Scepticism, faith and the recognition of the ‘Patriarch-Mother’ in the poetry of Thomas Kinsella

Abstract

This article argues that for Thomas Kinsella, the relationship between scepticism and faith is one of symbiotic interaction rather than one of mutual contradiction or convergence. That relationship is focused through his career-long engagement with the failures of embalmed idealisms in enlightenment, nationalist, aesthetic, and religious / ethical orders. Readings largely agree that for Kinsella, such idealisms are predicated on the displacement of an originary body or flux of experience. The present article proposes that this body of experience is understood by Kinsella in terms of the female who is occluded within patriarchy; the living female is displaced symbolically in favour of her oedipally-configured counterpart, which in Kinsella is named the ‘Patriarch-Mother’. This figure, it will be demonstrated, is related to the Jungian archetypal feminine in his work. The article offers a gendered reading of the terms of relation between scepticism and faith in Kinsella, as focused through the challenge which recognition of the Patriarch-Mother presents to the authority of the poet as witness and guide in his community.

Keywords:

• faith
• gender
• patriarchy
• self-reflexivity
• scepticism
• idealism

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Marion Teehan and Mary Atkinson of Tipperary, without whose generous help on the home front this article could not have been submitted in time.

Notes

 1. Kinsella, Belief and Unbelief.

 2. Apart from his work published since 2001, all quotations from poetry by Thomas Kinsella will be taken from the Carcanet 2001 edition of his Collected Poems . For the purposes of the present article, this 2001 edition is held to constitute the record of his original poetry output to that date. References to Collected Poems 2001 will be incorporated parenthetically using the abbreviation ‘CP’, and prefixed, where appropriate, with the date of publication of the volume from which they are taken.

 3. Though by no means a comprehensive list, some examples of Kinsella's poems in which the question of scepticism and faith is conducted prominently through the gendered positioning of personae, include ‘Baggot Street Deserta’ (1956/1958; CP, 11–13); ‘Downstream’ (1962; CP, 47–50); ‘Beloved …’ (the opening prose-poem in the ‘Wormwood’ sequence (1968; CP, 62)); ‘Nightwalker’ (1968; CP, 76–84); ‘Worker in Mirror, at his Bench’ (1973; CP, 123–6); Butcher's Dozen (1972; CP, 133–7); The Good Fight (1973; CP, 147–58); ‘Finistère’ (1974; CP, 162–5); ‘His Father's Hands’ (1974; CP, 171–3); A Technical Supplement (1976; CP, 175–93); The Messenger (1978; CP, 209–19); ‘Model School, Inchicore’ (1985; CP, 221–3); Her Vertical Smile (1985; CP, 239–52); ‘Native Wisdom’ (1987; CP, 254–5); ‘Memory of W.H. Auden’ (1990; CP, 303–4); ‘Morning Coffee’ (1991; CP, 307–9); ‘At the Head Table’ (1991; CP, 310–13); Open Court (1991; CP, 315–22); ‘Godhead’ (1999; CP, 336–9); ‘Citizen of the World’ (2000; CP, 343–5); ‘Cul de Sac’ (2000; CP, 356–8); ‘Songs of Exile’ ( Marginal Economy , 29–30); and ‘Foetus of Saint Augustine’ (Belief and Unbelief, 20).

 4. Tubridy, ‘Difficult Migrations’, 174.

 5. The terms in which Kinsella has recently acknowledged the importance of his older family members clearly signal his alertness to the independent life of others, in indebted relationship to which the individual ego forms. Of his parents and grandparents he says: ‘It was in a world dominated by these people that I remember many things of importance happening to me for the first time. And it is in their world that I came to terms with these things as best I could, and later set my attempts at understanding’ (my emphasis). His relatives here are presented neither as an addendum to nor catalyst of his autogenesis, but rather as sustaining his life through their own – lives whose autonomy he continues to prioritise as he considers his own process of coming into consciousness. Kinsella, A Dublin Documentary, 8.

 6. See Sullivan, ‘The Woman Poet and the Matter of Representation in Modern and Postmodern Poetics’, chap. 1; Sullivan, ‘The Treachery of Wetness’, 453; and Sullivan, ‘Irish Poetry after Feminism’. Sullivan's work is based upon psychoanalysis's recognition that ‘“the mother has always been a powerful unconscious symbol for forfeited or forbidden origins”’ (‘Irish Poetry after Feminism’).

 7. For analysis of Kinsella's concern with the ill effects of imposition of order in enlightenment and colonial contexts from the point of view of body politics, see Flanagan, ‘“Tissues of Order”’, 54–77; and Brazeau, ‘Thomas Kinsella's “Local Knowledge”’, 55–78.

 8. The term ‘enabling feminine’ is used by Kinsella to describe Joyce's aim in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (‘The form of the Portrait is a circuit, in search of art and the enabling feminine’). It is a phrase cited and further explored by Jefferson Holdridge in his work on Kinsella's engagement with the gendered post-colonial sublime. Kinsella, The Dual Tradition, 85; Holdridge, ‘Homeward, Abandoned’, 119, 123, 126, 127.

 9. In the Freudian version, the enabling feminine is that against which the male directs himself in order to fulfil the Oedipal differentiation imperative. By separating from the historical womb mother, this male child enters the Symbolic order and attains full subject identity. In the Jungian version, the enabling feminine is that towards which the incomplete subject directs him or herself to fulfil the individuation process. By engaging with either his suppressed feminine side in the form of anima archetypes if the aspirant subject is male, or (more notionally) her repressed masculine side in the form of animus archetypes if she is female, the child attains fullness of identity and can enter proper relations with his or her historical community.

10. Johnston, Irish Poetry after Joyce, 99.

11. Johnston, citing Jung, in Irish Poetry after Joyce, 111.

12. Jung, cited in Jackson, The Whole Matter, 87.

13. Christ, ‘Divine Feminine’, 142.

14. See Sullivan, ‘The Woman Poet’; Sullivan, ‘The Treachery of Wetness’; and Sullivan, ‘Irish Poetry after Feminism’.

15. The most sustained analyses of the Jungian underpinning of Notes are found in McGuinness, ‘“Bright Quincunx Newly Risen”’, 106–25; Jackson, The Whole Matter, 87–109; and Badin, Thomas Kinsella, 82–133. For Carol Tattersall, in contrast, Notes ‘appeal[s] for a Freudian interpretation’. Tattersall, ‘Thomas Kinsella's Exploration in Notes from the Land of the Dead of his Sense of Alienation from Women’, 83.

16. Sullivan uses the equation ‘matter/mater’ (e.g. in ‘The Treachery of Wetness’, 453) in order to highlight the manner in which, in Irish poetry discourse, conceptualisations of the material realm tend to be underpinned by concepts of the maternal.

17. Tattersall, ‘Thomas Kinsella's Exploration’.

18. Badin, Thomas Kinsella, 106.

19. Badin, Thomas Kinsella, 98.

20. Holdridge, ‘Homeward, Abandoned’, 118.

21. Collins, ‘A Little of What We Have Found’, 135.

22. Jackson, The Whole Matter, 59, 64.

23. Jackson, The Whole Matter., 71.

24. See ibid., 75.

25. Ibid., 81.

26. McGuinness, ‘“Bright Quincunx Newly Risen”’, 124.

27. Collins, ‘A Little of What We Have Found’, 141.

28. Collins, ‘A Little of What We Have Found’, 143.

29. Sullivan, ‘The Treachery of Wetness’.

30. Peter Denman alerts us to the fact that ‘The awareness of the feminine is central and foundational in Her Vertical Smile.’ Denman, ‘Significant Elements’, 106.

31. Maurice Harmon draws attention to this aspect of Her Vertical Smile in his article ‘From Basin Lane to Old Vienna’, 93.

32. Tubridy, Thomas Kinsella, 189.

33. Clutterbuck, ‘Good Faith in Religion and Art’, 133.

34. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, as quoted in Santoni, Bad Faith, Good Faith and Authenticity in Sartre's Early Philosophy, 72. In bad faith, one rests in false certainty, deceiving oneself with regard to the degree of evidence necessary for belief. In good faith, in contrast, one resists this tendency to stay at a place of rest in one's belief, by taking full account of all available evidence, always knowing that that conviction may later be challenged if other truths come to light. Bad faith converts to good faith when the inadequacy of the previously accepted belief is not only revealed, but is accompanied by the decision to renew faith, albeit now with an altered understanding (from Santoni, Bad Faith, Good Faith, 71, as summarised in Clutterbuck, ‘Good Faith in Religion and Art’, 135).

35. See Sullivan, ‘The Woman Poet’, chap. 1.

36. Badin, Thomas Kinsella, 65.

37. As Badin notes, ‘The spiky, dead world of the lunar surface, is the same as the human world the nightwalker was trying to escape by lifting his eyes to the skies.’ Badin, Thomas Kinsella, 72.

38. This is only seen off by the sceptic's turn, in the final lines of the poem, towards home and the nurturance of his own body. Accompanying the nightwalker's overdue recognition of this material realm is his awareness that he was all along ‘starved for speech’ (CP, 84), for communication with the living, significant other.

39. We see this correction in action in Kinsella's portrait of his father in The Messenger (1978). That pamphlet traces a journey from cynicism to a far more nuanced understanding with regard to the ‘eggseed Goodness’ (CP, 214) to which the father's life – as the life of a sceptic who was committed to positive change – has testified. At the opening of the pamphlet, this goodness, this ‘milkblue blind orb’ is a ‘dead egg […] – a pearl in muck / glimpsed only as the muck settles’ (CP, 209). As such it describes retrospectively the nightwalker's falsely abased sense of himself, along with his sense of the aborted potential of the socio-political world he inhabits. That personal and national self-image shifts in the course of The Messenger (through the recurring image of the orb), to an understanding that such goodness, however ‘abnormal’ its presence, is commensurate with the sceptic's true eye, that ‘pale with strain, forms in the dark’ and which, crucially, though itself ‘purifying nothing […] / […] nothing can befoul’ (CP, 218).

40. Sullivan argues: ‘“the father forbids the bodily encounter with the mother” by “putting the matrix of language” in the place of the originary womb. In poetics, this unconscious collective fantasy is manifested specifically in the necessity for a poet to create his own imaginative matrix, from which he must patroclinously emerge’. Sullivan, ‘The Treachery of Wetness’, 453.

41. Yeats, Yeats's Poems, 322.

42. Sullivan explores the indebtedness of critics of Irish poetry to the dictums of a high modernist aesthetic of poetic autogenesis: ‘Doubting woman's ability to “invent” alongside the great inventors, is tied to Pound's setting male intellectual self-birth against the materiality of female birth […] as exemplified by Pound's exhortation for himself that he wanted poetry to be, “harder” and “closer to the bone”, and “free from emotional slither”’. Sullivan, ‘Irish Poetry after Feminism’.

43. Sullivan, ‘The Treachery of Wetness’, 456. This concept can be traced to Luce Irigaray's foundational argument that ‘women have been aligned with lack in [patriarchal] culture’ while at the same time they are ‘allotted everything in culture that men have to deny in themselves – nature, biology, the body’. As a result, ‘men see women as a kind of black hole in being, an abyss equated with death which cannot be mastered within language’. This, for Irigaray, ‘explains why women have to be kept outside language and knowledge […] as the un-thought, as the dark continent’. As such, women are seen as ‘an unsymbolizable residue or excess which lies outside the apparent phallic wholeness of culture […] the indefinable formlessness which underlies all possible identities’; in this role women become ‘the screen for the projection of male phantasy’, even while this phantasy ‘omits the embodiment of women in the Symbolic and social order’. As this screen, women function as the ‘“masculine feminine”’, this ‘repressed feminine’ operating in fact as ‘another phallic theoretical structure around “femininity”’ through which ‘men incorporate the figure of the repressed mother on which they unconsciously depend at the expense of real women with bodies’. This repressed mother, in so far as she represents a lost originary wholeness, equates with the Patriarch-Mother of Kinsella's poetic – a figure simultaneously invoked and investigated in his work. Minsky, Psychoanalysis and Gender, 192–7.

44. Sullivan, ‘Irish Poetry after Feminism’.

45. Sullivan, ‘The Treachery of Wetness’, 459.

46. As Lucy Collins notes of the grandmother figure in this poem, ‘she is herself trapped in an enclosed space, in life as in art’. Collins, ‘A Little of What We Have Found’, 151.

47. Johnston, Irish Poetry after Joyce, 114.

48. Carol Tattersall correctly notes ‘the obsessiveness of [Kinsella's] will to expose, confront, and exercise […] the malignant female spectre’, but does not locate that will in Kinsella's effort to relocate the occluded historical female. Tattersall, ‘Thomas Kinsella's Exploration’, 82.

49. Sullivan, ‘The Treachery of Wetness’, 456.

50. Dennis O'Driscoll's words on Kinsella ring clear and true: ‘I would […] emphasize the exemplary importance for contemporary Irish writing of an unfettered poet who remains fiercely and stubbornly independent of the establishment – resisting all of its honours and institutions, works and pomps, and prepared to fearlessly and comprehensively expose its hypocrisies. He is a true dissident: obstinate, inconvenient, discomfiting, essential.’ O'Driscoll, ‘His Wit’, 14.

51. Sullivan, ‘The Treachery of Wetness’, 457–60, 457.

52. Tattersall argues that Kinsella in Notes ‘confronts his inability “to kiss” – to make contact with Woman’. She does not see that this ‘inability’ pertains more to the patriarchal culture which has formed his countrymen (including himself), than to Kinsella as an autonomous un-situated subject. Tattersall, ‘Thomas Kinsella's Exploration’, 87.

53. Badin, Thomas Kinsella, 163.

54. See also Ruth Ling's exploration of ‘woman's petrifaction into a living embodiment of the land of the dead’ and their re-emergence from this state in Kinsella's poetry, as traced in her article ‘Re-familiarizing The Familiar’, 153.

55. Sullivan, ‘The Treachery of Wetness’, 460.

56. Sullivan, ‘The Treachery of Wetness’.

57. Badin, Thomas Kinsella, 96.

58. John, Reading the Ground, 131.

59. Daniel O'Hara describes the guardian monster of this poem as ‘the poetic version of Freudian repression or the Jungian shadow’. O' Hara, ‘Appropriate Performance’, 77.

60. Sullivan, ‘The Treachery of Wetness’, 459.

61. Kinsella, ‘The Divided Mind’, 208–18.

62. O' Hara first linked the guardian monster in this poem to the guardian structure in Kinsella's larger poetic. O'Hara, ‘Appropriate Performance’, 77.

63. Sullivan traces the rejection of corporeal femininity in Ezra Pound's Imagist rejection of what he calls the ‘rotten’ application of word to thing, arguing that for Pound ‘the unhealthy “matter” is slushy, excessive and bloated, recalling the state of womanliness and specifically pregnancy. Pound's work is notoriously punitive of “excess” flesh.’ Sullivan, ‘Irish Poetry after Feminism’. Although Kinsella has recorded his debt to Pound (see ‘Thomas Kinsella’, in Haffenden, Viewpoints, 106), Alex Davis has argued for ‘Kinsella's abduration of Pound's frantic will to cohere’, pointing out that ‘a crucial difference between the two poets can be sensed in Kinsella's wariness vis-à-vis the authority of the “pattern” produced in the poetic act’. Davis, ‘Thomas Kinsella and the Pound Legacy’, 53, 43.

64. John, Reading the Ground, 186.

65. John, Reading the Ground.

66. I want to mark here my appreciation of discussions over the past few years with John Fanning of University College Dublin regarding Kinsella's public role in evincing a means by which Irish society can develop, through which my understanding of this aspect of the poet's achievement has grown.

67. See here Santoni's re-inflection of Sartre's recognition that ‘consciousness, by its very nature, carries with it “the permanent risk of bad faith”’, 16–18; see also 72–8.

68. See Popkin, ‘The French Enlightenment’, 462–71.

69. See Flanagan, ‘“Tissues of Order”’, for a detailed reading of A Technical Supplement in this light.