Passion and Arrogance: Poetic Craft and Topographies of Remembrance in the Work of Michael Hartnett

Abstract

In his seminal study, Oral Tradition as History, Jan Vansina argues that landscape is properly viewed as a layered and richly textured depository of both individual and communal memory. The landscape is implicated in the processes of retrospective remembrance, and it is also active in the creation of memory. Accenting the articulacy of topographical memory, Vansina suggests that "the landscape, changed by man or not, often was a powerful mnemonic device" (45) WTiile cartographic surveys and pastoral or romantic representations of physical terrains furnished limited versions of geographical record, in many respects such discourses are differentially collusive in the pacification of lived memory. It is my argument that such representations belong to the realm of historical discourse, and as such, are estranged from the realm of memory. Rather than celebrating or tracing the actuality of the concrete, the sacredness of the everyday or the evolution of the local, the historical record tends to analyse, dismember and consign the "traditional" and the "past" to anteriority In canvassing its own universality, history homogenises human experience and, thereby, neglects the multiplicity of collective and individual memory. It is in the light of Pierre Nora's contention that "Memory takes root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images, and objects; history binds itself strictly to temporal continuities, to progressions and to relations between things" (633), that I wish to broach the subaltern memorial signatures of Michael Hartnett's poetry. As Michael Smith's epigraphic tribute confirms, Hartnett's poetry embodies elements of Irish culture that are too often relegated to the wistful elegies of the picturesque, or the cheapened apologies of a society addicted to the promises of modernisation. Hartnett's work not only reflects the qualitative, and lived, communion between memory, tribe and topography, but his poetic craft is a vocational project that assumes its urgency from that very landscape. Such topographical preoccupations are long established in the Gaelic literary tradition, and are also evident in the poetry of contemporary Irish language art