acquaintances, and relatives. They would understand that actions instruct better than words, and that a hard world allows no pause before imposing its ways.

Yet the ploughman is unprepared for resistance from a surprising source, his son. Although the events of “Follower” are told in the language of an adult, they are shown as if through the eyes of a child. This discontinuity opens the possibility of exploring the impossible, the little boy's prelinguistic consciousness. The poem describes the toddler as “Yapping always,” as producing the fluent vocables that gradually give birth to words, but still not enunciating the words themselves. If so, then it cannot be the child's language that the audience hears. He might yap in the sense of producing sounds that resemble a small dog's annoying bark, but he could not say that he was yapping. Efforts to go beyond this point, as in children's stories, simply project an adult's language into a space from which it has still to emerge. Yet as part of its brazen experiment, “Follower” does venture into this space by using its visual decoupage as a cue for an opposing performative. The poem's arrangement of scenes retraces a sequence of physical points of view through which it becomes possible to follow the actions of the ploughman's son. While the little boy cannot speak for himself, his location, focus, and selection of visual subjects can speak for him.

At first, the ploughman appears from behind and at a distance with only his back, the wide frame of the plough, and the just-turned furrow visible. As instructed, his son watches from a safe distance. The scene cuts to the earlier events of adjusting the ploughshare, visualized from a few feet away, before fading to “The sod rolled over without breaking.” The line has an almost hypnotic effect with its continuous and endless motion. Together, the first three scenes suggest a child's fluid perceptions as they drift from distant impression, to close observation, to dreamlike reverie. Then abruptly, the decoupage begins to follow an orderly sequence of actions.

At the headrig, with a single pluck
Of reins, the sweating team turned round
And back into the land. His eye
Narrowed and angled at the ground,
Mapping the furrow exactly.

The son's wandering attention returns to the father who has meanwhile reached the end of the field. Though a child, he notes the precise cue that forecasts this event: a quiver in the hame rings. Once the team opens into full profile as they swing round and then recoil into a foreshortened oddity, the son shows even greater perceptiveness. He sees that the ploughman has only one eye showing. His father is now behind the draft, whose haunches might stand anywhere from 16 to 19 hands (5 feet 4 inches to 6 feet 4 inches), and even a powerful man must lean well forward to guide the heavy frame. So the ploughman is blind to whatever lies dead ahead. Moreover, the son notices that the ploughman must squint as he constantly gauges the 2-feet-square area between the breaking and the adjacent furrow. Swing wide and he loses yield, narrow and he overworks his team. The little boy consequently intuits that not only is there a considerable blind spot directly before the horses but also that his father's attention is riveted to a tiny spot just behind their rear hooves. At this moment he gets up from his vantage point and crosses the tilled field. “I stumbled in his hobnailed wake, / Fell sometimes on the polished sod. …” The ploughman's “wake” would be his most recent furrow. His son falls on ground dead ahead the landside horse.

The decoupage that brings the drama into focus offers only a hint of what happens next, for its evasive generalization precludes a conclusion. “Sometimes he rode me on his back / Dipping and rising to his plod.” The viewpoint shifts from the immediate sensations of uncertain legs over broken ground and small hands feeling the smooth, somewhat slick clay, to a distant observer who notices the steady rhythms of a silhouette. But who is this distant observer? Did a passerby chance to see the danger, or a hired man? There is no mention in the poem of other characters. Or did the mother, finding her child gone, go looking for her son and discover the threat in time to stop it with her cries? The silhouette lacks the detail that would be visible from a hailing distance. Or did she watch the disaster unfold, the calm of morning, the dark earth, the glint of the coulter, the ploughman lost in his task until the defiant draft balked and reared, their trip-hammer hooves just stirring the wisps above her child's upturned face?

The scene's ambiguity illustrates the cold brilliance of Heaney's early poems, where deadly calms only grudgingly divulge their world of inhuman humanness. The will to power generates not merely the fact of human existence but also the deepest intimacies of father and son, husband and wife. Nor does any insight wait to overcome the dark mysteries that pervade and bemock the dim consciousness that follows long after. Father and son join in battle to the death, yet neither can comprehend a rage so natural and loving. Long before they share even a single word, each regards the other across an ancient enmity whose rules never change because they are too banal to be spoken. A father must exercise absolute power over one thing in his powerless life, even if it be a two-year-old. A son must risk injury, dismemberment, and death itself, even if it be in empty defiance. The stakes are preposterous because they are irrelevant. Power is both genesis and eschatology in these malevolent idylls, its own beginning and its own end.

The performative cues of “Follower” considered so far include the poem's inventive use of genre, innuendo, parataxis, and decoupage. But perhaps the most fascinating markers are to be found in the poem's use of metaphor. George Lakoff and Mark Turner in More than Cool Reason distinguish between a metaphor's target domain (the conceptual field of the term that is being elaborated) and its source domain (the conceptual field of the term that does the elaboration). As an illustration, the source domain “polished” in the fourteenth line of “Follower” articulates the target domain “sod.” For Lakoff and Turner, a good metaphor significantly changes the way an era constructs its knowledge and values. Accordingly, a reader would decide how the associations of a surface buffed to a smooth luster might remap the concept of a dull, heavy, cumbersome lump of clay and densely matted roots. But as the example from “Follower” shows, Heaney's metaphors do not always acquire their poetic power from either the distance between the different domains or the surprising originality of the subsequent remapping. Well-polished brass and fertile soils both belong to an Irish aristocrat's estate. And depending on soil conditions, certain clays do seem as if shined by the coulter's slicing action, an image noted in Hopkins's “The Windhover.”⁸ Rather than using one concept to cognitively remap another, Heaney's metaphors often work on a principle of topographic counterpoint. They interpose an arbitrariness in the linkage between target and source domains which enables them to overlay discrete social worlds. With “polished sod,” one scene opens on domestic servants who dip, rub, or brush wood, stone, and brass with a light, rapid motion, a way to keep them not just busy but highly visible in drawing rooms, conservatories, libraries, and other public parts of private dwellings. The other scene shows starving, barely recognizable farmers as they heave a dense and tangled mass with crude implements to a capricious rhythm of weathers and seasons. Although a plot may not be recoverable from a metaphor's topographies, a range of settings usually is, and from their associations may emerge the actors, oppressions, resistances, and lingering bitterness of struggles that will not die.

“Follower” makes no mention of what happens between its unspecified moment in childhood and the endless present of its last lines. With a single phrase, “But now …,” entire decades might disappear into the textual abyss between successive sentences, were it not for the metaphors that intimate how the son's first lesson remained an active force. The father no sooner appears in the poem's opening scene than he drifts into an image taken from a schoolboy's daydream. His broad back becomes “a full sail strung” as it mingles with the new experiences of a history textbook or a master's lecture. The father's back resembles a sail because he wears a cloth shirt. It would be worn loose about his waist for mobility, and thus appear roughly square in shape: a trivial enough detail, except to a student who has just learned that renaissance mariners, beginning with the Portuguese, supplemented their usual lateen-rigged or triangular sails with an additional rectangular sail set on a fourth mast. The greater canvas area provided increased speed for the longer voyages needed to explore the coast of West Africa. Square-rigged sails were particularly effective on the lighter ships known as caravels, which is why the Nina and Pinta were apt choices for Columbus's first voyage. Almost imperceptibly, then, the metaphor offers a glimpse into the faded heterotopia of a schoolboy's fantasy, whose discreet source domain recalls an early rebellion. The invincible father of early childhood turns into a fair wind of freedom, his rocking horse plough into a vessel of grace, and the sullen Derry clay into a beckoning horizon that rounds a narrow field into a sphere of adventure. Sailors “set the wing” of the rigging. The coulter's prow smoothly cuts a sea that “rolled over without breaking.” The horses' turnabout gracefully tacks “back into the land” with a deck “dipping and rising” in the gentle swell. In its passage the ship leaves a broadening “wake” whose sun-streaked ripples are “polished” in the abundant light.

The beautiful world brought into being through this fantasy's performative replaces the blunt fact of power with an idyllic if impossible state of harmony. An actual ship of exploration, particularly one that might tilt off the world's edge, required a standard crew of drunkards and sociopaths, hence a chain of command with ranks, rules, judgments, and punishments. Columbus's sailors routinely threatened mutiny, and it was mainly his deceit that kept them tractable, for example by telling them that they lacked sufficient provisions to return and had no choice but to continue. Moreover, an actual ship would need to contend with hostile currents and storms, heavy seas and treacherous shoals. Even perfect tranquillity could mean dying of hunger and thirst while becalmed. But the schoolboy's magical craft, like the vessel of Coleridge's Rime when the weather is good, responds to the touch of a benevolent pantheism. There are no rivalries aboard this solitary vision, no suffering or distress, for the death-mocking Celtic warrior who once welcomed the fate of being trampled to death has since turned into a utopian fantasist. Perhaps the schoolboy had already learned that his father's early lesson would be tirelessly repeated by others, and that he would rarely be given either an opportunity for resistance or a rescuing audience. Yet a grim world can be turned into poetry, and poetry into beautiful dreams. The strategy makes good sense. While commonplace wisdom spurns escapism, practical experience sometimes calls for it. Prisoners of war and victims of torture often keep their sanity by drifting away to distant and untroubled scenes. To an imaginative boy recently consigned to the shot mill of his early schooling, fantasy offers a welcome freedom. No one can meddle in his paradise. It carries no obligations or uncertain consequences. He risks only that his inattentiveness might incur the wrath of a master, though even this would reassure him how little the others actually knew. For the powerless, the resistance of fantasy may be the one power left.

Still, even an opposing performative is not without contradictions of its own. The magic ship's invulnerability could lead to a false sense of safety, its isolation to a neglect of real responsibilities, or its harmony to an intolerance of cultural diversity. It might eventually produce a loss of self-respect, as the fantasist came to see himself as a temporizer or, worse, as one of the faceless They who gather at any act of official cruelty. Given such doubts, the schoolboy's metaphor apparently needed revision or, more precisely, a further shift to a heterotopia within its heterotopia. The father's shoulders as full sail do not rise, expand, billow, swell, or surge, any of which would be consistent with sail as a source domain. Instead they “globed.” This new figuration enacts a further performative, which though related to that of a Renaissance vessel of exploration is also distinct: the scholarly world of mapmaker and navigator. Here the horse plough turned caravel turns once again, but this time to the exacting if unglamorous tools that changed human civilization forever. The father's “eye / Narrowed and angled” as if drawing to scale the jagged precisions of a newly discovered coastline. The coulter sharpens to “the bright steel-pointed” tip of a compass. And when the boy tries “To close one eye, stiffen my arm,” he bears less resemblance to a straining ploughman than to a navigator who fixes a sextant on the horizon and squints to align the star's image.

When early mapmakers reached the limits of their charted worlds, they sometimes wrote “Here be Dragons” and drew what must have seemed hideous monsters, though today their cartouche seems more like grimacing dogs and cats with extravagant tails. Perhaps the schoolboy, now become a young man and himself confronting a world bounded by ignorance and fear, imagined a similar part for himself. He would neither pointlessly defy nor helplessly flee the real monsters of his upbringing, but like a mapmaker patiently plot their demise. The heterotopia works relatively well, especially for a poet intent on social transformation. Both poet and mapmaker work within inclusive spaces. Their parallel arts of word and legend encompass the omniglot signifiers of religious, political, military, philosophical, technical, rural, urban, economic, generational, and ethnic topographies. Both poet and mapmaker devise systems that are complex rather than complicated. Their discrete texts bring about interactions so unpredictable that any final resolution keeps receding beneath the horizon. Their symbols make the invisible visible and the inevitable contingent. Both mapmaker and poet open the circle of nature back into the maze of genealogy. Their fine instruments trace the myopias and terrors of a cultural moment, but in doing so summon the opposing designs on which they are written. And both mapmaker and poet offer a gateway to the future. Their schemes eventually must answer to the unceasing demand of the discoveries they bring into being.

But “Follower” does not actually end with so alluring a prospect. It only defers its end by disrupting the social event with which it begins. A performative criticism can patiently articulate the series of markers that lead from eulogist back to clumsy father, straying child, daydreaming schoolboy, and idealistic youth. No doubt it would be possible to construct a critical narrative that would link these successive heterotopias to the impatience of the final persona. But even in the most ingenious arrangement the seams would still show, and perhaps that is the point. Performative criticism begins in the gap between constative sense and dramatic consequences. The outburst of the final persona may simply serve to mark the permanence of that gap, not only within poetry but also within language itself. Any utterance, literary or otherwise, retains a performative dimension and thus a heretic's map of the heterotopic scenes at work within its meanings.

Notes

1. Heaney's mother and father were both living when “Follower” was first published, which suggests that its speaker is a dramatic character rather than a representation of the poet. In general, Heaney's critics can be divided into romanticists faithful to Wordsworth who assume that the speaker is the poet, and modernists faithful to T. S. Eliot who assume that the poet withdraws into an array of dramatic personas. Both approaches have produced valuable readings.

2. Given that any event may be further divided into innumerable constitutive events, the potential narrative arrangements of even a simple action become incalculable. “Narrative is the representation of at least two real or fictive events or situations in a time sequence, neither of which presupposes or entails the other” (Prince 4).

3. The ghost narratives of Ireland often commemorate an irreversible disaster, hence the return of a destructive force beyond human control (Colum iii). On the other hand, the ghosts that later appear in Station Island seem more intent on advice and remonstration (Vendler 94-98).

4. By the time he gets to lecture 8, Austin has defined his more familiar tripartite terminology: “We can similarly distinguish the locutionary act ‘he said that …’ from the illocutionary act ‘he argued that …’ and the perlocutionary act ‘he convinced me that …’” (102).

5. One might argue with the qualifier “mainly” on the basis that readers are not blank tablets but complex individuals who have undergone a lengthy process of acculturation. This line of reasoning, however, underrates literature's potential challenges to such conditioning (Rabinowitz 173-93).

6. Deconstructive theorists such as Barbara Herrnstein Smith have extended Austin's concept of the performative to literary texts by suggesting that they do not refer to actual conditions but to the agents, settings, conflicts, etc., of a fictional world:

   Poems and novels, as opposed to biographies and histories of the Civil War, are linguistic structures whose relation to the world of objects and events is short-circuited. The short circuit operates through a convention according to which certain identifiable utterances are understood to be performances of a verbal action, the occurrence of which as an “action” is entirely confined to such performances.

   (10)

   I develop performatives in a different direction by exploring how they can enact multiple and opposing social worlds.

7. Unless that person were a child. It might be that the speaker addresses his own son. If so, the shift in audience would lead to a much different reading, which is the explicit object of a performative criticism: to elucidate variables that may in turn contribute to a growing critical dialogue.

8. “No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion / Shine …” (30). Gardner glosses “sillion” as a strip of arable land, or a furrow (Hopkins 228).

Works Cited

Austin, John. How to Do Things with Words. Ed. J. O. Urmson. New York: Oxford UP, 1965.

Colum, Padraic. Introduction. Ghosts in Irish Houses. By James Reynolds. New York: Farrar, 1947.

Columbus, Christopher. The Diario of Christopher Columbus's First Voyage to America, 1492-1493. Trans. and ed. Oliver Dunn and James E. Kelley. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1989.

Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred & the Profane. Trans. Willard Trask. New York: Harcourt, 1980.

Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias.” Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory. Ed. Neil Leach. New York: Routledge, 1997. 350-356.

Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred. Trans. Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1977.

Heaney, Seamus. “Follower.” Selected Poems, 1966-1987. New York: Farrar, 1990. 8.

Hopkins, Gerard Manley. Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose. Ed. W. H. Gardner. London: Penguin, 1985.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Turner. More than Cool Reason. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989.

O'Neill, Charles. “Violence and the Sacred in Seamus Heaney's North,” Seamus Heaney: The Shaping Spirit. Ed. Catharine Malloy and Phyllis Carey. Newark: Delaware, 1996.

Prince, Gerald. Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative. New York: Mouton, 1982.

Rabinowitz, Peter. Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1987.

Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. On the Margins of Discourse: The Relation of Literature to Language. Chicago: U of Chicago P. 1978.

Vendler, Helen. Seamus Heaney. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998.