Parodic Digging and Reverse Stratigraphy: On the Night Watch

The attenuated poems of On the Night Watch range over a series of sites from domestic interiors to semi-rural landscapes populated with identifiable landmarks from Carson’s child and adulthood – ships at Belfast docks, a

118 _{Collins, pp. 151–2.}

119 _{Carson Breaking News (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 2003), p. 51; also cited in Homem, p. 196.} 120 _{Homem, p. 196.}

hospital bed, and the school playground.121 Yet the poet and the reader also leave the carefully mapped toponymy of Belfast streets for the edgelands of the city, which contain minefields, wells, a nuclear bunker, woods and grassland, bell- and conning-towers. Moreover the formal structure of the collection, with its three movements, short line-lengths, and repetition of final lines as titles of every third poem has the effect of collapsing these various sites into one indeterminate and abstract location that takes place in the time and space of the page. The short fourteen-line couplets consolidate Carson’s break with the long prosodic line first seen in Breaking News. Steven Matthews observes that the collection formally gestures to Heaney, the book’s dedicatee, as the poems combine ‘two forms’ that the older poet has ‘mastered; the blank verse

fourteenliner, and the slim, arterial’ verse of the ‘North era’.122 The slender poems of North have been described by critics as archaeological tools in themselves, the short lines drilling down through language, and earth.123 If On

the Night Watch ‘attains a true Heaneyesque mimeticism’ as Matthews

suggests, its formal imitation is nevertheless openly parodic and enables Carson to overturn traditional archaeological poetic models. Unlike the vertical precision of Heaney’s linguistic drilling, the white spaces between the couplets of these poems resemble a landscape undermined by gaps between strata that might otherwise appear as contiguous layers. In an interview concerning the collection Carson states that the poems are partly ‘about how gaps and silences can affect the syntax of what appears to be said.’124 The orthographic gaps are suggestive of the empty spaces that the poet finds when he hollows out this landscape, where digging reveals nothing, or only archaeological finds that must be ploughed back into the soil. These digs also violate the seamless relationship between depth-as-past and surface-as-present, producing a world turned upside down where contemporary ruins are often located beneath older strata. Whereas Heaney looks to archaeological poetics to restore or shed light on contemporary concerns, processes of unearthing in Carson offer no such consolation. Rather than providing a key to unlock the present, these ‘shards //

121 _{Carson, On The Night Watch (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 2009). Hereafter cited}

parenthetically as OtNW followed by page number.

122 _{Steven Matthews, ‘Bodies of Work’, Poetry Review, 100.1 (2010), 90–92 (p. 91).}

123 _{For the drill metaphor see McCarthy, Seamus Heaney and Medieval Poetry (Cambridge: D.}

S. Brewer, 2008), p. 99.

124 _{Carson, interviewed by Jon Michaud, ‘The Exchange: Ciaran Carson’, The New Yorker, 18}

May 2009, < http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2009/05/the-exchange-ciaran- carson.html> [accessed 11 January 2013].

& hoards of bones’ only parody such archaeological desires, confronting the reader with uncertainties (OtNW 80).

Like Inferno this indeterminate landscape refracts several literary landscapes, but particularly the earth writing of Heaney and Edward Thomas; the excavations of ‘wasted land’ (OtNW 27) occupy a textual space that lies between Heaney in the dedication, and Thomas in the final acknowledgements page.125 _{Here Carson notes that a number of the poems came from his reading} of Edna Longley’s annotated edition of Thomas’ verse (OtNW 143).126

Sandwiched between the contents page and the title of the opening section, the dedication ‘for Seamus Heaney’ suggests an acknowledgement of one poet to another, a literary debt or professional rivalry that might be glossed over by a reader keen to get to the body of the work. Such ‘front matter’ is ‘undoubtedly part’ of the poet’s work, as Eamonn Hughes remarks. Through the use of epigraphs, acknowledgements and other paratextual devices Carson ‘prompts us to ask where the text begins’.127 Such devices also operate as a lens through which the reader is enjoined to view the work. The paratext is less a rigid

‘boundary’ that demarcates the body of the work from the textual by-products of its publication, than a ‘threshold’ through which boundaries between world and text are blurred, and access to the work is made possible.128 Read in the light of a possible poetic agon between Heaney and Carson, the dedication acts as a commentary on the work and its public context, alerting the reader to the parodic strategy employed throughout. The public nature of this particular dedication also stands in sharp relief to the private ones that preface Carson’s earlier collections, those to his father William Carson, his wife Deirdre, or friend, poet and photographer, Leon McAuley. Indeed its presence seems to

deliberately prepare the reader for the subsequent encounter with an archaeological mode, albeit in parodic form.

Processes of ploughing, unearthing and plumbing the depths, which appear in many of the poems of On the Night Watch, can be read

125 _{There are also allusions to Eliot’s Prufrock in the poem ‘Let us Go Then’ and a several}

instances of eyebright, the plant of Celan’s ‘Todtnauberg’ (OtNW 27). Carson has read Celan in Pierre Joris’ parallel translation; see ‘For All I Know’ in Ciaran Carson ed. by Kennedy-Andrews.

126 _{Edward Thomas, The Annotated Collected Poems, ed. by Edna Longley (Tarset: Bloodaxe,}

2008). Carson’s use of first-line titles in On the Night Watch also reflects Thomas’ ‘default– setting’, as Longley calls it (p. 27).

127 _{Hughes, ‘“The mouth of the poem”: Carson and Place’, p. 91.}

128 _{See Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University}

straightforwardly as Heaneyesque parody, although the acknowledged

presence of Thomas’ digging in English soil further complicates the manuscript of Carson’s landscape. Longley says of Thomas that his ‘deep allusiveness tests the best-read reader’ even while his recapitulation of ‘English poetic “tradition”’ is cognisant of its ‘language, forms, structures and genres’ having been ‘pitched into the war’s vortex’. Thus, as she observes, ‘France haunts the poetic landscapes that distil Thomas’ experience of the English and Welsh countryside’.129 _{Alexander and Stafford both claim that ‘English literary tradition’} is unable to “mediate” in a Northern Irish context.130 _{Yet it seems that Carson} locates his own resistance to traditions of writing place somewhere within Thomas’ ambivalence to ‘home’ as it is continually refracted through a

militarised landscape. If ‘home’ is ‘ever unstable’ in Thomas’ poetry as Longley asserts, then so is the self, and the lyric persona frequently finds himself

confronted by the ghost of an ‘other’ who has preceded him, and passed along this road before. These ‘two’ appear throughout On the Night Watch, where the existence of the speaker is always predicated on visual recognition by, or dialogue with another.131 Longley observes that Thomas’ ‘portrait of the Other Man’ is a form of ‘self-parody’ that ‘satirises’ his ‘literary problems […], his love of Nature and traditional things’.132 Carson’s adoption of Thomas’ ‘other’ is a compounded literary joke on the continuities of poetic tradition which doubles as an affirmation of the self-reflexive mode that he finds somewhat lacking in

Heaney’s digging about in the rural landscapes of Northern Ireland. Thomas (mediated by Longley) provides Carson with a prism or lens through which the contemporary archaeological poetics exemplified by Heaney can be explored and challenged. This challenge is particularly apparent in poems concerned with two of Heaney’s characteristic excavatory practices – ploughing and digging.

The motif of the plough appears several times in On the Night Watch, creating a temporal movement across the collection through the repeated unearthing and re-interring of archaeological finds. ‘The Ploughman Sings’ recalls Heaney’s inclination to elide rural labour with the act of writing. For

129 _{Longley, ‘Introduction’, in Collected Poems, ed. by Longley, pp. 11–24 (p. 18).} 130 _{Stafford, Starting Lines, p. 247; also Alexander, Ciaran Carson, p. 154.}

131 _{The ontological dependence of the lyric persona on the unknown other is particularly acute in}

Thomas, ‘The Other’, in Collected Poems, ed. by Longley, pp. 40–42. See also the episode in Thomas’ prose work In Pursuit of Spring [1911] (Holt: Laurel Books, 2002).

Heaney the etymology of ‘verse’ connects the lyric voice with the imprint of the plough on the landscape. The Latin versus he observes, refers to ‘the turn a ploughman made at the head of a field as he finished one furrow and faced back into another’.133 In the first of the ‘Glanmore Sonnets’ ‘Vowels’ are similarly ‘ploughed into other: opened ground’ and ‘art’ is ‘a paradigm of earth new from the lathe / Of ploughs.’134 Heaney’s ‘poet as ploughman’ confidently inscribes the landscape in a continuous movement that, as Daniel Tobin claims,

‘embodies a promised ideal union of art and life’ and suggests a ‘deeper unity that might transcend history’s brutal patterns of conquest and reprisal’.135 _This sense of contiguity between art, labour and landscape is disrupted in Carson’s parodic version of the ploughman’s song. The ‘coulter’ of Carson’s plough ‘strikes // an obstacle’ that not only impedes the inscription of the plough across the field, but reveals that the existing site is profoundly unreadable. Rather than ‘stone’, which the ploughman might expect in rural pasture, the obstacle is an archaeological find, a ‘shard / interred // & now / unearthed // some thing / the indecipherable // letters of / a name of some // forgotten king / for all we know’ (OtNW 44). This found object is an explicit reference to Heaney’s

archaeological poetics, where the poem as ‘shard’ is significant for its ability to ensure ‘continuity’, the ‘restoration of a culture to itself’.136 In Carson’s field, the shard is rendered as ‘some thing’, an unintelligible fragment that the

enjambment suggests, is as ‘indecipherable’ as the ‘letters’ or ‘name’ inscribed on it. Hill’s Offa is also recalled here and in the next plough poem of the

sequence, ‘Stumbling’, in which a ‘coin’ is found that bears ‘the head of / a dead king’ (OtNW 72). Where naming is an essential part of conjuring the ruler of

Mercian Hymns, however, Carson’s nameless king is ‘forgotten’ and

inconsequential in the present moment of the poem.137 Forgotten, unknown, and unreadable, the shard remains irreducible and cannot be reconstituted as part of a cultural whole.

133 _{Heaney, ‘The Makings of a Music: Reflections on Wordsworth and Yeats’, in Preoccupations,}

pp. 61–78 (p. 65).

134 _{Heaney, ‘Glanmore Sonnets’ I, in Field Work, p. 33.}

135 _{Daniel Tobin, Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus}

Heaney (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), p. 158.

136 _{Heaney, ‘Feeling into Words’, p. 41.}

137 _{Archaeological sites and forgotten kings inevitably recall Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’. For a}

discussion of Romantic fragments and literary-archaeologies see Paul de Man, ‘Shelley

Disfigured’, in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. by Harold Bloom (New York: Continuum, 1979), pp. 39–74.

This disruption of the seamlessness between past and present, which should be guaranteed by the archaeological find and the cyclical temporality of the plough, is also found in Thomas. Thomas’ well-known poem, ‘As the team’s head-brass’ (1916), is refracted throughout Carson’s plough poems in the form of dialogue and the reworking of individual words such as ‘stumbling’. Unlike Heaney’s formulation of an unbroken process of traversing the field to create the pattern of ridge and furrow, Thomas’ ploughman stops each time the horses turn, in order to engage the poem’s speaker in conversation. Longley notes that this interruption of the ‘ploughman’s circuits establishes a template for all the poem’s structures: for the collapse of cyclical paradigms; for war-talk (including talk of dismemberment) breaking up blank verse; […] for gaps, discontinuities and absences.’ Carson appropriates these contingencies in On the Night

Watch, magnifying Thomas’ ‘jagged’ ‘line-turns’ (as Longley describes them) in

the halting syntax of the attenuated lines.138

Longley suggests that ‘As the team’s head-brass’ reworks Thomas Hardy’s ‘In Time of “the Breaking of Nations”’ (1915), challenging its cyclical ‘vision of history’ as rural idyll. Thomas’ poem instead registers ‘war’s intrusion into rural England’ and the English pastoral, its ‘oddly violent language’

suggesting ‘that farming and war are not wholly discrete products of human culture.’139 The faltering steps of Thomas’ ploughing team disclose the encroachment of war on pastoral landscape, circumventing the ability of the poet-as-soldier or poet-as-ploughman to assure the transcendence of art over war. In the concluding lines of the poem, the speaker ‘for the last time’ watches ‘the clods crumble and topple over / after the ploughshare and the stumbling team’, as furrows are figuratively turned to trenches.140 If Thomas extricates ‘stumbling’ from Hardy’s bucolic treatment as Longley suggests, then Carson amplifies its suggested violence in his first-line title. The speaker of ‘Stumbling’ trips ‘on a tuft / of eyebright’ tearing it ‘from the earth’ to find ‘below // a sightless hoard / of bones’ which register the prescient irony of Thomas’ association of dismembered bodies with ploughed fields (OtNW 72). Heaney also reworks ‘stumbling’ in the poem ‘Follower’ which begins with the son faltering in the ‘hobnailed wake’ of his father at the plough, and ends with his father ‘stumbling

138 _{Collected Poems, ed. by Longley, p. 301 n.} 139 _{Collected Poems, ed. by Longley, pp. 300–1 n.}

/ Behind’ him in old age.141 Heaney’s treatment of stumbling has more in common with Hardy, however, in that it reasserts an uninterrupted cyclical pattern of life or history rather than the threat and contingency captured in Thomas and Carson. The interlocutor of a subsequent poem in On the Night

Watch (‘This Field of Eyebright’ ) recalls a similar episode in conversation with

the poem’s speaker, but this time it is the ‘coulter’ that ‘turned up // beside sod / the shards / & hoards / of bones’ (80). The dialogue with this undisclosed figure (perhaps a ploughman) who remembers the field ‘since it / was plough land’ signals the abandonment and futility of the plough. Left undisturbed, eyebright, a parasitic plant purported to remedy failing sight and memory, has overtaken the formerly cultivated field. The exhumed dead of either poem provide no answers, however, and the plough, a symbol of regeneration for Heaney, is replaced by a field of eyebright and ‘sightless hoard / of bones’ which signal the foundering of an archaeological vision.

Another excavatory mode that Carson parodies in this collection is the practice of digging, both as a figure for writing and as a guarantor of cultural transmission. Heaney’s ‘Digging’ repeats the pattern of a son following in his father’s ‘wake’, this time with the spade (and pen) rather than the plough; three generations of men dig, plant and cultivate earth and language to ensure the continuation of cultural knowledge.142 Carson transforms this generational cycle into a Sisyphean task in ‘The Pit’, in which the speaker is impelled to keep digging to no avail. In this poem the speaker is searching for something that is never disclosed. An earlier poem ‘X Marks the Spot’ records a similar quest for treasure that when unearthed turns out to be a coffin (‘six-foot box’) or a mine (‘unexploded trove’) (OtNW 73). The euphemism for a grave appears again in ‘The Pit’ as the speaker strikes ‘oak boards’ after digging ‘six foot down’. Rather than a coffin the pit contains an oak floor ‘bearing words / in cipher’, and ‘under that / another floor’ (OtNW 96). The meaning of the inscription is not given, however, and there is no attempt to decipher the words, which seem less important than the act of digging itself. Finding that the earth does not give up its meaning easily is no deterrent to the speaker who just keeps on digging up one floor after another until he admits that ‘for years I have / been digging so // to find myself / no further on’ (OtNW 96). The poem offers a satirical jibe at

141 _{Heaney, ‘Follower’, in Death of a Naturalist (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), pp. 24-5.} 142 _{Heaney, ‘Digging’, in Death of a Naturalist, pp. 13–14.}

Heaney’s digging as a ground for cultural continuity. Archaeological poetics reveals nothing here except its own interminable desire to unearth the past. Yet Carson’s parody of Heaneyesque spadework is less straightforward when considered alongside Thomas’ digging poems or ‘Lob’.

The chthonic Englishness of ‘Lob’ seems at first sight antithetical to Carson’s poetics. Nevertheless Carson finds a source for his satirical digging in the figure of the illusory old man, Lob. In the opening lines of ‘Lob’ the speaker recalls a recent conversation with an old man who he meets whilst walking across the Wiltshire countryside. The speaker is already ‘travelling / In search of something chance would never bring’, but the undefinable object of the quest becomes the old man himself, who the speaker wishes to encounter again. Whatever is sought, the old man is certain that the traveller will not find it by unearthing the past in the local landscape. Lob points out the ‘mounds’ that now mark the ‘barrows’ excavated by archaeologists ‘Sixty years since’: ‘They

thought as there was something to find there, / But couldn’t find it, by digging, anywhere’.143 The old man’s remarks about the failed dig also comment upon the thwarted quest of the speaker for the ‘something’ (represented by the figure of Lob) that would connect past with present, and the various parts of England across which he travels. The attempt to restore English culture to itself, much in the manner of Heaney’s excavations of Northern Irish landscape, is always disrupted by the mocking words of the old man. Thomas’ work provides a valuable model for Carson because it registers an archaeological poetic desire for cultural transmission even while it acknowledges through self-parody, the impossibility of locating the origins of a culture (archē) in its soil.

Thomas’ ‘dark earth’ does not yield easily to stable interpretation, and neither does the overdetermined Northern Irish soil. In Carson’s poem ‘The Soil’, chthonic turf turns out to be nothing more than a language game: ‘an anagram of silo / an underground // nuclear bunker / sunk so many // fathoms deep / below a graveyard’ (OtNW 83). Carson’s ‘silo’ anagrammatically reveals a perilous landscape where it is late twentieth-century technologies of war rather than the paraphernalia of ancient kings that lie deep in the earth awaiting interpretation. Northern Ireland has only one nuclear bunker, in Portadown. There is no indication whether this is where the poem is located, or whether the bunker is a generic symbol of a completely militarised landscape. Nevertheless,

like the Portadown bunker which was built between 1987 and 1989, and closed shortly afterwards in 1991, many British nuclear bunkers were decommissioned after the break-up of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Portadown was restored in 2008 to provide a heritage site and museum. If the nuclear bunker fulfils its original purpose it will necessarily lie ‘below a graveyard’, but decommissioned it is an almost instant ruin that functions as a mythic

monument of the past (Cold War) and of total war supposedly as yet unrealised. In Bunker Archaeology Paul Virilio describes abandoned World War Two

bunkers along the Atlantic seaboard as concretised symbols of ‘total war […] revealed […] in its mythic dimension’.144 _{The World War Two bunker he claims} ‘is the proto-history of an age in which the power of a single weapon is so great