LITERATURA INGLESA IV: EL GIRO A LA POSMODERNIDAD

ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW FOR THE EXAM

Nacho Collins Ramos 2015/2016

POSSESSION by Antonia S. Byatt

1. Representation of history.

Continuous revelations and discovery show that knowledge and

interpretation of history are slippery and risky fields of knowledge. When,
at the end, ―the truth- seems to be discovered, Byatt surprises the reader
with the Postscript.

Every character in the romance is looking for the truth about what
happen in the past, the biographer and academic scholars: Cropper,
Leonora Stern, Blackadder and Beatrice Nest as well as Maud and
Roland but they could find only a part of it.

2. Characterization in Possession.

Characterization in Possession takes place through the narrator's

description as well as dialogues and the action of the characters. The
characters are complex and they develop throughout the novel, even it
can be said that the novel is a "Bildungsroman" where the main
characters grow and learn to overcome their difficulties, especially the
couple Maud and Roland, the twentieth century main characters. There
are links which relate present to Victorian past characters. Likewise,
there are similarities between the main contemporary characters Roland
Michel and Maud Bailey and the couple of Victorian poets they are
interested in. Roland and Randolph stories start with a transgression
and both are silently unhappy in their relationships. As for the female
characters, Maud and Christabel at first, try to reject an intimate
relationship and both defend their privacy. Roland is depicted as a no
action man who sees himself as a failure while Maud appears as a self-
confident woman with an academic and professional career, reflecting a
gender subversion against the established gender roles. In this regard,
the 20th century characters reflects the opposite than their Victorian
counterparts at first regarding the gender, but as the story unfolds, the
"weak" characters, Roland and Christabel, turn out to be stronger.

With respect to the secondary characters, Val, Roland's girlfriend, is

described as the breadwinner, against the expected female role, but, at
the same time, she gives up on her dreams to help her partner to do his
academic research. In this regard, Val has a similar role to Ellen, Ash's
wife, who live only to take care of her husband, trying to compensate the

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lack of sexual life in the marriage. Unlike Ellen, Val
in the end starts a relationship with Euan Macintyre,
a solicitor who helps to helps to hatch a plan that
ultimately solves the mystery of the relationship
between Ash and LaMotte.

Another comparison can be established between

Blanche Glover and Leonora Stern, both are the
female main characters best friends with some sexual
connotation, and both are betrayed by their friends.

As for the scholar characters, we find very different

roles: Blackadder, a meticulous scholar obsessed
with Ash's writings, Cropper, who writes his
biography and who is more interested in his personal effects, more
obsessed with objects and shows a greedy attitude to collect them, Fergus
Wolf, who appears at first as the antagonist of Roland, a charming and
successful academic young man. Beatrice Nest, devoted to the study of
Ellen Ash's journals as a way to get to know Ash himself and Leonora
Stern, a feminist literary critic. Leonora gets in touch with Dr. Ariane
LeMinier, a French student of women's writings at the University of
Nantes. Dr. LeMinier is working on a nearly unpublished writer named
Sabine de Kercoz who wrote a few poems in the 1860s and four
unpublished novels. Kercoz was a distant cousin of Christabel LaMotte,
who wrote extensively in her journals and letters about Christabel's visit
to her family's home where she lived with her father, Raoul. LeMinier
finds a connection to LaMotte through Sabine's letters and journals,
giving Roland and Maud another piece of the puzzle.

3. Names of the characters:

Maud Bailey: etymologically, the name comes from the Old French
Mahaut, from Medieval Latin Matilda from Germanic. Matilda comes from
French Mathilde, of Germanic original, literally “mighty in battle”. She
fights to discover the story behind the epistolary relationship between
Ash and LaMotte. Literally, Maud is the name of a collection of poems by
Lord Tennyson, Maud: A Monodrama.

Roland Michell: it comes from French, from Old High German Hrodland,
literally “(having) a famous land. Literally, Roland is the main character
of a relevant French romance, La chanson de Roland. In the book, Roland
is also the hero of the story, the one who begins the quest.

Randolph Henry Ash: Randolph comes from Old Norse Rannulfr “shield-
wolf” and Frankish *Rannulf “raven-wolf”. Ash means “ceniza” in English
and maybe in the book it has the idea of the ashes that keep in the air

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and that continue till the modern times. Ash's ashes have been
perpetuated by the research of Maud and Roland.

Blanche Glover: Blanche comes from French Blanche, from Old French
blanc “white”. Blanche has retired herself from society and lives in a pure
world. Glover's meaning appear in Possession in a conversation between
Maud and Roland: “I mean, all those gloves, a minute ago, we were
playing a professional game of hooks and eyes _ mediaeval gloves, giants'
gloves, Blanche Glover, Balzac's gloves, the sea-anemone's ovaries _ and
it all reduced like boiling jam to _human sexuality” (292).

Maia: it's the name of the Roman goddess of fertility, literally “she who
brings increase”, related to magnus “great”. Maia, one of the Pleiades, is
from Greek Maia, daughter of Atlas, mother of Hermes, literally “mother,
good mother, dame; foster-mother, nurse, midwife”. Maia is also the
Hindu goddess of energy and, indeed Maia is full of energy according to
the last pages of the book. Besides that, it's important the idea that the
little girl wants to be known as May, an easier name for her, and quite
significative, since May is traditionally the month of spring, what means
life. She is the life created by Ash and Christabel.

Ellen: an older form of Helen. Helen, from French Hélène, from Latin
Helena, from Greek Helene, probably fem. of helenos “the bright one”. In
Greek mythology, Helen's kidnap was the reason why the war of Troy
started.

Sabine: “pertaining to a people in ancient Italy” (they lived in the

Apennines and were subjugated by the Romans about 290 b.c.), from
Latin Sabinus, perhaps literally “of its own kind” and connected to root
of Sanskrit sabha “gathering of village community”, Russian sebr
“neighbour, friend”, Gothic sibja, Old High German sippa “blood-
relationship, peace, alliance”. In Possession, Sabine is Christabel's
cousin and she tries to get well with her, trying to find an alliance with
her, even though the poet has a great difficulty in opening herself to her
little cousin.

4. The meaning of parallel plots:

The structure of Possession reflects a cyclical exchange of past and

present and represents a fall from the Victorian conception of linear time.
Past and present develops in parallel plots, there's a development of two
parallel love stories: the Victorian writers and the twentieth century
academics that study them. As Roland and Maud discover the
relationship between Christabel and Randolph, they live a similar story,
as if their actions were determined by past lives. The similarities between
the two stories are reinforced through action and imagery. And, in the

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end, some lesson derived from the past story helps them to take decisions
in the present.

The love stories have many similarities, the male characters were involved
in unhappy relationships and both find another woman with whom share
intellectual interests as well as physical attraction and sexual fulfillment.
The female characters were both described as cool and independent
women, they have a special relationship with a woman: Blanche Glover
and Leonora Stern, and they both betray them. The two couples make
the same journey and they do it secretly, they don't tell nobody where
they go, even if in the end, their partners find out the truth. In the middle
of the novel, the plot lines converge, the lives of the protagonists mimic
each other, but, from that moment on, they take different paths and their
endings are quite different: while Randolph and Christabel live
separately even if they continue being in love, Roland and Maud choose
recognizing their feelings and carrying on with their relationship.

5. Historical novel and metafiction:

The past story in Possession is set in nineteenth Victorian society, and

this age is quite accurately depicted in the novel. Byatt's depiction of that
period shows an age where the role of the woman is mainly to be the
perfect wife and there was rarely recognition of the woman value as an
artist or a writer, as shown in the characters of Blanche Glover, the
impoverished painter or Christabel, the underestimated poet. In like
manner, the role of Ellen Ash shows clearly the gender expectations of
that time. Additionally, Ash can represent the prototypical Victorian
thinker who is interested in science, religion, philosophy, fiction, poetry
as a whole, as a result of the quest for knowledge in a comprehensive way
the contemporary intellectuals, who are interested in just some concrete
aspect.

In the novel, we can see the attempt done by some

scholars to reconstruct the past life of the
Victorian poets, to write their biography or to have
the key to read their writings in the light of their
actual life. The novel can be seen as a mock to this
attempt because it shows that there are always
important details from the actual lives of human
beings that cannot hardly be apprehended by the
literary critics and biographers. The postcritpt in
the novel shows that even if the scholars have
discovered important secrets in the life of the
poets that have been hidden for ages, there can

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always be something missing that can be
key to understand their life and writings.

6. Englishness:

In the novel, there is a description of the

cucumber sandwiches as the "English
manna" and they are described as
"perfect green circles with a delicate hint
of salt and fresh pale butter". These
features seem to be associated with
Englishness throughout the novel:
perfect, denoting the importance that
English in general give to detail; delicate,
referring to the English good manners,
unlike the American characters depicted
as vulgar and superficial; and fresh pale,
as the female characters depicted in
traditional English fairy tales, similar to
the female main characters in
Possession. The last feature can be
related to coldness as a feature of
personality against the warmth of
human contact represented perhaps by the French characters in the
story: Sabine and Raoul de Kercoz. In this regard, we can quote a
comment Sabine did about Christabel, her English cousin: "I have never
met anyone who so gave the impression that normal acts of friendliness
are a deadly intrusion".

7. Parody:

One of the issues of Possession is the sarcastic representation of

academic life.

Byatt pokes fun at literary schools of criticism on several occasions,

especially in her parodies both of feminist criticism and of literary
biographies.

Another kind of scholar is represented by Leonora Stern, who is so

confident and zealous in her psychoanalytical interpretation of
Christabel‘s work that she seems to be a parody of feminist criticism; her
writing insists obsessively on sexual metaphors hidden in Christabel‘s
work, so that the reader, aware of the fact that Christabel was not as
repressed as Leonora believes her to be, definitely see the American
academic in a satirical way.

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Female scholars in 1987 are treated with a tinge of fear and trepidation
by their male counterparts. The author gives a satirical perspective on
men's views of these women as roadblocks to discovery more than
colleagues.

8. Elements of popular fiction:

Possession follows the traditional pattern of a quest narrative. Although

mainly working with archetypes, Byatt also deploys here elements taken
from romance subgenres as detective stories and gothic fiction.

The romance

Byatt uses romance conventions, or rather, the many conventions that

have come together under that heading. Archetypal romance shapes the
structure of the story around the central motif of the quest.

Possession is also a romance in the popular sense of the love story, the
development of two parallel love stories: that of the Victorian literary
writers Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte, and that of the
academics Roland Michell and Maud Bailey

Byatt uses another traditional feature of romance and creates a happy

ending for all parties concerned, naturally excepting the villain. Of the
story, Mortimer Cropper, but once again she ironically plays with it: the
reader, by now convinced to have reached the end of the story, is
promptly surprised by the writer with the Postscript.

The detective story

It begins with a plot device widely used in literature, the found

manuscript theme.

All in all, the success of Roland and Maud's quest is based on their
powers of deduction.

It is true that they sometimes act on hunches rather than on evidence;

they belief, for instance, that LaMotte had accompanied Ash to Yorkshire
can at that stage be neither proved nor disproved. Therefore, intuition
appears to be here a further sign of the skills all detectives display at their
best.

The fairy tale

In addition to Christabel‘s own fairy tales and Gode‘s story, a perfect

illustration of traditional folktale, Roland and Maud quest can be seen
as a fairy tale. They are heroes that have to carry out a difficult task, in
which they are sometimes helped and sometimes hindered by secondary

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characters. The Baileys and Beatrice Nest can be seen both as helpers
and as obstacles.

Maud and Roland must move through testing to achieve their goal. Good
deeds are rewarded, so when Roland helps Lady Bailey, they gain her
gratitude, which opens the way to Seal Court and to the discovery of the
whole correspondence. Beatrice Nest at first appears as an obstacle, but
(another instance of “test” and “reward”) Maud‘s kindness will turn her
into a helper.

The Gothic Story

The gothic element has an unquestionable influence. In the description

of Mortimer Cropper‘s spooky night visit to a graveyard, where the digs
out the box of documents Ellen Ash had put in her husband‘s coffin,
Byatt resorts to the staple elements to create a gothic mood.

The gothic mode also provides the convention of the hidden manuscript,
which discloses the secret of the hero‘s mysterious origin or brings
solution to issues of rightful heritance or social status. So, Christabel‘s
last letter to Ash reveals that Maud is their direct descendant,
simultaneous solving the problem of property and copyright of the
documents themselves.

It must be added, nevertheless, that also Roland and Maud, in the end,
are proven wrong: they are not so good at being “natural detectives” (p.
237) as they believe to be and there are secrets which will never be
exposed.

Besides, while the modern scholars‘ quest highlights that there is no such
thing as an all-encompassing knowledge, the readers get to know really
“everything” thanks to a Postscript revealing an episode unknown to the
contemporary characters as well as to most of the Victorian ones.

9. Symbols and images:

Possession is a masterful rewriting of Victorian Literature told from a

postmodern perspective, an apparently heterogeneous agglutination of
texts and genres ending up by composing a perfect articulated unity. The
novelist vindicates the depth and complexity of Victorian attitudes and
thought, deploring the present-day vision of that fascinating period of
English history.

Byatt defended Victorian thinkers in the way that for them everything
was part of one thing: science, philosophy, religion, economics, politics,
women, fiction, and poetry.

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Possession is definitely a novel in which intertextuality is constantly used
but it also relies strongly on internal references and echoes: while it can
be true, as Chris Walsh pointed out, the “connections are traced avidly
by readers within the book”, it also undeniable that sometimes only the
“external” reader is able to detect and fully understand them. While
intertextuality underlines Byatt‘s wide cultural background and imagery,
intratextuality highlights her ability as a story-teller to create a complex
and multi-layered plot which nonetheless turns out to be articulate and
coherent.

What is particularly interesting in Possession, is the broad scope of

genres that Byatt skillfully combines throughout. Most chapters begins
with a fictitious work by Ash or LaMotte, but they are well written and
uniquely styled to form the image of these two people, and Byatt is able
to write each in different styles that definitely seem to come out of the
same time period. Comparing the two, it is obvious that Byatt was careful
to craft each in their own vogue.

Both writers capture the style of the romantic

period, yet each uses language differently,
Ash more open and sparse in "his" writing and
LaMotte more simplistic and with more
obvious patterns of rhyme and rhythm. It is
precisely Byatt‘s ability to create so many
different kinds of writing from the fictitious
people that brings life to this otherwise drab
pursuit. It is almost as if these people actually
exist for her.

Beyond the works of Ash and LaMotte are

their letters. Here the story breaks down just
a bit because of the
extraordinary luck that
befalls Roland and Maud, still, the great number of
letters is what actually creates Possession, and it could
not exist at all in its present form without them. The
letters give a great deal of information, not only to the
reader, but to Roland and Maud. The knowledge of the
past association of these past lovers is what allows the
parallel relationship to come to life for Roland and Maud.

A final point to touch on is the manner which Byatt uses

her title, Possession, throughout the story. The word
itself pops up numerous times, and the multiple
meanings resonate well with the reader after the story is over. The

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possession of the stolen letters, the possession of the lovers to each other,
and many other references make a neatly wrapped up and extended
theme for the text. It is obvious that Byatt either had the title in mind
from the beginning, or consciously decided on it as a motif. In either case,
it works well.

In Possession, A. S. Byatt has created characters of great depth, and she

has given us a reason to love them, hate them and pity them. She creates
a fantasy world of 19th century literary splendor and she has created two
belletristic figures of such depth that the reader must ask if they are not
real. Byatt intertwines her characters and plots so subtly at first that the
following crescendos and dénouements resonate with meaning. Her
beautiful writing and sense of passion caress and capture the heart and
soul. Possession, will, no doubt, become a standard by which future
works can aspire to.

10. Space and settings:

Roland lives in the basement of a decaying Victorian house in London

with his girlfriend, Val. Their relationship is not going well. Their sad little
apartment is a metaphor for their sad relationship.

Roland uses the bathroom first and notes how incredibly clean and tidy
it is compared to his messy home. Roland invades the ivory tower where
Maud lives and works, disrupting her daily life and changing her views.

Also, the small circular room where Miss LaMotte lived out the
remainder of her life seems like a prison. Her lyrical works frequently
begin the chapter.

All in all, the above poem fulfils several roles in Byatt‘s novel. One of the
tasks is to present an example of female poetry. As lyrical poems are
perceived as one of the most demanding kinds of literature, the quotation
of a ―female poem is ample proof that women might be good at creating
complex art. In addition to this, this poem is composed by a Victorian
woman, which makes it more valuable in the eyes of contemporaries; it
shows the role females had to play in Victorian society. In short, they
were supposed to sit at home, preferably in a dark place, seen by nobody.
Even if they were intelligent and had their own opinion, they were hardly
ever given the opportunity to show it. The poem presents a woman by
contrasting her with the man. One may find the apparent contradictions
differentiating a man from a woman, and – what is more – showing the
unequal treatment to which both sexes were subjected. The most striking
contrast is the names of the places both male and female might be found:

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 Public Square Dark Room
MAN WOMAN
Note that a Public Square is associated with an open space, which is
frequently associated with freedom, while the room stands for an
enclosed territory, limited by walls, or, in a broader sense, by some social
or moral rules. In this case the Public Square exemplifies the possibility
for a man to make himself visible, to realize his desires and to use his
free will. On the other hand, the Dark Room is the manifestation of the
restrictions Victorian society put on females.
The names of both of the places are written in
capital letters, which has a significant
influence on the interpretation of these
names. The use of capital letters in the name
of Public Square might be the reflection of
human craving for some space, and the
capitals: P and S might symbolize the space.
The letters D(ark) R(oom) might enhance the
feeling of alienation in a woman. When she is
alone, limited to the four walls, she tends to
exaggerate her grief and misery.

The reader is also provided with narration in

the form of a poem by an authentic figure.
During one of their long-lasting expeditions
Maud shows Roland a collection of some
poems, among which there was a work by
Emily Dickinson. Her piece concerns the
feelings of solitude and alienation typical for a
woman. At the same time, it might be an autobiographical poem, as it is
widely known that this great American poetess spent her life in one room
in her family house. (Byatt 1998: 65) There is a clear reference to the
figure of Christabel, who was the representative of a Victorian woman,
unable to reveal her poetry and lifestyle to the public, forced to live in a
dark room of tight social conventions and all-pervading morality. The
poem by Dickinson is further confirmation that a Victorian female was
forced to live in the shadow of society, hide her feelings and was doomed
to excessive mental suffering.

The same idea of mystery, hidden secrets and limited freedom is

represented by the house in which Christabel spent her life.

The description of Christabel‘s house might be the symbol of a previous

époque that had passed away, and looks unattractive in the eyes of
contemporaries. The house represents the Victorian époque, forgotten,

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covered with dust, mysterious and even scary. The description might
resemble the places of a Gothic style: dark, gloomy and unpleasant.

Maud suggests a trip to Seal Court, the Lincolnshire mansion belonging

to the Baileys where Christabel spent her last years; she doesn‘t know
what to expect, though, as her family branch and the Lincolnshire one
are not on speaking terms. Roland will unwittingly gain access to Seal
Court helping the frail and ancient Lady Bailey, who is on a wheelchair
and gets stuck on a track. Her husband, Sir George, a brusque and
guarded man, shows to Roland and Maud Christabel‘s bedroom: Maud,
recalling one of Christabel‘s poems, is able to discover a stash of letters,
the whole, secret correspondence between Ash and LaMotte.

The trip to Yorkshire will prove Roland and Maud right: the setting and
the language of The Fairy Melusina appears clearly to be inspired by
Yorkshire landscape and speech, but intertextual links between Ash and
LaMotte go even further because, as Roland points out, they influenced
each other‘s writing styles.

It foreshadows the trip that Christabel and Randolph take to Yorkshire

in which Ash collects microscopic samples. Swammerdam makes a life-
altering discovery, but he cannot force others to pay attention. Christabel
and Randolph discover each other, and their love is life-changing for
them, but they are unable to follow through with it because they cannot
break out of the strict rules of society.

Some episodes, in particular, are so tightly connected that they create a

deep narrative symmetry: the main example surely is Maud and Roland‘s
Yorkshire trip, which the novel presents before relating the “original” trip;
the effect is a distorted prospective because only after reading about the
modern characters‘ actions, words and thoughts the reader realizes the
Victorian characters somehow already anticipated them. There are many
intratextual association for this episode: even though Roland and Maud
stay in a hotel which is not the one Ash chose, both establishments are
run by women with a Viking look with the help of their daughters.

11. Class and Society:

The action of the book takes place in two periods. The two main
characters, Roland and Maud, are literary scholars living in the 1980's.
Their love story is shared and played out by the diaries, poetry, and
correspondence of two poets and lovers from the 1860's-Randolph Henry
Ash and Christabel LaMotte.

Byatt introduces several unusual relationships throughout her novel.

The nuclear family consists of Randolph Ash and his wife Ellen. Their

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marriage is seen as a superficial and this outlook give way for the affair
Ash succumbs to with LaMotte.

Many women of the Victorian era were not able to associate the positive
physical relationship between a married couple because of the strict
ideals the church imposed during this time. During the Victorian era,
women were more limited than men. It was not acceptable for women to
have affairs, but men were held to a different standard. The character of
Ellen is seen as a “victim of patriarchy” because her father so vehemently
opposed to her marrying Ash and the literary conventions that make Ash
desire her in an inaccessible manner. Ellen’s limitations in her life are
similar to many women during this time period who felt inhibited by a
strict religion, insecurity regarding living conditions, or fear of the
reactions of men. These limitations are distinct during the Victorian era
and Byatt is not shy to introduce these concepts in Possession.

LaMotte’s relationship with the painter, Blanch Glover. This secret love
affair involves the scandal of
sexual orientation during the
Victorian era. The relationship
is kept quiet, until Glover
commits suicide after
discovering the relationship
between Ash and LaMotte.
Byatt creates a contemporary
for Glover in the character of
Leonora Stern. Stern’s
character represents the
twentieth century view on
sexual orientation. The twentieth century is more adept in dealing with
sexual orientation, whereas the Victorian era focuses more on social
acceptance. Glover is viewed as the “good lesbian” because she can
control her sexual desires; Stern is viewed as a “dangerous lesbian”
because she fearlessly acts upon her desires.

The Victorian belief on life and love appears more alive and colorful.
Through the development of their relationship, it is evident that the
intensity and passion of a Victorian era couple drastically differs than a
couple from the twentieth century. The modern characters, educated and
trained in poststructuralist and psychoanalytical theories, cannot believe
in something called ‘Love’ anymore, indeed all the ‘looking-into’ and the
theoretical knowledge killed their desire and they long for isolation and
remoteness. Christabel’s reluctance to become romantically involved
with Randolph stems from her awareness of the basic inequality between

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men and women in Victorian society. She cannot be both lover and writer
as these were seen as mutually exclusive roles; she fears that Randolph
will consume her entirely, engulfing her creative genius. She prizes her
self-possession, her solitude, because it enables her to live outside social
conventions and pursue her writing.

12. Perceptions of the Victorian past:

Byatt manages to create a thorough outline of the writing style of the time
through the fictional writings (journal extracts, letters, and poems) of Ash
and LaMotte. These two fictional writers are so well constructed that you
believe that they actually existed. They both show different ways of
writing, each with their own particular features, LaMotte‘s being, for
instance, more anarchic and eccentric, but both well fitted into the
Victorian rhetoric and style. They are inspired by real romantic writers
Robert Browning and Christina Rossetti respectively (although LaMotte
resembles American Emily Dickinson too taking into account her
punctuation routine among other features). Moreover, through the letters
that Ash and Christabel sent each other, the reader gets a clear portrait
of the past and its society: the religious unease, their intellectual
curiosities and anxieties, the contradictions of a time where women
longed for freedom but at the same time wrapped themselves up in the
safety offered by their enclosures, sexual celibacy. Regarding that
enclosure aspect there is even an example in one of LaMotte‘s tales, the
princess in the glass coffin, forced into a death-like sleep. The same
seems to have happened to her, who used to live indoors sharing a house
with Blanche Glover, and only seemed to let go of her manners and her
being “caged” when she is in Yorkshire with Ash.

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 13. Intertextuality:

Possession can be considered a literary pastiche as it ends up being a

perfect mix of many literary genres such as romance (actually, the
subtitle of the book), detective and quest novels. There are many themes,
concepts and characters whose main traits are taken (or even imitated)
from other literary works. Moreover, we can also refer to it as a pastiche
regarding the fact that Byatt mimics past genres and poetry by
reconstructing them , even using a biography (the one written by
Cropper) to serve the plot.

The intertextuality on the other hand, is mostly reflected on its mirror

game style. Everything has a correspondence the two scholars fall in love
just as the aim of their research efforts develops, they start an affair just
as the focus of their pursuit, poets Ash and LaMotte, did. The
correspondence is also showed in some past attitudes, anecdotes, family
ties (LaMotte discovers she is a descendant of both poets), and especially
through objects (Maude’s brooch) and even mythologies.

Byatt brings these fictional Victorian poets to life by inventing countless

journal extracts and poems, perfectly written in the Victorian style and
riddled with ornate descriptions, something that Byatt also indulges in
during the developing of the eighties plot. Although sometimes such a
high volume of parallel texts can be quite distracting to the reader they
are always relevant to the aim of the author of constructing mirror stories
and convey the feeling of characters possessed by the past.

The postmodern device of Ventriloquism is one of the main features of

this romance. As we hear that Ash is known for it and then we see how
Byatt works with this device throughout the whole book.

14. Irony:

IRONY is the expression of one's meaning by using language that

normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect.

In the novel, the painful and quintessentially Victorian love story of Ash
and LaMotte is retold in their ''own'' words, offering an ironic
counterpoint to the contemporary story of Mitchell and Bailey, who both
eventually do fall into something like ''love.''. By a nice irony, the modern-
day lovers, for all their easy talk of sexuality in their literary analyses, are
rather more timid than their Victorian predecessors and their sexual act
takes place later in the book.

Ironically, Byatt destroys any attempt from the part of any of the
academics at constructing the entire Ash and LaMotte story.

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Continuous revelations and discoveries show that the knowledge and
bold interpretations of scholars are very restricted and superficial. Life
and literature are far greater than academic biography, literary theory,
and even history, which is another slippery and risky field of knowledge.
the novel establishes the (humble) limits of the task of the literary critic
and biographer: as the “Postscript 1968” at the end of the novel seems to
underline, it is impossible for the critic to know all the truth about literary
authors, for there are always important details from the lives of human
beings that cannot be apprehended.

Ironically enough, Byatt aims at demonstrating in this postscript

narrated by an omniscient voice that the reader remains to be the
principal protagonist of the literary process (the reader is the only one
who knows “the whole story” Hence the ironically cruel parody of the
academic world in Possession (which can be read in this sense as a
campus novel), in which (and this can obviously be a prejudiced attitude
from the part of Byatt) American scholars like Mortimer Cropper and
Leonora Stern are depicted as more academically predatory and
superficial than their British counterparts.

15. Postmodernist novel:

1) Possession presents us with an interesting case: in incorporating

elements of the postmodern and the archetypes of the romance narrative,
it becomes a transgressive and fascinating text. It is a romance about
text, among other things: it brings together the scholastic earnestness of
Victorian England and the institutionalized need to deconstruct
knowledge of 1980s England in a clash of intellectual movements.

2) Possession tells the story of two contemporary academics, Roland and

Maude, who focus their academic careers on researching two Victorian
authors, Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte, respectively.
Roland and Maude soon discover that their Victorian scholars had a
secret love affair, and begin to construct the whole story by uncovering
the obscured evidence.

3) Roland and Maud are postmodern, poststructuralist scholars and

their theoretical mindsets are continually
satirized throughout the novel. Possession
challenges postmodernism through a satire
of these characters who are afraid to embrace
life. Ironically, in the process of discovering
the secret love affair they become so involved
in the story that they begin to embrace what
postmodernism undermines they begin to

15
invest personally in the importance of history, they forget the principle
that there is no such thing as an error free text, and they fall in love, even
though they see love as a ―suspect ideological construct‖ (Possession
323). The metanarratives that they view, in theory, as flawed, begin to
hold meaning for them. Investigating the secret affair allows them to
suspend their disbelief.

4) Similarly, although it acknowledges that our understanding of the past

is textual, the novel‘s focus is on a rich past that has many gifts for the
present. In Possession, Byatt is more interested in exploring the ways
that we have to tell the story of the past than emphasizing that our
knowledge of the past can only be partial.

5) Possession is an experimental pastiche of a variety of literary forms

that can be used to narrate the past. It is simultaneously romantic and
realist, while it includes poems, diary entries, letters and fairy stories, all
adding to the rich tapestry of the narrative.

6) The novel uses many traditional and newer forms; theoretically based
academic writing as well as popular, lighter writing. The novel is
postmodern in its embrace of experimentation, but it is also something
too complex to be wholly captured by this limiting term. With its
commitment to traditional literature and its insistence on more
traditional values, such as the power and meaning of narratives, it is not
completely postmodern. Byatt‘s intelligent writing resists categorization:
she calls herself a ―self-conscious realist‖.

7) In Possession, Byatt returns to a world of romance and passion that

allows resolutions not countenanced by postmodern theory. She balances
her ambivalent attitude towards postmodernism and her love of
traditional literature to create a novel that is expressive of her individual
consciousness.

16. Deployment of time:

Possession takes the reader back and forth from the present-time
narrative to the middle of the 19th c. through a collection of
miscellaneous texts è texts-within-the-text, creating a metafictional
crucible, a ventriloquist climax, showing the desire of transcending the
barriers of the traditional fictional work in similar ways. Rejecting a linear
temporal pattern (fragmentary plot) and assuming instead a cyclical and
parallel plot, Possession takes the reader back and forth from the
present-time narrative to the middle of the nineteenth century through a
collection of miscellaneous texts. There are texts-within-the-texts
creating a metafictional crucible where very different elements get mixed,
showing the desire of transcending the barriers of the traditional fictional

16
work. Mise en abîmeis, roughly speaking, the French equivalent of
English terms like 'frame narrative' or 'fiction within-fiction'.

17- Metafiction:

It rejects a linear temporal patter and assumes instead a cyclical and

parallel plot, takes the reader back and forth from the present-time
narrative to the middle of nineteenth century through a collection of
miscellaneous texts. Texts-within-the-text, creating a metafictional
crucible, a ventriloquist climax.

Narrative intrusion. The narrator/author tells the reader that some

points ―will be discovered later‖. So the narrator controls what and when
the reader knows about it. (Metafictional reference)

18- Romance:

The subtitle of the novel, A Romance, is a metafictional hint to the reader,

together with the choice of the first opening epigraph, a quotation from
Nathaniel Hawthorne, where the American writer defines romance as a
genre which can employ fantastic elements and has a freedom in
representing the truth that novels don‘t have.

Possession is a romance in the popular sense of “love story”, since it

narrates two parallel love stories: that of the Victorian literary writers
Ash/La Motte and of the academics Roland/Maud. The Victorian story
is told through a variety of Victorian narrative techniques, while the
modern story resembles the ever-popular adventure formula.

It also contains different other subgenres as mystery, detective story,

epistolary work, parody, social satire, comedy of manners, campus novel,
quest narrative.

Furthermore it also contains 19th century poetry, Victorians letters and

diaries, fairy tales and gothic tales.

The found manuscript theme is a device widely used in literature as the

source of the opening exposition of a story. The finding originates a

17
transgression, the theft of the letters, which marks the starting of a quest.
Roland and Maud look for literary hints based on diaries, poems, letters,
tales etc. and also undertake a journey.

Other plot devices are: the gothic scene of the grave digging during a
stormy night, the disclosure of Maud‘s lineage, and the “happy ending”.

19- Role of poetry:

Ash's poetical works remind us some actual poems written by Victorian

poets like Browning. Browning's blank verse line and short sentences
which are shot through with rhetorical questions are easily identifiable
within 'Swammerdam' and 'Mummy Possest". Ash‘s love letters bring to
mind Browning‘s to Elizabeth Barrett, once more both in style and
substance; here is part of one of the drafts discovered by Roland. Ash‘s
prose and poetry are often similar in rhythm and patterns to the writings
of other famous Victorians such as Matthew Arnold, Alfred Tennyson,
Walter Pater and Algernon Swinburne, who wrote the poem 'The Garden
of Proserpine".

Lord Tennyson's 'The Lady of Shallot' and 'Maud, a

Monodrama' are both an inspiration for the features of
female main characters in Possession.

The poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge is key to an

understanding of Possession. The incompleteness of
his narrative poem 'Christabel' leaves the fate of the
heroine open to the imagination. By naming her
Victorian poetess after the heroine of Coleridge's poem,
Byatt establishes links at the level of plot and theme.

Emily Dickinson was an American poet and she is one

of the major models for Byatt's poet Christabel
LaMotte in terms of both style and character. Like Emily Dickinson's
poems, few of Christabel LaMotte's are actually given titles. Instead the
first line of the poem is used. Both uses repetition and do poetical use of
punctuation like the dashes in their poems. Aside from Emily Dickinson,
Byatt found a further model for Christabel LaMotte in the poet Christina
Rossetti (1830-1894). Several of her poems make interesting readings
against Possession in terms of content and idea. It is tempting to posit
the enigmatic 'Winter: My Secret' as a possible source for the LaMotte
poem 'Dolly keeps a Secret' which leads to Maud's discovery of the love
letters in Christabel's bedroom.

As for the central poem The Fairy Melusine, it can be said that it is in a
way a rewriting of Christina Rossetti's poem Eve, which contents the

18
image of the serpent and Keat's poem Lamia where a serpent become a
beautiful girl.

20- Term “possession”:

All of the main characters are possessed with the obsession of discovering
and researching beyond the “normal” academic endeavors.

There is Michelle’s obsession with discovering the addressee of Ash´s

mysterious letters, as if it was a kind of divine mission. This obsession
turns the novel into a kind of detectivesque narrative, weaved around
other characters, such as Mortimer Cropper, who, somehow, fight over
the price of being the most well versed person on Ash. Then, there is
Professor Leonora Stern, from the USA, a bisexual, who is possessed by
LaMotte’s romantic attachment to a woman, Blanche Glover.

The figure of Mortimer Cropper is almost ridiculously portrayed. He is

an American entrepreneur who is obsessed by the idea of possessing
everything that once belonged to Ash, including a metal box buried in the
poet’s grave (he suspects that if contains something of importance),
another important feature related to detective and mystery stories.

Roland possesses three images of Ash and Val, his partner, don’t like
them, hence, another factor that leads to their “Continuous” fall apart as
a couple.

21- Bildungsroman:

Possession is a masterful rewriting of Victorian literature, told from a

postmodern perspective. Byatt agglutinates several apparently
heterogeneous texts and genres that end up composing an articulating
unity. This novel plays serious games with the variety of possible forms
of narrating the past. Mixture of genres: The detective story, the
biography, the medieval verse Romance, the modern romantic novel, the
epistolary novel, the forget manuscript novel, the Victorian third person
narration and the primitive fairy tale. It is also a Romance in the popular
sense of a love story, or better said, the development of two parallel love
stories. Roland‘s story is a real and proper Bildungsroman, at the end of
which the protagonist is wiser and stronger. Yet Roland is a postmodern
hero, aware of the fact that theoretical knowledge is somehow
imprisoning him, and his main achievement lies in his ability to blend
academic criticism and instinctual passion.

19
 TIME’S ARROW by Martin Amis

1. Narrative techniques:

Amis‘ narrative techniques are unfamiliar, since the novel goes

backwards in time. It starts with the death of the main character and it
ends with his birth. Both the narrators are intradiegetic, which means
that they‘re characters involved in the action. The narrator is the
protagonist‘s soul. He admits the lack of access to the protagonist‘s
thoughts and he‘s very innocent, which makes his interpretations often
wrong. Because of this, the narrative flow allows the reader to see beyond
what the narrator sees. At the end, both the narrators are killed off, which
it‘s important from an ideological point of view, since closure is the point
in narrative when the several discursive threads are interweaved and the
argument is clinched.

2. Holocaust:

The novel recounts the life of a German Holocaust doctor in a reverse

chronology. We‘ve known about the Holocaust
from the victims‘ point of view, but Amis
defamiliarizes the subject matter of it, because in
Time‘s Arrow we see it from the perpetrators‘ point
of view. The fact that the narrator is one of the
perpetrators and the reverse narrative makes us
see the Holocaust from a completely new
perspective.

3. Science and medicine:

From the narrator's reverse-time perspective,

Unverdorben's medical work in America involves
an endless fight "against health, against life and
love". Working as a doctor in the early chapters,
Tod seems to make people worse rather than
better:

They come into his office smiling and feeling fine, and stagger out looking
awful. Narrator concludes that doctors "demolish the human body". As
Herr Doctor Odilo Unverdorben of Auschwitz, however, Tod comes on
like a miracle healer, and not just of individuals. All that horrendous
damage is undone before our eyes, as countless shattered children,
families, cultures, entire nations, are magically reconstituted in all their
original splendour.

In America he follows the path of many of the doctors reconnecting with

the Hippocratic sphere and attempting to reclaim his pre-Nazi self. But

20
of course he can never be whole again; as the narrator observes, he "can't
feel, won't connect, never opens up, and always holds something back"

Time‘s Arrow goes backwards in time to that point of awful conjunction

in history of the deaths of God and love. Man would replace God, divinity
no longer useful, with reason as his instrument of creation through
death.

Nazi doctors are invested with a godlike power – in exterminating a race

they are healing a nation. Whilst the rest of the novel depicts the resultant
absurdities of a temporal and therefore logical inversion, Nazi ideology is
already backwards and therefore acquires an unsettling kind of sense.

4- Role of time:

Time' is an abstract concept which depends on the

relative perception of the observer. In Time‘s Arrow the
narrative is progressive and linear. The plot, by
contrast, might be seen as corresponding to time as it
is distorted by consciousness and imagination.

With time's arrow flying backwards, Unverdorben

reverses his role in the gassing of the Jews. The
Narrator is unaware that his backward trajectory
through time violates ordinary chronology. The
narrator effects a poetic undoing of the Holocaust.
"You present it as a miracle, but the reader is
supplying all the tragedy," Amis has said of the
narrative perspective he employs in Time's Arrow. "It
was that kind of double-edged effect that I wanted.

We watch him through a deconstruction of time in which both History

and his story are undone. In so doing we learn not of his growth into
maturity but of ―the nature of the offence‖ - a well-known phrase of Primo
Levi‘.

Amis spends two- thirds of the novel getting

Unverdorben back to Auschwitz "to try to familiarize
the reader with a backward-time-world". Once readers
have learnt to reverse the sequence of everything, they
are rewarded with a truly absurd world in which
sustenance issues from the toilet, the doctor takes
candy from babies and money from the church
collection bowl…

The narrator observes, "We leave no mark on the ocean,

as if we are successfully covering our tracks" (99). This

21
is precisely what Unverdorben was doing in real chronological time—
erasing his past. But in reality he was leaving indelible tracks in his wake
that have vexed to nightmare the present age.

5- Parody and Irony:

Time´s Arrow in a novel full of irony starting with the name of the novel
all the way through the last word of it.

The title implies a forward movement; however the author tells us the
story in a reverse chronology. This strategy forces the reader to steadily
initiate a different kind of reading which forces us to reread in order to
understand what is going on. Time reverse ironically describes the
character´s life beginning with his experience at a hospital stretcher as a
dying old man, until being conceived.

The various name-changes of the main character reinforces the use of

irony by the author; the protagonist‘s name Tod Friendly, Tod means
¨death¨ in German and ¨Friendly¨ stands for America, open, friendly,
forgetful. (Book page 103). In contrast with the meaning of the first
character´s name, he becomes John Young, ¨younger¨, a Jack of all
trades. The time reversal takes the character to his original name Odilo,
which means ¨fortunate or prosperous in battle¨ and the last name
Unverdorben meaning ¨unspoiled¨ the irony is already set and will be
discovered as the reader goes through the work.

The ´soul´ knows he is inside Tod, but Tod does not share his thoughts.
He also remarks ¨So I am lonely, but not alone, like everybody else¨. The
narrator often says ¨when is the world going to start making sense? He
is aware that the time does not follow the natural movement.

The irony is underlined by the unreliable intradiegetic narrator, the

character´s soul, whose innocence and ignorance often make him widely
misinterpret what he sees, the reader begins to perceive the more sinister
signs, this allows the author to reconstruct an exactly opposite meaning
to the situation; as an example the effect of the World War II, ¨There was
a new smell in the air. The sweet smell¨ the reader understands the irony
in the narrator´s remark; the smell is actually the smell of human flesh
in the concentration camps.

The author also parodies with the extermination of a whole race in order
to give birth to a new one, uncontaminated, unblemished, untouched by
original sin. The main character develops a god-like creator when working
in Auschwitz, and this is perhaps the most outstanding irony in his work,
there was no nihilistic destruction but of creation (Unit 2, page 100).

22
6- Postmodern novel:

Defining the parameters of postmodern literature is a daunting task, due

not only to disagreements about what texts can or can‘t be approached
as postmodern, but also to the paradoxical and elusive nature of the
postmodern movement.

Much more than being a genre or a typology, postmodernism can be

approached as an attitude that is reactionary, especially towards the
ideas and ideals perpetuated in the modernist movement (e.g. the divide
between low and high culture, the view of humanity as an entity that is
perpetually improving and progressing, among others).

Temporal distortion is a common technique in modernist fiction:

fragmentation and non-linear narratives
are central features in both modern and
postmodern literature. Temporal
distortion in postmodern fiction is used in
a variety of ways, often for the sake of
irony. Time´s Arrow goes backwards in
time to that point of awful conjunction in
history of the deaths of God and love. The
disorienting narration, refusing a realist
chronology, is the key marker of Time´s
Arrow´s postmodern style.

The novel subverts two literary genres: the

science fiction and the Bildungsroman novel. By the fact of being written
backwards in time, the novel follows the narrator, a ghostly doppelganger
of a Nazi doctor, in a backwards physical universe. We watch him through
a deconstruction of time in which both History and his story are
underdone.

We could refer to Time´s Arrow as Historiographic metafiction. Linda

Hutcheon coined the term "historiographic metafiction “to refer to works
that fictionalize actual historical events or figures.

Amis employs this concept for example when he talks about Dr.
Menguele.

Irony, playfulness and black humor are central features in many

postmodern works. Linda Hutcheon claimed postmodern fiction as a
whole could be characterized by the ironic quote marks that much of it
can be taken as tongue-in-cheek. In Time´s Arrow, the narrator, who is
the protagonist´s soul, admits to lacking access to his thoughts. His
interpretations are usually wrongs and, being an innocent naïve observer,

23
the narrative flow allows us, readers, to see beyond what the narrator
sees so that we may figure what is really happening. Alerted by the
increasing irony of the voice´s flow, underlined by the unreliable narrator
whose innocence and ignorance often make him widely misinterpret what
he sees.

To sum up, the novel is postmodern in its literary style, with its
destabilized first-person narrative voice, refusal of conventional linear
time, and the use of irony. Because of Time´s Arrow’s postmodern style,
when the narrator sees the arrow flying ―point first‖ on the final page it
is impossible to determine its ultimate direction, and the novel´s
continual destabilization of time refuses the predictable resolution of
cyclical repetition.

7- Different locations:

The Auschwitz universe, it has to be allowed, was fiercely coprocentric. It

was made of shit. In the early months I still had my natural aversion to
overcome, before I understood the fundamental strangeness of the
process of fruition‖. This is the way Auschwitz is described, as a terrible
and nasty place full of dirt and sadness. Living in a place such that is not
easy, almost impossible, unless the inhabitants had an objective, a
reason to be there: the general though erratic quest for elegance, for
beauty. All the places related with that quest, with those experiments,
had the same essence that Auschwitz: they‘re grey, nasty, miserable.

The different houses where Odilo has loved all along his live are barely
depicted in the novel. All of them seem to be so similar or too common to
describe them. They are like trains stations: places in which stay in for a
little. Only Solingen deserves a brief description. Solingen, his birthplace
place (and Adolf Eich-mann‘s too), is famous for its knives, scissors, and
surgical instruments. His future as a doctor and his relation with the
Nazis seems be fixed since the very beginning, since he has born in a
modest town which is only known because of the medical instruments
made on it and because it‘s the birthplace of a German Nazi SS-
lieutenant colonel.

Lisbon may be considered as the place where Odilo has enjoyed his best
time ever, the Auschwitz opposite. In Lisbon Odilo remains calm,
unstressed, and playful in the way he falls in love soon… Life there is
comfortable and calm, surroundings are soothing and Odilo enjoys a
calm existence, unconcerned of what had happened in Auschwitz.

24
8- Violence and power:

Violence, destruction, traumatic facts, are the facts that heal people.
Violence doesn’t destroy buy create. The narration’s reversed temporality
upsets the directionality of cause and effect, past and present. Healing
becomes violence, the Holocaust unfolds as the creation of a people rather
than their destruction, and the war haunting Odilo’s past becomes the
narrator’s future. War is always looming but has also already happened,
and the entire world of the novel appears trapped in a perpetual state of
crisis. Inconceivable disaster lays both ahead and behind, and Odilo’s
life-line cuts history and future possibility short.

In Time’s Arrow Amis deals with the terrifying fact that the twentieth
century has twice confronted us with the limits of the ‘thinkable’—the
Holocaust of WWII and the potential
holocaust of the end of the world.
Amis seems to consider the “nuclear
age” as the continuation of the Final
Solution, with “nuclear holocaust” as
the culmination of the “Nazi ‘project’.
Thus the possibility of nuclear
holocaust—the “possible destruction
of all life”—is implicit in Time’s Arrow,
shadowing the novel’s explicit
examination of Nazi genocide.

The traumatic effects of these scenes at Auschwitz echo across space and
time so that the narrator identifies similar atrocities in post-War America.
The narrator, from his reversed perspective, sees American hospitals as
places of pain and death rather than healing. Caught in crisis-wrought
confusion, the narrator interprets “medicine’s therapeutic role” as
“destructive”, and describes New York surgeons in terms that seem better
suited to Auschwitz doctors. He sees the Nazis, in contrast, as ‘creators’
engaged in “dream[ing] [rather than destroying] a race”. In the novel’s
reversed temporality, creation and destruction are confused and
combined. Through this confusion, the destabilization of time, and the
imagery of war and violence, Time’s Arrow entwines postmodernity and
genocide as causes and effects of the perpetual apocalyptic condition.

9- Doppelgänger:

At the moment of his death in an American hospital, one-time Nazi doctor

Odilo Unverdorben "gives birth" to a doppelganger (literally, "double-
goer"), a child-like innocent who re-lives Unverdorben's life - in reverse.

25
He inhabits Unverdorben, who is unaware of his presence, like a
"passenger or parasite" (p.8). Though he lacks access to his host's
thoughts, he is "awash with his emotions" (p.7). He also possesses a
rudimentary conscience - most notably an aversion to human suffering.

Fortunately for the narrative, this narrator is "equipped with a fair

amount of value-free information, or general knowledge," and a "superb
vocabulary" (p.8,9). But he is unaware that his backward trajectory
through time violates ordinary chronology. He is also utterly ignorant of
history.

As he begins experiencing Tod‘s life backward, he has ―the sense of

starting out on a terrible journey, toward a terrible secret.‖ It is this
historical innocent, a modern Candid, who tells the story, and he is more
puzzled than the reader about where it is headed. ―It just seems to me
that the film is running backward, he declares.

Odilo, as a Nazi doctor, is implicated in the events that brought on this

rupture; he is also heavily invested in denying his culpability, thus it is
in relation to his character that we see the most severe effects of
apocalyptic trauma, including psychological dissociation.

The psychological dimension of apocalyptic rupture emerges through the

content of the narration, revealing the division of self that separates
narrator and protagonist while alluding to post-traumatic stress disorder
and to Robert Jay Lifton‘s theory of psychological doubling.

This rupture manifests in the anti-realist temporal and narrational split

between the first person narrator and the protagonist whose body he
occupies.

26
From present to past the narrator (re-) experiences Odilo‘s memories,
walking and hearing things backward and having to translate what he
hears and sees (6-7).

He is alienated from his own body and memories, and finds himself in a
world that does not make sense (82, 149), making him increasingly
―tentative about [things like] cause and effect‖ (44).

For the narrator, this about-face toward history signifies Odilo‘s desire
to reverse the trajectory of the Holocaust, undoing the atrocities and his
own crimes in an effort to evade moral responsibility.

It should also be noticed that in the body of Odilo Unverdorben, the

narrator does not so often speak of Odilo‘s actions or feelings as separate
from his own. He often uses the pronoun I instead of him and reveals
knowledge of their habits: ―I always felt a gorgeous relief at the moment
of the first stirring.

This suggests a shared memory base and a much closer tie between the
narrator and his host than before.

The narrator attempts to cleanse the mind of the doctor much in the same
way as would a Catholic confession. This interpretation could have an
impact on the reader‘s relationship to the doctor. He is now not only an
abuser, but the victim of his own abuse, which results from the
circumstances he finds himself in combined with his personal choices.

He is ―the worst man in the worst place at the worst time‖ (12), and has
not lived a happy and sorrow less life in America, but has lived with
mental bruises that have continuously injured him.

The function of Soul is dual in that he both allows for a creation of

suspense, and that he deepens the psychological experience of entering
the mind of a war criminal. The narrator may very well be a product of
the doctor‘s mind and an inherent part of his identity that has difficulties
accepting what he has done in the past, or he could just be a narrative
tool that should not be inserted literally into the story.

The question is actually whether the conclusion each reader might reach
in regard to this affects the ethical implications of the novel. This question
is indirectly raised by the critics of Holocaust fiction and ties in with the
literary post-modernist interest in, and focus on, the minds of the
perpetrators as opposed to the victims.

10- Treatment of women:

He looks at women as objects: from back: hair, waist, rump (soul says he
coincides)

27
When the soul first has sex with Irene he feels powerful, but it´s curious
that she is the powerful one, because she knows his secret. Her final
conversation with him, threatening to tell on him, makes him crash his
car.

The soul says two-timing is a loss of integrity but admits it´s a physical
buzz He sleeps with tons of women (uses his status as a doctor), many
dates come from the Association of Medial Services (AMS)

At the clubroom Art says that Tod “Had more ass than a toilet seat” “Still
chasing them?”(He played around)

When he goes to the back streets he ignores the hookers, tries to cure
them (guilt)

When he works at the hospital, sleeps with lots of nurses “knee

tremblers” in the Laundry Room. The soul says “it is true what they say
about nurses”

He avoids women with kids (one of the first question he asks). Doesn´t
mind boyfriends or husbands, but no children.

Irene is fat and white, more of a mother than a girlfriend.

He gives abortions at home

Irene started out as his cleaning lady.

Goes back to Europe, De Soussa with his villa and three maids. Special
interest in the 13 year old Gypsy Rosa

Herta comes into the picture

He talks about the bald whores at Aushwitz (no money, no questions), he

only stops touching them when Herta becomes pregnant

Only had sex with Herta once (since he started working at the camps),
got her pregnant.

He treats her with violence, punch in the breast, clean naked on all fours.

THE DUMB WAITER by Harold Pinter

1. Use of silence:

Pinter believed that language was a stratagem to cover vulnerability

Pinter‘s dialogue or lack of it echoes Beckett‘s strategic use of repetition

and pauses.

In the works of both playwrights, the true nature of their characters

emerges just as much from what they do NOT say as from what they DO.

28
However, while Beckett‘s silences suggest the alienation
of his characters (who are victims of the tedium and
meaninglessness of modern life), Pinter‘s are ominous
and threatening and often foreshadow a violent
denouement.

Pinteresque/Pinterese: words coined to refer to the

dialogues which camouflage a menacing situation due to
Pinter‘s unique utilization of language.

Pinter creates a world full of silence and repressed

violence.

The frequent use of pauses within his dialogues has come to be

considered such and outstanding characteristic of his work that at times
it has been the subject of parody and mockery.

Ben uses silence as a means of domination.

In Pinter‘s work, the spoken, in which the real concerns of the protagonist
are found, can be identified through his explosive silences and nuances
of vocabulary, perhaps even more so through their actions.

Pinter is a master of pauses, double

entendres, and silences that
communicate a secondary level of
meaning often opposed to the first.

Pinter said about language: “The

speech we hear is an indication of that
which we don‘t hear. It is a necessary
avoidance, a violent, sly, and
anguished or mocking smoke screen
which keeps the other in its true place.
When true silence falls we are left with echo but are nearer nakedness.
One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to
cover nakedness”.

2- Theatre of the absurd:

Pinter's plays generally take place in a single, prison-like room. His

works, which blend comedy and drama, often focus on jealousy, betrayal,
and sexual politics, but it is his dialogue—and the lack of dialogue—for
which he is known. Pinter's language, usually lower-class vernacular, has
been described as poetic. His compressed, rhythmic lines rely heavily on
subtext and hint at darker meanings. Just as important, however, are
the silences in his plays. Pinter has spoken much on the subject, and has

29
categorized speech as that which attempts to cover the nakedness of
silence. His most obvious forbear is Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, who
took silences to a new level, and other playwrights of the Theatre of the
Absurd (a French dramatic movement in the 1950s), but whereas
Beckett's silences hint at alienation, boredom, and the slow approach to
death, Pinter's are ominous and violent. The true natures and
motivations of his characters emerge in their silences.

3- Violence:

Pinter's work is heavily influenced by Samuel Beckett, who used silence-

filled pauses for a revolutionary theatrical effect. Pinter has spoken of
speech as a stratagem designed to cover the nakedness of silence, and
these aims are often evident in the dialogue of Gus and Ben. Ben's most
prominent response to Gus's constant questions about the nature of their
jobs is silence. Lurking underneath this silence is always the threat of
violence, the anticipation of something deathly—the play ends as Ben
trains his gun on Gus in silence.

Gus's questions and lamentations are also deflected, delayed, or

interrupted. Ben frequently changes the conversation and never replies
with any emotional depth to Gus's more probing questions. In the same
way, they both avoid discussing with any profundity the newspaper
articles about death, skipping past them to more trivial matters, such as
the malfunctioning toilet. Ben sometimes delays his response until they
are interrupted—by the sound of an inanimate object, such as the toilet
(which flushes on a delay) and the dumb waiter.

The language itself is also tinged with violence, especially when the topic
is something seemingly trivial. The men's argument over the phrase
"Light the kettle" is filled with Ben's barbs that intimidate and shame
Gus. Moreover, when Ben screams "THE KETTLE, YOU FOOL!" and
chokes Gus, one gets the feeling that his words are intertwined with the
act of physical violence.

4- Symbols:

Dumb waiter

One way communication (same as between Gus and Ben). Ben

refuses to speak to Gus/answer any uncomfortable questions.
They speak AT each other, not TO each other. Interrupts Ben
and Gus with demands. Has to wait for questions and answers

Dumb waiter is a camarero mudo, only obeys, doesn´t protest or question

orders.

30
Tea

Upper society and here lack of sophistication

Gus insists on making it, but later admits he

doesn´t like it. Then sent on the dumb waiter,
trying to please higher power, but tea is sent
back down= higher power not appeased.

BEN=Light the kettle (language game…but not to

learn, to gain power over the other)

Matches

They are not useful to them because they have no gas.

The person that shoved them under the door surely
knows this.

It is to upset, perturb. Don´t know who sends them or the

reason =absurdity

It starts an absurd fight between Gus and Ben about light the kettle or
light the gas. (Power war….not really about language)

5- Irony:

To reproduce his sense of the complexity and ambiguity of life, Pinter

employs various strategies; most notably he plays games with dramatic
irony. Unlike classical dramatists who rely on their audience‘s previous
knowledge of events, or provide a great deal of exposition, Pinter gives his
audience characters who know only as much as, or even more than, the
audience does. Because they never tell all they know or think or feel,
Pinter‘s characters make the audience guess about their psychology; we
try to explain their fears and their motivations based on their actions. We
may adopt a critical idiom of psychology or philosophy in our efforts to
understand and we may think we understand, but Pinter never allows us
certainty. We end up still full of questions, often questioning the very
nature and possibility of knowing, as puzzled and frightened as some of
Pinter‘s characters themselves.

All the unknown messages and the objects make the readers reach to the
conclusion that everything was planned without even making the
audience suspicious about it. In addition, Pinter makes the characters
confused because they are being emotionally driven by the situations.

The Dumb Waiter is a collection of situationally irony: the reader expects

something to happen but something else happens.

31
6- Dramatic characterization:

Gus

The audience is meant to sympathize with Gus, the well-meaning, slightly

slower junior partner-in-crime to Ben. We are in the same position as
Gus: like Gus, we are not familiar with the job they are going to perform,
we don't know what exactly is happening upstairs from the basement,
and Ben's betrayal should be as much of a shock to us as it is to Gus.
Gus is somewhat child-like, pestering Ben with numerous requests,
complaints about their environment, and questions. He is generally
submissive to Ben's orders—everything from making tea to investigating
outside the door—though he stands up for what he believes in, as with
the "Light the kettle" argument.

Gus is more sensitive than Ben to issues of traditional human concern.

He often touches upon deeper issues Ben does not wish to contemplate—
about death, the dull routine of life, and the nature of the elusive
employer Wilson. He is concerned with the consequences of his job. He is
haunted by the image of their messy murder of
their last victim, a girl, and is anxious about this
next job. He is fed up with the dull routine of life,
but can do nothing to get out of it. His recurring
trips to the bathroom underscore his
imprisonment to routine, especially in contrast
with Ben, who never goes to the bathroom. Unlike
Ben, he has no hobbies, which accounts for his
awareness of his static life.

If one were to read The Dumb Waiter as an

allegory of capitalist slavery, then Gus is the
employee who, because life offers him so little,
recognizes something wrong with the class
structure. He sees cracks in the façade of
Wilson—he is unafraid to yell and peer up the
serving hatch to where the god-like figure
reposes—but still feels uneasy in his presence, as most underlings do
with their powerful bosses. He also places accountability on Wilson as
the controller of the means of production; although Ben tells him
otherwise, Gus believes that Wilson owns the café and should therefore
pay for the gas meter (he is also miffed that Wilson, or the person
upstairs, wants tea while they are hungry and thirsty). Gus's class-
consciousness includes some shame about his poverty, but it is less than
that exhibited by Ben. When they send their working-class food up the
dumb waiter, Gus calls out the brand names as if announcing a fancy

32
dinner menu. Many productions of The Dumb Waiter will give the actor
playing Gus a Cockney accent to emphasize his lower-class standing, but
little else is known about his background. We learn that he has not seen
his mother in a long time, that he enjoys soccer, and is somewhat
unfamiliar with the richer sport of cricket.

By the end of play, Gus becomes somewhat resigned to his life enslaved
to routine. He accepts Ben's instructions to kill by mechanically repeating
them. When he realizes that Ben is betraying him, his silence does not
seem like one of shock. Rather, he has turned into a dumb waiter—
manipulated by others to carry out their directions, unable to speak for
himself.

Ben

Ben is the more dominant of the two criminals. As such, they resemble
the various couples in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, who also
complement each other with submissive and dominant traits. Ben broods
and reads his newspaper, and his silences are as much a feature of his
character as his dialogue. Whether Gus is asking him about the job,
Wilson, or if he ever gets bored with life, Ben refuses to enter into a
meaningful discussion. Part of the reason, of course, is that he does not
want to reveal the purpose of the job: to execute Gus. The other reason
is that Ben's chilling silences are laced with a defensive violence. Harold
Pinter has defined speech as a strategy designed to cover the nakedness
of silence, and Ben is a prime example. He
compensates for his naked silences with a
constant aura of violence and intimidation. And
just as he frequently checks his gun to maintain
his potential for violence, his often-venomous
speech further obscures his naked vulnerability.
In the argument over the phrase "Light the
kettle," the marriage of violent speech and violent
action seems appropriate when Ben chokes Gus
while screaming "THE KETTLE, YOU FOOL!"

Ben's language denotes other parts of his

personality, especially his shame over his lower
class. He feigns understanding the names of the
orders for exotic dishes sent down via the dumb
waiter (where upstairs, presumably, someone of higher standing,
physically and socially, presides). When they run of food in the basement,
he tells Gus (who yells up the hatch) to observe decorum, then strains to
make a formal apology. He is also immensely pleased when the person
upstairs uses Ben's phrase "Light the kettle." Like Gus, Ben is a slave to

33
the organization (one with several "departments"), but he does not have
the same class-consciousness as Gus; his partner is more aware of their
unfortunate lot in life, while Ben considers themselves "fortunate" and
diverts himself with hobbies. He also accepts whatever Wilson tells him
to do, making him as much a manipulated mute carrier of actions as Gus
is to Ben—a human "dumb waiter." His betrayal of Gus
at Wilson's behest is an unsettling reminder of what
workers will do to gain the acceptance of their superiors.

Wilson

Wilson never appears in the play, but he is directly or

indirectly behind the messages from the dumb waiter
and speaking tube. His obvious theatrical corollary is
Godot in Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Both are off-stage
characters who exercise a powerful, god-like influence
over the on-stage characters. When Gus suggests that
Wilson is playing "games" with the men (the orders for
food), he raises the possibility of Wilson's having a sadistic personality—
a malevolent god. Not only is he going to execute Gus, for unknown
reasons, but he will put him through an agonizing final day. Gus also
mentions that Wilson put them through tests several years ago to prove
themselves, so we know that Wilson may also be paranoid (a reasonable
expectation for the head of a crime syndicate).

7- Repetition: At the play's start and end, Ben expresses outrage at an

article in the newspaper while Gus sympathizes. Similar repetitions mark

34
 the action throughout the play.
Early on, Gus bemoans the dull
sleep-and-work routine of his life,
and various repetitive actions—
from Gus's tendency to run out
matches to his recurring trips to
the bathroom—emerge as the
basis of this cyclical fatigue.
Language, however, is where
Pinter's use of repetition points to
violence and the nearness of
death. Gus almost always has to repeat and rephrase his important
questions to Ben, questions that touch upon darker issues Ben does not
wish to reveal. Ben's mechanical instructions to Gus on how to execute
their murder are repeated by Gus with similar detachment, and when
Ben echoes through the speaking tube his own mission to kill Gus, it
likewise echoes the previous interaction with Gus. Pinter has compared
echoes to silence, and if one views the silences in his plays as indications
of violence, then linguistic echoes and repetitive actions suggest violence
as well.

In this play, characters often repeat a line that the other character has
already said. As equally important, the characters can be seen as
interchangeable, this textual repetition can be found throughout the play
as an indicator of the repetitiveness of live in general. The exact repetition
of the lines each time, along with stage directions reiterates the idea that
the same actions occurs over and over again.

Pinter uses repetition and silence with a violent appeal. Gus wants to ask
Ben something but is interrupted numerous times, and this occurrence
repeats throughout the play.

The repetitive, mechanical quality of language is the ultimate murderer

in this play. The characters' repetition of their newspaper routine—an act
that surely occurs every day—is part of the slow approach to death that
Gus spoke of at the start of the play when he bemoaned his dull, cyclical
life. Ben's instructions, which Gus repeats, similarly drain the life out of
an act that itself seeks to end life. Gus's toneless echo is actually a form
of silence that seeks to avoid having to perform the horrifying act.

8- Postmodern Play:

The language in The Dumb Waiter is an example of the postmodernism.

In Pinter, the two hired assassins Ben and Gus engaged with the
mundane discussion before their job. Gus‘s questions to Ben are ignored.

35
This shows the class superiority of Ben over Gus. No doubt both of them
are lower class criminals; the senior Ben tries to imitate the aristocracy.
For Pinter speech, as a strategy, is designed to cover the naked silence
with a constant aura of violence and intimidation. Beckettian dialogues,
as Lyotard says, atrophy the real whereas reality is deliberately subdued
by silence and menacing speeches in Pinter.

Pinter‘s stage in The Dumb Waiter is reduced to a small chamber without

ventilation, incommunicable and prison like. The play focuses on
jealousy, betrayal and class politics, but it is his dialogues-and the lack
of dialogue-for which he is known. Pinter‘s language, usually lower class
vernacular has been described as poetic. In addition, Pinter‘s silences are
ominous and violent.

The impact of off stage character is discernable in The Dumb Waiter and
in Waiting for Godot. In both cases they are powerful and influence the
onstage character. The later Godot presents a neutral God-like character
for which the characters wait, but in the former case Wilson is a
malevolent god whom the characters wait for in violent silence. The Dumb
Waiter carries the Lyotard‘s concept of mininarrative-consisting of one
act, which is a postmodernist characteristic. It does not have formal plot,
character, or action. In The Dumb Waiter the characters read the
newspaper and quarrel for the trivial things whenever they forget the
responsibility bestowed on them by their superficial Boss. Their silence,
mini conversation, attention to command from Wilson and fear for death
make their thought fragmented. They quarrel for the phrase ‗light the
kettle‘. They are engaged to fulfill the orders of sophisticated dishes, made
through the dumb waiter- an elevator connected the upper floor for
transporting food from the kitchen where the two rogues sheltered, in
order to impress their Boss. Though they remember their last victim, a
girl, they do not lament for it. Gus is worried about the order so he asks
questions to his senior Ben about when Wilson will come. The answer is
most predicted he says, ―He might not come. He might just send a
message. He doesn‘t always come‖. At last for them the fragmentation
becomes strategic, they welcome and enjoy. The play ends up when Gus
goes on to the lavatory to get water, at that time the dumb waiter whistles,
Ben listens to it and repeats it loud the order that the man has arrived
and they will be commencing their job shortly. Hurriedly Gus comes out
from the lavatory stripped off clothes and gun. Ben near dumb waiter
poses to kill him and they stare.

Postmodernism is not an approach to drama criticism as it is an

approach to fiction or other semiotic practices but drama can also reveal

36
 interesting possibilities when viewed in the
light of postmodernism and Pinter is a very
good case of postmodernist writing.

9- Setting:

Single room= prison (cannot leave/afraid to

leave)

Who owns building?

Is Wilson upstairs?

10- Violence:

The play‘s ending is not surprising, or at

least there are a series of elements towards
the end of the play that make it somehow
predictable. When Gus repeats the
instructions for murder from Ben, the former fails to repeat two words,
which points to Ben's eventual betrayal of Gus. He accidentally repeats
"He won't know you're there" instead of translating "you're" into "I'm."
This suggests that Gus ("he," the actual victim) won't know that Ben
("you're") is there (that Ben is betraying him). There is also a scene, in
which he reminds Ben that he hasn't been given instructions yet to take
out his gun (showing that Ben wants Gus to be unarmed). The
instructions are also delivered mechanically to counterpoint their horrific
nature.

Similarly, when Gus is catching on to the betrayal as Ben makes

comments about newspaper articles, itself a mechanical ritual that
drains the importance of deaths and other tragic news, he responds to
the stories with detachment. However, when Ben receives instructions to
execute Gus through the speaking tube, he repeats the words without
any notable distress. He has already become desensitized to violence, and
the murderous words are mechanical from the start for him.

The concept of betrayal is also present from the very beginning. When
reading the newspaper, Gus bets that the story that says an eight-year-
old girl killed a cat is a lie. He thinks that probably the eleven-year-old
boy killed it and blamed it on the girl. Throughout the play, the audience
receives several hints about Ben hiding some information from Gus,
which will weaken even more his lower position in the uneven partnership
he forms with Ben. For example, Gus twice says that he doesn't know
what the envelope is, and twice that "no one" and "nothing" were outside.
These last two statements both express an absence—both of knowledge
and of the physical presence—that constitute a type of silence, and Ben's

37
repetitive queries try to cover this naked, fearful mystery with extraneous
speech. He later deflects Gus's question referring to who they will
victimize, answering with silence and then ordering Gus to make tea.

The possible explanation for Gus‘murder could be his continuous

questioning about their job, which insinuates his disapproval with the
orders he is supposed to obey. So, for example he shows anxiety, caused
by the ―mess‖ of the pair‘s previous assignment where they have
murdered a girl who didn‘t ―seem to hold together like men do.‖ It also
bothers him that he is kept in the dark about too many things, such as
who cleans up after their murders, who owns the houses they are told to
wait in, and who ultimately might be their next target.

Surprisingly, his inquisitiveness and apparent moral awake about their

crimes turn into passivity and he resigns himself to his dramatic faith.
Thus, Gus facing Ben‘s gun without physical resistance, implies that,
although he has realized the criminal nature of his job, he will do nothing
to persuade, stop, or fight Ben, and will rather die. The order to murder
they were waiting for throughout the play has finally arrived via the dumb
waiter's speaking tube, operated by Ben while his partner was out of the
room . Gus has re-entered on the opposite side from which he departed,
which is disconcerting enough, but then his supposed partner raises his
gun. The lights go down, leaving to the audience‘s imagination
Gus‘murder, although making it clear who the victim is.

11- Intertextuality:

The paramount literary influence on Pinter's play is Samuel Beckett's

“Waiting for Godot” Essentially, the play is an obscure rendition of two
tramps waiting for the arrival of the mysterious Godot, the play seems to
be a series of grim vaudeville turns by the two. Nothing really seems to
happen except for the meaningless passage of time in a world emptied of
meaning in which people live devoid of purpose or power. Beckett’ s play,
with an apparent lack of plot, focuses on language as .the main
instrument of man’ s refusal to accept the world as it is.. Although there
is no lack of plot in Pinter’s play, this work shares Beckett’s obsession
with language, and this element plays a central role. For example, Pinter's
use of repetition and silence harkens back to Beckett's work. Beckett's
primary use of these is to suggest the ideas of alienation and the
approach of death, but Pinter fashions them with a more sinister, violent
touch. (As I have explained in the previous question, short and absurd
sentences and silences predict violence and central events in the play).

As with “Waiting for Godot”, there are two characters, one dominant, one
submissive, who share the amount of letters and syllables in their names

38
(although Pinter's Gus and Ben are simpler names and simpler
characters than Beckett's Vladimir and Estragon).

Both authors also share their attention to apparently unimportant

details, which emphasizes the monotony and meaninglessness of their
lives. Gus's difficulty in putting on his shoe corresponds to a similar
problem with a boot in Beckett's play. In both plays, moreover, the
characters have been stranded in one place with an unclear purpose, at
least from the audience's perspective. The single location is a staple of
Pinter's other plays, as well.

Wilson never appears in the play, but he is directly or indirectly behind

the messages from the dumb waiter and speaking tube. His obvious
theatrical corollary is Godot in Beckett's play. Both are off-stage
characters who exercise a powerful, god-like influence over the on-stage
characters. Similarly, both of them never appear, although their absent
presence strongly affects the main characters decisions and existence. In
the case of Wilson, not only is he going to execute Gus, for unknown
reasons, but Gus also mentions that Wilson put them through tests
several years ago to prove themselves, another example of how he can
control their lives. Both character’s relationship towards Wilson is clearly
different. Ben reveres Wilson, while Gus is uncertain of their relationship
to the character, similar to how Estragon feels about Vladimir and Godot.

39
12- Comedy of menace:

Pinter creates a world full of silence and repressed violence; for this
reason, his plays have often been called “comedies of Menace”.

Martin Esslin defined this kind of comedies as “plays which can be very
funny up to the point when the absurdity of the character’s predicament
becomes frightening, horrifying, pathetic, and tragic”.

Dialogues between Gus and Ben: short utterances and repetitions seem
hostile and intimidating.

40
TED HUGHES: POEMS

41
 Pike
Pike, three inches long, perfect

Pike in all parts, green tigering the gold.

Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin.

They dance on the surface among the flies.

Or move, stunned by their own grandeur,

Over a bed of emerald, silhouette

Of submarine delicacy and horror.

A hundred feet long in their world.

In ponds, under the heat-struck lily pads-

Gloom of their stillness:

Logged on last year’s black leaves, watching upwards.

Or hung in an amber cavern of weeds

The jaws’ hooked clamp and fangs

Not to be changed at this date:

A life subdued to its instrument;

The gills kneading quietly, and the pectorals.

Three we kept behind glass,

Jungled in weed: three inches, four,

And four and a half: fed fry to them-

Suddenly there were two. Finally one

With a sag belly and the grin it was born with.

And indeed they spare nobody.

Two, six pounds each, over two feet long

High and dry and dead in the willow-herb-

One jammed past its gills down the other’s gullet:

The outside eye stared: as a vice locks-

The same iron in this eye

Though its film shrank in death.

42
A pond I fished, fifty yards across,

Whose lilies and muscular tench

Had outlasted every visible stone

Of the monastery that planted them-

Stilled legendary depth:

It was as deep as England. It held

Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old

That past nightfall I dared not cast

But silently cast and fished

With the hair frozen on my head

For what might move, for what eye might move.

The still splashes on the dark pond,

Owls hushing the floating woods

Frail on my ear against the dream

Darkness beneath night’s darkness had freed,

That rose slowly toward me, watching.

43
“DAFFODILS”

Remember how we picked the daffodils?

Nobody else remembers, but I remember.

Your daughter came with her armfuls, eager and happy,

Helping the harvest. She has forgotten.

She cannot even remember you. And we sold them.

It sounds like sacrilege, but we sold them.

Were we so poor? Old Stoneman, the grocer,

Boss-eyed, his blood-pressure purpling to beetroot

(It was his last chance,

He would die in the same great freeze as you) ,

He persuaded us. Every Spring

He always bought them, sevenpence a dozen,

‘A custom of the house’.

Besides, we still weren’t sure we wanted to own

Anything. Mainly we were hungry

To convert everything to profit.

Still nomads-still strangers

To our whole possession. The daffodils

Were incidental gilding of the deeds,

Treasure trove. They simply came,

And they kept on coming.

As if not from the sod but falling from heaven.

Our lives were still a raid on our own good luck.

We knew we’d live forever. We had not learned

What a fleeting glance of the everlasting

Daffodils are. Never identified

The nuptial flight of the rarest epherma-

Our own days!

We thought they were a windfall.

Never guessed they were a last blessing.

So we sold them. We worked at selling them

As if employed on somebody else’s

Flower-farm. You bent at it

In the rain of that April-your last April.

We bent there together, among the soft shrieks

44
Of their jostled stems, the wet shocks shaken

Of their girlish dance-frocks-

Fresh-opened dragonflies, wet and flimsy,

Opened too early.

We piled their frailty lights on a carpenter’s bench,

Distributed leaves among the dozens-

Buckling blade-leaves, limber, groping for air, zinc-silvered-

Propped their raw butts in bucket water,

Their oval, meaty butts,

And sold them, sevenpence a bunch-

Wind-wounds, spasms from the dark earth,

With their odourless metals,

A flamy purification of the deep grave’s stony cold

As if ice had a breath-

We sold them, to wither.

The crop thickened faster than we could thin it.

Finally, we were overwhelmed

And we lost our wedding-present scissors.

Every March since they have lifted again

Out of the same bulbs, the same

Baby-cries from the thaw,

Ballerinas too early for music, shiverers

In the draughty wings of the year.

On that same groundswell of memory, fluttering

They return to forget you stooping there

Behind the rainy curtains of a dark April,

Snipping their stems.

But somewhere your scissors remember. Wherever they are.

Here somewhere, blades wide open,

April by April

Sinking deeper

Through the sod-an anchor, a cross of rust.

45
SYLVIA PLATH: POEMS

46
47
 DADDY

You do not do, you do not do

Any more, black shoe

In which I have lived like a foot

For thirty years, poor and white,

Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.

You died before I had time——

Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,

Ghastly statue with one gray toe

Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic

Where it pours bean green over blue

In the waters off beautiful Nauset.

I used to pray to recover you.

Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town

Scraped flat by the roller

Of wars, wars, wars.

But the name of the town is common.

My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.

So I never could tell where you

Put your foot, your root,

I never could talk to you.

The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.

Ich, ich, ich, ich,

I could hardly speak.

I thought every German was you.

And the language obscene

48
 An engine, an engine

Chuffing me off like a Jew.

A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.

I began to talk like a Jew.

I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna

Are not very pure or true.

With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck

And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack

I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,

With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.

And your neat mustache

And your Aryan eye, bright blue.

Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You——

Not God but a swastika

So black no sky could squeak through.

Every woman adores a Fascist,

The boot in the face, the brute

Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,

In the picture I have of you,

A cleft in your chin instead of your foot

But no less a devil for that, no not

Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.

I was ten when they buried you.

At twenty I tried to die

And get back, back, back to you.

I thought even the bones would do.

49
 But they pulled me out of the sack,

And they stuck me together with glue.

And then I knew what to do.

I made a model of you,

A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.

And I said I do, I do.

So daddy, I’m finally through.

The black telephone’s off at the root,

The voices just can’t worm through.

If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two——

The vampire who said he was you

And drank my blood for a year,

Seven years, if you want to know.

Daddy, you can lie back now.

There’s a stake in your fat black heart

And the villagers never liked you.

They are dancing and stamping on you.

They always knew it was you.

Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

50
 Lady Lazarus
I have done it again.

One year in every ten

I manage it——

A sort of walking miracle, my skin

Bright as a Nazi lampshade,

My right foot

A paperweight,

My face a featureless, fine

Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin

O my enemy.

Do I terrify?——

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?

The sour breath

Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh

The grave cave ate will be

At home on me

And I a smiling woman.

I am only thirty.

And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.

What a trash

To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.

The peanut-crunching crowd

Shoves in to see

51
 Them unwrap me hand and foot——

The big strip tease.

Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands

My knees.

I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.

The first time it happened I was ten.

It was an accident.

The second time I meant

To last it out and not come back at all.

I rocked shut

As a seashell.

They had to call and call

And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying

Is an art, like everything else.

I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.

I do it so it feels real.

I guess you could say I’ve a call.

It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.

It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.

It’s the theatrical

Comeback in broad day

To the same place, the same face, the same brute

Amused shout:

52
 ‘A miracle!’

That knocks me out.

There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge

For the hearing of my heart——

It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge

For a word or a touch

Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.

So, so, Herr Doktor.

So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,

I am your valuable,

The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.

I turn and burn.

Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash—

You poke and stir.

Flesh, bone, there is nothing there——

A cake of soap,

A wedding ring,

A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer

Beware

Beware.

53
 Out of the ash

I rise with my red hair

And I eat men like air.

54
TONY HARRISON: Poems

Allotments
Choked, reverted Dig for Victory plots

Helped put more bastards into Waif Home cots

Than anywhere, but long before my teens

The Veterans got them for their bowling greens.

In Leeds it was never Who or When but Where.

The bridges of the slimy River Aire,

Where Jabez Tunicliffe, for love of God,

Founded the Band of Hope in eighteen odd,

The cold canal that ran to Liverpool

Made hot trickles in the knickers cool

As soon as flow. The graveyards of Leeds 2

Were hardly love-nests but they had to do –

Through clammy mackintosh and winter vest

And rumpled jumper for a touch of breast.

Stroked nylon crackled over groin and bum

Like granny’s wireless stuck on Hilversum.

And after love we’d find some epitaph

Embossed backwards on your arse and laugh.

And young, we cuddled by the abattoir,

Faffing with fastenings, never getting far.

Through sooty shutters the odd glimpsed spark

From hooves on concrete stalls scratched at the dark

And glittered in green eyes. Cowclap smacked

Onto the pavings where the beasts were packed.

And offal furnaces with clouds of stench

Choked other couples off the lychgate bench.

55
 The Pole who caught it at us once had smelt

Far worse at Auschwitz and at Buchanwald,

He said, pointing to the chimneys, Meat!

Zat is vere zey murder vat you eat.

And jogging beside us, As man devours

Ze flesh of animals, so vorms devour ours.

It’s like your anthem, Ilkla Moor Baht’at.

Nearly midnight and that gabbling, foreign nut

Had stalled my coming, spoilt my appetite

For supper, and gave me a sleepless night

In which I rolled frustrated and I smelt

Lust on myself, then smoke, and then I felt

Street bonfires blazing for the end of war

V.E. and J burn us like lights, but saw

Lush prairies for a tumble, wide corrals,

A Loiner’s Elysium, and I cried

For the family still pent up in my balls,

For my corned beef sandwich, and for genocide.

Heredity
How you became a poet's a mystery!

Wherever did you get your talent from?

I say: I had two uncles, Joe and Harry-

one was a stammered, the other dumb.

National Trust
Bottomless pits. There’s one in Castleton,

and stout upholders of our law and order

one day thought its depth worth wagering on

and borrowed a convict hush-hush from his warder

and winched him down; and back, flayed, grey, mad, dumb.

Not even a good flogging made him holler!

O gentlemen, a better way to plumb

the depths of Britain’s dangling a scholar,

say, here at the booming shaft at Towanroath,

now National Trust, a place where they got tin,

those gentlemen who silenced the men’s oath

56
 and killed the language that they swore it in.

The dumb go down in history and disappear

and not one gentleman ’s been brought to book:

Mes den hep tavas a-gollas y dyr

(Cornish)—

‘the tongueless man gets his land took.’

Book Ends.

Long Distance
Though my mother was already two years dead

Dad kept her slippers warming by the gas,

put hot water bottles her side of the bed

and still went to renew her transport pass.

You couldn't just drop in. You had to phone.

He'd put you off an hour to give him time

to clear away her things and look alone

as though his still raw love were such a crime.

He couldn't risk my blight of disbelief

though sure that very soon he'd hear her key

scrape in the rusted lock and end his grief.

He knew she'd just popped out to get the tea.

57
 I believe life ends with death, and that is all.

You haven't both gone shopping; just the same,

in my new black leather phone book there's your name

and the disconnected number I still call.

Turns
I thought it made me look more 'working class'

(as if a bit of chequered cloth could bridge that gap!)

I did a turn in it before the glass.

My mother said: It suits you, your dad's cap.

(She preferred me to wear suits and part my hair:

You're every bit as good as that lot are!)

All the pension queue came out to stare.

Dad was sprawled beside the postbox (still VR) ,

his cap turned inside up beside his head,

smudged H A H in purple Indian ink

and Brylcreem slicks displayed so folks migh think

he wanted charity for dropping dead.

He never begged. For nowt! Death's reticence

crowns his life, and me, I'm opening my trap

to busk the class that broke him for the pence

that splash like brackish tears into our cap.

Marked with D.
When the chilled dough of his flesh went in an oven

not unlike those he fuelled all his life,

I thought of his cataracts ablaze with Heaven

and radiant with the sight of his dead wife,

light streaming from his mouth to shape her name,

'not Florence and not Flo but always Florrie.'

I thought how his cold tongue burst into flame

but only literally, which makes me sorry,

sorry for his sake there's no Heaven to reach.

I get it all from Earth my daily bread

but he hungered for release from mortal speech

that kept him down, the tongue that weighed like lead.

The baker’s man that no one will see rise

58
 and England made to feel like some dull oaf

is smoke, enough to sting one person’s eyes

and ash (not unlike flour) for one small loaf

BENJAMIN ZEPHANIAH: Poems

Dis Poetry
Dis poetry is like a riddim dat drops

De tongue fires a riddim dat shoots like shots

Dis poetry is designed fe rantin

Dance hall style, big mouth chanting,

Dis poetry nar put yu to sleep

Preaching follow me

Like yu is blind sheep,

Dis poetry is not Party Political

Not designed fe dose who are critical.

Dis poetry is wid me when I gu to me bed

It gets into me dreadlocks

It lingers around me head

Dis poetry goes wid me as I pedal me bike

I’ve tried Shakespeare, respect due dere

But did is de stuff I like.

Dis poetry is not afraid of going ina book

Still dis poetry need ears fe hear an eyes fe hav a look

Dis poetry is Verbal Riddim, no big words involved

An if I hav a problem de riddim gets it solved,

I’ve tried to be more romantic, it does nu good for me

So I tek a Reggae Riddim an build me poetry,

I could try be more personal

But you’ve heard it all before,

Pages of written words not needed

Brain has many words in store,

Yu could call dis poetry Dub Ranting

De tongue plays a beat

De body starts skanking,

Dis poetry is quick an childish

Dis poetry is fe de wise an foolish,

Anybody can do it fe free,

59
 Dis poetry is fe yu an me,

Don’t stretch yu imagination

Dis poetry is fe de good of de Nation,

Chant,

In de morning

I chant

In de night

I chant

In de darkness

An under de spotlight,

I pass thru University

I pass thru Sociology

An den I got a dread degree

In Dreadfull Ghettology.

Dis poetry stays wid me when I run or walk

An when I am talking to meself in poetry I talk,

Dis poetry is wid me,

Below me an above,

Dis poetry’s from inside me

It goes to yu

WID LUV.

White Comedy
I waz whitemailed

By a white witch,

Wid white magic

An white lies,

Branded by a white sheep

I slaved as a whitesmith

Near a white spot

Where I suffered whitewater fever.

Whitelisted as a whiteleg

I waz in de white book

As a master of white art,

It waz like white death.

People called me white jack

60
 Some hailed me as a white wog,

So I joined de white watch

Trained as a white guard

Lived off the white economy.

Caught and beaten by de whiteshirts

I waz condemned to a white mass,

Don't worry,

I shall be writing to de Black House.

Terrible World
I’ve seen streets of blood

Redda dan red

There waz no luv

Just bodies dead

And I think to myself

What a terrible world.

I’ve seen pimps and priests

Well interfused

Denying peace

To the kids they abuse

And I think to myself

What a terrible world.

The killer who’s hero

The rapist who’s indoors

The trade in human cargo

And dead poets on tours

I’ve seen friends put in jail

For not being rich

And mass graves made

From a football pitch.

I’ve seen babies scream

Nobody cared

Civilians starve

Whilst troops are prepared

61
 And I think to myself

What a terrible world

Yes I think to myself

What a terrible world.

The Death of Joy Gardner

They put a leather belt around her

13 feet of tape and bound her

Handcuffs to secure her

And only God knows what else,

She's illegal, so deport her

Said the Empire that brought her

She died,

Nobody killed her

And she never killed herself.

It is our job to make her

Return to Jamaica

Said the Alien Deporters

Who deports people like me,

It was said she had a warning

That the officers were calling

On that deadly July morning

As her young son watched TV.

An officer unplugged the phone

Mother and child were now alone

When all they wanted was a home

A child watch Mummy die,

No matter what the law may say

A mother should not die this way

Let human rights come into play

And to everyone apply.

I know not of a perfect race

I know not of a perfect place

I know this is not a simple case

Of Yardies on the move,

We must talk some Race Relations

62
 With the folks from immigration

About this kind of deportation

If things are to improve.

Let it go down in history

The word is that officially

She died democratically

In 13 feet of tape,

That Christian was over here

Because pirates were over there

The Bible sent us everywhere

To make Great Britain great.

Here lies the extradition squad

And we should all now pray to God

That as they go about their job

They make not one mistake,

For I fear as I walk the streets

That one day I just may meet

Officials who may tie my feet

And how would I escape.

I see my people demonstrating

And educated folks debating

The way they're separating

The elder from the youth,

When all they are demanding

Is a little overstanding

They too have family planning

Now their children want the truth.

As I move around I am eyeing

So many poets crying

And so many poets trying

To articulate the grief,

I cannot help but wonder

How the alien deporters

(As they said to press reporters)

Can feel absolute relief.

63
 Introductionary Chant

JEAN “BINTA” BREEZE: Poems

64
Earth Cries

65
Could it be

66
 GRACE NICHOLS: Poems:

"Wherever I Hang"
I leave me people, me land, me home

For reasons I not too sure

I forsake de sun

And de humming-bird splendour

Had big rats in de floorboard

So I pick up me new-world-self

And come to this place call England

At first I feeling like I in a dream -

De misty greyness

I touching the walls to see if they real

They solid to de seam

And de people pouring from de underground system

Like beans

And when I look up to de sky

I see Lord Nelson high - too high to lie.

And is so I sending home photos of myself

Among de pigeons and de snow

And is so I warding off de cold

And is so, little by little

I begin to change my calypso ways

Never visiting nobody

Before giving them clear warning

And waiting me turn in queue

Now, after all this time

I get accustom to de English life

But I still miss back-home side

To tell you de truth

I don't know really where I belaang

Yes, divided to de ocean

Divided to de bone

Wherever I hang me knickers - that's my home.

67
My Gran Visits England
My Gran was a Caribbean lady

As Caribbean as could be

She came across to visit us

In Shoreham by the sea.

She'd hardly put her suitcase down

when she began a digging spree

Out in the back garden

To see what she could see

And she found:

That the ground was as groundy

That the frogs were as froggy

That the earthworms were as worthy

That the weeds were as weedy

That the seeds were as seedy

That the bees were as busy

as those back home

And she paused from her digging

And she wondered

And she looked at her spade

And she pondered

Then she stood by a rose

As a slug passed by her toes

And she called to my Dad

as she struck pose after pose,

'Boy, come and take my photo – the place cold,

But wherever there's God's earth, I'm at home.'

From Under the Moon and Under the Sea.

Skin Teeth
“Not every skin-teeth

is a smile 'Massa'

if you see me smiling

when you pass

if you see me bending

68
 when you ask

Know that I smile

know that I bend

only the better

to rise and strike

again”

Thoughts drifting through the fat black woman's head while having
a full bubble bath
Steatopygous sky

Steatopygous sea

Steatopygous waves

Steatopygous me

0 how I long to place my foot

on the head of anthropology

to swig my breasts

in the face of history

to scrub my back

with the dogma of theology

to put my soap

in the slimming industry’s

profitsome spoke

Steatopygous sky

Steatopygous sea

Steatopygous waves

Steatopygous me

69
 JOHN AGARD: Poems:

Listen Mr Oxford don

Me not no Oxford don

me a simple immigrant

from Clapham Common

I didn't graduate

I immigrate

But listen Mr Oxford don

I'm a man on de run

and a man on de run

is a dangerous one

I ent have no gun

I ent have no knife

but mugging de Queen's English

is the story of my life

I don't need no axe

to split/ up yu syntax

I don't need no hammer

to mash/ up yu grammar

I warning you Mr. Oxford don

I'm a wanted man

and a wanted man

is a dangerous one

Dem accuse me of assault

on de Oxford dictionary/

imagine a concise peaceful man like me/

dem want me to serve time

for inciting rhyme to riot

but I tekking it quiet

down here in Clapham Common

I'm not violent man Mr. Oxford don

70
 I only armed wit mih human breath

but human breath

is a dangerous weapon

So mek dem send one big word after me

I ent serving no jail sentence

I slashing suffix in self-defence

I bashing future wit present tense

and if necessary

I making de Queen's English accessory/ to my offence isten Mr Oxford Don

FRED D’AGUIAR: Poems

Letter from Mama Dot

Born on a sunday

in the kingdom of Ashante

Sold on monday

into slavery

Ran away on tuesday

cause she born free

Lost a foot on wednesday

when they catch she

Worked all thursday

till her head grey

Dropped on friday

where they burned she

Freed on saturday

in a new century

, "Mama Dot", ???????????????’

71
72
The New Poetry:

In 1962, the English writer and literary critic A. Alvarez, published The
New Poetry, a poetic anthology in which he joined the work of what he
considered to be the most significant figures of the post-war scene in
Great Britain. The New Poetry was widely read and became extremely
influential.

Alvarez divided his Anthology into two sections: “The Americans” and
“The British” John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and Anne
Sexton were the American poets chosen as those worthy of attention, for
they were “able to write poetry of immense skill and intelligence which
coped openly with the quick of their experience, experience sometimes on
the edge of disintegration and breakdown.”

English poets, on the contrary, were still maintaining the stance of what
he referred of as “gentility” the belief that “life is always more or less
orderly, people always more or less polite, their emotions and habits more
or less decent and more or less controllable; that God, in short, is more
or less good.”

Some of the British poets whom he considered worthy of this new

category and whose poetry was included in this Anthology were Donald
Davie, Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, John Wain, Thom Gunn, Geoffrey
Hill and Ted Hughes among other.

“Confessional poetry”:

Due to the rendering of personal experiences and their disregard for

social convention, the American poets that Alvarez advocated were to
later be referred to as “Confessional Poets”.

Confessional poetry is the poetry of the personal or “I”. This style of

writing emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s and is associated with
poets such as Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and W. D.
Snodgrass. Lowell’s book Life Studies was a highly personal account of
his life and familial ties and had a significant impact on American poetry.
Plath and Sexton were both students of Lowell and noted that his work
influenced their own writing.

The confessional poetry of the mid-twentieth century dealt with subject

matter that previously had not been openly discussed in American poetry.
Private experiences with and feelings about death, trauma, depression
and relationships were addressed in this type of poetry, often in an
autobiographical manner.

73
The confessional poets were not merely recording their emotions on
paper; craft and construction were extremely important to their work.
While their treatment of the poetic self may have been groundbreaking
and shocking to some readers, these poets maintained a high level of
craftsmanship through their careful attention to and use of prosody.

One of the most well-known poems by a confessional poet is "Daddy" by

Plath. Addressed to her father, the poem contains references to the
Holocaust but uses a sing-song rhythm that echoes the nursery rhymes
of childhood.

Themes that had previously and decorously been hidden from society
were confronted by these poets: insanity, suicide, sex, repressed feelings,
were dealt with explicitly. However, what made a poem confessional was
not only its subject matter or the emphasis on oneself, but also the
directness with which the themes were addressed. These poets made an
artifice of sincerity and authenticity by discussing ―real‖ situations and
relationships.

Gender:

Sylvia Plath

Plath lived and worked in 1950s/1960s England and America, societies

characterized by very strict gender norms. Women were expected to
remain safely ensconced in the house, with motherhood as their ultimate
joy and goal. Women who ventured into the arts found it difficult to attain
much attention for their work, and were often subject to marginalization
and disdain. Plath explored and challenged this reductionist tendency
through her work, offering poems of intense vitality and stunning
language. She depicted the bleakness of the domestic scene, the
disappointment of pregnancy, the despair over her husband's infidelity,
her tortured relationship with her father, and her attempts to find her
own creative voice amidst the crushing weight of patriarchy. She shied
away from using genteel language and avoided writing only of
traditionally "female" topics. Most impressively, the work remains poetic
and artistic - rather than political - because of her willing to admit
ambivalence over all these expectations, admitting that both perspectives
can prove a trap.

Plath felt like a victim to the men in her life, including her father, her
husband, and the great male-dominated literary world. Her poetry can
often be understood as response to these feelings of victimization, and
many of the poems with a male figure can be interpreted as referring to
any or all of these male forces in her life.

74
In regards to her father, she realized she could never escape his terrible
hold over her; she expressed her sense of victimhood in "The Colossus"
and "Daddy," using powerful metaphors and comparisons to limn a man
who figured heavily in her psyche.

Her husband also victimized her through the power he exerted as a man,
both by assuming he should have the literary career and through his
infidelity. Plath felt relegated to a subordinate, "feminine" position which
stripped from her any autonomy or power. Her poems from the "Colossus"
era express her frustration over the strictures under which she operated.
For instance, "A Life" evokes a menacing and bleak future for Plath.
However, in her later poems, she seems finally able to transcend her
status as victim by fully embracing her creative gifts ("Ariel"),
metaphorically killing her father ("Daddy"), and committing suicide ("Lady
Lazarus", "Edge").

"Daddy" is not only an exploration of the speaker's relationship with her

father and husband, but of women's relationships with men in general.
It was written in the 1960s, a time when feminists fought for women's
rights and made big progress in the way that gender was viewed in
society. Though this poem does not address feminism blatantly, it is a
powerful statement from a female against males. It's not limited to
addressing one male, but any male who has suppressed, betrayed, or,
perhaps worst of all, died and left behind their daughters and wives.

Jean “Binta” Breeze

In Earth Cries Binta explores social injustice obliquely, using and

concentrating on the psychological dimension of black women's
experience, which records a life lost between the comparation and
personification with the planet Earth. We find two alternative points of
view: the gender cause and the environmental effort. In this poem is
speaking a third person, .SHE., and she is describing someone else, the
Earth. Mother Earth is self- sustaining and both, women and the planet
are not been treated properly good, are being dominated by powerful men.
It is probable that the poet wrote this as an environmental effort, and the
speaker=s attitude seems to be curious, and sympathetic. This poem
stands out by its wonderful imagery and the fusion of rhythm, lyrical
intensity and stunning imagery (water, rivers, heaven….)

It is a beautiful, tender and fragile poem to talk about gender trouble,

using and repetition along of the poem the pronoun .she. and the verb .to
cry. to focus in the most important theme: the Earth cries and the
freedom of women (artistic, physical as well as political freedom). We can
see a repetitive and very simple structure with most lines stating that the

75
Earth cries for something, followed by an explanation for the cries. The
continuous negative phrases are explaining that 'she doesn't cry' and the
reasons, until the last 4 lines where the true reason for the crying is
revealed, builds interest to the readers for why the poem's title is 'earth
cries', and what the reasons are for the title written. No use of
punctuation makes the poem seem like lyrics, with rhythms created,
especially with iambic pentameter that appear quite often throughout the
poem.

Breeze is a valuable storyteller, and she defended her position to

introduce a woman=s voice and body into this highly gendered genre, into
a political poem. Breeze resists the concept of a post-colonial black victim
identity for women. She avoids the depiction of conflict and violence and
directs our attention to the psychological dimensions of women=s
experience. Her poem deals with the biological, social, cultural and
historical aspects of mothering and, especially, the experience of
mothering in the Caribbean diaspora in London.

It shows again in could it be her huge and wonderful experience as a

storyteller of her women memories in Kingston, of family life and of the
work of mothers at home.

She mentions on her work that made her aware of the “difference it
actually made being a woman in the field” and maybe that is what it called
along this poem “the thing”, the difference between biological women
condition and gender troubles.

Grace Nichols

Skin Teeth was published in Nichols’ collection The Fat Black Woman‘s
Poems in 1984 in which Nichols challenges some of the Western
standardized stereotypes of fat, black women. In Skin Teeth, the female
speaker of the poem addresses a slave owner in a rebellious way; her
threat is open and direct.

Thoughts drifting through the fat black woman‘s head while having a full
bubble bath is also part of the collection The Fat Black Woman‘s Poems
(1984) and it is probably its most famous one. Here the fat black woman
speaks in the first person and goes through the official discourses of
science, history, religion and consumer capitalism, mocking them
through the appropriation of a scientific term that was traditionally used
to define and victimize people like her. The narrator of the poem, the fat
black woman, is reflecting upon the word and comparing herself with the
immensity of the sky, the sea and the waves. Thus, she is identifying
herself with nature and the landscape.

76
The fat woman’s thoughts reveal how she would like to dismantle this
discourse using her body parts, her “foot” and her “breasts”. In addition,
science and history are also personified, as they have “head” and “face”,
suggesting that, rather than science and history themselves, she is
thinking about the people (= men) that invented these discourses.
Through her description, Nichols makes the readers think that the body
parts of the black woman would easily overpower science’s head and
history’s face, and this is supported by the comparison between the black
woman and the powerful natural elements that she personifies in the first
and the last stanzas of the poem.

Animals in Ted Hughes poetry:

Famous for his animal poetry, ted Hughes earned the reputation of being
the first English poet of the “will to live”. His choice of animals as the
themes of his poems is, of course, not without the reverse side of his
desire, as he revealed: “my interest in animals began when I began. My
memory goes back pretty clearly to my third year, and by then I had so
many of the toys lead animals you could buy in shops that they went
right round our flat topped fore place fender nose to tail”.

In his poetry, animals are presented, not as playthings, but as lords of

life and death, they assumes the status of mystical gods. They are
presented superior to men, with their lack of self-consciousness and
sickness of the mind. They are found free from inhibitions, fears; and full
of the courage and concentrations. With their focused life, with all their
innocence of men‘s corruption, they emerge, like Adam and Eve in
paradise, in state before the fall. Hughes first volume of the poems, The
Hawk in the Rain (1957), illustrated all these ideas, and made him famous
as a poet.

Thus, Hughes is vehement and brutal, sometimes reminiscent of Donne

and Hopkins, but endowed above all with a spontaneous violence that
tends instinctively towards the parallel between the nature of man and
the ferocity of wild beasts and the birds of prey.

Usually written contrary to the prevailing style, Hughes's work has

always been controversial. "Critics rarely harbor neutral feelings toward
Hughes's poetry," observed Carol Bere in Literary Review. "He has been
dismissed as a connoisseur of the habits of animals, his disgust with
humanity barely disguised; labeled a 'voyeur of violence,' attacked for his
generous choreographing of gore; and virtually written off as a cult poet.
. . . Others admire him for the originality and command of his approach;
the scope and complexity of his mythic enterprise; and the apparent ease

77
and freshness with which he can vitalize a landscape, free of any
mitigating sentimentality."

To read Hughes's poetry is to enter a world dominated by nature,

especially by animals. This holds true for nearly all of his books, from The
Hawk in the Rain to Moortown, an examination of life on a farm.

Apparently, Hughes's love of animals was one of the catalysts in his

decision to become a poet. Hughes once confessed "that he began writing
poems in adolescence, when it dawned upon him that his earlier passion
for hunting animals in his native Yorkshire ended either in the possession
of a dead animal, or at best a trapped one. He wanted to capture not just
live animals, but the aliveness of animals in their natural state: their
wildness, their quiddity, the fox-ness of the fox and the crow-ness of the
crow."

Animal images are the central focus for Hughes's important mythic
presentations: metamorphosis as an image of the indestructibility of life,
and the god-animal as symbol for creative and destructive forces in
nature.

Thus, speaking in general terms, it can be said that Hughes animal poetry
is based on the Shamanist idea that animals are more powerful and
spiritual beings when compared to man, since they live a totally instinct
based life. Animals are far from limits and social values, thus they are
capable of living their own self true nature and that specialty makes them
powerful and wise. Man, on the other hand, is far from living its own true
nature due to the limitations and social values which block the instincts.
Thus, man is not free, confused, ignorance and lost.

Anguish and dissatisfaction in Sylvia Plath`s poems:

The Disquieting Muses

In the opening stanza, the speaker blames her mother for letting the
sinister elements enter into her life from infancy. While the five negative
prefixes ("illbred," "disfigured," "unsightly," "unwisely" and "Unasked")
demonstrate negative elements, the repetition of "Mother, mother"
indicates the speaker's anger and accusations against her mother.
Instead of the presence of a loving mother, the haunting godmothers
present themselves "With heads like darning-eggs to nod / and nod and
nod at foot and head," like singing a distasteful lullaby to the baby. And
they demonstrate a control over the infant by surrounding the cradle.

The speaker then portrays in the second stanza the idealistic childlike
world that the mother wants to establish for the children. The mother
provides the children with a world where there are only imaginative

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heroes and where evil does not exist or is easily dismissed. But the
mother's heroic stories do not expel the evil muses; on the contrary, she
is unable to perceive their presence and powerless to drive them away.

The third stanza illustrates a hurricane episode. The mother idealistically

instructs the children that thunder is only a mythological god who is
harmless, yet the wicked muses rupture the father's study windows as
easily as breaking bubbles. Their destructive power is more vicious than
the hurricane. By destroying the father's bubble-like windows—a symbol
of the paternal intelligence and the fragility of the mother's protection—
the speaker affirms the persistence of negative elements in her life.

Sylvia Plath’s poem illustrates a non-communicative mother-daughter

relationship. While de Chirico's painting strips the objects of meaning
and portrays an enigmatic vision between surreal subconscious and
inaccessible memories, Plath's poem borrows the haunting figures in the
picture as a representation of the dark force of life. These bare, indifferent
mannequins become not only delegates of ominous women, but also
representatives of the bad fairies and the evil mothers, who are the
opposites of the well-meaning natural mother. The poem therefore
suggests a contrast between light and dark, ideal and familiar. The three
muses are surrogates of a cold, indifferent, painful, realistic world. These
evil mothers overshadow the natural mother, who lives in a fairylike,
cartoon world and is not aware of the presence of them. Like the good
fairies in Sleeping Beauty and the muses of Greek mythology, the muses
in the poem are the speaker's patrons; but unlike the good fairies, the
three muses do not give her good gifts. Plath herself commented the three
dummies represent a twentieth-century version of other sinister trios of
women: the Three Fates, the witches in Macbeth, and de Quincey's sisters
of madness. With many details from her childhood, the first-person
speaker describes her growing awareness of the conflict between two
worlds, and later realizes that she belongs to the dark, ominous one. And
by accepting the existence of the dark side in her life, the speaker thus
symbolically destroys the natural mother's idealistic world and creates
her own world, with the three muses as her company.

Child

Although a short poem, “Child” looms large in Plath’s oeuvre as an

example of her unequivocal love for her children, and an expression of
her stress over being unable to provide for them as she would like to. The
poem was written about two weeks before she committed suicide, and is
most likely about her son Nicholas, who was just under one year old at
the time.

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Many of Plath's poems deal with pregnancy and motherhood. Her
husband, the poet Ted Hughes, believed that maternity inspired her
tremendous development as a poet, especially as seen in the growth from
The Colossus to Ariel. His statement accompanying the latter work said
as much: "...while she was almost fully occupied with children and
house-keeping, she underwent a poetic development that has hardly any
equal on record...the birth of her first child seemed to start the
process...her second child brought things a giant step forward. All the
various voices of her gift came together..." If we stipulate this
interpretation as accurate, then this poem's competing feelings - love and
hope for the child, contrasted with her own anxiety - grows even more
profound.

The first three stanzas outline how Plath cherishes her child and views
him as a perfect creature, uncorrupted by society and civilization. She
hopes to expand her child’s horizons by revealing to him the mysteries
and magic of the world, a veritable ―zoo of the new. She imagines her
young son learning the names of tiny white flowers, and hopes that what
he sees through his ―clear eye‖ is always ―grand and classical. Together,
the first three stanzas are unambiguous expressions of her love, and
unfiltered optimism for his future. When she imagines the world outside
of him, she sees it as a cornucopia of lovely, pastoral experiences.

In the fourth stanza, however, the tone abruptly shifts. She suddenly
suggests that the world also carries with it "this troublous / Wringing of
hands, this dark / Ceiling without a star." The first three stanzas detail
the world as she imagines it for her child. The fourth stanza presents
reality as Plath knows it - an upsetting, anxious, and bleak existence. It
is almost as though, in imagining a lovely life for him, she suddenly
recalled that life is not limitless, but rather defined by limits (a "ceiling")
and pain. Further, there is an implication that she herself could be the
cause of the pain, as though her own emotional instability might inspire
him towards his own anxiety. The contrast is harsh and unambiguous,
as threatening as the first stanzas are promising.

In her influential book A Disturbance in Mirrors: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath

feminist scholar Pamela J. Annas looks at Plath's poetry in relation to the
repeating image of the mirror, and to her multiple evocations of self.
Annas briefly addresses "Child" from this perspective, noting that while
Plath's other late work seemed to have entirely rejected love and beauty
as possibilities in life (as exemplified in poems like "Daddy" and "Lady
Lazarus," as well as in her great prose work The Bell Jar), she did believe
"the one potentially uncorrupted and wholly positive love seems to be that
between herself and her children, for at least in that relationship one

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person's perception is as yet unspoiled by a knowledge of the world it
must live in." Plath hopes she can fill her child's life with positivity, but
"this is an embattled love and beauty, hemmed in and threatened on all
sides." In other words, the most painful feeling is the possibility of
positivity, since it brings the strongest reminder of the pain she was
feeling. Considering the poem from this angle, it holds an impressively
profound set of emotions, especially considering its brevity.

Daddy

The speaker of "Daddy" is obsessed with mortality – her father's mortality,

and her own. When the speaker's father dies, she sees killing herself as
a way to become reunited with him. She also declares that she has to kill
him. This poem explores the paradoxes of death, the afterlife, and
memories of the past. After all, "Daddy" is addressed to a dead person.

Who is the speaker, can she or he read minds, and, more importantly,
can we trust her or him? Usually we're super-strict about keeping the
speaker of a poem separate from the author of a poem. After all, poets
often create fictional personas who they imagine to be speaking their
work – not everything they write down is what they personally believe.
But the line between the real-life Sylvia Plath and the speaker of "Daddy"
is blurry. Plath's poetry is usually considered to be part of the
Confessional movement, and "Daddy" certainly reads like a personal
confession. Plath's father was a German immigrant, like the father in the
poem. He died when she was young (eight years old), though not quite
the same age as in the poem (ten years old). Plath, similar to the speaker
in the poem, tried to commit suicide. Plath was married to her husband
for about seven years when she wrote this poem, and the speaker's
husband sucked her blood for seven years. Despite these similarities, the
speaker in this poem is different from Plath, as the characters of the
speaker's father and husband are different from Plath's own father and
husband. She has made herself, and them, into characters. Common
sense and fact tell us that Plath's father was not really a Nazi, and her
husband was not a vampire. We can guess how Plath may have felt about
her husband and father, but we shouldn't take anything about her
relationships with these two men as fact from this poem. Sure, this poem
may reflect how Plath felt at the moment she was writing this poem, but
it would be unfair to make generalized conclusions about her
relationships from it. One of the main benefits of writing poetry rather
than, say, a memoir, is that it doesn't have to be non-fiction. You can
stretch the truth in poetry, as Plath does in this poem. The speaker is a
persona that Plath created so that she could write a poem that may be
based on her life, but isn't trapped by having to stick to the literal truth.

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Besides, if this poem were simply autobiographical, we'd miss out on all
the other cool meanings that it could have – like "Daddy" being a
metaphor for men in general, or a symbol of evil in the world. So, now
that we know the speaker is different from Plath, well, who exactly is she?
She's a tortured woman, who lost her father when she was so young that
he seemed huge and powerful, like God. Memories of him have caused
her pain – they've made her want to die. When dying doesn't work, the
speaker tries to find a husband just like her father. Her playful rhythm
and rhyme juxtapose with the desperation and violence of her language,
to make her words poisonous to these two men and their power over her.
This poem is like a stake in the heart of her disturbing memories – by the
end of the poem, she has killed them.

Lady Lazarus

The speaker is obsessed with death, both literal and figurative. She's
attempted to commit suicide in the past, and she keeps playing out
scenarios in her mind in which she's a victim of the Holocaust. Lady
Lazarus is not in a good mental place in the poem, that's for sure.

"Lady Lazarus" is an undeniably violent poem. It's filled with mangled

bodies, fierce circus crowds, and murderous Nazis. The best way that
Lady Lazarus (and, for that matter, Sylvia Plath) can communicate her
deep depression to us is through violent imagery and imagined
experiences. We don't know much about Lady L's life outside of the poem,
but her imagined life of brutal circuses and concentration camps is a
violent, horrific place.

The big, controlling metaphor of the poem is Lady Lazarus's comparison

of herself with the fate of the Jews who were slaughtered (all six million
of them) during the Holocaust. She compares her emotional suffering to
their physical suffering (and deaths). She takes on their suffering to
explain their own. Obviously, this daring move makes us ask a whole lot
of questions, but it's also a reminder that every line of this poem is going
to be majorly depressing.

Who is the speaker, can she or he read minds, and, more importantly,
can we trust her or him? The speaker of "Lady Lazarus" is Lady Lazarus
herself, and in that sense, this poem almost reads like a monologue.

She's extremely depressed, disturbed, and suicidal.

Her name references the figure of Lazarus from the Bible—a man who
died and was resurrected by Jesus. But there's no Lady L in the Bible;
our Lady is Plath's creation.

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Lady L is a whole lot like Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide not long
after writing the poem by sticking her head in a gas oven.

Despite her similarities to Plath, it's important to remember that poems

are not real life, and that Plath has gone out of her way in this poem to
speak in the voice of Lady Lazarus—not in her own voice. Thus, it's key
that we talk about Lady Lazarus when we discuss this poem, not Plath.
While the poem may give us a tiny little window into Plath's feelings, we
can't assume that we know her just because we've read one of her poems.

Lady Lazarus is one powerful lady. Despite all of her suffering, she seems
to have serious control over the one thing that matters most to her—her
language. She may often feel like a victim, but her words have serious
bits. She ends the poem by "eat[ing] men like air."

Violence:

Ted Hughes:

Some readers have led to believe that the author's intention in writing
poems as Hawk Roosting was to glorify violence, or at least to make
violent behavior acceptable. Hughes answered this charge directly in a
1971 interview. "Actually what I had in mind was that in this hawk
Nature is thinking. Simply Nature. It's not so simple because maybe
Nature is no longer so simple." Whether or not the poem expresses
approval of the behavior that its speaker describes is debatable; a strong
argument may be presented for each viewpoint.

Hughes in his very childhood (when he was only seven) experienced the
violent ferocity of nature when his family moved thirty miles south-east
to Mexborough. There Pennine hills and the wild moorland above
Mytholmroyd strongly influenced his creative imagination. In the poem
―Wind‖, he depicts the dark and violent role of nature. Wind, like a
demonic force, destroys and demolishes everything. It stampedes down
―the fields under the window‖; it leaves ―the woods crashing through
darkness‖ and the hills ―booming‖. The primitive nature of wind becomes
more prominent when the poet shows how it flings a magpie away and
how a black-back gull bends slowly like an iron bar.

Violence is nowadays part of our very existence since from the morning
till night we are the subjects and objects of violence. We come across
violence on our TV sets, on streets, in societies, in states, in countries,
and above all on the entire earth. Through violence we have destroyed
the beauty, innocence, and order of nature.

The violence Hughes projects in his poems is ―a greater kind of violence,

a violence of the great works.‖ He just points out the disharmony and

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imbalance in nature and suggests the ways of restoring them and making
the world a better place. In doing so he brings about the core cause of
cacophony and catastrophe in nature, which is without any doubt
violence. Hughes just manages to harmonize in his poetry myriad forces
existing in nature to retain truth, beauty and purity. ―To redress some
balance disturbed by human error‖ he brings his poetic world alignment
with unalloyed natural primitiveness. One can note that the jaguar‘s
indomitable spirit or the pike‘s cannibal nature or the bear‘s omnipotent
character or the hawk‘s godlike power just vibrates life, regenerates the
rotten conscience, brings purity in nature, and celebrates unbound
freedom which nature once enjoyed. Thus, his violence is of creativity and
beauty. Violence in Hughes ‘poetry amounts to energy, vigor and an
intense impulse of creation. An obituary on Hughes published in The
Sunday Times mentions that the forcefulness and animal vitality of his
poems injected new life into English poetry (unnumbered). Verily, Hughes
is widely read and will be read most particularly for his animal poems
expressive of an emblem of the ferocity of his own poetry, a vivid vitality
in all forms, and obviously an indomitable violence in all forces of
primitivism.

Sylvia Plath

Death is an ever-present reality in Plath's poetry, and manifests in several

different ways.

One common theme is the void left by her father's death. In "Daddy," she
goes further in claiming that she wants to kill him herself, finally
exorcising his vicious hold over her mind and her work.

Death is also dealt with in terms of suicide, which eerily corresponds to

her own suicide attempts and eventual death by suicide. In "Lady
Lazarus," she claims that she has mastered the art of dying after trying
to kill herself multiple times. She sneers that everyone is used to
crowding in and watching her self-destruct. Suicide, though, is presented
as a desirable alternative in many of these works. The poems suggest it
would release her from the difficulties of life, and bring her transcendence
wherein her mind could free itself from its corporeal cage.

Benjamin Zephaniah

Despite its humorous tone, White Comedy (from Propa Propaganda) is a

clear statement against racism towards black people and how ordinary
language can be so perverse. The use of the first person pronoun ―I‖‖
indicates that the author is participating in the action as a victim of
discrimination, slavery and physical violence due to his skin colour, as
he clearly states in lines 4 and 5 of 1st stanza and line 6 of 2nd stanza.

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Louis Armstrong’s song -What a Wonderful World- ‖ is parodied by
Zephaniah in a humorous work of intertextuality called Terrible World.
The poem pictures the author’s ironic vision of the world he has
experienced in first person in terms of police brutality, gender violence
and poverty: In 2nd stanza we see a whole example of children abuse by
pimps and priests and the third stanza deals more with poverty, rape,
death… Especially in its last two lines where death and poverty are
associated. Last stanza speaks about civilians‗ starvation while a lot of
many is invested in military troops.

The most striking element in The Death of Joy Gardner are the facts in
themselves. The author reports the true story of the arrest and death of
a woman immigrant in hands of the police. The image of her son watching
TV while the death of her mother is happening a few meters away shows
the cruelty of the event.

The irony comes to its highest in lines 5, 6, 7, ―She died, nobody killed
her, and she never killed herself‖. How can someone die without
committing suicide or being killed? This could be understood as an
accusation to the ones responsible of her death who were not found
guilty.

Canonical and popular:

In the post-war scene of poetry in English language, two different groups

of poets can be visualized.

The first group who write poetry following rules, principles and standards
accepted as axiomatic of this field (canonical.) Their poetry is targeted to
a reader with a middle/high class education. In the first group in this
unit we have studied Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Tony Harrison.

The second group (popular.) which multicultural and postcolonial poets

belong to, breaks all previous canons and forms a completely new poetry,

More specifically Dub poetry, based on orality and performed in front of

an audience; words as well as sound and rhythm create the poetic form
which can be understood by everyone, no matter, the age, the
background, the level of education etc.

Their turned their poetry into concert-like performances, so that everyone

could understand and enjoy the beauty of poetry, even who cannot read
and write.

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Symbolism:

Ted Hughes: Animals and Nature are personified or used as metaphors

or vehicles to focalize moments in the past.

Pike: Different perspective of the predator fish and the natural word lead
to the realization of how human beings have been wrongly imposing their
own vision of the world of animals.

Wind: description of an extreme weather condition, almost a violent

hurricane and its victims. Metaphor for creativity, the inspiration that
energizes the poet.

Daffodils: He remembers his past with his wife. Pessimist poem: the
daffodils are the past life that he didn‘t value while he was living it. The
scissor: an anchor to his misery and the cross he has to bear, a metaphor
of the lost marriage.

Hawk Roosting: The personified hawk means powerful self-assertion.

The hawk is a metaphor of the arrogance, narcissism, conceit and egoism
of man.

Sylvia Plath: Images of sickness, torture, sadness, anger, anguish and

pain.

Daddy: her father is compared to a black shoe, a statue, a Nazi, a

Swastika, a vampire.

Lady Lazarus: a male figure, a Nazi, God, Lucifer, symbol of male cruelty,
men’s value system and male god. She is “Jew linen”. The poem can also
be understood as a symbol of female artist’s struggle for autonomy in a
patriarchal society, the statement on how the powerful male figure
usurps Plath’s creative powers but is defeat by her rebirth.

Child: compared to a pool, a stalk.

Tony Harrison: he makes use of obscenity and sexual imagery to reflect

upon his youth.

Book Ends: is an extended metaphor about him and his father – although
they are similar they are far apart. It is structured into 2 lines rhyming
couplets to emphasis he and his father as a pair.

Multicultural and postcolonial poets: Their use of symbolism is minimal.

The poems are straightforward, easy to understand and address directly
the hearer/reader.

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The use of the vernacular in contemporary British poetry:

Tony Harrison: While using the tools of classic poetry he also uses his
own dialect, in order to deal with the connection between language and
power, that is, the way the ruling class keeps the working class in line
through culture, language and accent.

The underlying thesis of his poetry is that by ―owning‖ the language the
ruling classes have managed to maintain their social supremacy; the poet
has therefore taken up the task of speaking for those who cannot speak
for themselves (including the low-class social environment and family
where he grew up). He blends formal English with colloquial expressions,
words and accent from Leeds. He not only includes but celebrates
northern speech.

Multicultural poetry:

Benjamin Zephaniah Dub poetry is based on orality and vernacular

speech. His poetry presents multi-cultural element. Lexical choice and
diction derives from his Jamaican heritage, have disregard for past and
future tenses and write words as they are spoken. He often writes the
words as they are pronounced and not as they should be spelled. Often
dialect and Standard English are combined.

Postcolonial poetry:

The language is an important feature of this poetry for its uniqueness.

In 20th century poets began to use different dialects and vernacular

speeches.

Poets refers to it as their ―National language‖ as the basis of cultural

resistance and assertion, a tools of empowerment and as a means of
being subversive, while at the same tome deconstruction the English
literary canon.

Political in Tony Harrison and Benjamin Zephaniah:

Although from different cultural background, both Harrison and

Zephaniah have in common their belonging to lower social classes,
Harrison as a part of the working-class and Zephaniah as a son of
immigrants.

There is in Harrison‘s poetry evident tension between his working-class

upbringing and his upper middle-class education. Harrison considers
education as a political tool used in detriment of working-class culture
and values. Harrison specifically referred to this fact as ―the internal
colonialism of British education‖. He feels this conflict in his personal

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case and identifies with the oppressed lower classes, as in his poem “On
Not Being Milton”, where oppression hinges on the lack of articulateness
and the lower class has been rendered powerless by the English ruling
class, or in ―Them and [uz]‖ that deals with the way the ruling class keeps
the working class in line through culture, language and accent. In his
poem “Book Ends” we can observe how the distance between lower and
middle class has a reflection in the relationship with his father.

One of Zephaniah‘s main concerns is also education and its role in

perpetuating oppression. But he also addresses a wide range of political
themes. For example, in his poem “White Comedy” he deals with white
dominance and racism, police brutality is the subject of “The Death of
Joy Gardner” and western oppression, life in the ghetto and current social
and political events are treated in “A Terrible World”. In his poems, the
political becomes personal as Zephaniah includes himself in the group of
victims of the injustices that he denounces. This is indicated by the fact
that in all the poems mentioned before except one, “The Death of Joy
Gardner”, he uses the first person singular “I”.

Alienation in British postcolonial poetry:

Fred D’ Aguiar and Grace Nichols are two of the most important
representatives of postcolonial poetry. Both draw on their early Guyanese
childhood experiences and the loss of innocence, exploring the recurrent
themes in Caribbean literature of alienation from a metropolitan society.

Nichols explores the theme of alienation in children poems such as “My

Gran Visits England”, which contains a positive view on immigration. The
grandmother in the poem, when she arrives in England, searches the
connection between her home country Guyana and England and she
finds it in nature. The tone of the poem is thus conciliatory. Nichols’ Lazy
Thoughts of a Lazy Woman is a collection of poems that addresses themes
such as the immigrant experience and contemporary Diasporas.
“Wherever I Hang”, in this collection, is reminiscent of “My Gran Visits
England”, in a more adult version, since, at the end of the poem, the
speaker seems to have become reconciled with England, although still
has apparently more reservations than “Gran”. It expresses many of the
feelings that the author has experienced over the years: a yearning for
the past, alienation from a foreign, urban community, and her sadness
at leaving “calypso ways” behind.

D’ Aguiar shows a wider range of stance towards his adoptive country.

We can see an openly confrontational tone in “The Ballad of the
Throwaway People”. In this poem, immigrants are depicted as outcasts in
a hostile society. They are regarded as a “problem that won´t go away”,

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an epidemic, second class citizens that are not even allowed a decent
burial. In other poems D’ Aguiar’s voice changes to celebratory and
sentimental, because he feels that England is now his home. His nine
“Sonnets from Whitley Bay” are sad and sensual, and transmit a genuine
feeling of belonging.

Education in Benjamin Zephaniah´s poems:

The importance of education is a prominent subject in Zephania‘s poetry.

Specifically, his work School`s Out: Poems Not for School focuses on the
importance of education and the way in which educational institutions
can be oppressive and subordinating. There are two main critics to the
educational system in Zephania‘s work. The first one is to the access of
education as a means of social discrimination, so that lower classes keep
being oppressed by the higher classes, which gain economic and political
power through education. This idea can be seen in his poem ―Dis Poetry‖,
from his fourth book of poems, City Psalms.

Race in British multicultural and postcolonial poetry:

Two of the most important multicultural poets are Benjamin Zephaniah

and Jean “Binta” Breeze. They are also referred to as a “Dub Poet”
because their poetry is based on orality, as it emphasizes the spoken
word, and is accompanied by reggae rhythm. They usually deal with
identity in multi-cultural, multi-lingual Great Britain and in the case of
women Dub poets, sexism is a frequent theme as well. Zephaniah is a
second generation British poet, so he manifests his complete lack of
anxiety about declaring his Britishness and his enthusiasm to embrace
that identity. That is the reason why in many of his poems his choice of
language comes closer to that spoken in the United Kingdom. However,
his poems are riddled with multi-cultural elements and the presence of
his heritage. In his poems for children, Zephaniah tends to adopt a
conciliatory tone and stress the common links between different races.
For example, We Are Britain is a collection of poems written for and about
children, a celebration of cultural diversity in Great Britain. Each of the
twelve poems is about a child living in the United Kingdom and his/her
cultural environment. Zephaniah challenges traditional perceptions of
the way children live while pointing out that, despite their differences,
they basically share the same concerns and interests. However, there is
room in Zephaniah‘s work for racial vindication. Zephaniah‘s adults
poems are in fact much more combative, especially his collection Too
Black, Too Strong, which addresses the struggles of black Britain more
forcefully than all his previous books‖, according to the text on the back
cover. The poet‘s own introduction entitled, “What Am I Going on About”

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is especially interesting, since he discusses multi-cultural Great Britain,
and shares his reflections on identity, and being Black in this country.

Jean “Binta” Breeze is the first woman to write and interpret Dub poetry.
Among other themes, she deals with the problems of immigrants in
Britain, gender and race trouble.

Orality is also at the heart of postcolonial poetry. Among those poets, an

important group is the Caribbean writers, who have made language the
basis of cultural resistance and assertion of their racial identity. This is
well reflected on “Listen Mr. Oxford Don” by John Agard, a performer-
poet born in Guyana who blends Calypso with unique sounding spoken
word.

Nichols is the most well-known woman poet from the Caribbean. Slavery
and racism are some of her more prominent themes. Her series of poems
I is a long memorized chronicles the lives of black women who survived
the passage from Africa to the New World and the Caribbean and is told
from the perspective of a female slave. In “Skin Teeth” the female speaker
addresses the slave owner. The tone is rebellious and her threat is open
and direct. The speaker in this poem seeks to fight back the oppressor
that enslaves her due to the color of her skin. In her second poetry
collection, The Fat Black Woman’s Poems, she confronts the western
beauty canon, challenging racist and sexist stereotypes by reminding us
in poem after poem that to be beautiful, a woman does not necessarily
have to be thin and European. In “Thoughts drifting through the fat black
woman” head while having a full bubble bath” from that collection, her
fat black woman longs to be able to physically confront her oppressors
using her body to do so. The use of the word “steatopygous” is ingenious,
as it achieves two things: it increases the humorous tone of the poem,
and is highly allusive, because steatopygia is “an excessive development
of fat on the buttocks among some black women.

Fred D’ Aguiar is considered to be a member of the second generation of

Caribbean immigrants. History plays an essential role in his work, and
he focuses especially on the slave trade between Africa and the Americas.
For example, in “Letter from Mama Dot”, Mama Dot represents Guyana
herself and her letter to England focuses on the present economical and
political state of the former colony with respect to its colonizers. His poem
“The Ballad of the Throwaway People” is openly confrontational. It speaks
of the cruel discrimination against immigrants by British society.

Is contemporary British poetry postmodern?

According to DeHay, many features of post-colonialism overlap with the

basic tenets of postmodernism. There are five main elements that both

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post-colonialism and postmodernism share. I will proceed to list them
and provide examples from contemporary British poets that include
multicultural and confessional poets, along with post-colonialist poets.

The first element that DeHay considers is the decentering and

historicizing of the subject. This is especially relevant in the case of
postcolonial poets such as Grace Nichols and Fred D‘Aguiar. Nichols‘s
series of poems I is a long memorized chronicles the lives of black women
who survived the passage from Africa to the New World and the
Caribbean and is told from the perspective of a female slave. For D‘Aguiar,
history plays an essential role in his work, and he focuses especially on
the slave trade between Africa and the Americas. For example, in “Letter
from Mama Dot” Mama Dot represents Guyana herself and her letter to
England focuses on the present economical and political state of the
former colony with respect to its colonizers.

The second element is the employment of textual strategies in order to

subvert the dominant discourse, where irony and parody are the most
commonly used. Multicultural and postcolonial poets often use humor,
irony and parody in their works. For example, in “White Comedy”
Zephaniah cleverly inverts the words “white” and “black” to call our
attention to the derogatory use that we often confer to the latter. The
poem makes a cultural and political statement while doing so through
humor. Likewise, in “Terrible World” the poet resorts to humor by
parodying Louis Armstrong‘s song “What a Wonderful World” while
dealing with a number of very serious themes like police brutality, gender
violence and poverty. In “Thoughts drifting through the fat black woman‘s
head while having a full bubble bath”, Nichols mocks the vocabulary of
official discourse, that of scientists, anthropologists, historians and
theologians while using her body to repudiate them and to break through
the barriers of the western beauty canon. Tony Harrison, in the opening
poem of The School of Eloquence, “On Not Being Milton” is sardonic and
subversive.

The third element is the presence of deconstructive strategies within the

text. As it has already been mentioned, the inversion of words in
Zephaniah‘s “White Comedy” can be considered as a deconstructive
strategy in order to call our attention to the derogatory use that we often
confer to the latter. Ted Hughe‘s Crow sequence can also be considered
to use a deconstructive strategy. He reworks the legends of the Creation
and the Apocalypse from a nihilistic point of view. Crow is inspired by the
Native-American mythical figure of the Trickster –a mischievous and
disruptive character, often a raven, that frustrates God‘s plans by
bringing about chaos and destruction. God is at first indulgent, and tries

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to teach Crow human skills and emotions and change his selfish nature.
But he fails in his efforts, and the Trickster haughtily invents his own
Theology. By creating the quasi-human figure of Crow, Hughes explores
the human psyche.

The fourth element is the questioning of historical certainties while

criticizing the notion of realism. In this regard, Ted Hughe‘s “Hawk
Roosting” has been interpreted by some as a “fascist” symbol of a horrible
totalitarian genocidal dictator‖. The reader is presented with the
reflections of a hawk that is surveying the world as it rests on a tree-top.
The hawk kills those who challenge his authority, and the result is that
nothing can or will ever change. Tony Harrison‘s From „The School of
Eloquence‟ and Other Poems deals with history, language and culture,
and the connection between language and power. Also, a different
perspective of history and slavery has been provided, as mentioned
earlier, by Grace Nichols and Fred D‘Aguiar.

The fifth element is the rejection of universals and essentialism. Sylvia

Path attacks universal patriarchal values in poems such as “Daddy”,
where the father figure is represented as a Nazi, or “Lady Lazarus”, whose
end lashes out at men, their system of male values, and their male god.
Tony Harrison often identifies with an exploited class whose oppression
hinges on its lack of articulateness and has been rendered powerless by
the English ruling class. In “Them and [uz]” he deals with the way the
ruling class keeps the working class in line through culture, language
and accent. Also, multicultural and post-colonial poets have rendered a
different view on race.

Britishness and Englishness:

Although Britishness or Englishness entails, generally, a sense of

belonging and of nationhood, in Tony Harrison's poems, the reader will
find a rupture from that ideal of nationalism. His writings exude a more
politicized and, even, anti-system and anti-British focus. In his Collected
Poems, he underlines his Loiners roots by using colloquial expressions
and vocabulary from Leeds. He also deals with the struggle of northern
society trying to break away from English self-centeredness.

Multicultural poets such as Benjamin Zhepaniah and Jean “Binta”

Breeze attempt, also, at parting away from any connection with
Britishness. Zephaniah emphasizes the everyday struggle of black people,
criticizing the lack of space in nowadays British culture and literature. At
the same time, his poems are constant reminders of the harsh and cruel
consequences of British colonialism and how the British society of today

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has to come to terms with its brutal past in many of its colonies. In that
way, Zephaniah wants to break up with the idyllic notion of Britishness.

On the other hand, Jean “Binta” Breeze focuses on challenging the

homogeneity within Britishness models by including in her works race
and gender issues and the struggle of those mentally ill.

Postcolonial writers have also dwelled on the idea of “otherness” within

the concept of Britishness. With Caribbean roots and an immigrant in
London, John Agard in “Listen to Mr Oxford Don” gives voice to those who
have not in the self-centered British society, the immigrants. Grace
Nichols in Whenever I hang also reflects on the feeling of isolation of
immigrants in a new country.

Rhythm and music in multicultural British poetry:

The use of rhythm and music in multicultural poetry aims at subverting

the canon and presenting a new view, a view of “otherness” within the
generally acclaimed literary works. Dub poets, like Benjamin Zephaniah
or Jean “Binta” Breeze, use a sort of chanted speech and exaggerated
intonation in order to infuse Caribbean rhythms into their poems. With
this, not only are they vindicating their Caribbean roots and their
inclusion in nowadays British culture but, also, they are contributing to
transmit poetry to more segments of society (youngsters, immigrants,...).

An excellent example of the role of rhythm in poetry is Dis poetry by

Zephaniah. The poem is full of alliterations that give rhythm and
musicality to the work: “Dis poetry is like a riddim dat drops”. The short
length of the lines confer speed and cadence and help the reader/listener
to memorize easily what is being narrated. In a way, dub poetry brings to
the mind oral epic poetry and rhapsodes.

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