Snow Was General All Over Japan

Abstract

Derek Mahon discovered Matsuo Bash014D;’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches in a Penguin edition of the early 1970s.¹ This poem-filled travelogue inspired ‘The Snow Party’, which also became the title of Mahon’s 1975 collection.² In the same year Seamus Heaney published North and Eavan Boland The War Horse, a coincidence which led critics to compare these authors on the grounds of their engagement with the Troubles. While all of them confront the sectarian murders of Northern Ireland, Mahon does so less openly than Heaney, partly due to a more independent ethic and an innate urgency to break free from the provincialism of Ulster. Critics like Seamus Deane and Jerzy Jarniewicz argue that commitment is a fundamental feature of Mahon’s oeuvre, because ‘only in the human world of history, time and consciousness can the victims of history be retrieved and saved in human memory’ (Kennedy-Andrews 2002: 18). Yet the dramatic ‘elsewheres’, which in ‘SP’ are evoked from the dislocated perspective of seventeenth-century Japan, raise the crucial question whether history is reduced to ‘a painful historical parenthesis of the political into the aesthetic’ (Haughton 2007: 100). This chapter will break new ground in the interpretation of Mahon’s poetry, analysing some unpublished materials which have not been taken into consideration so far.