Incertus as Queerness; Queerness as Incertus
On Seamus Heaney, Seán Hewitt, and the excavation of self
‘The truths of metaphysics are the truths of masks’
Oscar Wilde
In a lecture delivered to the Royal Society of Literature in October 1974, and later published as the essay ‘Feeling into Words’, Seamus Heaney revealed the pseudonym under which he had despatched several of his earliest poems to Irish newspapers and journals in the early 1960s, when he was still caught in the process of discovering his poetic voice. ‘I called myself Incertus, uncertain, a shy soul fretting and all that’.[1] Taken from the Latin, to be Incertus is to be uncertain in the face of oneself. Heaney was unsure of which poetic register suited him best; he sought neither to sound pretentious nor archaic, but to embody a style that reflected his own artistic timbre, whatever this was. He didn’t know. Heaney was straining for solidity but found himself falling into doubt and timidity. He ‘was in love with words themselves, but had no sense of a poem as a whole structure and no experience of how the successful achievement of a poem could be a stepping-stone to your life.’ Heaney was still searching for it, ‘a definition of his own stance towards life, a definition of his own reality’, which would give substance to his art and illuminate the path he ought to tread. ‘Writing does not depend on certain well-worn rebellious attitudes towards convention,’ so noted his friend, the poet and critic Seamus Deane. ‘It depends on the questioning, at a high pitch, of the nature of the relation between the perceiving artist and the perceived world; and the relation between this and the transposition of it into fiction. To be an artist, one must be an intellectual first’.[2] As for Stephen Dedalus in the famous closing chapter of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Heaney’s task was to identify an aesthetic lens through which to refract his perception of reality in order to sublimate it into poetry, providing the basis and incentive to further poetic exploration; for the artist not only requires reassurance that the ground on which they tread is secure, that it won’t collapse beneath them, but also the confidence to proceed beyond that first tentative step. Until then, Heaney would take refuge behind a mask, a persona, lest he be essentialised or ‘type cast’ in the wake of one of his ‘trial pieces’, as he recalled his first poems, ‘little stiff inept designs in imitation of the master’s fluent interlacing pattern, heavy-handed clues to the whole craft’.[3]
Should we be confident in ever reaching a point at which this ‘whole craft’ becomes clear to us, allowing us to navigate even the more recondite dimensions of our chosen art with equal subtlety and dexterity, as though it were second nature to us? Heaney didn’t think so; in their pretensions to ‘authenticity’ the artist merely signifies their capitulation to another persona, before this invariably gives way in an interminable logic of self-discovery and disavowal. The ‘artistic life is only self-development’, as Wilde put it.[4] There is no end, no final certainty; no definite path onto which we all must stumble in our own good time. There is only Incertus, in art as in life. Much unadulterated truth may be discerned in the melancholic lament of Jacques in the second act of Shakespeare’s As You Like It (1599): ‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players…’.[5] To comport oneself in society is to play a role on a public stage alongside a multitude of actors, all to differing levels of natural aptitudes, making each individual more or less suited to the task at hand. Thus allowing some to issue convincing performances wrapped in lucid eloquence, standing behind insecurely fastened masks which are always liable to loosen and fall but rarely seem to do so; while leaving others searching in vain for a mask that fits, ensuring their dismissal as bad actors from a stage they cannot leave but must stalk surreptitiously.[6] The term personæ has survived uncorrupted from its advent in Latin antiquity, where it denoted the character played by an actor in a theatrical context; a visage to be adopted or substituted depending on one’s situation.[7] It provides a fitting analogy for modern social life that the term ‘person’ derives from personæ. To be a ‘person’ is to wear a mask. Though what this mask can be said to cover, if anything, is a perennial question of some difficulty.
To be queer is to be Incertus; to be Incertus is to be queer, in a manner that does not prioritise the factor of one’s sexual orientation. This would be to narrow the concept unnecessarily, and preclude the possibility of constructing a more accommodating sensibility. For to be queer is to be unsure of oneself, to be perceptively aware of one’s inability to relate concretely to oneself or to one’s community, for whatever reason – autism, in my case. Call it a sense of dissonance that throws into sharp relief all that which others can pass over without having to consider twice. Queer people cannot escape the matter of themselves, driven into such a state of pejorative narcissism by the pressures of a social system to which they are in some vital respects incompatible. To be queer is to hold out the hope of achieving aesthetic solidity, of reconciling oneself to oneself in an act of heroic constitution, but finding resolution in the acknowledgment of dissonance. For the act of self-effacement, in mutilating and contorting oneself in such a manner as to render a self that is more compatible with the society they cannot extract themselves from, one substitutes oneself for another self in an indefinite series leading nowhere. Queer people, in one sense, lack the firm basis on which to construct themselves as themselves; they are riven by the demands of social presentation and obligations of self-abnegation. Or, I should say, the illusion of some solid foundation in selfness. For a key discovery of modern philosophy is that there is no such basis, no perennial sense of selfhood. It is a social construct, and as such it accommodates some to the detriment of others. To this truth queer people enjoy unvarnished access, giving powerful expression to Theodor W Adorno’s maxim: ‘The piece of grit in your eye is the best magnifying glass’.
It is in this sense that we might read Seán Hewitt’s important memoir, All Down Darkness Wide (2022).[8] A tender evocation of queer love and desolation, caste in limpid prose and tinged in English gothic, it offers a model of queer self-creation. ‘Lying is something I had become good at with practice,’ Hewitt writes in a vital section of his memoir that serves a similar to purpose to the final pages of Joyce’s Portrait, where the anonymous author gives way to a coruscating Stephen Dedalus intent on re-drawing, on his own terms, the parameters of his character and experience. ‘Before I came out, it was so deeply integral to the way I lived my life that it was hard, afterwards, to unpick which parts of myself were armour and which parts of myself were real.’[9] Moulding himself in contrast to the world as he found it growing up, Hewitt was obliged to fabricate a negative-self founded on a succession of personae, each of which being tailored to meet the requirements of a certain encounter or situation. ‘Queerness involved a process of becoming, undertaken in a world built around heterosexuality, and so that process happened in no small part through the ways I butted up against the world I lived in.’[10] He had chosen to hide, to embrace the ‘freedom of invisibility’ rather than risk the consequences of distinction. He shifted in and out of sight, forever conscious of his inability to efface his queerness completely; depositing him in a tenuous condition, suspended between rival actualities, each locked in conflict with the other.
All Down Darkness Wide represents an attempt to extract a sense of coherence out of this conflagration of self. ‘If I was to move forward, to trade the freedom of invisibility for the freedom of distinction, I had to look back.’[11] In this, Hewitt ventures forth on a Nietzschean genealogy of selfhood, starting at the surface and tracing backwards through the accumulated layers of personae. ‘I dug at the detritus of the years, brushed and dusted them away, and hope that, in the end, I might find something intact, a part of myself preserved, brought up to the light.’[12] There is no such locus of selfhood to be discovered, let alone brought to the surface unmarked and pristine; it will always bear the marks of its violent disavowal, woven into a fabric of painful association, forever entwined with it. On a quest in search of clarity, Hewitt will not find solidity lest he forge it himself in dialogue with a sundered personal history: rather than reject this history, he embraces it in order to appropriate and transcend it. Here lies the inauguration of his aesthetic of selfhood, born in the act of literary constitution, to which we enjoy access and from which we can draw inspiration – if only our contemporary conjuncture was more accommodating of our so doing.
Unless, of course, we take it upon ourselves and act.
[1] Seamus Heaney, ‘Feeling Into Words’, idem, Finders Keepers: Selected Prose, 1971-2001 (London: Faber & Faber, 2002), pp. 14-25 (at p. 17).
[2] Seamus Deane, Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature, 1880-1980 (London: Faber & Faber, 1985), p. 80.
[3] Heaney, ‘Feeling Into Words’, p. 17.
[4] Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, The Works of Oscar Wilde (London: Galley Press, 1987), pp. 853-89 (at p. 867).
[5] William Shakespeare, ‘As You Like It’ (1599), Shakespeare: Complete Works, W.J. Craig (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1905), pp. 217-42 (at p. 227).
[6] For the classic socio-psychological work in this area, see Irving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956). This has recently been reissued in Penguin’s Modern Classics series, alongside several of Goffman’s other works. See, for example: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/13511/the-presentation-of-self-in-everyday-life-by-erving-goffman/9780241547991
[7] Hence why you find in any faithful edition of Shakespeare’s plays a list of characters under the general heading dramatis personæ.
[8] Seán Hewitt, All Down Darkness Wide (Jonathan Cape: London, 2022).
[9] Ibid, p. 184.
[10] Ibid, p. 185.
[11] Ibid, p. 185.
[12] Ibid.