he writes. This portrait is of Heaney as a deconstructive master who
tests the English language and its ideologies to the limits. In ëHeaney
Among the Deconstructionistsí (1990), Henry Hartís deconstructive
reading finds that the poetic method in Heaneyís Sweeney poems is
like a ëlinguistic map or a deconstructive journeyí: ëAs Heaneyís
poems rearrange archaic systems of privilege and distinction, of
centrality and marginality [...] they continue to reflect on the way
displacements and differences make it possible for language to have
meaning.í^55 Translating Sweeney Astray, Heaney becomes a de-
constructionist ëmarks-maní who highlights the sign as a structure of
differencesí rather than finding ëa presence or an absence.í^56
Using the examples of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, Hart
draws on Terry Eagletonís review of Richard Kearneyís work where
he argues that in Ireland, deconstruction comes with the territory:
that post-structuralism should strike a responsive resonance in a post-colonial
[and here we could add colonial] society is really not at all surprising: it is not
irrelevant that the founder of deconstruction grew-up as an Algerian colonial
[...]^57Here, Ireland is positioned as a ëpost-colonial societyí, and con-
nections are made between post-structuralism and ëthe collapse of
triumphalist teleologiesí such as imperialism. At an ideological level,
deconstructive and deterritorializing visions become both a symptom
of and an antidote to the epistemic violence of colonialism.
When Joyce implores the pilgrim-poet to swim out on his own,
he is asking him to move away from the impulse to retrench and
instead, to float in a world of water and air; an imaginary space where
the rootedness of identity is called into question. As Heaney mentions
in his essay on Patrick Kavanagh in The Government of the Tongue
(1988):
55 Hart, ëHeaney Among the Deconstructionistsí, Journal of Modern Literature,
Vol.16, No.4, Spring 1990, p.478.
56 Ibid. Here, Hart draws on Heaneyís elegy for his former Harvard colleague,
Robert Fitzgerald.
57 Ibid., p.467. Cf. Terry Eagleton, ëTurning Towards Europeí, Times Literary
Supplement, 10ñ16th February, 1989, p.132.