Heaney's The Cure at Troy and the Christian Virtue of Hope

Abstract

Heaney’s The Cure at Troy and the Christian Virtue of Hope Paul Corcoran ‘Believe that a further shore Is reachable from here’. Introduction The penultimate chorus of Seamus Heaney’s Cure at Troy contains perhaps the poet’s most oft-quoted words. They cap the tone of a work that ‘proceeds from, and ends in, optimism’.1 Delivered through an adaptation of Sophocles’ ancient Greek tragedy, Philoctetes, and addressed delicately to a divided Ireland emerging from the wounds of the Troubles, they are an act of supreme ventriloquism. In a modern world where art, as much as politics or religion, has been the forum for such debates, Heaney’s manifesto in The Cure at Troy has become literary shorthand for a societal vision of hope. Yet, amidst this deft adaptation across time, it has been claimed that ‘often [we] find a Christian God…added to the ancient text’.2 In other words, the possibility presents itself that the message of hope that rings across the centuries in Heaney’s Cure at Troy is, in important ways, a Christian one. Thus, Heaney’s work might also offer an intriguing insight into what, in particular, Christianity adds to the basic content of hope in a modern society. The pursuit of this question will be the animating focus of the present essay. Heaney’s is a complex agenda in The Cure at Troy. His work is no mere translation of Philoctetes. It runs to a similar length as the Greek original and, allowing for the idiom and wit of Heaney’s English, the greater part of The Cure at Troy is faithful to the plotting and content of Sophocles’ tale of suffering and pride. Philoctetes, crippled by a snake bite on the way to Troy, is abandoned by his fellow Greeks on a deserted island, only to be requisitioned again after many years of agony. The Greeks need his magical bow to finally take Troy, but, in a struggle between integrity and duty, between pride and compromise, his stubborn hope for revenge threatens to extinguish Studies • volume 109 • number 436 435 the possibility of anything greater. In the character of Philoctetes we are confronted, as Heaney himself later put it, by ‘a sense that the pride in the wound is greater than the desire for the cure’.3 This is the immediate context into which Heaney’s great paean to hope is raised. The Chorus addresses the fateful words to Philoctetes just at the moment he seems about to choose ‘the intoxication of defiance over the civic, sober path of adjustment’.4 In such moments, Heaney’s artful translation of a Greek tragedy becomes something more substantial. Here, Heaney engages in quite drastic adaptation of Sophocles’play, adding whole sections that have no equivalent in the original Greek – most notably the ‘Hope Chorus’.5 The present essay will investigate the extent to which, in the course of this adaptation, Heaney subtly Christianises the vision of hope in Sophocles. He chose the story of Philoctetes – its struggle of suffering, justice and pride – to deliver a message of hope that would resonate in the Northern Ireland of 1990. As will be demonstrated, in order to produce something that would have meaning for the ‘innocent in gaols … the hunger-striker’s father … the police widow’,6 Heaney had to speak about suffering, divinity and love in an essentially different way than his ancient Greek predecessor. Often, in the course of his subtle adaptation, he addresses these fundamentally religious questions in ways that bear the mark of the Christian faith of his own background. In this sense, the vision of hope offered by Heaney’s work is not necessarily one that would be recognisable to the original audience of Sophocles’play. But as this essay will also make clear, neither is The Cure at Troy some kind of Christian apologetic. The state of counterpoise in which the art of good adaptation exists meant Heaney could only go so far. His was not the task, nor the wish, to articulate in literary form the terms of the Christian virtue of hope. In this light, a concluding section of the essay will go where The Cure at Troy...