In Lawrence Grossberg’s interview regarding articulation, Stewart Hall says: “Let me come to the question of social forces. This ideology, which transforms a people’s consciousness and awareness of themselves and their historical situation, although it explodes culturally, does not constitute itself directly as a social and political force. It has its limits, as all religious forms of explanation do. But it does become articulated to a social movement, a movement of people. And it functioned so as to harness or draw to it sectors of the population who have never been inside that historical bloc before….I want to think of that connection, not as one necessarily given in socio-economic structures or positions, but precisely as the result of an articulation ….I’d like to say that the social operates like a language.”

Slavoj Zizek, in his video, ‘The Hegelian Wound’, (NYU, 2014) begins with an anecdote about being at a conference in India where the local scholars complain of having to discuss the issues in English, so the very act of their discourse about colonialism is forced to take place in the language of the colonizers. To which Zizek immediately responds by grousing that everyone is not exactly going around speaking Slovenian, either. He points out that because of English, he can even have associates from the Dalit or ‘untouchable’ caste, and that by speaking English they are raised to a linguistic equality they hadn’t been able to access before. “Seeing the deprivation of native roots as a unique chance for freedom.” (17:15)

Then he starts talking about Hegel and reflexivity. “You heal yourself by reflexively realizing the wound itself is its own solution. You just change your perspective: applied to the example of Indian and English language. You fight it by endorsing and perceiving the liberating potential of the wound. And more generally, Hegel goes here to the end, elevates the paradox to the fundamental feature of subjectivity as such, subjectivity as consciousness.” He says “the wound is at the beginning, a catastrophe. And then as things go on, you overcome the wound, you know, Hegel’s famous saying, ‘the Spirit is strong enough to heal itself.”

According to Zizek, the wound is the symbol of a primordial trauma, one that, in Lacanian discourse, constitutes the subject by setting into motion desire and its attendant symbolizing activity. Zizek’s comments about English and translation provide a point of entry into my own work on Seamus Heaney, and his notion of poetic translation as a means of engaging a peace process. In the context of Heaney’s poetry, the “wound” is, of course, the Troubles, which produced a fragmented Ireland at war with itself, requiring a healing solution (reconciliation) if regeneration and unity are to occur. Zizek insists that the desire for synthesis is illusory if we are seeking some impossible “original”: the truly universal is not a positively constituted reality but rather a purely negative or virtual space that we might term the poetic. In Zizek’s words, “we enact ‘reconciliation’ not by way of a miraculous healing of wounds, and so forth, but by…realizing that reconciliation is already accomplished in what we (mis)perceived as alienation.” (Less Than Nothing, 2012)

In the lecture, Zizek enlists Walter Benjamin’s Task of the Translator to explain the source of this vision of wholeness, citing Isaak Luria’s discourse on the “shattering of the vessels”: the ten vessels that were intended to contain the emanation of God’s light were inadequate and thus either displaced or shattered. The resulting cosmic catastrophe caused the archetypal values through which the cosmos was created, to be shattered and disjointed, and the world we live in is made up from the shards. But the reassembling of these shards can never reproduce the “original” vessel, which was broken before it could be fully realized. Thus the knit together fragments produce not a new “original” but recover a dimension of the theoretical (or purely virtual) original that existed before the shattering. Every addition brings the object – in our case, the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf – closer to an act of healing. In this way, Heaney’s translation confirms that no “original” can actually exist, the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf being itself derivative oral composite of many older myths and traditions. Zizek recaps, “The original and the translation are both fragments. Don’t try to be similar to capture the original, but fill in what is already missing in the original so together, they form some kind of totality. The original is already the fragment of a vessel, so the goal is not to achieve fidelity to the original, but to supplement it, to create two fragments of a broken whole that may fit one another.”

In his introduction to his 1999 translation of Beowulf, Heaney writes: “Sprung from an Irish nationalist background and educated at a Northern Irish Catholic school, I had learned the Irish language and lived within a cultural and ideological frame that regarded it as the language that I should by rights have been speaking but I had been robbed of. I have also written, for example, about the thrill I experienced when I stumbled upon the word lachtar in my Irish-English dictionary, and found that this word, which my aunt had always used when speaking of a flock of chicks, was in fact an Irish language word, and more than that, an Irish word associated in particular with County Derry. Yet here it was surviving in my aunt’s English speech generations after her forebears and mine had ceased to speak Irish. For a long time, therefore, the little word was – to borrow a simile from Joyce – like a rapier point of consciousness pricking me with an awareness of language-loss and cultural dispossession, and tempting me into binary thinking about language. I tended to conceive of English and Irish as adversarial tongues, as either/or conditions rather than both/and, and this was an attitude that for a long time hampered the development of a more confident and creative way of dealing with the whole vexed question – the question, that is, of the relationship between nationality, language, history and literary tradition in Ireland. Luckily, I glimpsed that possibility of release from this kind of cultural determination early on…” https://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/beowulf/introbeowulf.htm

That “possibility of release” struck me as an articulated connection point. A precursor to the masterpiece of cultural reimagining that was his Beowulf translation, in 1991 Heaney published his adapted translation, The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes; The play centers on the title character, who is stranded on an island with an unhealable wound; he returns to the Troy to be ‘cured’, and the language makes it clear that this represents Ireland and the Irish suffering. In 1995, even the likes of US President Bill Clinton was quoting lines from it when speaking in Derry during the initial years of the peace process that would eventually culminate in the St Andrews Agreement of 2006, effectively ending the Troubles. At the time of publication, Heaney himself related the poem to the return of Nelson Mandela after his imprisonment, and the ending of the apartheid regime in South Africa.

History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave,
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.

With the potential, the possibility of release inherent in the notion of using translation as a way of reimagining cultural identity, I see this particular articulation operating like a language, like something that can unite social groups in new combinations that can, and have shown themselves to be, powerful and effective for liberation and resistance against oppression of all kinds. I propose that what drives the poet to become this healing translator is his notion of himself as a “voice”, in Heaney’s case, of the Irish people. As Mladen Dolar insists in A Voice and Nothing More, this voice is the aphonic voice, a voice that precedes and subtends the poetic voice of intellect. This is the voice that inherently brings with it a people’s cultural self-recognition through their own language and history. Heaney’s poetic project is refracted in the theories of Benjamin, Hegel and Dolar (via Zizek) in that he brings to light the “non-original” Ireland that is dividing the country, locking it into a neo-historical myth whereby they are separate peoples at war over the land and language. Heaney’s reclaimation of both is the remarkable result of his finding in himself this voice, the voice which uses classical literature as its template, heard on a deep strata of levels. Hegel’s “wound” arises from the idea that there is an original Ireland that must be battled over and scarred by war, but Heaney’s synthesis of languages and cultures represents a poetic triumph over ideology, and an avenue towards peace and reconciliation.

Sources

Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913-1926, ed. Bullock, Marcus; Jennings, Michael W.; Belknap/Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA; 1996.

Dolar, Mladen, A Voice and Nothing More, Verso Books: NY; 2014.

Heaney, Seamus, Beowulf: A New Verse Translation; Farrar, Straus & Giroux: London, UK; 2000.

Grossberg, Lawrence. “On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10 (1986): 45– 60.

Slack, Jennifer Daryl, and J. Macgregor Wise. “Agency,” “Articulation and Assemblage.” Culture + Technology: A Primer. New York: Peter Lang, 2005. 115–33.

Zizek, Slavoj, Less Than Nothing; Verso Books: NY, 2012.