‘Prick-tease of the soul’: negative dialectics and the politics of Tony Harrison’s v.

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper argues that, despite being classified as an unambiguous political statement against the Thatcherite government, Tony Harrison’s v. is a complex exercise in negative dialectics that resists revealing a clear polemical stance. A close reading of the poem, focusing on its structure, its indebtedness to Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, and finally its representation of the female body throughout the narrative, reveals that the politics of v. are unable to articulate themselves in an unambiguous way. The ‘v’ that constitutes a catalogue of ‘versuses’ for the poet-narrator delineates the struggles of the poem: the conflicted poet-narrator against the disaffected skinhead; the poet’s desire to foreground his personal subjectivity against his desire to subsume it; the poet’s insecurities about his masculinity against his desire to create a ‘working marriage’ uniting masculine and feminine. These conflicts play out through the poem without resolution, revealing that neither of the two main characters in the poem, nor the poem itself, present an integrated course of action or even a fully articulated reaction to the socioeconomic moment that Harrison chooses as its setting. Rather than a feasible political stance, Harrison’s v. performs the sort of negative dialectics advocated by Theodor Adorno.