‘stalled in the pre-articulate’ there is an awareness of human suffering among human beings there must also be art as the
objectiveform of that awareness.^59
‘On the side of art’, Adorno criticizes not so much poetry as the culture of the West
that produced, almost inexorably, the Holocaust. Within such a debased culture,
poetry’s capacity to witness or testify to ‘human suffering’ proves valuable so long
as this responsibility avoids self-indulgence. But Adorno goes further, inquiring
into the real if atrocious question, ‘whether one canliveafter Auschwitz’. A pallid
derivative of this question is echoed by the graffito in Ballymurphy that Heaney
quotes in ‘Whatever You Say Say Nothing’: ‘Is there a life before death?’^60 Adorno
refers to a Sartre play in which a character who is tortured ‘asks whether or why one
would live in a world in which one is beaten until one’s bones are smashed’.^61 ‘Since
it concerns the possibility of any affirmation of life,’ Adorno says in the strongest
possible terms, ‘this question cannot be evaded.’ In seeking a poetry ‘that gives
peace and tells horror’, Heaney espouses a poetics that encompasses the question
of whether ‘any affirmation of life’ is possible; the question remains embedded in
his response that the ‘overmastering power’ of horror must be ‘acknowledged and
unconceded’.^62 Thomas Hardy, from another direction, addresses much the same
thing in his still-conditional declaration that, ‘ifway to the Better there be, it exacts
a full look at the Worst’.^63 Such a gaze into the ‘Worst’, which interrogates our very
reason for living amidst such suffering, forms the core of a poetics of witness. For
the poet who occupies ‘the solitary role of witness...the redress of poetry’, Heaney
says, ‘comes to represent something like an exercise of the virtue of hope as it is
understood by V ́aclav Havel,’^64 who describes it as a stance in which ‘its deepest
roots are in the transcendental, just as the roots of human responsibility are’.^65
Generally, Heaney refuses to merely transform loss and suffering into the
readilyforgottenloveliness of false consolation, but ‘The Strand at Lough Beg’
short-cuts the hard work of witnessing for a notoriously resolving or consoling
vision. Imaginatively dabbing clean with moss and dew his dead cousin Colum
McCartney, killed in a random sectarian attack in Northern Ireland, Heaney’s ‘The
Strand at Lough Beg’ concludes consolingly by burying the cousin with the crime
of his murder and the travesty of the war itself. When Heaney says, ‘With rushes
that shoot green again, I plait|Green scapulars to wear over your shroud,’^66 he
overreaches as poet, claiming for himself and poetry in general a power and a
prerogative that one maywishto have, but one cannot claim, especially in the
(^59) Adorno,Metaphysics: Concept and Problems, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Rolf Tiedemann
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 110–11. 60
Heaney, ‘fromWhatever You Say Say Nothing’, inOpened Ground, 133.
(^61) Adorno,Metaphysics, 111. (^62) Heaney, interviewed by Rand Brandes, 21.
(^63) Thomas Hardy, ‘In Tenebris II’, inThe Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy,ed.JamesGibson
(London: Macmillan, 1976), 168; my italics. 64
66 Heaney, ‘Redress of Poetry’, 4.^65 V ́aclav Havel, quoted ibid. 4–5.
Heaney, ‘The Strand at Lough Beg’, inOpened Ground, 153.