Review of Irish Studies in Europe (Nov 2021)
‘A Roar of Wings’: Faith, Scepticism, the Sublime in Medbh McGuckian’s The Book of the Angel
Abstract
Medbh McGuckian’s main epistemologies in The Book of the Angel (2004) are aesthetic, religious, and poetic. The critical apparatus of this essay consists of the aesthetics of the sublime and beautiful from the eighteenth century (Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant) to the present day (Jean-François Lyotard), the aesthete Walter Pater, who heralded the aesthetics of Modernism, and contemporary critics of McGuckian. The essay aims to show how these types of knowledge inform McGuckian’s use of the word ‘angel’ by arguing that the sublime effect of her choice moves along the bifurcation of scepticism and faith. The sublime is a suitable aesthetic for understanding her stance toward the transcendent and the empirical, the spiritual and the sensual, scepticism and belief. Even though she couches so much of The Book of the Angel in the language of religion, any simple interpretation of her poetry as a mere statement of either scepticism or faith becomes complicated. For McGuckian, there is always a force at work in poetry, as in nature, that is more transformative, that awaits the visionary appearance, but its power is as much in the invocation and the waiting as it is in the epiphany.
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