'Eros/Thanatos a pair': The Dialectic of Life and Death in Tony Harrison's Laureate's Block

Abstract

The dialectic of life and death is a persistent theme in Tony Harrison's poetry. Some of his greatest poems are dominated by this subject: 'A Kumquat for John Keats', 'Cyprus and Cedar', 'The Lords of Life', to name just a few. Critics have repeatedly highlighted this feature: Sandy Byrne's pioneering book states that 'most reviews of Harrison's work begin by saying that it is concerned with division, or that it is dialectical'; she then goes on to state that '[m]any of the poems' protagonists abound in ambiguities, inconsistencies and paradoxes'.1 In a much quoted interview with John Haffenden, Harrison sketches out that fundamental paradoxical division of his personality: If I had to divide the heart and the head, I would say that my head faces human history, and has a very bleak and pessimistic view of the possibilities for mankind, while at the same time I am very conscious of having a very sensual, celebratory nature: much of my work seems to be a confrontation of the two.2 Various critics have commented on this paradox in connection with the 'American poems' mentioned above, but little has been said so far about the imagery of this life/death antagonism in Laureate 's Block. My contention is that it is the central feature of this volume and that a detailed analysis in terms of Roman Jakobson's metaphor/ metonymy dichotomy reveals that Harrison sees these two poles of human existence as a metonymie, organic unity rather than a metaphoric contrast. The 'bolts of annihilation' pervading Harrison's generally lifeaffirming poetry have already been diagnosed by Antony Rowland in his book tracing the poet's obsession with the Holocaust. In a fine reading of 'A Kumquat for John Keats' Rowland delineates the