Depression and Ted Hughes's Crow, or through the Looking Glass and What Crow Found There

Abstract

Two aspects of Ted Hughes's Crow: From Life and Songs of have proved hard to swallow for some critics, namely, book's language and its imagery, or as Roy Fuller puts it, the pathological violence of its language, its ideas, its sadistic imagery (297). Fuller points out three things here, although it might be more accurate to speak of antiliberal humanist ideas, assuming that has any ideas of its own, which is not certain. any case, epithet anti-human seems to reflect here only ideas, or rather ideals, of certain type of criticism. Writing from much same point of view, Geoffrey Thurley finds a somewhat inhuman, even brutal book, with none of broad strength of best of Hughes's earlier poems. It remains to be seen whether Hughes's abandonment of is ultimately justifiable (189). abandonment of human perspective in is really no more than abandonment of transparent language of metaphysical self, language that bears no recognition of its material (linguistic, cultural, unconscious) determinants. If book can be conceived of as reflective surface, then it is cracked one, one that fails to give any return on humanist preconceptions, or rather returns them in distorted fashion, in pieces. For critic anticipating corroboration of certain literary expectations or ideals, seems to allow of only one response: Calvin Bedient's words, is total nihilist, while is the croak of nihilism (101, 114). CARNIVAL Other criteria than human[ist] perspective are clearly needed if is to be read as anything more than nihilistic lack of returns, as book that sadistically refuses to reciprocate any human idea. Calvin Bedient touches on crux of question: In most of these poems Hughes wastes himself. master of language who tosses words on page - can any aesthetic justify this (114)? Given tile plurality of discourses that inform - biblical narratives, myth, cartoon strip, science, psychoanalysis - and bearing in mind slapstick way in which these discourses are thrown together, book might be 'justified after Bakhtin as carnivalesque literature. What Bakhtin calls the direct authorial (Dialogic 301) is difficult to locate in Crow, in Bakhtin's words, poet here is speaking language, language that has somehow more or less materialized, become objectivized, that he merely ventriloquates (Dialogic 299). To read words at face value is therefore to miss point. Hughes's seemingly evasive comment that poems wrote themselves(1) is to be taken literally: figure of is as much as anything else device for testing out cultural narratives and meanings that are already there, that have already been written; does not so much produce meaning as reaccentuate it, blackly. relationship to language is thematicized in number of poems: Crow's First Lesson, A Disaster, The Battle of Osfrontalis, Crow Goes Hunting. What these poems materialize at level of theme is radical otherness of word as experienced by Crow: Words came with Life Insurance policies - feigned dead. Words came with warrants to conscript him - feigned mad. Words came with blank cheques - He drew Minnie Mice on them. (The Battle of Osfrontalis) - etcetera. Figured as an agent of negativity with regard to ideologically loaded word, only way forward in his quest for self-definition is through kind of discursive loophole. This loophole is dialogical discourse as proposed by Bakhtin and elaborated by Kristeva: In its structures, writing reads another writing, reads itself and constructs itself through process of destructive genesis (Desire 77). Neither cartoon nor Bible story, neither poetry nor prose, improvises its own dialogic space that is littered with fragments of discursive collisions, collisions that concretize and relativize mish-mash of scripture and physics in and through which is, in Hughes's words, intermittently conscious (Reply 111). …