‘A series of images against you and me’: Richey Edwards’ portrayal of the body in Journal For Plague Lovers
2020; Intellect; Volume: 10; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1386/punk_00033_1
ISSN2044-3706
Autores Tópico(s)Visual Culture and Art Theory
Resumo‘It is at the level of the body that we proceed’ (David Foster Wallace, The Pale King ). Although there has been critical analysis of Richey Edwards’ lyrics on the post-punk album The Holy Bible , there has been little analysis of his final published lyrics from the folder that Edwards left prior to his disappearance, as used for the 2009 album Journal For Plague Lovers ( JFPL ). As Wodkte (2016) states in her chapter in Triptych: Three Studies of Manic Street Preachers’ The Holy Bible , ‘ JFPL uses the body and skin as texts of difficult knowledge and abjection’. Over the course of JFPL ’s lyrics, the human form is dissected, distorted and eventually the physical envelope is ruptured. The narrative offered by each album track is considered in order to examine this. This article expands on the small number of previous analyses of Edwards’ lyrics in two ways: (1) it contrasts JFPL to Giacomo model for understanding modes of artistic output (considering textscapes, soundscapes and landscapes); and (2) this article builds on applications of Greenblatt’s (1983) concept of ‘self-fashioning’ in relation to JFPL . The article concludes that in Edwards’ lyrics, a number of metaphors reconfigure the malleability of the physical body and expand the concept of how self-fashioning can be applied in relation to it.
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