the parent and child since, according to the proverb: ëYou cannot fit a
square peg into a round hole.í The squares and circles are comparable
with the Canadian writer Margaret Atwoodís novel Surfacing (1979)
which narrates the story of a woman who is looking for her lost and
dead father, and who has a breakdown where her view of the world
becomes distorted. There is a coincidental intimacy between
McGuckian and Atwood as Atwood imagines the act of surfacing as
the uninventing of the world, destroying the sentence back to sense,
thus avoiding being taken over by the myths of an ideological history.
Atwood writes: ëEverything from history must be eliminated, the
circles and the arrogant square pegs.í^35 ëOn Ballycastle Beachí also
attempts to dive from the wreckage of history into something less
scripted and this can be understood in terms of McGuckianís secretive
hermeticism, a delirious destruction of the sentence back to sense or a
strange unreading in the sense of dÈlire.
The squares and circles of the book in ëOn Ballycastle Beachí do
not form words as we know them and so this is a book of hieroglyphs.
The poem itself seems to be haunted by personalized poetic codes and
traps through which the reader must tread carefully in a poem where
vanishing or absence is associated with language as with Tom Paulinís
ëglitch/ in what youíre sayingí in ëAlmost Thereí (1994). The gram-
mar and images of the poem become fragmented and unclear. This has
the effect of articulating an ambivalent, ever shifting poetic vision and
this flits from thoughts of the ësummer houseí to a ëpre-wedding/
Dressí with the effect of creating a personalized code or private realm
where we must read in the gaps and the silences. The Symbolic ability
to represent is called into question and the poem lapses into a fluid
realm of linguistic breakdown that is associated with the Atlantic. As
in ëSmokeí, the poetic speakerís gender is unclear as is her/his
territory with the implication that identity is a fragile construction
which does not always hold since it is forever in process. ëOn
Ballycastle Beachí charts a place at the floodgates of representation
where meaning, territory and identities are dissolved.
35 Margaret Atwood, Surfacing (1979), pp.176ñ7. Cf. ëIntroduction to Placeí, The
Post-Colonial Studies Reader, eds., Bill Ashcroft, Helen Tiffin, Gareth Griffiths
(London: Routledge, 1995), p.396.