Reterritorialization and the Revival
In The Rough Field (1972) John Montague evocatively views the
North of Ireland according to an Old Rhyme: ëAs a severed headí
speaking ëwith a grafted tongueí. Where there is:
The whole landscape a manuscript
We had lost the skill to read,
A part of our past disinherited.^7Beneath the colonized landscape lies a buried native tradition akin to
the lost Irish language that cannot be read. In relation to this, Lloyd
recalls the slogan of The Nation which ësuccinctly expresses the
ramifications of the nationalist project: ìTo foster public opinion and
make it racy of the soilîí. Lloyd explains how the fictiveness of
building a national consciousness is renaturalized through the
metaphor of grounding:
through its rootedness in the primary soil of Ireland, the mind of Ireland will
regain its distinctive savour. The ërootí meaning of culture is implicit here, and
certainly, insofar as a literary culture is envisaged as the prime agent and
ground of unification, it is literary taste which is subject to the most rigorous
ëreterritorializationí.^8This can be compared with the effects of Yeatsís mythologization of
Ireland in his poetry whereby a sense of motherland and nationalist
history are sometimes woven together.
Although Yeats is obviously different from Heaney in his
position as an Anglo-Irish Protestant from the South who wrote at the
beginning of the century, Lloydís notion of a national consciousness
being renaturalized through metaphors of grounding is evocative of
some of Yeatsís poems. Initially, Yeats does not seem to be
purposefully fleeing from the nets of national representation. His
Revivalist stance argues that ë[t]here is no great literature without
7 John Montague, ëThe Severed Headí, The Rough Field (Dublin: Dolmen Press,
1972), pp.31, 35.
8 Lloyd, p.16.