HKU Bulletin June 2006 (Vol. 7 No. 3)

18 19 ARTS Penwork, Prizes and Perspective Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney opened the Hong Kong International Literary Festival with a lecture at the University. I rish poet and Nobel prize-winner Seamus Heaney delighted audiences at the Loke Yew Hall in March when he structured a reading of his poetry around the title Penwork, Dreamwork, Fieldwork . “I come on,” he said. “In the persona of what James Joyce called Shem the Penman in Finnigan’s Wake .” And went on to explain why he uses the term penwork. “From the moment I started to go to school, we were called scholars and the penwork was literal, in learning to use the pen, and it was respected by the men herding cattle along the road. “An old fellow called John McGrogan used to say ‘The pen’s a lot lighter than the spade, son. Stick to the books.’ Of course this is literally true but one thing that has happened to me is to have learned the counter truth; that the pen is not always lighter than the spade. It can have its own weight of responsibility attached to it. Its own burden of awareness.” He went on to say that a lyrical poet is a very strange thing because “what generates the poetry can be very secret and very odd stuff and yet there’s some responsibility to link to the world of common concerns. Ted Hughes was a great educator about poetry and he has written about it very beautifully. He says your first duty is to your gift.” The burden of awareness, however, led him away from the early pastoral writing of Digging , and his first collection of poems in Death of a Naturalist to a desire to ‘say what happened’. “After 1969 in Northern Ireland,” he explained. “There was an eruption of violence, increasing polarization, increasing distress and solitude for people of goodwill on both sides, increasing solidarity and prejudice for people of ill-will on both sides.” Inspired by Robert Lowells’ poem Epilogue and the lines ‘Yet why not say what happened’ he appeased himself for a little while of being involved in matters in Ireland by saying what happened. “And I wrote a poem about a second cousin of mine, Colum McCartney, who was shot in a random sectarian assassination. He was coming from a football match south of the border, driving into Northern Ireland on a Sunday afternoon and he was just shot. He had no connection with the IRA or any subversive organization. He was just picked because he was known to be part of the Catholic crowd.” Heaney was moved to start The Strand at Lough Beg when he discovered a passage in Dante’s Purgatorial where Dante comes out of the underworld of hell into the Easter morning. “It reminded me of the little lake beside which my cousin grew up, near Lough Beg,” he said. In a later poem he allowed his cousin to talk back to him in a book called Station Island . Heaney concluded his talk by saying that the given subjects of the ‘distressed country’ had preoccupied him but there had come a point where he allowed himself to write poems of sheer joy “and also I think of sheer wisdom.” Fiction and the Dream Booker prize winner John Banville was at the University in March to deliver the Man Booker Distinguished Lecture as part of the Hong Kong International Literary Festival. I n a talk entitled Fiction and the Dream John Banville, who scooped the 2005 Man Booker prize with his novel The Sea spoke about the synergy between dreaming and writing. “Literature is not as fashionable as it used to be,” he said. “It doesn’t do anything in the world... it doesn’t make people any less greedy, any less quarrelsome, any less violent. “But it does, perhaps, give us some kind of insight into other lives, even if the other lives are imagined. Sometimes it seems to us that Emma Bovary and Natasha Rostov or Leopold Bloom are more real than even ourselves. This is a remarkable phenomenon and people still continue to write fiction. And my talk today is just to give some practical perspective on why the thing is done and how it’s done.” He went on to describe a man retelling a dream to his bored wife. “I can think of no better analogy for writing than this,” he said. “The novelist’s aim is to make the reader have the dream. Not just to read about it but actually to experience it.” In this post-religious age, he said, the writer seems priest- like. “The unceasing commitment to an ethereal faith, the mixture of arrogance and humility, the daily devotion, the confessional readiness to attend the foibles and fears. The writer goes into a room... and remains there for hour after hour in eerie silence. “With what deities does he commune in there? What rituals does he enact? Surely he knows something that others do not. Surely he is privy to a wisdom far beyond theirs. These are delusions of course. The artist, the writer, knows no more about the great matters of life than anyone else. Indeed he probably knows less.” We write, he said, about the inner organization of human affairs. “But I know nothing about life, only about art.” “The writer is not a priest, not a shaman, not a holy dreamer... I have no grand psychological theory of the creative process to offer you. “When I began to write I was a convinced rationalist. When I began a book I knew where I was going. Before I wrote the first line I had the last line planned... I became obsessed with proportion in my work.” But after his parents died he found ‘a new way of working’, letting his consciousness dictate what was on the page. “The dream world is a strange place. Everything there is at once real and unreal. The most trivial or ridiculous things seem to carry a tremendous significance. A significance which... the waking mind would never dare to suggest or acknowledge. In dreams the mind speaks the truth through the medium of a fabulous nonsense and so I think does the novel.”