Deconstruction for New Meaning: Seamus Heaney's Bog Poems and Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body

Seamus Heaney is one of the most popular contemporary poets in the world, particularly in Ireland. His work exudes a more traditional, Romantic atmosphere, and he has a "wariness of modernism and...the postmodern" (Schmidt 921). Conversely, Jeanette Winterson is one of the UK's best writers and journalists, whose fame extends to the United States, with her United States debut being the novel I will be discussing, Written on the Body: a decidedly postmodern text ("Written on the Body" Winterson). It is apparent to all familiar with Virginia Woolf that Winterson is in dialogue with her, but I would also suggest that Winterson is in dialogue as well with Seamus Heaney, all critical differences aside.

In an article for the Times in March of 2006 (just in time for St. Paddy's Day) Winterson wrote an article entitled "Ireland Has Done Well to Keep Its Songs At the Heart of its Culture," in which she praises Irish poetry and culture, and questions whether the British have the same level of poetical ability. She also commends the way the Irish are cognizant of their culture: "[t]he Irish know their James Joyce and Seamus Heaney" (Winterson "Ireland"). Although she doesn't quote either, one gets the feeling that she is familiar with both. So rather than moving to Winterson's more recent work, I believe it may be better to begin with Heaney's example of around thirty years before.

Heaney was very influenced by his visits in the Danish countryside, where he saw the preserved remains of the bog bodies. The most popular bog poems seem to be those about the "Tollund Man" and the "Grauballe Man;" however, I will be focusing on three which are not as well-known and more applicable to Winterson's text: "Bog Queen," "Punishment," and "Strange Fruit."

"Bog Queen" is unique because of the first person narration used, which is not present in the other poems. The narrator is the Bog Queen herself, who enumerates on how she has become one with nature and been preserved, even as less enduring things like her clothing passed away: "[m]y body was braille/for the creeping influences" and "the illiterate roots/pondered and died/in the cavings/ of stomach and socket" (Heaney 108). As she describes her body, she is deconstructing it, in the way that she breaks it down into parts, and in the way that she has been metamorphosed by the bog, not to mention Heaney's characteristic short lines and small stanzas. This has the effect of making the reader more intimate with the narrator, and more interested in her as we grow to visualize her. Interestingly, the narration is written in such a way that the Bog Queen has a sort of dignity (perhaps pride) about her preserved self, and this serves to make the imagery much less morbid or creepy than it could have been.

In Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body, the narrator is suffering a great deal of emotional stress because s/he had found out that her/his love has cancer and has separated her/himself from her in the hopes that she will return to her husband, a doctor. To cope, s/he reads anatomy books, and a section of the text is set aside for the parts where the narrator reads a sentence from the anatomy books and then uses a prose-poem sort of style to describe his lover Louise's body; how s/he loved each part described above in the epigraph. It is like Heaney's poem in that the narration doesn't make the narrator morbid and obsessive so much as loving, giving us a new and fresh tenderness through the deconstruction (see Winterson 115-139).

Another part of the novel which has interested critics like Antje Lindenmeyer is the melding of the two bodies or "selves" that the narrator perceives (see page 53). At one point, s/he sees him/herself as one with Louise, so much so that s/he cannot tell the difference between the two: "[y]ou are my blood. When I look in the mirror it's not my own face I see. Your body is twice...[c]an I tell which is which?" (Winterson 99). Heaney uses a similar element in his bog poems, particularly in "Punishment." In this poem, Heaney describes a young girl who is believed to have been killed because she was an adulteress, and he starts off with lines which signify the narrator's immersion in her: "I can feel the tug/of the halter at the nape/of her neck/ the wind on her naked front" (Heaney 112). He also uses this technique in the "Tollund Man:"[s]omething of his sad freedom/ as he rode the tumbril/should come to me, driving" (Heaney 63). Although in both instances the narrator removes himself from this element, as the lover in Winterson's text does, both exhibit a larger sense of connection which, like the deconstruction, allow readers to be more interested in the story.

Lindenmeyer is also interested in the way that the narrator sees the cancer in the story. As she explains, s/he sees Louise's body turning on itself as a "law-and-order state" would deal with a civil war or rebellion. Heaney as well sees the body in very political terms: "Punishment" has to do with the execution of the adulterous women of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), as many of the other bog poems have political overtones (see Heaney 113). However, our last poem "Strange Fruit" doesn't have as much to do with politics so much as the disruption of the narrator's connection. In Written on the Body, the narrator, while describing what the cancer is doing in Louise's body, although ostensibly still caring about Louise, does not exhibit as much of the connection as s/he did before, even though s/he wishes that s/he could climb inside her body in order to protect her (Winterson 115). Similarly, Heaney's "Strange Fruit" is the most impartial of the poems, which blithely states without very much emotion exactly how the bog person looks. There is not the pride or tenderness that is present in "Bog Queen" or "Tollund Man." However, it still continues with the theme of deconstruction present in the other poems, with her head being described as an "exhumed gourd" (Heaney 114).

In Seamus Heaney's bog poems as well as Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body, there exists a method of deconstruction for the sake of familiarization between the reader and the character. Through the minute detail, we see the narrators become bound up in the "selves" of what they describe, as well as distancing themselves a little at certain times. Despite Heaney's and Winterson's differences of style, I believe that both have some similar ways of discussing and describing the body, using deconstruction as the new method of achieving the same level of feeling.

Sources:

Heaney, Seamus. Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998. Print.

Lindenmeyer, Antje. "Postmodern Concepts of the Body in Jeanette Winterson's "Written on the Body" Antje Lindenmeyer." Feminist Review 63 (1999): 48-63. JSTOR. Web. 14 Dec. 2012.

Schmidt, Michael. "Speaking and Speaking For." Lives of the Poets. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999. 919-24. Print.

Winterson, Jeanette. "Ireland Has Done Well to Keep Its Songs at the Heart of Its Culture'" The Times [London] 18 Mar. 2006, Features: Books sec.: 3. LexisNexis Academic. Web. 14 Winterson, Jeanette. "Written on the Body, A Novel of Loss and Love, Philosophical Meditation on the Body, Jeanette Winterson Novels, Collection of Short Stories, Poetic Novels, Magical Fantasy." Written on the Body, A Novel of Loss and Love, Philosophical Meditation on the Body, Jeanette Winterson Novels, Collection of Short Stories, Poetic Novels, Magical Fantasy. N.p., n.d. Web. 14 Dec. 2012.

Winterson, Jeanette. Written on the Body. Vintage: New York, 1994. Print.