Constructing Identity
Continuity, Otherness and Revolt in the Poetry of Tony Harrison
Summary
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the author(s)/editor(s)
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Contents
- Introduction “The whole view North”
- Chapter One “Correct your maps: Newcastle is Peru!” Continuity of Exploration and Exploitation in The Loiners
- Chapter Two “Wherever did you get your talent from?” Continuity of Poetic Heritage in The School of Eloquence
- Chapter Three “The still too living dead.” Continuity of Mourning in the Selected Elegies from The School of Eloquence
- Chapter Four “Half versus half, the enemies within.” Changing Patterns of Revolt in v.
- Chapter Five “This frightening mask.” Continuity of Poetic Gaze in Selected War Poems
- Conclusion “How have you been useful for the polis?”
- Bibliography
Born in 1937, Tony Harrison is a poet who crossed the boundary dividing the English working and middle classes. He was one of those children who, due to educational reform,1 received state scholarships and went to grammar schools, and as a result, had the opportunity to become the students representing the first generation of the working class of the North at university level. Reading Harrison’s poetry, it seems justifiable to say that his poetic path started not when he published his first poem but much earlier, in 1948, when, as a “scholarship boy,” he crossed the threshold of Leeds Grammar School, finding himself from that moment onwards “at the friction point of two cultures,”2 as Richard Hoggart put it (2005: 239). This was a crucial moment, a triggering point that changed the trajectory of Harrison’s ← 11 | 12 → life, opening doors to the world of eloquence and simultaneously depriving him of a clear identification with the place he grew out of, and one to which he will be returning again and again in his verse, continually “Facing North,” as one of his titles asserts. In this poem, Harrison describes “the act of poetic composition” as “luminous O of … light, itself illuminating” (Byrne 1998: 177) darkness.
God knows why of all rooms I’d to choose
the dark one facing North for me to write,
….
The window’s open to the winter’s chill,
to air, to breezes and strong gusts that blow
my paper lantern nothing will keep still
and let me make things happen in its O.
….
Now when the wind flays my wild garden of its green
….
and starts the lightbulb swinging to and fro,
and keeps it swinging, switched off, back and forth,
I feel the writing room I’m leaving grow,
dark, and then darker with the whole view North. (Facing North 1–2, 17–20, 41, 45–48)
Harrison’s description of the act of creation can be explained in relation to the words of Barbara Skarga, who in her book Tożsamość i Różnica, comments on Emmanule Levinas’ thought:
‘Light’—writes Levinas—‘is what makes a given thing different from what I am, and in the same time as if it came from me.’ An illuminated object is something we encounter but precisely because it is illuminated, we simultaneously encounter it as if it came from us … Therefore seeing, capturing something in the light is identical not only with … understanding of it but also with exerting control over it.3 To see is—to make something one’s own, to include it in the realm of our knowledge and our power, it is to lose the awareness of otherness.4 (Skarga 2009: 172–173) ← 12 | 13 →
In the poem, light actually illuminates lines of text—something familiar as it quite literally comes from the speaker but also from something other than the Self, something that must be encountered and confronted by the one who wants to read it. “The act of poetic composition,” (Byrne 1998: 177) whose metaphorical rendering in the poem is based on the opposition between light and darkness, is, first of all, the act of seeing. The idea refers to the broader concept which recurs in Harrison’s work, namely that the poet’s unflinching gaze, maintained even in the face of the atrocities of history, and a continuous observation of reality are necessary elements of literary craft. Other necessary elements are mastering eloquence and exerting control over a language which quite literally, Harrison says, serves as a tool of power, since a “tongueless man gets his land took” (Harrison National Trust 17) and loses influence over his own fate.
In the third stanza of the poem, the northern wind swings the lamp, the circle of light loses its shape, chaos replaces cosmos, and suddenly, in a fashion that brings to mind the metaphysical imagery of John Donne and Andrew Marvell, the room grows into a universe with “planets hurled/… off their courses” where “there is no gravity to hold the world” (Facing North 26–28). Luke Spencer comments on this sudden change of perspective, suggesting that in the poem, the North gains a broader, more universal meaning:
In the meditation/lucubration … the North is extended beyond its typical English association—of dourness, ugliness, lack of compromise—to encompass an older, more archetypal image of all that has immemorially threatened human comfort, not to say complacency. ‘The whole view North,’ with its darker perspective on both past and present is an essential element in Harrison’s vision. His continuing exposure to the chilling but bracing challenge reinforces his artistic survival skills. The unlit, draughty writing-room … is a metonymy for his continuing—intermittent but unbreakable—commitment to facing the puzzlement and anguish by which humanity has always been beset. (Spencer 1994: 100)
Details
- Pages
- 212
- Year
- 2016
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9783631696590
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9783653051988
- ISBN (MOBI)
- 9783631696606
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9783631658819
- DOI
- 10.3726/978-3-653-05198-8
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2019 (April)
- Published
- Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Wien. 2016. 212 pp.
