special issue: thomas kinsella || 'tissues of order': kinsella and the enlightenment ethos

'Tissues of Order': Kinsella and the Enlightenment EthosAuthor(s): Ian FlanaganSource: Irish University Review, Vol. 31, No. 1, Special Issue: Thomas Kinsella (Spring -Summer, 2001), pp. 54-77Published by: Edinburgh University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25517150 .

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Ian Flanagan

'Tissues of Order': Kinsella and the

Enlightenment Ethos

Look into the cup: the tissues of order Form under your stare.

Thomas Kinsella ? 'Phoenix Park'1

The first publication of Thomas Kinsella's Peppercanister series was the

hurriedly-written Butcher's Dozen in April 1972. The circumstances of

this publication notwithstanding, (the volume was released a week after

the report of the Widgery Tribunal of Inquiry into the shooting of civil

rights demonstrators in Derry on Bloody Sunday), Kinsella was already in possession of a larger ordering schema for his new poetic enterprise in the form of a chart on which he had'... sketched a programme, made a scheme for everything I wanted to achieve.' This chart envisaged the new series as a form of numerological progress, with the poet 'trying to

count up to five, which would represent totality.'2 We can presumably read (as numerous critics such as Dennis O'Driscoll, Peggy Broder and

Arthur McGuinness have done) the fractured circle/zero motif of Notes

from the Land of the Dead (1972) and the eponymous One (1974), as the

initial movements toward this projected totality. Given the subsequent

development of the series over the following quarter of a century how

ever, the critic is unsurprised to learn that this 'containing shape' (CP,

p. 264) was jettisoned shortly afterwards by the poet: T suppose the final reason for abandoning this scheme of the five steps can be explained in

very simple terms, ordinary experience began to take over.'3

The brief adherence of the Peppercanister series to a formal plan or

'map' gives way to a sequence that seems at times wholly arbitrary, to

poems that seem almost manifestly disordered. The possibility of clear

progression and completion proposed by the chart is held up to ridicule

by a poetry which 'brim[s] with matter' (CP, p. 302), which sees one

poem spilling over into subsequent ones, poetry which makes a virtue

out of its very incompleteness and unfinishedness. This adoption and

1. Thomas Kinsella, Collected Poems 1956-1994 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996),

p. 89. Future references to this text will be incorporated parenthetically using the

abbreviation 'CP'. 2. Thomas Kinsella, Interview with Ian Flanagan, Metre, No. 2, Spring 1997, p. 108.1

would like to thank Prof. W.J. McCormack for bringing the existence of the

Peppercanister chart to my attention.

3. Ibid.

54



TISSUES OF ORDER': KINSELLA AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT ETHOS

later relinquishing of an ordered system is important on a number of levels. In microcosm, it serves to express the fundamental formal

difference between Kinsella's early and late work, of which the poet has said 'one of the things that has disappeared by comparison with the

early work, is the notion of a 'complete' poem, the idea that a poem can have a beginning, middle and end and be a satisfactory work of art

thereby.'4 More importantly, though, the evolution of the Peppercanister series forces the critic into a re-examination of the very concept of order

itself, which has been central, both as metaphor and thematic, to

Kinsella's work since the earliest poems. This essay analyzes the nature of order in Kinsella's poetry, probing

the numerous different meanings of order raised and explored in the

poet's work. These various interpretations range from Enlightenment

cataloguing, to colonial cartography and post-Darwinian system atization. In these contexts, both the latent disorder that is present in the

early work and the formal disordering that is embraced consistently in

the work written after 1968, can be seen as deeply subversive. Disorder, in this sense, can be read as a categoric renunciation by Kinsella of the

various attempts to categorize and contain his narrator, and signals instead the resolute attempt to establish 'who and what I am' (CP,

p. 277) on his own terms. In this way, it can be seen that the order/ disorder dialectic is of profound importance; the growing structureless

ness with its formal innovations and developments being understood

in terms of the ongoing thematic investigation of systems of order and

classification. These systems are primarily those proposed by Enlighten ment thinkers such as Diderot and those historically applied to Ireland

by successive colonizers and cartographers, like Edmund Spenser and

William Petty. Kinsella, as I will show, seeks to problematize the ordering

categories proposed by these figures and to blur the divide between that

which is ordered and civilized and that which is chaotic and savage.

2

Analyzing the poem 'Mirror in February' (CP, p. 54) from Kinsella's col

lection Downstream (1962), Seamus Deane notes that the verb 'mutilated'

is one that is 'highly characteristic of the poet.' Deane continues: 'the

4. Thomas Kinsella, Interview with Dennis O'Driscoll, Poetry Ireland Review, No. 25,

Spring 1989, p. 59. It is of course necessary to clarify the terms 'early' and 'later'

when considering Kinsella's poetic development. While the Peppercanister series

and the significantly-titled New Poems 1973 clearly indicate a new direction for the

poet, I am in agreement with W.J.McCormack in viewing Nightwalker and Other Poems

(1968) as a pivotal collection ? the 'Red Sea-dividing' collection, as McCormack

has it. (W.J. McCormack, 'Politics or Community: The Crux of Thomas Kinsella's

Aesthetic Development', Tracks, No. 7 [1987], p. 63.) In broad terms then, I take 1968

to be the dividing line between 'early' and 'later' Kinsella.

55



IRISH UNIVERSITY REVIEW

stanza in which it occurs also contains the words "hacked", "defaced",

"brute", all of them harbingers of the violence which is still, at this stage, contained by the stylish, slightly pompous close: "... but man". But the

structuring capacity of style is under pressure even in these early poems and it is difficult to remain insensitive to the threat of experiences too

powerful, too inchoate to be accommodated.'5 The highly structured and

contained violence, does indeed, as Deane suggests, offer an early hint

of the changes which Kinsella's poetic will undergo in the later volumes.

Kinsella has realized that 'it is a great artistic temptation to impose order or purpose on one's work, and if the temptation is yielded to the price can be great.'6 It is clear that the poet means that the imposition of

structure or order on uncontained data or matter can result in the

distortion or even destruction of that very material. This play on

Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and the interrogation of the nature

of observation will be developed further in Kinsella's own work, when

the slaughterhouse observers of A Technical Supplement (1976) become

themselves the thing that is observed in the later poem 'Night Conference, Wood Quay: 6 June 1979' (CP, p. 302). Given the highly nuanced nature

of the term 'order' though, as I suggested in the introduction to this

essay, it is possible to read Kinsella's words as an uneasy recognition that his earlier urge to order replicates previous attempts at classification, all of which on some level served to sanction the categorization both of

his own family ancestors and of Ireland itself, as racially inferior. This is

ultimately why the ordering impulse must be rejected. In the poet's mature work, the imposed order that is evident through

out Another September gives way to an acceptance of randomness, the

ordering impulse replaced by the dictum 'Respond. Do not interfere.

Echo' (CP, p. 210). Kinsella's resolve, 'Move, if you move, like water'

(CP, p. 210) conveys both a willingness to search for the inherent har

monies in apparent chaos and a new understanding of what Deane calls

the 'dialectical relationship ... between modes and moments of order

and modes and moments of dissolution.'7 Kinsella's central concerns, his interrogation of, and attempts to understand (and possibly forge some

equivalency between) not only the artistic process but also personal and

national origins, are played out between the poles of order and disorder.

Formally, as well as thematically, he is effectively 'Stretching a thread. /

Trying to strike right' (CP, p. 226), trying to find a poetic balance between

the opposing poles. A valuable parallel which allows us to understand

the poet's stance here is provided by Kinsella's stated admiration for

5. Seamus Deane, Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modem Irish Literature (London: Faber, 1987),

pp. 138-39.

6. Thomas Kinsella, 'The Divided Mind' in Sean Lucy (ed.), Irish Poets in English (Cork: Mercier, 1972), p. 212.

7. Deane, Celtic Revivals, p. 142.

56




sean-nos singing, a genre in which the singer becomes almost invisible,

eliding his own presence so that 'nothing interfere [s] between the song and its expression/8 The poet, though, needs to take a more proactive role. Kinsella acknowledges the need to shape and hone the artistic work

so that

Out of its waste matter

it should emerge solid and light. One idea, grown with the thing itself, should drive it searching inward

with a sort of life, due to the mirror effect. (CP, p. 128)

The description, however, of such moments as 'states of peace nursed

out of wreckage' (CP, p. 128) alerts us to the fact that the order / disorder

axis is central not only to the poetry's formal construction but also, at a

deeper level, functions as a dominant metaphor in the poet's political and historical analyses of personal and national origins.

At this further level, the order/ disorder polarity provides a point of

continuity between Kinsella's own work and those earlier textual

accounts of Ireland by writers such as Spenser and Petty (namely A View

of the Present State of Ireland and A Political Anatomy of Ireland) which he

seeks to question and re-examine as part of an investigation of his own

cultural inheritance. Because both writers sought to make Ireland

knowable, to compile, piece by piece, an encyclopaedic knowledge of the

country, Kinsella's interrogation also includes in its scope Diderot and

his Encyclopedic with its similar goal of all-encompassing knowledge. The poet's use of the order/disorder trope echoes these earlier texts'

narrative concern with, and fear of, the unshaped Irish 'wilderness' in

need of ordering and cultivation. The repeated 'collisions' depicted in

these texts between the ordered 'civil society that Britain, more than any other European country, exemplified' and the 'irredeemably strange

country'9 that is Ireland, represent for Kinsella successive points of

contact, the re-examination of which are essential to an understanding of his cultural origins. In this sense, then, the continual tension between

order and disorder is both a formal and a thematic concern, and is

perhaps the crux of Kinsella's mature work.

3

Reading A Technical Supplement, it appears, at first, as if the earlier

detached scientific gaze of Another September remains unaltered:

8. Thomas Kinsella, Fifteen Dead (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1979), pp. 67-8.

9. Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 16-17.

57




It would seem possible to peel the body asunder, to pick off the muscles and let them

drop away one by one writhing until you had laid bare four or five simple bones at most. (CP, p. 184)

However, this time, the matter that is observed resists the surgical dissection and refuses the order which the poet is attempting to enforce,

Except that at the first violation the body would rip into pieces and fly apart

with terrible spasms. (CP, p. 184)

This defeat of the poet's ordering will has been prefaced in the collection

by references to William Petty and Denis Diderot, the two figures whose

earlier attempts at creating a systematized order, form the backdrop

against which Kinsella's probing of the order/disorder relationship is played out. Both men are forebears to Kinsella: Diderot, whose

Encyclopedic was the bible of the Enlightenment, and Petty, author of the

seventeenth century Down Survey, the first concerted effort to 'map' Ireland. For Kinsella, both represent primary attempts to impose shape and structure, to elicit order and cohesion out of resolutely chaotic, uncontained material. The numerous images of surgical dissection and

anatomizing that appear in A Technical Supplement (accompanied by woodcut illustrations from the Encyclopedic) can be understood as the

poet's pointed re-evaluation of the work of both men. For Kinsella, their

shared need to impose order is indicative of a state of being which views

the unknown as anathema. For both Diderot and Petty, no region can be

left uncharted, unordered. Kinsella leaves us in no doubt that such

mapping and classifying is clearly not disinterested. To him, they both

embody, and are instrumental in further developing, the ethos which sees the gradual elision of the boundary between the natural philosopher seeking knowledge and the colonizer interested only in exploiting resources. The overlap between the respective aims of both men, with

which Kinsella is concerned, signals a larger congruence which, as

Jonathan Sawday notes, 'equated scientific endeavour with the

triumphant discoveries of the explorers, cartographers, navigators and

early colonialists.'10

In A Technical Supplement both are depicted as struggling to remain in

control. Diderot is cited writing to Voltaire:

My dear master, I am over forty. I am tired out with tricks and shufflings. I cry from morning till night for rest, rest; and scarcely a day passes when I am not tempted to go and live in obscurity and die in peace in the depths

10. Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 24.

58



'TISSUES OF ORDER': KINSELLA AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT ETHOS

of my old country. There comes a time when all ashes are mingled. Then

what will it boot me to have been Voltaire or Diderot [... ] (CP, p. 183)

Petty, meanwhile is the subject of an ironic invocation from the poet:

Blessed William Skullbullet

glaring from the furnace of your hair thou whose definitions ?

whose insane nets ?

plunge and convulse to hold thy furious catch let our gaze blaze, we pray, let us see how the whole thing

works (CP, p. 184)

This appeal contains an implicit warning. The 'blazing gaze' causes us

to pay heed to Sawday's caution 'But to blazon a body is also to hack it

into pieces, in order to flourish fragments of men and women as trophies [...] Thus a dissection might denote not the delicate separation of

constituent structures, but a more violent "reduction" into parts: a brutal

dismemberment of people, things or ideas.'11 By virtue of his juxta

position of Petty and Diderot, Kinsella seeks to probe the congruence of

the scientist and natural philosopher with the colonialist cartographer. In so doing, the poet reveals that the 'blazoning' gaze of the Encyclopedic is the same one that Petty employs in his Political Anatomy of Ireland (1691).

At this point, it is possible to discern a shift between the physical body and the body politic. Spenser, in A View of the Present State of Ireland,

employs similar language when discussing the problems that disorderly Ireland poses for those who seek to 'reduc[e] that nation to better

government and civility':12

Irenaeus:... it would seeme to you very evill surgery to cut off every unfound or sicke part of the body, which being by other due meanes

recovered, might afterwards doe very good service to the body again, and haply helpe to save the whole. (View, p. 57)

In the dissective images that appear throughout A Technical Supplement, therefore, we see a figurative replaying of these earlier narrative accounts,

but it is a rewriting which subtly subverts the original texts. The repeated

image of the knife meeting the skin reiterates a succession of points of

contact, contact between the ordering knife and the 'mass of entrails'

(CP, p. 188), and also contact between the ordering observer and the mass of native Irish. Here, too, in A Technical Supplement, an anatomy is

being performed:

11. Ibid., pp. ix, 1.

12. Edmund Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland, in James Ware (ed.), Two Histories

of Ireland (Amsterdam: De Capo Press, 1971), p. 1. Future references to this text will

be incorporated parenthetically using the abbreviation 'View'.

59




Two elderly men in aprons waded back and forth

with long knives they sharpened slowly and inserted, tapping cascades of black blood (CP, p. 188)

In common with Petty's Anatomy, the dissection takes place on a living

entity:

they were dangling alive, the blood trickling over nostrils and teeth. (CP, p. 188)

At this point, however, Kinsella problematizes the earlier Anatomy, which

effectively depicts Ireland as being 'at the disposition of the Common

wealth, "like a patient etherized upon a table".'13 In the poet's own

dissection, the body, as we have already seen, refuses the attempted

ordering, exploding into 'terrible spasms' (CP, p. 184). This functions as

a moment of resistance that allows us to understand the introduction of

both Petty and Diderot, and Kinsella's preoccupation with juxtaposed

images of order and chaos, as part of a larger design to question the

entire Enlightenment project and to interrogate the binary categories of

order and disorder, which are metaphoric representations of the divide

between civilized and savage. In Orientalism, Said notes how fundamental the Enlightenment urge

to classify and order was in the creation of imperialist ideology:

A[n]... element preparing the way for modern Orientalist structures

was the whole impulse to classify nature and man into types [...] if

one looks in Kant or Diderot or lohnson, there is everywhere a similar

penchant for dramatizing general features, for reducing vast

numbers of objects to a smaller number of orderable or describable

types. In natural history, in anthropology,

in cultural generalization, a type had a particular character which provided the observer with a

designation and, as Foucault says, "a controlled derivation".14

Despite predating the Encyclopedic by more than a century, Petty's Down

Survey is likewise concerned with systematizing complex material, with

making it assimilable. Kinsella's Technical Supplement, and the bulk of the

Peppercanister series, is supplementary to and addresses, works of this

nature; Diderot's Encyclopedic, Petty's Down Survey and Political Anatomy

of Ireland and also Spenser's View of the Present State of Ireland. I instance

these works, merely to demonstrate the nature of the texts that Kinsella's

work supplements (and, one expects, the texts that the poet hopes

ultimately to supplant). I am of course using the term 'supplement' (and

interpreting Kinsella's own Supplement) as Derrida does in his own

critique of Enlightenment thinking:

13. Karl S. Bottigheimer, English Money and Irish Land: The 'Adventurers' in the Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 117.

14. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 119.

60




The supplement adds itself, it is a surplus,

a plenitude enriching

another plenitude, the fullest measure of presence [...] But the

supplement supplements. It adds only to replace. It intervenes or

insinuates itself in-the-place-of; if it fills, it is as if one fills a void. If

it represents and makes an image, it is by the anterior default of a

presence. Compensatory [suppleant] and vicarious, the supplement is an

adjunct, a subaltern instance which takes the place [tient-lieu].15

Kinsella's work is not merely a complement but a supplement, effectively a

substitute, designed to replace the original. In reaching this conclusion I am of course, to an extent, arguing against the strand of post-colonial

thought encapsulated by Gayatri Spivak's view that 'the subaltern cannot

speak.'16 Kinsella's poetry is above all, I suggest, concerned with reclaim

ing narratorial capability. The scope and nature of his project is such

that the entire trajectory of historical writings concerning Ireland, ranging from Cambrensis' Topographica Hibernia (1185), through Gerard Boate's

Natural History of Ireland (1652), to proto-eugenicist essays by Charles

Dilke, like that in Greater Britain (1869), is subject to interrogation in his

poetry. The common thread shared by all these texts is the 'blazing gaze', the clinical observation that is brought to bear on the material, in this

instance, the matter of Ireland, as the first step in imposing order.

Kinsella's intentions are twofold; to explore and reveal how the original

classifying gaze quickly allows cultural generalizations 'to acquire the armour of scientific statement' and how, inexorably, the textual and

contemplative awareness gradually becomes 'administrative, economic

and even military.'17 Kinsella's second task, is to problematize the order

ing categories proposed by these works, to interrogate and blur the divide

between that which is ordered and civilised and that which is chaotic

and savage, and which requires ordering. In Cambrensis's twelfth-century Topographica Hibernia the images of

Ireland as an unformed wilderness in need of ordering, and the

fundamental dichotomy between the civilized and the savage which will

be employed by virtually all observers in the succeeding centuries, are

already in place. The divide between the rational commentator and the

barbaric world he attempts to classify could not be more clear-cut.18

15. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (London Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976),

pp. 144-45.

16. Gayatri Spivak, 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg

(eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 308.

See also Edward Said, 'Permission to Narrate', London Review of Books, 16 February, 1984.

17. Said, Orientalism, pp. 149, 210-11.

18. Cambrensis writes of 'a man that was half an ox and an ox that was half a man ...'

More significant, though, is his claim that'... shortly before the coming of the English into the island, a calf that was half a man was born into the mountains around

Glendalough.' Here, we see a distinct temporal break between the uncivilized world

in which reason is debased, that exists before the arrival of the English, and the

promise of a more elevated, ordered society, in the aftermath of this event. See

61




Kinsella, in his use of those works that elide the differences between the textual and the economic, seeks to upset this clear-cut distinction by

questioning the intertwining of the rhetoric of the Enlightenment with the cold reality of colonial exploitation, probing what Adorno and Hork

heimer call the 'dialectical link between enlightenment and domination/19 If England represents a world that is both ordered and controlled,

then Ireland, as it is depicted in the texts mentioned, is its polar opposite. In A View of the Present State of Ireland, Spenser affirms the understanding offered in The Faerie Queen of the Irish as a 'salvage nation' (Faerie Queen,

iv.viii.35.2). I will discuss later Kinsella's play on this term and his under

standing of it not only as 'savage' nation, but also literally as salvaged, or 'nursed out of wreckage' (CP, p. 128). Of course, in Kinsella's view, Ireland is not 'salvaged' from the wilderness and waste but rather from

the wreckage of the fallen structures which sought to classify it. There is no doubt, however, that Spenser's own usage of the term is focused on

the savage nature of the natives. His account is replete with cautionary instances of endangered order, which reinforces the sense of continual

threat that is posed to the civilized newcomer by the wild and barbaric

natives. There runs throughout the narrative the fear that the newly laid foundations of 'civil' society, will be brutally uprooted and the

'wilderness' will reassert itself:

... Murrough-en-Ranagh, that is Morrice of the Feme or wast wilde

places, who gathering unto him all the reliques of the discontented Irish, eftsoones surprised the said Castle of Clare, [...] and thence

marched forth into Leinster, where he wrought great outrages, for it

was his policie to leave no hold behinde him, but to make all plaine and waste. (View, pp. 11-12)

This representation can be interpreted in a number of ways. Primarily, of course, it is another indication of the 'uncivilized' nature of the natives

who are both hostile and lazy, and not sufficiently evolved to bring under

control (and simultaneously exploit) the world that they inhabit. Sir John

Davies, writing in 1610, rationalized his position thus:

... for if themselves [the mere or pure Irish] were suffered to possess the whole country, as their septs have done for many hundreds of

years past, they would never, to the end of the world, build houses, make townships or villages, or manure or improve the land as it

ought to be: therefore it stands neither with Christian policy nor

Giraldus Cambrensis, The Topography of Ireland, trans. John J. O'Meara (Dundalk:

Dundalgan Press, 1951), pp. 56-7.

19. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso,

1997), p. 169.

62




conscience to suffer so good and fruitful a country to lie waste like a

wilderness, when His Majesty may lawfully dispose it to such

persons as will make a civil plantation thereupon.20

More pragmatically, though, the division of territory into wild zones

and arable ones was the original motive behind Petty's survey. The Down

Survey was instigated in the wake of the Cromwellian conquest, to

ascertain the boundaries of those lands which were to be forfeited by those natives not of 'constant good affection' to the parliamentary forces; the land being reallocated to the soldiers in lieu of payment. In a very real sense, then, the territory of Ireland represented collateral and Petty's

survey was designated, among other things, to project when exactly that

collateral would run out. As Bottigheimer notes, the Earl of Clarendon was later to declare 'Ireland was the great capital out of which all debts were paid, all services rewarded, and all acts of booty performed.'21 Kinsella wryly acknowledges this in the sequence One Fond Embrace

(1988). There, the destruction of native history ? a process that was

accelerated by the Down Survey's erasing of Gaelic toponyms ? continues

under the inept leadership of the contemporary 'city fathers', for whom

Ireland still represents mere collateral:

and at the heart, where the river runs

through Viking ghosts at every tide

by a set of shadow structures

that our city fathers, fumbling in their shadow budget, beheld in vision for a while, pulverising until the cash failed (CP, p. 284)

In A Technical Supplement, Kinsella parodies the manner and diction

of Petty the cartographer. The markedly infertile world which Kinsella's

narrator faces,

[... ] All that sour soil

stuffed with mongrel growth ? hinges and bits of slate,

gaspipes plugged with dirt (CP, p. 191)

is Petty's Irish wilderness reimagined. Like him, the narrator sets about

imposing order, employing, again, that 'scientific' gaze:

What an expanse of neglect stretched before us!

Strip to the singlet and prepare,

20. Henry Morley (ed.), Ireland under Elizabeth and James the First: Described by Edmund

Spenser, Sir John Davies and FynesMoryson (London: George Routledge, 1890), p. 307.

21. Bottigheimer, English Money and Irish Land, p. 43.

63




fix the work with a steady eye, begin: scraping and scraping

[... ] making it good, treating it (CP, p. 191)

There is a patently Spenserian overtone at this point, the narrator's

actions following almost to the letter the prescription advocated by Irenaeus in A View:

.. .for all these evills must first be cut away by a strong hand, before

any good can bee planted, like as the corrupt braunches, and

unwholesome boughes are first to bee pruned and the foule mosse cleansed and scraped away, before the tree can bring forth any good fruite. (View, pp. 65-6)

Here, again, there is a subtle rewriting and undermining of the original text, and an ultimate refutation of the ethos shared by both Spenser and

Petty, by the colonialist and the cartographer. Just as the earlier attempt in A Technical Supplement to expose the body's

anatomy ended in failure, so too, here, the effort loses its way, remaining

incomplete,

Growing unmethodical after a while,

letting the thing stain and stay unfinished. (CP, p. 191)

It is certainly possible to see in these lines a statement of Kinsella's own aesthetic credo, with its commitment to the incomplete, the urifinished,

and, as such, it is one that runs counter to the ethos of Diderot's

Methodique. Spenser and Petty, though, remain the primary addressees.

Petty's representation sees the Irish as 'cheap and common animals' and

Ireland as a tabula rasa 'scarce twenty years old,'22 upon which he can

perform his rudimentary anatomy. This portrayal is indeed butchered

by Kinsella in 'Swift's slaughterhouse' (CP, p. 187), the location of many of the events of A Technical Supplement. More fundamentally, though, Kinsella is engaged in performing his own personal anatomy, one that can counter those undertaken by the previous observers. The poet, in

personally performing an anatomy upon himself, attempts to escape the boundaries and maps drawn by previous observers, motivated by the belief that the cartographers' control can be broken. There is a

conflation of the individual and the collective; an equivalency is drawn

between the physical body and the body politic and, as Jane Elstone

notes, an association is created 'between biological processes and the

development of human cultures.'23 By this, I mean that Kinsella's project

22. William Petty, Economic Writings of Sir William Petty, ed. T.H. Hull, 2 Vols. (London, 1898, Vol. 1), p. 129.

23. Jane M. Elstone, 'Divided Minds and Grafted Tongues: Tradition and Discontinuity in the Poetry of Austin Clarke, Thomas Kinsella and John Montague', Dissertation,

The University of Oxford, 1992, p. iv.

64



'TISSUES OF ORDER': KINSELLA AND THE ENLIGFTTENMENT ETHOS

of anatomizing rationality and interrogating primary 'civilizing' texts is

played out in the poetic dissection performed by the narrator upon himself. The self-anatomization and focus on the body subversively

replays, on one level, the colonial enterprise itself. 'The alien/ Garrison

in my own blood' (CP, p. 15) of the 1958 poem 'Baggot Street Deserta', for instance, can now be interpreted as reconfiguring the colonizing by a foreign military force, while also recalling the 'civilizing' motivations

that sought to justify such endeavours. The 'alien Garrison' is a sign that

the blood, the biological inheritance, is not 'pure', unlike that of the

observer who performs the anatomy. Kinsella's technique however, which effectively juxtaposes his self-anatomy with Petty's Political

Anatomy, problematizes and makes impossible such divisions. This,

ultimately, is what the poet's deliberate confusion of seemingly-fixed roles seeks to achieve. The narrator who is, by turns, both the subject of

anatomy and performer of anatomy, orderer and unwieldy subject to

be-ordered, mimics the classification of the 'civilizing' texts but more

fundamentally displaces and makes impossible the rigid antinomies

which they propose. The disruptive and transgressive nature of anatomy, its broaching of

the seemingly-fixed boundaries of the body, is to be seen as a metaphor for potential breaching and disordering of the boundaries and zones (as

they are seemingly fixed by ordering texts like Petty's Down Survey) of

the body politic and of the land itself. The 1973 poem 'The Route of the

Tain' signals this possibility, as the apparently fixed coordinates of both

place and identity become disordered. The image that opens the poem is a moment of seeming order and fixity: 'Gene sat on a rock, dangling our map' (CP, p. 124). However, this does not last. In an echo of Spenser's View, the landscape literally asserts itself, rising up and defying the efforts

of those who attempt to map it, pin it down:

After they tried a crossing, and this river too

'rose against them' and bore off

a hundred of their charioteers toward the sea (CP, p. 124)

Just as the later attempt in A Technical Supplement to systematize and

classify the slaughterhouse animals, ends in failure ? 'At a certain point it is all merely meat,/ sections hung or stacked in a certain order,' (CP,

p. 189) ?

so, too, in 'The Route of the Tain' does the narrator's perception of himself and his acquaintances, 'Wandering off, ill-sorted,/ like any beasts of the field' (CP, p. 124), indicate a failure of classification (and, in

particular, undermines Petty's understanding of the Irish as 'cheap and common animals'24). The ordering system which seeks knowledge, which

seeks to know and place names upon both the landscape and its

inhabitants, is evaded:

24. Petty, Economic Writings, p. 129.

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something reduced shivering suddenly into meaning along new boundaries (CP, p. 125)

While the deconstructive reading of maps that takes place in 'The

Route of the Tain' is an almost standard response of the post-colonial writer, it is also a vitally necessary step in the poet's ongoing investigation of his racial and cultural origins, for 'topographical identification in the

Irish mind is inescapable from genealogy, because of the tribal nature of

Irish society up to the end of the sixteenth century.'25 Kinsella's disruption of the 'mapped' world, the unfixing of the ordered, is made possible by the performance of his own anatomy. In so doing, he blurs the distinction

between ordering observer and unformed, or disordered, subject. His

self-surgery and dissection on his own body allows him to see beyond the coordinates and toponyms fixed by previous observers. In 'The Route

of the Tain', the Gaelic name 'Miosgan Medba' lodges as an unassimilable

fragment, in both the text and landscape. 'Miosgan Medba' has manifestly not been absorbed or erased by the Anglicized toponyms of Petty's

Survey. The literal translation 'Queen Medb's turd' (CP, p. 125) inherently retains traces of the waste and wilderness which Spenser and Petty were so determined to eradicate. 'Miosgan Medba/ that hill on the route of The

Tain, becomes for Kinsella another site of resistance, the landscape

literally refuting the attempt to transform it into a tabula rasa.

This resistance is signalled in the poetry by an increasing focus on the

body and its physical components. Like the animals in the charnel-house

that encounter a probing knife which 'loosens the skin about their tails/ with deep cuts' (CP, p. 188), the clinical self-observation that was seen

first in the 1958 poem 'Clarence Mangan', now reveals the narrator

Soak[ing] left wrist in cold water to numb the pain.

Then slashing] my wrist and plung[ing] it into a bathtub of hot water. (CP, p. 159)

The similarities shared between man and beast (between civilized and

savage, to use Petty's vocabulary) that we see here is an important theme in Kinsella's work, and is a metaphoric device used by the poet to

problematize and blur the civilized/savage divide and to question the

nature of reason. In deploying these images, Kinsella's narrator is

effectively ridding himself of the image and form of self that had been

imposed from without. The narrator, here, attempts to disorder and

displace the assimilable, ordering category that is proposed in the texts of

Spenser and Petty. The structuring principle of the imposed identity has

become constrictive and must be destroyed:

25. Maurice Harmon, in Okifumi Komesu and Masaru Sekine (eds), Irish Writers and

Politics (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1989), p. 72.

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The point, greatly enlarged pushed against the skin

depressing an area of tissue.

Rupture occurred (CP, p. 186)

We see here the writing of a new self-identity, almost as if

The fingers of the right hand are set in a scribal act on the skin (CP, p. 269)

While this may well be influenced by Joyce's Shem the Penman, who

writes on 'the only foolscap available, his own body',26 the emphasis on

skin, blood and biological inheritance is once again firmly rooted in the

'civilizing' tracts of Spenser and Petty.

4

At this point, I would like to focus a little more closely on the issue of

biological inheritance and examine how the 'higher' and Tower' racial

binary was sustained by Spenser, Petty and other 'civilizing' writers.

One of the obvious tactics, of course, was the denigration of the language and cultural history of the 'inferior' race. We have already seen how

Petty's Anatomy was performed on a native people, whom he perceived to be 'cheap and common animals'. Throughout Petty's work, and that

of his fellow observers, elements that were to form the philosophical backbone of the eugenics movement, more than two centuries later, such as the inherent belief in superior and 'cheaper' or lower races (again, characterized by the civilized/savage opposition) are everywhere evident. Sir Charles Dilke's Greater Britain of 1869 provides a represen tative example, its survey of the empire revealing how the 'cheaper races

were being displaced by the British colonists' and how the Americans

'are run into an English mould: Alfred's laws and Chaucer's tongue are

theirs whether they would or no.'27 Kinsella, not uniquely among Irish

poets, has sought to depict the impact of 'Chaucer's tongue' on the native

tradition. The location is a graveyard:

Two languages interchanged.

[... ] A flat root of stone

lay like a tongue in the coarse grass. (CP, p. 261)

The overthrowing of the Gaelic language by 'Chaucer's tongue' is only the most visible symptom of the obscuring of a native Irish tradition,

26. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 185.

27. Quoted in Peter J. Bowler, The Invention of Progress: The Victorians and the Past (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 58.

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made possible by writers like Spenser and Petty, whose texts sought to

'contain' that very tradition, to reduce it to knowability and, ultimately, to denigrate and bury it. The cultural and racial origins of Kinsella's

narrator are thus obscured, which allows the 'civilizing observers' to

attribute to him a lineage and an inheritance, that will bolster the binary

opposition that they themselves have created, of lower and higher races.

'St. Paul's Rocks: 16 February 1832' explicitly evokes a Darwinian context:

In squalor and killing and parasitic things life takes its first hold. Later the noble accident: the seed,

dropped in some exhausted excrement, or bobbing like a matted skull into an inlet. (CP, p. 131)

In A View of the Present State of Ireland, Spenser anticipates the eugenics movement in his depiction of these opposing races, both held rigidly in

place and defined by their very difference from each other; the grand

lineage and pure blood of the 'higher' race that is representative of

stability and order and, in contrast, the 'mongrel growth' of the Tower'

race, characterized by dubious origin and mixed blood. The pure-blooded

King Henry is possessed of a clearly-defined, ordered lineage and,

consequently, of a rooted identity:

nothing was given to King Henry which he had not before from his Auncestors, but onely the bare name of a King for all other absolute

power of principality he had in himselfe before derived from many former Kings, his famous Progenitours and worthy Conquerors of

that Land [Ireland]. (View, p. 7)

In the binary world of the 'civilizing' texts, Henry is indeed a worthy conqueror of Ireland 'for not of one nation was it peopled, as it is, but of

sundry people of different conditions and manners' (View, p. 27). In

contrast to the ordered and established lineage of Henry, the native Irish

derive their racial inheritance from the Spanish who 'had left no pure

drop of Spanish blood.' As Spenser notes:

[... ] Of all nations under heaven... the Spaniard is the most mingled, and most uncertaine, wherefore most foolishly doe the Irish thinke to enoble themselves by wresting their Aunciestry from the Spaniard,

who is unable to derive himselfe from any in certaine.

(View, pp. 31-2)

Spenser's racial model is one that is consistent with all the other

'civilizing' accounts of Ireland; one of the stated aims of Cambrensis, on

coming to Ireland for the first time in 1183 was to 'explore the site and

nature of the island and the primitive origin of its race.'28 Petty, mean

28. John J. O'Meara, foreword to Cambrensis, The Topography of Ireland, p. 3.

68




while, in cataloguing the improvements and progress (those archetypal

Enlightenment terms once more) made under British jurisdiction, notes

that 'the Gentry have better Breeding than the generality of the Plebians.'29

Consistently, the ordering observers promulgate a rigidly oppositional model of racial binarism which seeks, in Homi Bhabha's words 'to construe the colonial as a racially degenerate population in order to justify conquest and rule.'30

Amidst all the talk of 'mongrel growths' and mingled blood, it remains

something of an enduring paradox that the English observers were

simultaneously able to write of the same people as mere (Latin merus;

meaning pure or unmixed) Irish. Perhaps it signals a tacit recognition on the part of the writers, that the wild Irish may, after all, be redeemed

for civilization, as Seamus Deane claims:

all that is extreme is brought under narrative control by an observer,

traveller, story-teller, whose function is to communicate to an

audience that shares her or his values a sense of the radical difference

of the other territory or condition and, at the same time, however

contradictorily, to claim that this territory and condition can be redeemed for normality.31

More likely, though, is that 'mere Irish' implicitly warns of that race's

grimly intransigent resistance to civilizing influences. Ireland and the

Irish remain untainted by order and civility. 'Mere Irish' thus further

bolsters the polarized racial world proposed in A View of the Present State

of Ireland and A Political Anatomy, warning the New English, as it does, of the dangers of cultural pollution, of'sinking' racially. In A View, Spenser is more explicit in his warning to the New English:

they [English] doe not onely make the Irish their tennants in those

lands, and thrust out the English, but also, some of themselves

become meere Irish, with marrying with them, with fostering with

them, and combyning with them against the Queene ... Lord how

quickely doth that countrey alter mens natures. (View, pp. 105-6)

Kinsella counters the racial categorizing of these texts in a number of

ways. The Darwinian image of the 'matted skull' reappears in A Technical

Supplement, as the animals are anatomized by an abattoir worker 'who

excavated the skull through flaps of the face' (CP, p. 188). Here, again, the skull's customary function as memento mori is subverted by the poet.

Rather, it is associated now with origin of some kind ('seed', 'excavated';

CP, pp. 194,188). This can be linked, I think, with the continual emphasis

29. Petty, Political Anatomy, p. 102.

30. Homi Bhabha, in Bill Ashcroft et al. (eds), The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (London:

Routledge, 1995), p. 41.

31. Deane, Strange Country, pp. 18-19.

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on skin, blood and cells, as a reference to the rhetoric of eugenics prevalent in the aftermath of the publication of The Origin of Species. This was a

period in which

New techniques were introduced for identifying racial types by skull structure and character of hair, as well as colour of skin [...] As

English historians began to emphasize the genius of the Anglo-Saxon race ...

they inevitably reinforced prejudices against neighbouring

people who were seen as obstacles to the aspirations of the higher race. This prejudice was

particularly strong against the Irish ... 2

Throughout the Peppercanister series, Kinsella continually undermines

the notion of a superior biological inheritance; of the 'higher' race that is

effectively promulgated by Cambrensis, Spenser and Petty. These writers, who anticipate the belief in the perfectible body; in the 'perfect efficiency of muscle and brain'33 that will be held by later eugenicists, are refuted

by Kinsella who depicts the body in its most imperfect and degenerate state, the body as resolutely physical, subject to rending and decay.

Kinsella may toy, in A Technical Supplement, with the rhetoric employed

by Spenser and Petty:

We have shaped and polished. We have put a little darkness behind us, We are out of that soup.

Into a little brightness. (CP, p. 192)

but his reference to the 'mongrel growth' that clogs the 'sour soil' (CP,

p. 191) is a deeply subversive one. He is availing, himself, of the language of science and of improvement but is, in fact, turning it back upon the

colonizing observers. The 'mongrel growth' imputes now not the inferior

native race in need of better breeding but the 'grafted tongue'34 of the

commentators. Kinsella's technique undercuts the observer's self-image of a more evolved race, as he reveals the exploitation and atrocities that

went hand-in-hand with the drive toward 'progress'. The poet's method

makes impossible the maintenance of a higher/ lower racial divide. One,

two, three, the foundation blocks of order, logic and advancement

become, in 'A Country Walk', the casual butchery that is repeated on

three different occasions:

32. Bowler, The Invention of Progress, p. 107

33. Manouf Arif Hasian, The Rhetoric of Eugenics in Anglo-American Thought (London:

University of Georgia Press, 1996), p. 30. 34. The term is John Montague's, whose poem of that name raises issues similar to

those investigated in Kinsella's work, namely the loss of a native tradition caused

by the imposition of another cultural tradition, the 'grafted tongue' being the

language and symbols of the triumphant culture. John Montague, Collected Poems

(Dublin: Gallery Press, 1995), p. 37.

70




There the first Normans massacred my fathers

[...] Twice more the reeds grew red: when knot-necked Cromwell

Despatched a convent shrieking to their Lover; And when a rebel host, through long retreat Grown half hysterical

? methodical, ludicrous ?

Piked Cromwell's puritan brood [...] Into the sharp water in groups of three (CP, p. 46)

'Progress', imaged here by the progressive steps of numerical order

('first', 'twice', 'three'), is brutally undermined.

Performing his own anatomy allows Kinsella to regain control over

his own ancestry. His racial inheritance is no longer a 'mongrel growth' but something that affirms his act of resistance as part of an established

sequence or tradition of similar acts:

Your family, Thomas, met with and helped many of the Croppies in hiding from the Yeos or on their way home after the defeat

in south Wexford. (CP, p. 178)

As part of this inheritance, the poet traces his artistic lineage to the ninth

century philosopher Iohannes [John] Scotus Eriugena who,

taught in the Abbey at Malmesbury and died there at his students' hands.

They stabbed him with their pens because he made them think. (CP, p. 266)

In the 1988 collection of his Peppercanister series, Blood and Family, the

poet supplied a set of notes to the poems in the sequence Out of Ireland

which are omitted from the Collected Poems. These 'Precedents and Notes'

make Kinsella's purpose here even more overt. With regard to Eriugena,

they tell us,

... the literary revival was animated by a group of Irish (Scoti): [...] above all, John Scotus Eriugena, whose very name proclaims his

Irish birthplace. A protege of Charles the Bald, John [...] revived the School of Laon, making it a centre of Greek studies and philosophy. The Irish were

astonishing [...} because of their free speech, worldly science and intellectual audacity. These were

incomparably learned

men.35

Kinsella's invocation of Eriugena is an explicit attempt to assert the value

and worth of his own cultural inheritance and is one which problematizes and undermines the binary positions of 'civilized' and 'uncivilized'

proposed by, for example, the Scottish historian John Pinkerton:

35. Quoted in Thomas Kinsella, Blood and Family (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988),

p. 87. The source is cited as Pierre Riche's Daily Life in the World of Charlemagne, trans. Jo Ann McNamara (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), no page reference

given.

71




The [Irish antiquaries] say their country was highly civilized, had letters and academies, as the Greeks and Romans. The [European

antiquaries] say, the Greeks we know, and the Romans we know, but who are ye? Those Greeks and Romans pronounce you not only barbarous, but utterly savage

... Where are the slightest marks of

civilization among you?[...] Can a nation, once civilized, ever

become savage? Impossible!36

Kinsella's method here adopts a time-honoured device of the colonial

writer, as defined by Ibrahim Abu-Lughod:

Nineteeth-century Arab westernizers explicitly acknowledged the

superiority of Europe in the sciences and the arts. This forced [Arabs] again to look backward to the time when the Muslim world had excelled in scholarship while Europe was in the grip of the most horrible form of savagery and barbarism.37

Kinsella, however, does not merely re-establish the discredited 'verities'

of higher / lower and civilized / savage, by simply reversing the identities

of the racial groups who occupy these antinomian positions (it is, after

all, the native Irish who commit the final barbarity in 'A Country Walk',

CP, pp. 45-8). He writes to convince us that man, in Swift's memorable

phrase, 'is not animal rationale but animal rationis capax'38 and apparently incapable of using that reason, or more precisely, of using that reason

reasonably. Far from being polar opposites, Kinsella, reaching the same

conclusion as Walter Benjamin, shows that the civilized and the savage are implicit partners.39 He continues Swift's project of highlighting the

dangerous consequences of the doctrine of unlimited enquiry, which

propelled the Enlightenment. This ethos, which saw bestiality subsumed to reason, has created'A model [...] / To horrify and instruct' (CP,p.53).

The post-Darwinian world of Kinsella's poetry sees the search for knowl

edge accompanied by the projection onto others of that bestiality. Kinsella

seeks to disturb and upset these ostensibly fixed categories of civilized

and savage. In this 'evil dream where rodents ply, / Man-rumped, sow

headed' (CP, p. 49), human degeneracy reaches a new nadir. The imagery is, once again, that of skin tissue and nerves. Now though, those in 'Old

Harry' who lose their 'flesh and blood' (CP, p. 43) are the victims of the

atomic bomb; the self-destructive nature of the Enlightenment ethos that

36. John Pinkerton, An Enquiry into the History of Scotland, Vol. II (London, 1789), pp. 18-19.

37. Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Arab Rediscovery of Europe: A Study in Cultural Encounters

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), pp. 150-51.

38. Harold Williams (ed.), The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, Volume III (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 103.

39. Benjamin concludes in 'Edward Fuchs, Collector and Historian', that 'there is no

cultural document that is not at the same time a record of barbarism/ One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London:

NLB, 1979), p. 94.

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Swift portrayed in Gulliver's use of Yahoo skins to sole his shoes, brought to its 'rational' conclusion.

Here again, with the focus on the body, an equivalency is drawn

between the physical body and the body politic. Bodily hunger, con

sumption and digestion (with its attendant waste products) become in

Kinsella's work, metaphors not only for the colonial enterprise, but also

the search for knowledge itself. In Kinsella's view pure, disinterested

knowledge is not possible as it will always be contaminated and tainted

by the colonial enterprise. The poetry makes us see that Enlightenment is not, in fact'... the regime of reason [and] a potential source of criticism

directed against the arbitrary power of empire,' but rather that 'the two

terms are identical, Enlightenment as the vehicle through which empire establishes domination and maintains its .. .control.'40 The all-consuming desire for 'progress' through enquiry and knowledge is questioned by Kinsella:

A man one night fell sick and left his shell

Collapsed, half-eaten, like a rotted thrush's (CP, p. 49)

This motif can be traced to Shelley's own critique in Defence of Poetry, 'our calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we

can digest.'41 'Digestion' is another characteristic Kinsellan verb. It con

veys, at once, both the urge to contain and absorb, to incorporate and

impose form upon, and also of course, the consuming, destructive nature

of this desire:

How to put it... without offence ? even

though it is an offence

monstrous, in itself.

A living thing swallowing another. (CP, p. 189)

This dual nature inherent in digestion ? the containing/destroying

element, but also the creative tension between the undigested (the 'half

eaten' man) and the absorbed or assimilated ? has become the aesthetic core of Kinsella's later work.

The consumption/digestion nature of the artistic process as depicted in 'Worker in Mirror, at his Bench' ?

It is tedious, yes. The process is elaborate,

and wasteful ? a

dangerous litter

of lacerating pieces collects.

Let my rubbish stand witness.

Smile, stirring it idly with a shoe (CP, p. 128)

40. Russell A. Berman, Enlightenment or Empire: Colonial Discourse in German Culture

(London: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), p. 6.

41. Percy Bysshe Shelley, 'A Defence of Poetry', in M.H. Abrams (ed.), The Norton

Anthology of English Literature, 5th ed., Vol. 2 (New York and London: W.W. Norton,

1986), p. 787.

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? has been subsequently embellished by the poet. 'The whole process of note-taking, drafting, exploration and the absorption or dismissal of

material, continues, mining away until the poem shows its proper direction and whether or not the data are going to cohere.'42 Here, one

sees another anatomization, this time of Kinsella's own creative process. The tension enacted between the material that is absorbed and that which

resists assimilation is 'how the whole thing/ works' (CP, p. 184). The references in the interview to 'note-taking', 'exploration' and 'data'

are highly significant, once more calling to mind the idiom of Spenser,

Petty and Diderot. I believe that this is perhaps the most important key to understanding Kinsella's mature work. Kinsella has internalized his

thematic concern with the previous 'anatomisers' to the extent that it

has become perhaps the dominant feature of his own artistic process. By this, I mean that Kinsella himself seeks, literally, to absorb and

'incorporate' these previous accounts; that he intends his work not merely to supplement, but (as Derrida argues) to supplant theirs. As Spenser and Petty sought to 'contain' and 'order' Ireland and the Irish in every

possible sense, especially textually, psychologically and linguistically, so now does Kinsella's own work similarly 'contain' the original texts.

Parts of Kinsella read virtually as a pastiche (and parody) of the key texts, which I have discussed here. The formal construction of the poetry

both contains and mirrors that of the poet's primary sources. He plays with the surviving fragmented form of the Lebor Gabala Erenn (The Book

of Invasions), and with the manuscript hiatuses throughout Petty's Political

Anatomy, to instance but two of the most visible 'incorporations' in

Kinsella's poetry. I remarked at the beginning of this essay how, for writers such as

Petty and Diderot, no area could be left uncharted or unknown. A central

part of Kinsella's project is to reassert the sense of unknown or unknow

ability in his work. The poem 'Finistere' is exemplary, in this regard. By virtue of its very title, it serves to reclaim Ireland, the actual matter of

Kinsella's narrator's cultural and racial origin, from the mapping containment of Petty. Ireland is reasserted as unknowable, resisting the

gaze of the 'civilizing' observer. It is figured, not as the end of the earth, or as Land's End, but more specifically as the end of that which is known.

'Finistere' lacks clarity, it is a series of fragments and questions for which no answers are known or

given:

Who is a breath [...]

Who is the bull with seven scars [...]

Who is the word that spoken [...] (CP, pp. 170-71)

42. Kinsella, Interview with Dennis O'DriscolI, p. 61.

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The poem is full of ellipses, voids, holes and pools, all unknowable spaces: 'We were further than anyone had ever been' (CP, p. 170). In this sense

the poem functions as another act of resistance, taking on the form and

shape and, effectively, becoming one of the medieval maps of Ireland, those pre-Petty maps lacking in exactness, where all is not known, indeed

where all cannot be known. The gaps and lacunae of 'Finistere' are also, of

course, more fully representative of the artistic process, with its struggle to find the balance between shaping material and 'interfer[ing] between

the song and its expression'. Michael Bernstein, writing of Pound, cites

the poet's opposition to the 'fini', in the sense of 'a coherent resolution of

[the work of arf s] elements.' This 'finish' 'cleans up, rubs out the traces of

the real work, erases the evidence of the brush strokes, glosses over the

rough edges of the forms.'43 For Pound, this 'fini' was anathema, as it

saw 'the removal of the traces testifying to [the artist's] struggles with

his materials.'44 In Kinsella's work, the artist's struggle with his materials

is glaringly evident.

Unfinishedness then, is fundamental to the work of art and this very

openness denies us, in Kinsella's work, a 'complete' or a 'closed' poem. As the Enlightenment conception of a perfectible body disappears in

Kinsella, so too does the notion of a perfect or finished poem. As that

body decays and suffers violence, so does Kinsella's style. Like Diderot, Kinsella presents the reader with a 'corpus' that is encyclopaedic. The

anatomization of the body and its dispersal over the pages of the Encyclo

pedic is mirrored by the scattered verse-corpus of Kinsella's mature work.

The body, like the verse, continually evades linguistic order and structure:

man beast

(d)amn

best

mean

r i

team bans

XX

meat (CP, p. 161)

The fact that the poet distrusts so much of his own raw material, and

seeks to undermine it, leads to an almost continual questioning of the

forms of his own art. The creative process depicted in 'Worker in Mirror' ?

'Smile, stirring it idly with a shoe' ? has been reimagined more

bitterly:

43. Michael Andre Bernstein, The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 130.

44. Ibid., p. 155.

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I stirred a half brain of cauliflower with my foot, on wet paper

against the corrugated tin and the neglect next door.

('The Back Lane', CP, p. 310)

What we see, at this point, is a complete undermining and rejection of

the Rationalist project (which is to say the 'civilizing' projects of Spenser and Petty, and the encyclopaedic project of Diderot.) The 'half-brain of

cauliflower' follows the equation 'beast best brains' as the latest in a series

of images which portray the limits, and ultimate defeat, of that foun

dation stone of Enlightenment enquiry, the human brain. The replaying of Kennedy's death (literally, the exploding brain) in The Good Fight

when all of a sudden a black shadow or a black ruin

or a cliff of black crossed at rapid speed and spoiled everything (CP, p. 161)

is preceded by the description of Sean (3 Riada's funeral in A Selected Life:

swallowed back: animus

brewed in clay, uttered

in brief meat and brains, flattened back under our flowers. (CP, p. 145)

It becomes clear, at this point, that what is under the dissector's knife

in ATechnical Supplement is nothing less than knowledge itself. Kinsella's

work is replete with images of civilized achievement and scientific

discovery: Diderot's search to advance human knowledge; the early

cartographers efforts to similarly push back the frontiers and boundaries

of knowledge, the cultural glories of Mahler. However, as Kinsella himself

recognizes in 'The Route of the Tain', humankind remains 'Wandering off, ill-sorted, like any beasts of the field' (CP, p. 124). The efforts of the

cartographers and Diderot have led inexorably to the sanctioning of

colonial exploitation; the thrill of scientific discovery has resulted in the

nuclear butchery of 'Old Harry'. Thus, Kinsella reveals all humankind's

striving and so-called 'progress' to be essentially worthless. Despite the

language of Enlightenment and rational evolution, the poet shows that

every new pushing back of boundaries, every new breaking of ground

merely undertakes that old journey yet again:

Overtures and alliances

White gloves advance,

Decorated bellies retire

down mirrored halls.

Entente. Volte face.

And seize your partner.

And it's off to the muttonchop slaughter. (CP, p. 250)

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The image of a civilized and cultured humanity, attempting to impose order and cohesion, is ridiculed and dismissed in a wry fashion:

I lift my baton and my

trousers fall. (CP,p.260)

The rigid polarities of order /disorder, civilizer /savage and human/ beast are all irreversibly disturbed by the poet. As Swift demonstrated, the transformation from civilized observer to the savage subject of that

gaze takes place very quickly. So too, in Kinsella's work, does the order

and ritualized dissection of A Technical Supplement swiftly become the

terrifying and barbaric 'muttonchop slaughter'. In the Technical Supple ment slaughterhouse, it should, theoretically, be possible to distinguish the human observers (hardly a neutral term in Kinsella's poetry) from

the doomed animals. In 'Night Conference, Wood Quay: 6 June 1979', the charnel-house viewers suddenly find the roles reversed and see their

'known' world turn threateningly disordered:

The half-dug pits and night drains brimmed with matter. A high hook hung from the dark: the swift crane locked

? and its steel spider brain ? by

our mental force.

*

Where are they, looking down. At what window.

Visages of rapine, outside our circle of light. Their talk done. The white-cuffed marauders. (CP, p. 302)

The poem closes with several Darwinian images; the competing forces

of humankind in conflict with the surrounding environment, 'the steel

spider brain' versus 'our mental force'. However, the earlier example of

A Technical Supplement and the frightening sense of threat evoked by the

'visages of rapine' outside the evolved and rational 'circle of light' tell

us that there can only be one victor in this battle. The observers from the

slaughterhouse now find themselves the threatened subjects being watched. The stage is set for a replaying of the earlier events, only now

of course, the roles have been reversed. The Rationalist (in Kinsellan

terms, the 'ordering' and 'civilizing') project has failed, a failure sym bolized by the terminal defeat of that symbolic bulwark of the Enlighten

ment, of 'progress' and logos, the human head itself.

Vital spatterings. Excess.

Make the mind creep. Play-blood

bursting everywhere out of

big chopped dolls: the stuff breaking copiously out of a slow, horrified head. (CP, p. 189)

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special issue: thomas kinsella || 'tissues of order': kinsella and the enlightenment ethos

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