Reflections on Stephen Alexander's 'I Want to Hold Your Hand' - A Guest Post by Sally Guaragna

Stephen Alexander:  

I Want to Hold Your Hand (2024)

 

Stephen Alexander's disturbing self-portrait accompanied by Myra Hindley is a stark reminder of the fact that evil lurks around every corner and that the radiant innocence of childhood offers no protection; as the parents of the young girls murdered in Stockport last month discovered to their horror [1].

 

It also reminds us of the fact that the Swinging Sixties began not only "Between the end of the 'Chatterley' ban / And the release of the Beatles' first LP" [2], but with the Moors murders - just as it ended in an equally brutal and depraved manner with the Tate-LaBianca murders carried out by the Manson Family in the summer of 1969. 

 

The fact that the photo of the artist as a child is for the most part entirely genuine - taken in 1966 at Southend-on-Sea - only adds to its power. The only change made (non-digitally) is the replacement of the head of Alexander's sister with that of a woman dubbed by the press as the most hated woman in Britain. 

 

Alexander explains: 

 

'I cut out the famous police photograph of Hindley taken shortly after her arrest in 1965 and pasted it by hand directly on to the photo of my sister. I wanted it to look like a mask being worn. A mask more terrible even than the one worn by Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), because it depicted the face of a rather glamorous young woman who, with her peroxide blonde bouffant, reminded me of a much-loved aunty in the 1960s whose hand I would happily hold.'    

 

Alexander's is a great image; one that, in my view, deserves to be hung alongside Marcus Harvey's controversial 1995 painting made using casts of an infant's tiny hand to create a giant mosaic of Hindley:   

 

 

Marcus Harvey: Myra (1995) [3]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] On 29 July 2024, a mass stabbing occurred at a dance studio in Southport, Merseyside. Three children were killed, and ten other people - eight of whom were children - were injured, some of them critically. A 17-year-old male was arrested at the scene and charged with murder, attempted murder, and possession of a bladed weapon.

 

[2] Philip Larkin, 'Annus Mirabilis', first published in The London Magazine, Vol. 9, No.10, (January 1970): click here. 

 

[3] Marcus Harvey's 1995 painting Myra caused a lot of fuss when it was displayed at the Sensation exhibition of Young British Artists at the Royal Academy of Art in London from 8 September to 28 December 1997: four members of the RA resigned in protest at its inclusion; windows at Burlington House, where the Academy is based, were smashed; the painting was vandalised twice (by fellow artists); and a children's charity accused the RA of the 'sick exploitation of dead children'. Even Hindley wrote from prison to ask for her portrait to be removed from the exhibition.

 

 

To read another post by Sally Guaragna - reflections on my 'When the Moon Hits Your Eye' photo (5 May 2023) - please click here. 

To Hull and Back (In Memory of Gillian Hall)

Lucy Beaumont / Michelle Dewberry

 

 

I. 

 

Lucy Beaumont and Michelle Dewberry are the two women I love most on British television. The former is a comedian and writer, who once worked on the meat counter at ASDA; the latter, a businesswoman and broadcaster, who once worked on the tills at Kwik Save. 

Both are blonde: both are beautiful: both are smart, sexy, and successful - so what's not to love? 

 

However, the thing that makes them particularly attractive - for me at least - is the fact that they share a distinctive English accent, both coming as they do from the fabled city of Hull ...

 

 

II. 

 

Now, I know that Hull - or Kingston upon Hull to give it its royal name - is not everybody's favourite place on earth; Philip Larkin once described it as a fish-smelling dump full of drunken dullards. But even he came to recognise its charms eventually, including, perhaps, its cream-coloured telephone boxes [1].

 

I know also that not everyone finds the Hull accent with its amusing vowel sounds - including the letter 'o', which sounds as if it should have an umlaut over it - as alluring as I do, but there you gö [2]. 

 

I suppose, when I think about it, the reason I like to listen to Lucy Beaumont and Michelle Dewberry on the telly, is because their accent triggers a certain romantic nostalgia, reminding me of lost love and times gone by. 

 

Reminding me, that is to say, of Gillian, the beautiful young punk and self-styled scorpion goddess from Hull [3], with whom I was romantically involved back in the early 1980s and who introduced me to the delights of coition, as well as Humberside.

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Philip Larkin moved to Hull in 1955 to take up the post of head librarian at the university. He soon began expressing his negative feelings for the city and its people in letters written to friends: 'I'm settling down in Hull all right. Every day I sink a little further.' 

      However, he gradually found things to like about Hull, where he lived and worked for thirty years, producing most of his greatest poetry, including 'Here', which opens his collection The Whitsun Weddings (Faber and Faber, 1964): click here to read online. 

      Readers interested in the Larkin/Hull love/hate relationship might enjoy Stephen Walsh's article in The Guardian (30 May 2017): click here.

 

[2] Those who study this kind of thing refer to it as a metaphonic mutation. It means that whereas, for example, the word goat is pronounced ɡəʊt in standard English - and ɡoːt across most of Yorkshire - it becomes ɡɵːʔt̚ in and around Hull. 

      An example of the Hull accent can be found in the British Library's Accents and Dialects Collection: click here to listen to a working class teenage schoolgirl, named Jessica Hardcastle, speak about her family, friends and social life. 

      Readers might also find an article by Jasmine Andersson (23 Jan 2020) on the i News website of interest: click here. 

 

[3] As a matter of fact, Gillian was from Leven, rather than Hull; one of those isolate villages on the outskirts of the city, where lives are clarified by loneliness, as Larkin would say.  

 

  

On Myth and Literary Criticism

Northrop Frye (1912-1991) 

Photo by Andrew Danson 
The Canadian Encyclopedia

I.

Many (anti-modernist) writers continue to exploit ancient myths as a literary resource, even when they have ceased to be meaningful in any vital sense. And many critics still like to delve into what Philip Larkin referred to dismissively as the myth-kitty in order to interpret what they might otherwise find impossible to comprehend. 

As Deleuze and Guattari point out, there's nothing easier than to read in this way; "you can always do it, you can't lose, it works every time, even if you understand nothing" [1] and even if the mythological (and related psychological) approach to literature is ultimately reductive; i.e., one that degrades the object of its study.   

II.

I suppose if there is one name above all others associated with myth-crit, it is that of Northrop Frye, author of Anatomy of Criticism (1957), a work whose very title betrays a certain morbidity of thinking and the fact that Frye ultimately regards literary criticism as a mortuary enterprise. 

Frye posits the idea that all literature is founded upon myth - particularly myths concerning the cycle of the seasons and different phases of the agricultural year. Even the most sophisticated fiction can thus be read as archetypal - i.e., full of archetypal characters, archetypal events, and archetypal themes. 

For me, this is a form of monomania: or, at the very least, it is shaped by myopia. For in order to view things in this manner he has to turn a half-blind eye to the huge differences between modern literature and ancient myth, forcing everything individual into what Nietzsche calls a universal mould, so that all sharp corners and distinct outlines are blunted and blurred in the interest of uniformity.       

An archetypal approach will never have much time for precision; it will always deal in approximations and generalities. It is a distorted and deceitful understanding of literature that integrates and coordinates difference into a network of correspondences and similarities so as to "render consistent with one another categories that are no longer compatible in the modern understanding of the world" [2].

Ultimately, Frye and his followers use myth to reinforce the reign of the Stereotype and crush production of the New, thereby preserving the old order or what D. H. Lawrence refers to as the Great Umbrella.

Any contemporary text - even the most avant-garde in character - is immediately coordinated within the archetypal framework and even the most transgressive authors are passed off as myth-makers who are concerned with universal truths and eternal patterns of meaning, rather than singular events and unique individuals.   

Frye effectively covers everything and everyone in a thick layer of maple syrup (or what Barthes terms doxa). Supporters may pretend to locate within his criticism all kinds of potentially liberating elements, but it best serves to support a model of bourgeois realism based on the essential facts of human experience; i.e., those things that go without saying and thus need no further explanation. Far from opening up the future, he uses the past to reaffirm the present.


III.

Like Frye, the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer is another idealist who fantasises about a mythic unconscious and treats myth as a primordial symbolic form; i.e., a kind of non-discursive language that is not only more archaic than logic, but also more vital.

For Cassirer, modern writers who explore the recesses of mythic consciousness should be valued above all others; for they keep us in touch with the very springs of our humanity. But as one critic asks, how can Cassirer and his admirers possibly know this:

"As we have no way of demonstrating that the mythopoeic ability of a modern writer is an archaic residue [...] there is not much point in saying it unless one happens to thrill at the very suggestion that primitive vestiges are present in modern man." [3]

This sounds a little flippant, perhaps, but I think a crucial point is being made here. For despite the "dreary earnestness of so much myth-critical writing", there is little doubt that many readers find the language used strangely seductive, resounding as it does with "awe-inspiring words [...] which promise to [...] put us directly in touch with the eternal and the infinite and the Wholly Other" [4].

In short, the language used by myth-critics is basically a rhetorical trick for soliciting approval from the faithful.

But like Deleuze and Guattari, I'm more interested in critics who suggest experimental methods of reading, rather than simply interpret a text; who ask how a book works, rather than what it means; who concern themselves with surfaces and lines of flight, rather than origins and depths.

For like Deleuze and Guattari, I think the aim of criticism is not to rediscover the eternal or universal, but to locate the conditions under which something new might be produced. Great books are never really concerned with the recounting of past experiences and memories - nor are they a place in which one merely confesses one's dreams and fantasies. They are, rather, sites of becoming and, as such, concerned with multiplicities, not myths.

Notes

[1] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (The Athlone Press, 1996), p. 41. 

[2] Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence, (Polity Press, 1994), p. 114.

[3] K. K. Ruthven, Myth, (Methuen, 1976), p. 74.

[4] Ibid., p. 78. 

This post is a revised extract from 'On the Abuses and Disadvantages of Mythology for Life: A Timely Meditation', in Stephen Alexander, Visions of Excess and Other Essays, (Blind Cupid Press, 2010), pp. 219-253. For a related post - also extracted from this essay - on Nietzsche, Voltaire, and myth, click here.

Larking About with Philip Larkin

The Larkin Toad by Frances Kelly 
Image: The Philip Larkin Society

I.

When it comes to how we view and remember our poets, I'm all for a certain irreverence. But I don't like caricatures that mock without affection; particularly if they also seem to display a poor reading of the author's work.

In other words, whilst a cruel misportrayal of a writer is objectionable, a crass misinterpretation of their text is unforgivable.  

And so we come to the case of Philip Larkin and his representation as a giant toad during Larkin 25 ...

II. 

2010 was the 25th anniversary of Larkin's death and an arts festival in Kingston-upon-Hull culminated on 2 December with the unveiling of a life-size bronze statue of the poet by Martin Jennings. The unveiling was accompanied by Nathaniel Seaman's Fanfare for Larkin, which had been specially composed to mark the occasion.

Although born in Coventry, Larkin had lived and worked (at the Brynmor Jones Library) in Hull from 1955 until his death thirty years later and the city had even named a bus in his honour, so fair enough that the good people thereof should regard him as one of their own and choose to celebrate his life.

However, I'm not sure the centrepiece of the festival is something they can look back on with pride: a work consisting of 40 fibre-glass toad sculptures, each painted with a unique design by a local artist and inspired - or so it's claimed - by Larkin's poetry. Central amongst the designs was The Larkin Toad, by Frances Kelly.

Even at the time, voices of concern were raised. It was said that were it possible for Larkin to have posthumous knowledge of himself reincarnated in bufonid form with dry, leathery skin and short, fat little legs, this would send him spinning in his grave. And Rachel Cooke wrote of the toad stunt that it was:

"so loopily against the spirit of the two poems that are their inspiration - 'Toads' and 'Toads Revisited', in which the squatting toad, impossible to shake off, is both a symbol of work and of the narrator's timid and confining personality - I find myself wondering whether their creators have actually read either one."

And that's the fatal criticism in my view; not that it mocks the man - in whom, by his own admission, something sufficiently toad-like squatted inside - but that it misunderstands (and sells short) his writing.  

Notes 

Rachel Cooke, 'In search of the real Philip Larkin', The Observer, (27 June 2010): click here to read online. 

'Toads' (1954) and 'Toads Revisited' (1962), by Philip Larkin, can be found in Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite, (Faber and Faber, 2003).  

For a sister post to this one - on why I love Larkin - click here. 

Why I Love Philip Larkin (The D. H. Lawrence Birthday Post - 2018)

Portrait of Philip Larkin by gforce7 (1996)

deviantart.com 

There are many reasons to love Larkin - and doubtless just as many to hate him. 

Primarily, of course, is the body of work he left behind. Whatever the shortcomings of the man, these were more than compensated for - as if they needed to be - by the strength of his writing. He's unarguably one of our finest post-war poets, something which even most of his critics concede.

But I also love Larkin for his porno-fetishistic interests, his peculiarly English pessimism that is both ironic and understated, and the fact that he declined the honorary position of Poet Laureate when offered it in 1984 (having already turned down an OBE in 1968). A lyrical discontent, Larkin disliked fame and had no time for the trappings of success.       

And then - perhaps best of all - there's his love for Lawrence, whose work his father introduced him to and whom he regarded as the greatest of all English novelists throughout his life. Indeed, such was Larkin's devotion to DH that, according to his biographer, he even liked to mow his lawn whilst wearing a Lawrence t-shirt and drink his tea from a Lawrence mug.     

See: Andrew Motion, Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life, (Faber and Faber, 1994). 

For a sister post to this one - on Larkin and the Larkin Toad - please click here. 

Save the Hedgehog

Photo: Tim Melling /Getty Images 

As a rule, I don't like the idea of saving anything, be it a whale, an immortal soul, or a sum of money. Whenever someone says we need to save this, that, or other, I always wonder from what and for what. It seems a slightly futile - if not ultimately a nonsensical - concept.

However, in the case of the hedgehog I'm willing to make an exception, because it's such an exceptional little beast; one of the earliest mammals and little changed in its spiny perfection for the last 15 million years. 

It also, of course, has a special place in the affections of the British; indeed, in a recent poll, it was voted our favourite wild species. But as author and journalist Tom Holland asks: If we love hedgehogs so much, why are we letting them vanish?

The answer, of course, is because we prefer to convert our gardens into driveways and eat McFlurries in a lifeless concrete world, sprayed with pesticide. We might anthropomorphically fantasise about Mrs Tiggy-Winkles, but we are supremely indifferent as a nation to the demise of the humble hedgehog, whose numbers have crashed dramatically over the past 20 years (down by over 30%).

Today, entire regions of the country are hedgehog-free zones. As Holland notes, an animal once ubiquitous in our fields, parks, and gardens is now facing extinction. It's a national shame: we encourage other peoples around the globe to protect their tigers, pandas, elephants and gorillas, but we can't even ensure the survival of our own small creatures. 

I wholeheartedly agree with Holland that we have an ethical duty to protect our wildlife; to be kind, while there is still time, as Larkin wrote in a mournful verse after accidently killing a poor hedgehog with his lawnmower.   

Notes

Tom Holland, 'If we love hedgehogs so much, why are we letting them vanish?', The Guardian (9 Sept 2018): click here to read online. 

Philip Larkin, 'The Mower', Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite, (Faber and Faber, 2003): click here to read on The Poetry Foundation website. 

For a related post to this one, on hedgehogs versus HS2, please click here.

We Are All Hunchbacks

One must inevitably clash with those individuals - such as my sister - who are beyond reason and kindness; those who are fatally burdened with history and round shouldered with memories of the past, allowing this to deform and define who they are.

To be crippled and subjectified in this manner - to literally have too much behind one - is to suffer cruelly. But, as Zarathustra says, if you take away the hump from a hunchback you take away their soul.

Besides, are we not all of us to a greater or lesser extent hunchbacks? That is to say, are we not all of us made a little monstrous by our parents and our upbringing? 

As Philip Larkin so memorably pointed out in verse, the misery and resentment that we feel and spend a lifetime trying to overcome is passed down the generations just as surely as certain genetic conditions, including debilitating forms of kyphosis: 

They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do.

If only my sister could be made to understand this, then she might learn not only to think a little more philosophically, but be a little happier - which, in turn, would make me a little happier and enable us to develop a connection of some kind.

Notes: 

For Zarathustra's encounter and discussion with a hunchback, see 'Of Redemption', in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Philip Larkin's 'This Be The Verse', from which I quote, can be found in Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite, (Faber and Faber, 2003).

This Be the Post

They fuck you up, your mum and dad. 
They may not mean to, but they do. 

From my mother I get: 

My urgency, my phobias, my obsessive character, my estrangement from the world and my prejudices (I do not eat tins of tuna, buy things from a market stall, or trust Cockneys). In a word, from my mother I get my complexity.

From my father I get:

My passivity and lack of worldly desire or ambition, my inability to prosper and almost Christ-like unconcern for those things belonging unto Caesar. In a word, from my father I get my saintliness.