Allusion and ambiguity in Seamus Heaney's “Blackberry-Picking”

55 Pages·2005·0.18 MB·English

nº 17, November 2004
Departamento de Filología Inglesa
Universidad de Alicante
ISSN 0214-4808 ● CODEN RAEIEX
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Edición electrónica:
Allusion and ambiguity in Seamus Heaney’s
“Blackberry-Picking”
Jonathan P.A. Sell
Contents
Allusion and ambiguity in Seamus Heaney’s
“Blackberry-Picking” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6
Abstract . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8
2. Allusion in “Blackberry-Picking” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .10
3. Intertextual interpretations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .18
4. A stylistic aproach to allusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .26
5. Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .41
Appendix: Allusions to Keats . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .43
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .53
Revista Estudios Ingleses 17 (2004)
Allusion and ambiguity in Seamus Heaney’s
“Blackberry-Picking”
Jonathan P.A. Sell
University of Alcalá
[email protected]
Abstract
This paper subjects the function of allusion fi rst to a stylistic and then
to a more pragmatic analysis. It is argued that allusion is interactive
and enables the construction of a community or culture in which the
sender invites the receiver to share. In the case of Heaney’s short
lyric, it is shown how allusions to Keats at fi rst sight persuade readers
of the existence of a shared community with the poet that is founded
on shared cultural experiences. However, this sense of community is
problematised by the experiential disjunction between the allusively
competent “you” to whom the poem is addressed and the “you” in-
scribed into the poem itself. This disjunction entails the alienation of
the explicit addressee from the recollected experiences of the poetic
persona as narrated within the poem, an alienation which mirrors that
CONTENTS 6
Allusion and ambiguity in Seamus Heaney’s
“Blackberry-Picking”
Jonathan P.A. Sell
persona’s forlorn incapacity to map onto the Ulster of his childhood
the allusive pre-texts of English culture. Thus allusion throws into relief
both what sender and receiver may have in common and what keeps
them apart, while also offering the poet refuge in the ambiguity inher-
ent in the twin possibilities of referential or associative readings.
“Blackberry-Picking”
For Philip Hobsbaum
Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At fi rst, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that fi rst one and its fl esh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk-cans, pea-tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our
boots.
Round hayfi elds, cornfi elds and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full,
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
CONTENTS 7
Revista Estudios Ingleses 17 (2004)
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard’s.
We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was fi lled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet fl esh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn’t fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not.
(Heaney, 1980: 15)
1. Introduction
T
he initial impetus behind this paper was an unease at
the way both traditional students of allusion and inter-
textualists tend to seek a single and defi nitive meaning
to explain a writer’s use of allusion within a given text, as if
interpretation were a question of Manichean decision-mak-
ing, of choosing either this or that, where “this” and “that” are
taken to be mutually exclusive. (note 1) The paper gained
momentum when I discovered how intertextual theory and lit-
erary stylistics have relatively little to say about each other;
thus it became an experiment in combining two approaches
to literary texts. My main fi nding is that ambiguity, normally
understood to be a semantic phenomenon where one signi-
CONTENTS 8
Allusion and ambiguity in Seamus Heaney’s
“Blackberry-Picking”
Jonathan P.A. Sell
fi er or chain of signifi ers denotes two (at least) logically in-
compatible meanings, with the corollary that one or other of
the possible meanings is relegated to a second place or re-
jected altogether, may also exist on the plane of Jakobson’s
functions. Thus, one meaning may pertain to one function,
another to a second function, and, so long as a text provides
suffi cient signals to identify its twin functions, both meanings
or interpretations may exist simultaneously and with equal
validity. Seamus Heaney’s poem “Blackberry-Picking” was
selected as a test-case because its allusions have so far at-
tracted little attention, especially its allusions to the poetry of
John Keats. What is more, Heaney is a poet acutely aware
both of literary and linguistic traditions and of his varying de-
grees of sitedness within them. (note 2 )It therefore seemed
worthwhile to discover what the function of allusion might be
in one of the poems from Heaney’s fi rst published collection,
where the young poet was in search of a voice and an audi-
ence. Once the presence of allusion in “Blackberry-Picking”
has been established, the possible functions of that allusion
will be assessed according to current intertextual opinion; then
an attempt will be made to systematise the allusive functions
by applying Jakobson’s functions of verbal communication.
Finally conclusions will be drawn regarding the theoretical is-
sues raised and the interpretation of Heaney’s poem.
CONTENTS 9
Revista Estudios Ingleses 17 (2004)
2. Allusion in “Blackberry-Picking”
2.1. Wordsworth, Frost and Roethke
“Blackberry-Picking” is one of a handful of lyrics in Heaney’s
fi rst published collection of poems, Death of a Naturalist
(1966), which have to do with his youthful encounters with the
natural world. With respect to this handful, among which the
most famous is the poem which gives the collection its title,
it has become a commonplace of Heaney criticism to identify
a distinctly anti-pastoral strain (Hart, 1992: 9-31) and/or a pri-
mordial debt to Wordsworth, whose guilt-ridden expoliations
of a rowing-boat in Book I of The Prelude and of hazelnuts in
“Nutting” were reprimanded by a minatory, animistic nature
(Morri-son, 1982: 21-2; Corcoran, 1986: 47-8; Foster, 1989:
23; Roe, 1989: 166-70; Tamplin, 1989: 16-7; Hart, 1992: 26).
The common burden of much of this criticism is that in such
poems Heaney is charting by means of sexually charged met-
aphor “the end of innocence” (Corcoran, 1986: 48) and giving
expression to “intimations of mortality” (Foster, 1989: 23).
Wordsworth’s “Nutting” may well be a topical forebear of
“Blackberry-Picking”, but a summary review of Heaney’s lexis
suggests that Theodore Roethke’s “Moss-Gathering” (1975:
38) is a rather closer literary relation, as hinted but not ex-
plored by Foster (1989: 21) and Hart (1992: 26). As well as
CONTENTS 10