SHARP sunshine cuts through the romantic mist shrouding the Antrim coast road, one of the most dramatically beautiful routes in Ireland. While here and there cars have been hastily parked and photographs are being taken at frequent intervals, too frequent, other drivers are travelling with a heightened sense of urgency.
Just beyond Carnlough, between the Glens of Glencloy and Glenariffe, the Ninth John Hewitt International Summer School is in progress. Prof Seamus Deane, poet John Montague, critic Terry Eagleton, poet and commentator Tom Paul in, Owen Dudley Edwards and others have gathered to discuss the theme "Regions of the Mind".
"This year's school is proving to be a great success," says Paddy Close, secretary of the Hewitt School. "We've had our difficulties in recent months, but the increase in numbers attending would suggest that our visitors are persuaded by the quality of the programme and, I think, by the pertinence of Hewitt's work and thought at this politically uncertain time."
Of the programme itself, Close agrees that it is deliberately devised to reflect the diversity of John Hewitt's wide ranging cultural, political and social interests. And diverse the programme has proved so far. St MacNissi's College, a co educational school whose independent thinking is paralleled by the John Hewitt school itself, is an ideal setting for a forum such as this.
Rabbi Julie Neuberger addressed the issue of asserting one's cultural identity without reverting to the stereotypes created by religion and nationalism. She drew parallels between the young of the Jewish diaspora confronting their own determination to be Jewish without practising their religion and the search for Irish identity. An engaging, open minded speaker, stimulating rather than provocative, Neuberger deals with ideas rather than absolutes. Throughout her conversational address, she acknowledged the difficulties encountered in attempting to offer rigidly prescriptive solutions to highly complex issues.
She set the tone for much of the debate at the school ... we would be strangers in the Capitol,/ this is our country also, nowhere else,/ and we shall not be outcast on the world", wrote John Hewitt in The Colony. Using the text of his poem, together with experiences he had on a recent trip to India poet and critic C.L. Dallat, who was born in the Antrim Glens, revisited post colonial theory and offered a reading which suggests that the "North East" should take its post colonial models from the United States and Canada rather than the Third World. In an analysis stressing the misreading by both Marxist and Revisionist critics, he also suggested that there were other ways of guaranteeing a Protestant culture than by a link with Westminster.
Earlier Bill McCormack of Goldsmiths College, University of London, in a paper entitled "Passing the Gap" considered the difficulties created when political religions and cultural borders do not coincide. Indeed when their frequent overlapping defies the chances of a resolution. His paper moved between the political and the literary - inevitable considering the context.
Referring to Synge's tendency to identify the beggar with the artist, in particular in The Well of the Saints - from where he had taken his lecture title - McCormack called that play Synge's most thorough exploration of this proposition, and added it is the play in which regional difference is at its most explicit and most extensive.
JOHN Hewitt was also fascinated by the local history of the Glens of Antrim and his friend, the late Jack McCann, who founded the Hewitt Summer School was also a founder of the Glens of Antrim Historical Society. The society published Hewitt's The Day of the Corncrake in 1969, a collection of poems testifying to Belfast man Hewitt's love of his adopted region.
Yesterday afternoon, on a mild day of sunshine and gentle breezes, local historian Cahal Dallat, in keeping with an established ritual of the school, led a tour through the Middle Glens. For many of the delegates this was their introduction to the physical reality and rugged grandeur of Hewitt's "chosen ground".
The campus setting - the Gothic, crenellated folly of Garron Tower, the dramatic backdrop of the brooding basalt headland of Garron Point itself and sea views - all allow intense political cultural and literary debate develop in an atmosphere with few distractions, aside of course from the magnetic draw of the Olympic Games. Throughout yesterday several discussions about regions and regionalism, be it intellectual, political or literary, included speculation about Sonia O'Sullivan's performance.
Then drama: a screech of brakes and the crowds gathered outside heaved a collective sigh of relief as their unofficial guest of honour - poet, critic, academic, editor of the still controversial Field Day Anthology and now novelist, Seamus Deane, arrived, a hostage to traffic. There had been immense interest in his novel, Reading in the Dark, and the Hewitt School was to provide a preview of this novel which will be published in September.
Prof Deane read two extracts, and later discussed the book in terms of Gothic and story telling. He illustrated how fabulation can both help us to approach reality and assist us in obscuring the pain of it. Episodic, mysterious, autobiographical and possibly detached, it is a novel with many sides to it and delegates were disappointed they couldn't buy a copy of it on the spot.
