20th century AD

Two aspects of Ted Hughes's Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow have proved hard to swallow for some critics, namely, the book's language and its imagery, or as Roy Fuller puts it, "the pathological violence of its language, its anti-human ideas, its sadistic imagery" (297). Fuller points out three things here, although it might be more accurate to speak of Crow's antiliberal humanist ideas, assuming that Crow has any ideas of its own, which is not certain. In any case, the epithet "anti-human" seems to reflect here only the ideas, or rather ideals, of a certain type of criticism. Writing from much the same point of view, Geoffrey Thurley finds Crow "a somewhat inhuman, even brutal book, with none of the broad strength of the best of Hughes's earlier poems. It remains to be seen whether Hughes's abandonment of a human perspective is ultimately justifiable" (189). The abandonment of a "human perspective" in Crow is really no more than the abandonment of the transparent language of a "metaphysical" self, a language that bears no recognition of its material (linguistic, cultural, unconscious) determinants. If the book can be conceived of as a reflective surface, then it is a cracked one, one that fails to give any return on humanist preconceptions, or rather returns them in distorted fashion, in pieces. For the critic anticipating the corroboration of certain literary expectations or ideals, Crow seems to allow of only one response: In Calvin Bedient's words, "Hughes is a total nihilist," while Crow is "the croak of nihilism itself" (101, 114).

A CARNIVAL

Other criteria than a "human[ist] perspective" are clearly needed if Crow is to be read as anything more than a nihilistic lack of returns, as a book that sadistically refuses to reciprocate any "human idea." Calvin Bedient touches on the crux of the question: "In most of these poems Hughes wastes himself. A master of language who tosses words on the page - can any aesthetic justify this" (114)? Given tile plurality of discourses that inform Crow - biblical narratives, myth, the cartoon strip, science, psychoanalysis - and bearing in mind the slapstick way in which these discourses are thrown together, the book might be '"justified" after Bakhtin as carnivalesque literature. What Bakhtin calls "the direct authorial word" (Dialogic 301) is difficult to locate in Crow, in Bakhtin's words, the poet here is speaking "through language, a language that has somehow more or less materialized, become objectivized, that he merely ventriloquates" (Dialogic 299). To read Crow's words at face value is therefore to miss the point. Hughes's seemingly evasive comment that the poems "wrote themselves"(1) is to be taken literally: The figure of Crow is as much as anything else a device for testing out cultural narratives and meanings that are already there, that have already been written; Crow does not so much produce meaning as reaccentuate it, blackly.

Crow's relationship to language is thematicized in a number of poems: "Crow's First Lesson," "A Disaster," "The Battle of Osfrontalis," "Crow Goes Hunting." What these poems "materialize" at the level of theme is the radical otherness of the word as experienced by Crow:

Words came with Life Insurance policies -

Crow feigned dead.

Words came with warrants to conscript him -

Crow 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 the ideologically loaded word, Crow's only way forward in his quest for self-definition is through a 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 a process of destructive genesis" (Desire 77). Neither cartoon nor Bible story, neither poetry nor prose, Crow improvises its own dialogic space that is littered with the fragments of discursive collisions, collisions that concretize and relativize the "mish-mash of scripture and physics" in and through which Crow is, in Hughes's words, "intermittently conscious" ("Reply" 111).

On this reading - Crow as carnivalesque discourse - the book's violent and bizarre imagery involving bodily distortion and dismemberment is assimilable to Bakhtin's notion of the "grotesque," defined by Bakhtin as "The specific type of imagery inherent to the culture of folk humor in all its forms and manifestations" (Rabelais 30). "Material" processes of birth, death, copulation, growth, disintegration, and dismemberment around which the grotesque bodily image gravitates are opposed by Bakhtin to "the classic images of the finished, completed man, cleansed, as it were, of all the scoriae of birth and development" (Rabelais 25). Seen in this light, the imagery of Crow seems to articulate a kind of grotesque groundswell (of bodily life), rupturing and denaturing the naturalized codes of Judeo-Christian morality and Western scientific objectivism, codes that otherwise threaten to foreclose Crow's attempts to figure his own meaning.