1 The Luminary. Issue 4. Autumn (2014). 2 Hidden Voices: Whispers, Silences, Undersides Issue 4: Autumn 2014 This issue explores the muffled or silenced voices that can be found in art, literature and culture. These are the voices that are hushed or even silenced, voices that whisper at the edges of conversations. Each of the pieces in this issue - both critical and creative - explore silences or uncover conversations going on underneath the hubbub. Acknowledgements Cover art by Vivien Leanne Saunders, Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts, Lancaster University. Creative editors: Liz Monument and Yvonne Battle-Felton Critical editors: Rhianon Jones, Chuckie Patel, Vivien Leanne Saunders and Chloe Germaine Buckley General Editor: Chloe Germaine Buckley We would also like to thank our peer reviewers for their kind consideration and efforts with this issue The Luminary. Issue 4. Autumn (2014). 3 Contents Creative Pieces Thanksgiving, no Thanks (Creative Writing - Short Fiction) 11-15 David Garrett Izzo A sadistically cruel breakup sends a man hurtling through a drug-induced unhinged vortex of hidden voices until the dizzying centrifugal spin crashes him into a very public breakdown and an ambulance ride to the local psycho ward. The Good Postman (Creative Writing - Short Fiction) 16-22 Jan Carson The Good Postman is a short story which explores the fragile and oftentimes strained bonds which exist between people who have been drawn together by geography. Adopting a slightly absurdist tone, the story raises the question of whether community is possible and how this can be achieved in a world where neighbours lead increasingly compartmentalised lives. 21 Yr. Old Mass Murderer (Creative Writing - Short Fiction) 23-26 Richard Barr This story explores the nascent influence of the ‘conspiracy theorist’ in the sphere of print and broadcast news journalism. The narrator of the piece, in a letter to unspecified ‘Sir(s),’ sets out what he believes to be the true circumstances behind a recent upsurge in spree shootings. Referring to his mounting research and drawing attention to the fact there’s a growing audience for his work, he implores the general public to take heed of his warnings before the danger represented by these killings becomes too big to resist. Thematically, the story explores the ways in which information is managed in the age of news in real-time, with the narrator representing the increasingly vocal ‘Info-Warrior’ – those on the fringes of the news media who absorb, interpret and circulate their own take on domestic and world events; appraisals which are almost always at odds with those of the mainstream, established press. ‘The Giving Trees’ and ‘Where the Wild Things Were’ (Poetry) 27-31 Elizabeth Johnston ‘Where the Wild Things Were’ is a re-writing of Maurice Sendak’s children’s story, Where the Wild Things Are, whose protagonist responds to a wild call from across the sea. However, it is also a feminist rewriting of Lord Alfred Tennyson’s fairy tale poem, ‘The Lady of Shalott,’ which tells of a woman trapped in a tower who is The Luminary. Issue 4. Autumn (2014). 4 suddenly, wordlessly called to leave her tower and go down to the river’s shore. This rewriting also brings in the voice of Emily Dickinson in ‘Wild Nights,’ a poem whose primary symbol is also the sea and which similarly features a speaker yearning for the forbidden love that calls her. ‘Where the Wild Things Were’ brings all three works into dialogue thematically and linguistically. ‘The Giving Trees’ is also a rewriting of a classic children’s story by Shel Silverstein, The Giving Tree. Though beloved among many generations of readers, the inherent message of this story is problematic from a feminist perspective. This rewriting gives voice to the ‘giving trees’ by explicitly calling into question the traditional narrative of femininity as selfless, silent martyr. Chuck and Di (Creative Writing - Monologue) 32-38 Lisa Blower ‘Chuck and Di’ pays homage to Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads and, in particular, the way Bennett wanted to capture ‘how life generally happens elsewhere and in hearsay.’ This monologue focuses upon the ailing marriage of a retired working-class couple in Stoke-on-Trent for whom the demise of the Potteries has had a long-standing effect upon their way of life. It attempts to recapture the working-class voice, silent stories, and rigorous work ethic of a fading culture: its tone is reflective of how women gossiped on their front doorsteps yet evaded any intimate disclosure; careful to always conceal the woman who really existed beyond the surface of oral storytelling. The Luminary. Issue 4. Autumn (2014). 5 Critical Essays Female Subjectivity, Sexual Violence, and the American Nation: Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye 39-54 Melissa R. Sande, Union County College This essay closely reads the destructive nature of silencing in Toni Morrison’s first book, The Bluest Eye, published in 1970. Morrison had been at work on the book for quite some time before finally publishing at the end of this important decade. If Sylvia Plath opened the decade by pondering why motherhood and wifehood were a woman’s obligations to the nation in The Bell Jar, Morrison brings this idea full circle when she deconstructs the notion of childhood innocence in her novel. As Debra T. Werrlein explains, there has often been an inextricable link ‘between thematics of childhood innocence in American culture and an ideology of national innocence’ (54). With characters like Pecola Breedlove, Maureen Peel, or even Claudia MacTeer, Morrison demonstrates otherwise: these are anything but innocent, uncorrupted children. Using the community in the novel as a microcosm for the larger nation, Morrison’s attention to the cyclical nature of human behaviour seeks to emphasize just how responsible complacent community members are for the hideous injustices enacted based on race and gender, which, in this case, include sexual violation and physical abuse. ‘We Sing our Lies through Empty Sounds:’ Hidden Voices in Gothic Music 55-64 Vivien Leanne Saunders, Lancaster University This paper seeks to explore the narrative potential of contemporary Gothic music. In particular, it looks at works that are lyrically inarticulate, yet communicate complex ideas, narratives, characters and emotions. Chris Baldick informs us that Gothic literature combines affective features which ‘reinforce each other to produce an impression of sickening descent into disintegration’ (Baldick 2009). It is my argument that the diverse emotional features of music can also interrelate to form this Gothic effect. Further, I propose that this interaction leads us to mistrust our normal cognitive response to lyrical music, and instead find contradictions between the articulate and expressive narrative voice. Inarticulate works such as ‘Five Years’ by Sugar Hiccup (1995) describe vivid scenarios by subverting our anticipations of the lyric. These scenarios are enriched through the imposition of deliberate muteness. Although Gothic musical works often have very diverse stylistic features, the manipulation of expectations in inarticulate works is a feature which begins to suggest genre congruency. Of Spectacle and Grandeur: The Musical Rhetoric of Private vs. Public Ceremony in Showtime’s The Borgias 65-78 Maria M. Kingsbury, Southwest Minnesota State University and Texas Tech University and Stephen A. Kingsbury, Southwest Minnesota State University While its salacious advertising campaign and lush visuals do not evoke a television show sporting complex layers, the historical music used in the premiere episode of Showtime’s The Borgias (2011) encourages audiences to scratch away at the shiny surface to realize darker, complicated, and often ironic realities upholding both the characters in the narrative and the historical context that the story reflects. This paper, which examines the narrative placement of ‘historical’ (not original soundtrack), seemingly chronologically accurate music of ‘The Poisoned Chalice,’ including Handel’s Zadok the Priest and Carlo Gesualdo’s O Vos Omnes, suggests that nothing in The Borgias ought to be taken at face value; what seems to be ‘authentic’ 15th century music is actually anachronistic. Anachronism, our paper goes on to argue, ought not to be viewed in this context as a fault. Instead, uncovering the messages embedded within these pieces’ original contexts and performances reveals character The Luminary. Issue 4. Autumn (2014). 6 motivations and knowledge not verbally acknowledged in the television program itself. Audiences, then, might look upon ‘anachronisms’ and disruptive elements in scripted television epics such as The Borgias not as detracting from the viewing experience, but as opportunities to examine unspoken messages and assumptions that may resound just beneath the surface of the fictional narrative. Ridley’s Key: The Forgotten Influence of Joseph Losey in Blade Runner 79-107 Vincent Joseph Noto In the film adaptation of Sarah’s Key something other than Sarah’s brother calls out from behind a secret closet, at least in terms of film history. It is the voice of blacklisted Joseph Losey who addressed the topic of the Vel d’Hiv Roundup much earlier in his 1976 film Monsieur Klein. This is a part of film history that has been repressed or forgotten. But Losey’s voice, still especially under-recognized in the U.S., can be made out in the works of a director widely appreciated in American culture, Ridley Scott, particularly in his masterpiece, Blade Runner. This article discusses how Scott alludes to or borrows Losey’s imagery in ways subtle and not so subtle. It closely scrutinizes imagery, themes, and tropes of eye-examinations, of psychological tests, of photograph and mirror inspections, of state-altered memories, of the animal nature of man, of the Brechtian man-as-machine formulation, of gender roles and doll-associations, and of film noir-like room and backstage-dancehall inspections used as metaphor for examinations of the unconscious. This article will identify within Blade Runner an array of allusions and homages to Joseph Losey’s Monsieur Klein, The Boy with the Green Hair, Time Without Pity, Modesty Blaise, and M.