Writing Lough Derg: From William Carleton to Seamus Heaney (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Writing Lough Derg: From William Carleton to Seamus Heaney Andrew J. Auge Writing Lough Derg: From William Carleton to Seamus Heaney, by Peggy O’Brien , pp. 312. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2006. $29.95. The pilgrimage to Station Island in Lough Derg, County Donegal, the legendary locus of St. Patrick's Purgatory, is one of the most longstanding and distinctive rituals of Irish Catholicism. In Peggy O'Brien's rendering, this site constitutes nothing less than an omphalos, a nodal point where the ligatures of religion and nation that define so much of Irish identity are tightly knotted together. Like the childhood wells that Seamus Heaney casts as his own omphalos, Lough Derg exhibits a delphic duality. Those writers who journey there sometimes experience the purification that this sacred place proffers, but they are just as likely to discover that, as Heaney puts it, "to pry into roots" is "to finger slime," that identity—whether personal or communal—is always impure and resistant to apprehension. The strength of O'Brien's analysis of the literary [End Page 156] representations of Lough Derg lies in the deft manner in which she brings out this "doubleness." Employing an eclectic mix of intertextual, feminist, and formalist critical approaches, she carefully elaborates how the act of writing about this site simultaneously clarifies and complicates the notions of poetic, religious and national identity at stake for these authors. The literary Lough Derg that she presents is a place where renewal occurs as much through accretion as purgation. O'Brien's opening chapter provides a condensed history of Lough Derg's shifting status within Irish culture and Catholicism. She touches briefly upon most significant pre-modern representations of Lough Derg: the Fenian tales and their Christianized redactions that identify the site with the two greatest cultural heroes of ancient Ireland—Finn MacCool and St. Patrick—and the medieval monastic account of Knight Owen's supernatural penitential experiences that inaugurates Lough Derg's reputation as a place that engenders otherworldly visions. Her commentary on these early works serves primarily as a propaedeutic to the more substantial analysis of the modern Lough Derg writers that occupies her throughout the rest of the book. That analysis begins, fittingly, with the early nineteenth-century Irish author William Carleton, whose "Lough Derg Pilgrim" culminates a Protestant tradition of exposé that casts Lough Derg as a site of exploitative and dangerous mortification. But here as elsewhere, Lough Derg functions like the proverbial cracked looking-glass, revealing the bifurcations in those colonial or postcolonial subjects who peer into it. In the case of Carleton, his "skepticism" is belied by his unwilling acquiescence in the "Catholic mesmerism" that Lough Derg triggers. Subsequent chapters delineate how lesser known writers, seeking to redress Carleton's critique, attempt to homogenize the site. The Catholic protégé of the Young Irelanders, Denis MacCarthy, produces his St. Patrick's Pugatory, a translation of Calederón's seventeeth-century play, in an effort to solidify Lough Derg's Patrician identity. A similar essentializing intention underpins the Lough Derg works of the Anglo-Irish Catholic convert Shane Leslie and the Dante scholar Alice Curtayne, each of whom responds to the uncertainties of the nascent Irish state by employing Lough Derg as the foundation for monolithic conceptions of cultural identity. In the final six chapters, the heart of the book, O'Brien focuses upon Denis Devlin, Patrick Kavanagh, and, most extensively, Seamus Heaney. Each poet's Lough Derg work illuminates the central anxieties and aspirations that animate his oeuvre. The encounter with Lough Derg confronts these poets with "a range of dichotomies"—self and community, skepticism and faith, spirituality and sensuality—that they struggle, with varying levels of success, to resolve. For the cosmopolitan Devlin, O'Brien's symbiotic reading of "The Heavenly Foreigner" [End Page 157] and "Lough Derg" shows how his baroque modernist style is driven by a desire for integration that remains unfulfilled. On the matter of whether Devlin's intransigent "doubleness" should be regarded as virtue or a flaw, she remains, appropriately, of two minds. Her incisive readings of Kavanagh's "The Great Hunger," "Father Mat," and "Lough Derg," reveal an analogous duality arising from the...