The Landscape of Three Irelands: Hewitt, Murphy and Montague

The Landscape of Three Irelands: Hewitt, Murphy and Montague
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三个爱尔兰的风景:休伊特、墨菲和蒙塔古

DOI:
10.1007/978-1-349-80425-2_8
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发表时间:
1992
期刊:
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
影响因子:
--
通讯作者:
J. Foster
J. Foster
中科院分区:
--
文献类型:
--
作者:
J. Foster

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和我们所有人一样,谢默斯·希尼(Seamus Heaney)对爱尔兰生活的分裂感到困惑,他最近在绝望中抓住了爱尔兰历史学家 J. C. Beckett 的一句话:“爱尔兰有一个稳定的因素——土地,也有一个不稳定的因素——人民。”我们必须寻求连续性。”1 然而,我担心,在文学中——而且我怀疑在历史中(即在事件的重述中)——风景是一种文化代码,它使新教编年史家贝克特和天主教作家希尼更愿意逃避的不稳定和破裂得以延续,而不是掩盖。我想尝试参考三位当代爱尔兰诗人约翰·蒙塔古、约翰·休伊特和理查德·墨菲的作品来证明这一点。碰巧的是,三位诗人都意识到自己分别作为本地人、种植园主和盎格鲁-爱尔兰人的代表地位。几年前,休伊特和蒙塔古在北爱尔兰各地联合举办了题为“种植园主和盖尔人”的诗歌朗诵会。在他们的诗歌中,土地是对分裂的阿尔斯特精神的持续隐喻。自然地,我们期望在休伊特和蒙塔古发现不同的景观,因为它们来自不同的北部地形。
Baffled, like all of us, by the divisiveness of Irish life, Seamus Heaney has recently seized in desperate hope upon a remark by the Irish historian J. C. Beckett: ‘We have in Ireland an element of stability — the land, and an element of instability — the people. It is to the stable element that we must look for continuity.’1 I am afraid, however, that in literature — and I suspect in history (that is, in the retelling of events) — landscape is a cultural code that perpetuates instead of belying the instabilities and ruptures Beckett the Protestant chronicler and Heaney the Catholic writer would prefer to escape. I would like to try to demonstrate this with reference to the work of three contemporary Irish poets, John Montague, John Hewitt and Richard Murphy. As it happens, all three poets are conscious of their representative status as, respectively, native, Planter and Anglo-Irish. A few years ago, Hewitt and Montague jointly gave in various parts of Northern Ireland a poetry-reading entitled ‘The Planter and the Gael’. In their poems, the land is a sustained metaphor for the cloven Ulster psyche. Naturally we would expect to find different landscapes in Hewitt and Montague by mere virtue of the fact that they hail from different Northern terrains.