(no subject)
Considering in detail one or two poems, how far and in what ways do you think prejudice is an important issue in Harrison’s poetry?
Tony Harrison, the son of a Leeds baker, won a scholarship to Leeds Grammar School in 1948. Growing up in war time and post-war Britain, he was in a position to see firsthand the inhibitions against, and suspicion of social mobility, at the time; both in the form of his growing alienation from his parents, and the snobbery of his teachers.
Coming from such a background and given that his work is mainly concerned with describing the working class society around him, prejudice cannot help but be one of the themes he writes about.
Heredity, Harrison’s epitaph to School of Eloquence begins with the patronising, “how you became a poet’s a mystery”. When read out loud the stress is on the “you”, which gives it connotations of “you of all people,” or “Someone like you”. This suggests the speaker thinks there is a type of person that makes a poet, and cannot believe “someone like” Harrison could ever have such control over language. Many of his sonnets, like Bookends One and Two, are Meredithian Sonnets. George Meredith was a poet of a working class background, who later tried to hide his origins. It could be said that Harrison, in using Meredith’s structure, but by describing aspects of working class life, not hiding that part of him, as Meredith did, he is challenging social perceptions that the working class cannot produce art. However, there is also the practical side to consider. There is a sense in which Meredithian Sonnets are more flexible than other sonnet structures, as they don’t need a volta, or have a set rhyme scheme; this flexibility perhaps is what attracted Harrison.
In Bookends One and Two, Harrison’s father snaps “You’re supposed to be the bright boy with description….you can’t tell them what the fuck to put!”. The plosive alliteration of “bright boy” makes it sound like he is mocking his son’s “bright”ness, and wondering what it is for. The way Harrison’s father says “you’re supposed to be the bright boy…and you can’t tell them what the fuck to put” suggests that he thinks that seeing as his son is well-educated and good with words, he ought to be able to take control of the situation and at least think of an epitaph for his mother. This reflects wider society’s prejudice that those with an education are better able to articulate their feelings than those without. In fact, both Harrison and his father sit in “sullen silences and sullen looks”. By drawing attention to the similar way he, classically educated, and his uneducated father deal with grief, Harrison demonstrates that educated people also have problems expressing themselves. His father says, in Bookends Two, “it’s not as if we’re wanting…a whole sonnet”, which is ironic, because the Bookends are sonnets. In this irony there is the suggestion that perhaps it would have been easier for Harrison to write a sonnet, than to try and condense what he wants to say into something short enough be carved onto a gravestone. Harrison again makes the point that education, even if it gives you a certain familiarity and ease with words, is not the key to articulacy about your feelings.
In v. I think the clearest way that Harrison exposes prejudice is with the image of the skinheads. On finding the graves sprayed “PAKI GIT” and “NIGGER”, he immediately blames “Skinhead spraycans.” This sibilant alliteration makes “skinhead” and “Spraycans” seem almost like one word, and the word order suggests Harrison is describing the spraycans themselves “skinhead”, by virtue of the fact that they’ve sprayed “Nigger” on tombstones. By the 1980s, with the rise of fascist white-power skinhead gangs, racism was widely seen as an integral part of skinhead subculture. Harrison plays on this prejudiced view to create in the mind of the reader or listener a powerful image of a thoughtless, self-righteous swastika-tattooed thug. He then goes on to disappoint our expectations, because when we meet Harrison’s skinhead double, he is not a mindless racist. He is an embittered cynic, very aware of the class struggle going on in Britain at the time, whose vitriol is saved for middle-class intelligentsia like Harrison, as shown when he spits, “yeh’ve given yerself toffee, cunt…it’s not poetry we need in this class war.” Harrison subverts the stereotype, and by doing so highlights society’s prejudice. In this way, Harrison shows up three types of prejudice. There is the racism of the people who did spray the tombstones, and his own stereotyping of skinheads as racist. There is also the suspicion of verbosity and academia that the skinhead- Harrison displays; he attacks Harrison for only getting his “tongue round fucking Greek”, and feels like people speaking eloquently are showing off or “treating [him ] like [he is] dumb” as opposed to just talking how they normally talk.
Harrison describes his father as feeling “squeezed by the unfamiliar”. When something is being “squeezed”, it has pressure on all sides, so while there is no room for it, it cannot move either. This metaphor suggests that Harrison’s father feels like there is no space for him any more, but at the same time he is being hemmed in. The alliteration of “fear of foreign food and faces” binds “Food and faces” together, suggesting Harrison’s father’s fear is of foreignness and strangeness in general, as opposed to a specific dislike of foreign people. The violent racism of the people who sprayed their support of the National Front on the tomb stones is juxtaposed with the less militant prejudice of Harrison’s father. Whereas they, jobless and resentful, blame “Pakis” and “niggers” for their state, Harrison’s father just sees the world he knew changing faster than he can cope with, and is reacting by becoming more and more wary of people and things he finds alien. To a certain extent, there could also be some similarity drawn between the vandals and his father; both are frightened about the future, because they had a certain view of the world that no longer fits with the reality. For Harrison’s father, it was that the community he lived in would not change. For the unemployed vandals, it was that there would always be work for them. In drawing this comparison, Harrison points out that we are all a prey to our expectations, which we tend to view as a right. Rather than being surprised when our expectations are not fulfilled, we are affronted, and try to justify our beliefs with extremist views or aggression.
Therefore, prejudice is a strong theme throughout Harrison’s poetry. However, he does not reserve his depictions of prejudice to any one class, which, after all, would be stereotyping. He encompasses a cross section of society. True, the person saying “Wherever did you get your talent from” in Heredity might be a patronising middle-class southerner, on the other hand, it could be his mother. It could be elements of both. Perhaps the way we interpret it reflects our own prejudices about what “sort of person” says what.