셰이머스 히니의 탈지역적 역사의식: 문화소통의 한 양상

Abstract

The British Empire in the nineteenth century abused its literature for the cultural propaganda of its superiority and governance. After the fall of the Empire in the postcolonial stage of the world, however, it appears to abandon the former strategy of discrimination for the newer one, say, of accommodation; it now admits into its literary canon many works in English by the authors from the former colonies or the British commonwealth. But some authors, for example, Seamus Heaney of Northern Ireland or Ngugi wa Thiong’o of Kenya, strongly refuse to enter into the English literature. Even the ‘critical cosmopolitanism’ of Rebecca Walkowitz might be serving for the gluttony of the English literature to feed down the works of the local in English. In the Global/Local situation we must try to understand and to focus on the border between nations or cultures. But problems will remain unsolved if translocal narratives tend to turn our eyes only to the global even though we should “act locally, think globally.” From the first time of history, by the local or national contacts, transculturality or translocality has been an element of any society. One of the examples is Northern Ireland, whose incompatible and contradictory composition made of both the ‘Irish Irelanders’ of the Catholic natives and the ‘British Irelanders’ of the Protestant comers has made inevitable the cultural contacts and fatal conflicts between them. People of Northern Ireland were faced, from the start, with two problems; on the one hand they had to fight against the Empire, and on the other hand they had to treat the other side of Northern Ireland as ‘enemies’ or ‘allies.’Among the writers of Northern Ireland Seamus Heaney, the Nobel Prizer in Literature 1995, acknowledged the ‘in-betweenness’ of the country and expressed a kind of transcultural and translocal attitude in his poetry. What is unique is that he got to see the translocality in the very local life and history. In his poems and critical essays, he discloses every local has the same weak or strong points in its custom, has been entangled with each other in the formation of each local culture, and in the end meets in the larger world, namely the Western culture. The deeper he stepped down into the local, the more often he sensed the traces of other cultures.