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Tony Harrison, the Gulf War and the poetry of protest

2005; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 19; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09502360500091618

1470-1308

Aanne Whitehead,

Race, History, and American Society

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeKeywords: Acknowledgement I would like to thank Professor Desmond Graham for his careful reading of the draft version of this article and for his valuable comments and suggestions. Notes 1 Alan Rusbridger, ‘Tony Harrison and The Guardian’, in Tony Harrison: Loiner, ed. Sandy Byrne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 133–6 (p. 135). 2 Quoted in Susan Mitchell, ‘Beyond the lens’, http://www.worldpress.org/Europe/665.cfm, accessed 3 June 2004. 3 Marita Sturken has observed that because military censorship was instituted so strictly, the images were not seen live, although claims that the footage was ‘live’ predominated nevertheless. See Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, The AIDS Epidemic and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley, C.A.: University of California Press, 1997), p. 126. 4 Don McCullin, ‘This is war’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,895618,00.html, accessed 27 May 2004. 5 Don McCullin, ‘This is war’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,895618,00.html, accessed 27 May 2004. 6 Don McCullin, ‘This is war’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,895618,00.html, accessed 27 May 2004. 7 John Berger, ‘Photographs of agony’, in The Photography Reader, ed. Liz Wells (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 288–290 (p. 290). 8 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003), p. 9. 9 See Tony Harrison, ‘Initial Illumination’, in The Gaze of the Gorgon (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1992), pp. 46–7. 10 Philip M. Taylor, War and the Media: Propaganda and Persuasion in the Gulf War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 82. 11 Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, trans. Paul Patton (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 32. 12 See Tony Harrison, ‘A Cold Coming’, in The Gaze of the Gorgon, pp. 48–54. 13 Rick Rylance, ‘Doomsongs: Tony Harrison and War’, in Tony Harrison: Loiner, pp. 137–60 (p. 145). 14 Quoted in Bloodaxe Critical Anthologies I: Tony Harrison, ed. Neil Astley (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1991), p. 9. 15 Tony Harrison, ‘Facing up to the muses’, in Bloodaxe Critical Anthologies I: Tony Harrison, pp. 429–54 (p. 437). 16 Antony Rowland, Tony Harrison and the Holocaust (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001), p. 26. 17 Quoted in Richard Hoggart, ‘In conversation with Tony Harrison’, in Bloodaxe Critical Anthologies I: Tony Harrison, pp. 36–45 (p. 43). 18 For a detailed analysis of rhythm in ‘A Cold Coming’ see Martyn Crucefix, ‘The drunken porter does poetry: metre and voice in the poems of Tony Harrison’, in Tony Harrison: Loiner, pp. 161–70 (pp. 162–6). 19 T. S. Eliot, ‘Journey of the Magi’, in Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber, 1974), pp. 109–10 (p. 109). 20 Ian Gregson, ‘How does it feel? Thoughts on Tony Harrison's poem “A Cold Coming”’, London Review of Books, 14 May 1992, p. 23. 21 Luke Spencer, The Poetry of Tony Harrison (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994), pp. 118, 119. 22 Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, p. 62. 23 Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, p. 23. 24 Joe Kelleher, Tony Harrison (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1996), p. 67. 25 Tony Harrison, ‘Facing up to the muses’, p. 436. 26 Tony Harrison, ‘Facing up to the muses’, p. 440. 27 Kelleher, Tony Harrison, p. 53. 28 The CBS cameraman Jim Helling, who was with Jarecke when he took the photograph, has described the image as ‘the face of war’. 29 Kelleher, Tony Harrison, p. 50. 30 Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 87. 31 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Abacus, 1988), pp. 63–4. 32 Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 2. 33 Rowland, Tony Harrison and the Holocaust, p. 79. 34 Paul de Man, ‘Autobiography as de-facement’, in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), pp. 67–82 (p. 76). 35 Paul de Man, ‘Autobiography as de-facement’, in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), pp. 77, 78. 36 Quoted in Sarah Jackson and Annabel Merullo (eds), The Eye of War (London: Weidenfield & Nicolson, 2003), p. 255. 37 Kelleher, Tony Harrison, p. 54. 38 Harrison, ‘Facing up to the muses’, p. 445. 39 Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, p. 72. 40 Kelleher, Tony Harrison, p. 53. 41 See Wilfred Owen, ‘Strange Meeting’, in War Poems and Others, ed. Dominic Hibberd (Sydney, Australia: Random House, 1987), pp. 122–3. 42 Dominic Hibberd, Owen the Poet (London: Macmillan, 1986), p. 177. 43 Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, p. 82. 44 Paul Patton, ‘Introduction’, in The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, pp. 1–22 (p. 19). 45 Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘The Revolt of Islam’, in Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 31–158 (pp. 81, 82). 46 Hibberd, Owen the Poet, p. 176. 47 Hibberd, Wilfred Owen: A New Biography (London: Weidenfield & Nicolson, 2002), p. 311. The latter reference is to Owen's 1912 poem ‘Supposed Confessions of a Secondrate Sensitive Mind in Dejection’. 48 For more on disproportion in ‘A Cold Coming’, see Dominic Rainsford, ‘Numbering pain: testimony, quantification and need’, Discourse 25; 1 and 2 (2003), pp. 19–35 (pp. 22–4). 49 ‘The pity of war’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/leaders/story/0,3604,895202,00.html, accessed 10 June 2004. 50 Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, p. 102. 51 Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, p. 104. 52 In the 1991 Gulf War, The Sun almost equalled its performance in the Falklands War by printing a full-colour front page which carried only a Union Jack flag with the face of a soldier in the middle. The newspaper appealed to its readers to display this in their windows to pledge their support for the war. Harrison combines his reference to the Falklands with this ‘flag-bedecked page 1’. 53 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2004), pp. 131–51. 54 See Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985).