Alison
I cannot argue nor disagree with you on the subject of 'erasure', what you
say is profoundly true, but 'erasure' doesn't just apply to female voices,
the reality of our inherited culture has been that most voices are male but
also that they wrere only 'certain' males, oddities like John Clare might
have got through but in the main disenfranchisement of voice extended to
most people, regardless of gender. Women got a worse deal than males, that I
agree with, but it doesn't mean that all men were free to speak.
The Duffy poem is becoming a headache: I think we probably are in agreement
about its literary merits, what seems to be the latest issue is the question
of 'female desire'. Well, we all have desire, whether male or female, I
can't see that the gender of origin is somehow morally superior, myself I
incline to the 'Past reason hunted, past reason hated' school of thought, I
hate the fact that I have used others as objects at times in my life,
although of course the argument against would be biological necessity, i.e.
people have to fuck in order to reproduce the species.
Which oddly enough brings me to Shakespeare: while watching Hamlet last
night I forgot the presence of the author, a crucial point, I wasn't
thinking 'this is a great poet' but rather 'this is great poetry' it didn't
matter who it was by, not what gender nor class etc just there was the real
thing.
Back to the Duffy poem, I am old enough to have talked to people who were
servants in Edwardian times, and I can aver that they did not have the
attitudes portrayed in her poem, they hated what they had to do. One of the
moot points that is lurking in this debate is the Condition of England in
1914, sentimentalists like Larkin or Hartley depict it as a Golden Age, the
reality was that the country was on the verge of Civil War and only the
outbreak of WWI stopped that. Even the schoolkids were going on strike. the
counterpoint is to say that Duffy's poem is 'contemporary', as you do, but
then one has to ask what is it contemporary about? And why does it have all
the trappings of realism?
More I could say but am starting to yawn myself, give me the publishing
details of Atomised btw, I'd like to have something to be really angry
against!
All the Best
Dave
David Bircumshaw
Leicester, England
Home Page
A Chide's Alphabet
Painting Without Numbers
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/index.htm
----- Original Message -----
From: "Alison Croggon" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, January 06, 2003 10:27 PM
Subject: Re: "form" (Commanders of the British Empire)
At 7:22 PM +0000 1/6/03, david.bircumshaw wrote:
>Where I do have problems is the suggestion that Duffy's poem is not
>connected to issues of class, I can't see how anyone can look at a poem
>which is ostensibly in the 'voice' of an Edwardian/Victorian servant and
not
>register the issue of class.
Hi Dave - I wasn't saying that it wasn't connected to class at all: I
was saying that to claim the poem is unthinkingly restating class
stereotypes is to ignore the issue of female desire working within
the poem: which is after all what the poem is "about". It seems to
me impossible to talk about that poem without taking that into
account: and yet your analysis scarcely mentions it, except
dismissively as a tawdry fantasy; nor does it explore the
implications of its presence, which is intended to destabilise the
class assumptions implicit in the poem, as well as the hierachies of
language it plays with. (Btw, if the poem doesn't use the language
of the times, doesn't that suggest that it's a contemporary poem
making a metaphor?)
Your erasure of the presence of that desire is precisely what the
poem is arguing _against_; it's an erasure which has been hallowed by
centuries of Western art, which instates the possessiveness and
ownership of the male eye and the passive nature of the female
(nature, property &c) as exploitable owned object. I'm saying that
the class thing is much more complex in the poem than you're
suggesting, not that it's not there. Hierachies work along many
vectors, not just one: a routine removal of the female as perceiving
subject, or the sentimentalisation of the female, are deeply embedded
habits in our literary canons. But all this has been talked about so
much as to make me yawn saying it, and all that talk sometimes seems
to make no difference to actual behaviours: the same erasures occur
again and again. The latest one to ignite my ire is Michel
Houllebecq's Atomised, which I think is a total fraud of a book (but
you have to read the whole thing to find that out). But that's an
aside.
I quite agree there are much more successful literary workings of
these ideas than this poem, which as Liz says, doesn't really bear
the weight of these discussions very well. I too have problems with
its language... in the end, I don't think it's especially
interesting. But it's only fair to discuss it on its own terms, to
see what it _is_ in fact doing.
Best
A
--
Alison Croggon
Home page
http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
Masthead Online
http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/
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