Abstract

Julia Kristeva emphasizes that it is ‘not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order’ (Kristeva 1982: 4). It might be argued that Northern Ireland has been in abject condition since its inception - a state or body politic of permeable boundaries, marked by the yearning for, and violent rejection of, origin associated with abjection. This essay will trace the relationship between abjection and the sublime in Northern Irish poetry, by examining the work of Derek Mahon, Tom Paulin, Seamus Heaney, Ciaran Carson, Michael Longley and Paul Muldoon. The discussion will have two main, interwoven, concerns: space and the violated body (which map, in certain respects, onto the poles of the symbolic and semiotic). It will explore Mahon’s and Paulin’s preoccupation with the economy of waste - exile, abandonment, the temporary, the derelict ‘mute phenomena’ of late modernity – that can be sourced back in part to Louis MacNeice’s ambivalence towards rootedness and authenticity. It will then examine the ‘rite of defilement’ that attends the violated body in Seamus Heaney, Ciaran Carson and Michael Longley. The deliquescent landscapes and uncanny maternal homecomings in Heaney’s early poetry can be measured against the gruesome debris of Carson’s cityscapes, where dispersal is corporeal, political and linguistic, and acts of re-membering in Michael Longley’s work. The concluding section deals with Paul Muldoon, whom Guinn Batten has termed ‘a poet of abjection’ (Batten 1996: 180). Characterised by filth, fluids, impurities and psychic/ corporeal invasions and transgressions, Muldoon’s work also mourns and rejects a maternal bond that simultaneously figures as a traumatic historical memory.