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TODO LO QUE NECESITAS PARA LITERATURA INGLESA IV
TODO LO QUE NECESITAS PARA LITERATURA INGLESA IV
1. Representation of history.
2. Characterization in Possession.
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a similar role to Ellen, Ash's wife, who live only to take care of her
husband, trying to compensate the 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 LeMinier is working on a nearly unpublished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and four unpublished novels.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.
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
“shieldwolf” 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
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the air 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
“bloodrelationship, 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.
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in the 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.
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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 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:
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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
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The Gothic Story
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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 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
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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.
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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,
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
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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
lifealtering 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.
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
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.
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LaMotte’s relationship with the
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engulfing her creative genius. She prizes her self-possession, her
solitude, because it enables her to live outside social conventions and
pursue her writing.
13. Intertextuality:
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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:
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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.
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(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 work. Mise en abîmeis, roughly speaking, the French
equivalent of English terms like 'frame narrative' or 'fiction within-
fiction'.
17- Metafiction:
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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:
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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:
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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:
1. Narrative techniques:
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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:
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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:
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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).
6- Postmodern novel:
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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:
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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, 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:
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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.
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.
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9- Doppelgänger:
26
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.
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
27
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)
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
28
1. Use of silence:
29
2- Theatre of the absurd:
30
Dumb waiter
31
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.
6- Dramatic characterization:
Gus
32
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
classconsciousness 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 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
33
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 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:
35
mundane discussion before their job. Gus‘s questions to Ben are
ignored.
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.
36
Postmodernism is not an approach to drama criticism as it is an
approach to fiction or other semiotic
practices but drama can also reveal
interesting possibilities when viewed in the
light of postmodernism and Pinter is a very
good case of postmodernist writing.
9- Setting:
Is Wilson upstairs?
10- Violence:
37
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 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:
38
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 (although Pinter's Gus and Ben are simpler names and simpler
characters than Beckett's Vladimir and Estragon).
39
relationship to the character, similar to how Estragon feels about
Vladimir and Godot. 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
42
Whose lilies and muscular tench Had outlasted every visible stone
“DAFFODILS”
43
Nobody else remembers, but I remember. Your
44
Opened too early.
shiverers
April by April
Sinking deeper
45
46
47
DADDY
Ach, du.
My Polack friend
An engine, an engine
48
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
49
I made a model of you,
Lady Lazarus
I have done it again.
I manage it——
50
A sort of walking miracle, my skin
My right foot
A paperweight,
Jew linen.
my enemy.
Do I terrify?——
At home on me
I am only thirty.
What a trash
Shoves in to see
Gentlemen, ladies
knees.
51
I may be skin and bone,
It was an accident.
I rocked shut
As a seashell.
Dying
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels real.
Amused shout:
‘A miracle!’
There is a charge
It really goes.
52
And there is a charge, a very large charge
Or a bit of blood
I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
Ash, ash—
A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.
Beware
Beware.
53
Out of the ash
54
TONY HARRISON: Poems
Allotments
Choked, reverted Dig for Victory plots
55
Stroked nylon crackled over groin and bum
Heredity
How you became a poet's a mystery!
56
National Trust
Bottomless pits. There’s one in Castleton, and
stout upholders of our law and order one day thought its
hush from his warder and winched him down; and back,
(Cornish)—
Book Ends.
Long Distance
Though my mother was already two years dead
57
Dad kept her slippers warming by the gas,
Turns
I thought it made me look more 'working class'
Marked with D.
58
When the chilled dough of his flesh went in an oven not
Dis Poetry
Dis poetry is like a riddim dat drops
Preaching follow me
59
Dis poetry is not Party Political
Chant,
In de morning
I chant
In de night
I chant
In de darkness
An under de spotlight,
Dreadfull Ghettology.
60
Dis poetry stays wid me when I run or walk
Below me an above,
It goes to yu WID
LUV.
White Comedy
I waz whitemailed
By a white witch,
An white lies,
I slaved as a whitesmith
Whitelisted as a whiteleg
Don't worry,
Terrible World
I’ve seen streets of blood
61
Just bodies dead And
I think to myself
Well interfused
Denying peace
a football pitch.
Nobody cared
Civilians starve
She died,
62
And she never killed herself.
Return to Jamaica
In 13 feet of tape,
63
They make not one mistake,
Is a little overstanding
Introductionary Chant
64
JEAN “BINTA” BREEZE: Poems
65
66
Earth Cries
67
Could it be
68
GRACE NICHOLS: Poems:
"Wherever I Hang"
I leave me people, me land, me home
I forsake de sun
So I pick up me new-world-self
De misty greyness
Like beans
Divided to de bone
69
My Gran was a Caribbean lady
As Caribbean as could be
She'd hardly put her suitcase down when she began a digging spree
Skin Teeth
“Not every skin-teeth is
a smile 'Massa'
you pass
70
Know that I smile know
that I bend
again”
Thoughts drifting through the fat black woman's head while having
a full bubble bath
Steatopygous sky
Steatopygous sea
Steatopygous waves
Steatopygous me
Steatopygous sky
Steatopygous sea
Steatopygous waves
Steatopygous me
71
JOHN AGARD: Poems: Listen Mr
Oxford don
Me not no Oxford don
me a simple immigrant
I didn't graduate
I immigrate
a dangerous one
split/ up yu syntax
to mash/ up yu grammar
a wanted man is a
dangerous one
72
Dem accuse me of assault on de
I tekking it quiet
dangerous weapon
if necessary
kingdom of Ashante
73
Sold on monday into slavery
74
The New Poetry:
75
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”:
76
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
77
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
78
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.
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
79
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 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
80
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:
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
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.
81
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
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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 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
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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.
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.
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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.
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."
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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 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
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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
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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:
Symbolism:
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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.
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:
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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:
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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”, 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:
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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” 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
performerpoet 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
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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?
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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 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
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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:
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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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