The Quaking Sod
David Lloyd asserts in his essay ëPap for the Dispossessedí (1993)
that Heaney ëseeks to give an Irish bend to cultural traditioní,
grafting it on roots which are identified as rural, Catholic, and, more remotely,
Gaelic. That grafting is enabled by the return to place, a reterritorialization in a
literal sense initially, which symbolically restores the interrupted continuity of
identity and ground.^4Lloydís essay does not cover Heaneyís poetry or critical writing after
1984 which becomes a transitional moment in his work. If we take
into account the poetry from Station Island onwards, we can see a
more complex response to identity than Lloyd suggests. Calling into
question roots and continuity, the later poetry moves towards a present
of deterritorialization rather than a past of reterritorialization.
Addressing these concerns, it is necessary to explore the
preoccupation with the land, gravity or grounding in Irish writing.
With pessimism, Daniel Corkery described Irish identity as ëa quaking
sodí: ëEverywhere in the mentality of the Irish people are flux and
uncertainty. Our national consciousness may be described, in a native
phrase, as a quaking sod. It gives no footing.í^5 Corkery locates ëthe
Irish peopleí as a collective ënational consciousnessí that represents
itself via a ënative phraseí which is evocative of their landscape. This
logic is bound up at a metaphorical level with notions of ëimagined
communitiesí and ëstates of fantasyí whereby what is conceived is an
idea of Irelandís state of mind.^6 For Corkery, ëthe Irishí are ëa peopleí
with ëno footingí. Due to a history of colonialism they have been
uprooted, their land and native language disturbed by colonial
4 David Lloyd, ëPap For the Dispossessed: Seamus Heaney and the Poetics of
Identityí, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment,
(Dublin: Lilliput, 1993), p.23.
5 Daniel Corkery, Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature (Cork: University Press,
1931), pp.14ñ15.
6 Cf. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and
Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Jacqueline Rose, States of
Fantasy: The Clarendon Lectures in English Literature, 1994 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1994).