Prometheus to Revelation : Fire and the Work of Tony Harrison

THE UNIVERSITY OF HULL Prometheus to Revelation: Fire in the Work of Tony Harrison being a Thesis submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the University of Hull by Stephen John Whitaker, M.A. (Hudds.) December 2013 Contents Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………………………………3 Abbreviations…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….4 Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….5 Notes on Approach…………………………………………………………………………………………………..17 Chapter One : Childhood’s End - Reverie and the Narcotic Gaze………………………….23 Part One : Awakenings…………………………………………………………………………………………….23 Part Two : Elegy, Embrocation and the Empty Meter………………………………………………41 Chapter Two : The Shadow of Christianity…………………………………………………………….62 Part One : The Infernal Gulph – Injustice and the Wolves of Memory……………………..62 Part Two : The Song within the Flames – ‘Marked with D’ and ‘Fire-Eater’……………..80 Part Three : The God of the People - Fires of Ritual…………………………………………………98 Chapter Three : Fahrenheit 451…………………………………………………………………………..109 Chapter Four : Prometheus and the Fatal Gift……………………………………………………..135 Part One : A Blaze out of the Blackness…………………………………………………………………135 Part Two : The Glossolalia of Fire………………………………………………………………………….146 Part Three : Prometheus……………………………………………………………………………………….165 Chapter Five : Eros and Thanatos…………………………………………………………………………177 Part One : Too Much Spawning – The Flames of Lust and the Soft-Backed Tick…....177 Part Two : Toxins of Fire – The Paradoxes of Semen………………………………………………187 Part Three : Fire and Scouring Flood – The Nuptial Torches………………………………… 211 Part Four : Sun, Sin and Syphilis – ‘The Dark Continent of Fallen Sex’…………………..218 1 Chapter Six : Ordo Poenarum - Fire, Ice and Silence………………………………………….235 Part One : The Freezered Phoenix of our Fate………………………………………………………235 Part Two : Katabasis - Plumbing the Faecal Furnace…………………………………………….245 Part Three : Ice, Silence………………………………………………………………………………………..265 Conclusion……………………………………………………..…………………………………………………….281 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………………………………285 2 Acknowledgements I wish to express my heartfelt thanks to my supervisor, Dr Cliff Forshaw, for his unending kindness, guidance and ‘sunny-side-up’ cheerfulness throughout. Without his support I doubt I would have got through the past five years. Profound thanks also to my second supervisor, Dr David Kennedy, for his ongoing help and incisive comments as to the direction of my thesis at crucial stages in its development. I wish David a speedy recovery from his current illness. I would like also to thank Dr David Wheatley, and Professors Valerie Sanders and Janet Clare who at different times have offered support and encouragement. Many thanks to Ruth Hawden, Pru Wells and especially Paula Shaw in the English Office for their invaluable administrative help, often in times of crisis ! I am grateful also to the staff of the Graduate School, and particularly Lindsey Thomas, for being helpful and effortlessly friendly in equal measure. An especial thank you to Tony Harrison for his kindness in replying to my letters, and for offering some useful insights during our brief correspondence. I am indebted to the staff of the Brotherton Library’s Special Collections department at the University of Leeds for helping me to negotiate a productive passage through a huge archive over a three month period. Loving thanks to my family and friends for their ongoing curiosity and support: to Shirley who endured several years of major disruption, to Dave Brown for our lengthy conversations on thesis-related themes, to Vivienne who encouraged me throughout, and finally to Wendy who persuaded me that the word ‘binary’ should not be used 500 times in a single chapter ! 3 Abbreviations to Tony Harrison’s Work CC……………The Common Chorus CFP………….Collected Film Poetry CP………….. Collected Poems F………………Fram GG…………..The Gaze of the Gorgon M…………….The Mysteries P…………….. Prometheus P3 …………..Plays 3 : Poetry or Bust; The Kaisers of Carnuntum; The Labourers of Herakles T……………..Trackers of Oxyrhynchus TW………….Theatre Works : 1973-1985 Note : For convenience and coherence, I have chosen to abbreviate only Harrison’s major works. References to Special Collections and to anthologised prose materials are given in full. 4 Introduction Luke Spencer’s contention (1994, p.xi) that the lack of sustained critical attention to Tony Harrison’s work has been occasioned by the poet’s frightening diversity and ‘upfront political concerns’, does not amount to a comprehensive explanation. Peter Forbes’s observation of Harrison’s steadfast refusal to review poems, and his negativity about the poetry scene generally, suggest a state of mind which would tend to distance critical reception of his own material (Forbes, 1997, p.191). Within that limited critical canon, a similar elision appears to have occurred respecting the centrality of the idea of ‘fire’ to Harrison’s oeuvre. Where it is not marginalized or ignored, it is often generalized to the point of bland acknowledgement and with little further elaboration, as though fire’s purpose was a donnée and thereafter given comprehensive definition. Sandie Byrne’s summation of the poet’s existential fears –‘ Harrison’s terrible muse is the high-tech fire which could consume poetry and life alike’ (Byrne, 1998, p.237), and Peter Forbes in similar vein - ‘Fire is a recurring thread […] and the big fire, the nuclear holocaust is the biggest of all’ (Forbes, 1991, p.492), are characteristic here. Both make a persuasive point but what remains problematic is the omission of supporting evidence. A generalisation of, or unwillingness to engage at greater depth with, Harrison’s preoccupation is characteristic of those critics who venture any more than a desultory opinion. Sean O’Brien, by contrast, reverses the critical telescope by describing Harrison’s vigorous, obsessional pursuit of his established themes in incandescent metaphors of the sort the poet himself might employ - ‘The painful dramatization of linguistic and class prejudices which light Tony Harrison’s poems like a naval flare’ (O’Brien, 1998, p.244). The one major exception to such critical footnoting is Antony Rowland’s long study, Tony Harrison and the Holocaust, where the very nature of the themes – nuclear annihilation being chief amongst these – renders a detailed engagement with fire inevitable. I am therefore 5 obliged to Professor Rowland’s work for some useful pointers regarding those aspects of fire whose attribution is specifically destructive. But fire infects almost all areas of Harrison’s poetic development, including those whose meaning does not reside exclusively in the negative and the annihilative. Not merely a useful and multivalent poetic device, fire may be a conduit to general definition which reveals at least as much about the poet’s inner thinking and motivation as about his thematic interests. Critical attention has focused on several such thematic registers, principal among which are language and silence, elegy and remembrance, class division, and, most recently, and forcefully, annihilation and the possibility of meaningful poetic discourse in the shadow of Auschwitz.1 The fashioning, in Luke Spencer’s words, of ‘truly oppositional meanings’ (Spencer, 1994, p.16), or binaries, in the crucible of intense commitment is perhaps Harrison’s most significant achievement. That critics have drawn any conclusions as to this ongoing dialectic, with only scant attention to the fire trope which informs it, is unaccountable. Fire is a highly amenable tool for the development of binaries since its very nature compounds the contradictory and the diametrically opposed. Harrison has many times reframed Gaston Bachelard’s neat aphorism, ‘It is cookery and it is apocalypse’ (Bachelard, 1964, p.7), not least in the oblique reference to his general purpose in the preface to the film/poem Prometheus : ‘The flames that created reverie create nightmares’ (P, p.xx). There is a constant striving for clarity in Harrison’s work; an attempt to make sense of a modern universe which, to paraphrase Jonathan Dollimore’s existential reading, has replaced the earlier Western Humanist traditions of unity, fullness and freedom with psychological disunity, crisis and fragmentation (Dollimore, 2001, p.91). Fire streamlines the poet’s thinking as it shapes meaning through invigoration and transmogrification, but it also yields a paradoxical uncertainty. It defines an increasing complexity of oppositions, or oppositions which become more complex as they are rendered mutable by the phenomenon, and it reduces these referents to one, ultimately simple opposition: that of creation and destruction. In his Presidential Address to the Classical Association of 12 April, 1988 - ‘Facing Up to the Muses’ – Harrison notes the presence of two pictures on the wall of his home. One is 1 Antony Rowland’s long study, Tony Harrison and the Holocaust (2001) finds poetic viability in Harrison’s own ‘barbaric’ discourse in answer to Adorno’s seminal dictum, ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’. This issue is discussed at length towards the end of my final chapter. 6 of the Muses dancing on Mount Helicon, the other a photo of the Greenham women dancing at a US airbase containing a nuclear silo wherein, in the poet’s words, the possibility of ‘our extinction is stored’ (Harrison, 1991 (1), p.448). Harrison is declaring, through the symbolism of the dancing figures, the propinquity of death and celebration, and rehearsing one interpretation of his unperformed play The Common

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