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Steven Berkoff figuring figuration


 

 
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Figuring Figuration by Deborah Knight
THE PLAYS

VII  Social Discourse in Literature

In much the same way as Berkoff appears to consciously take on identities to suit his purposes, the script of his play Greek could be interpreted as proposing a similar project for women. While the role for the female protagonist is introduced as ‘Waitress’, it changes once she is liberated from the husband who maltreats her, becoming not ‘Mum’ as she logically should, but ‘Wife’. Although an objection could be made that Eddy remains himself throughout whereas her identity remains tied to her social function, obviously the point that is being made is that it is her mode of relating to her life-partner that is the essential factor and not the role society has bestowed upon her regardless of whether or not she is aware of the blood ties she shares with her new husband. These changes are evidently destined for the reader’s eyes alone as they serve in the text to allocate words to the same actress but are never spoken aloud, suggesting a silent form of revolution which would have more to do with a change in the way woman interprets her role in society’s overriding script than in rejecting her part altogether. Paradoxically it is not the real mum who becomes a wife that is being called into question, but all the real wives who play the parts of waitresses and mums. Rather than serve their husbands’ sexual needs as waitresses or cater to their daily requirements as a-sexual mums, wives could perhaps interpret their role in marriage as nothing other than a wife, on a decidedly equal footing with their husbands.

It would be nice to think that everyone could change their enactment of their life roles for others better suited as the need was felt. However, as Sailor 1 of Sink the Belgrano! inadvertently demonstrates, the myriad ‘invisible’ beliefs that govern us render our ability to alter the course of our lives far more difficult than would be supposed, however perspicacious we may believe ourselves to be. Priding himself on his ability to think for himself, this sailor asks the others on board The Conqueror who they think they are there to protect and for whom, and is horrified by Sailor 2’s robotic response: ‘For self-determination of the Falkland folk / To make an omelette you gotta break some yolks’  (153). The lack of a coherent link between these two statements reveals them to be clear cases of unthinking quotation. While the clichéd use of the idiom is too common to necessitate commentary, Sailor 1 nonetheless picks him up on his understanding of the term ‘self-determination’:

‘What’s self-determination, mate?  
Do you know what the f*ck it means?
You just shove big words down your throat
Like when mum gave you medicine…
Now open up and down it goes, good boy.
Whenever hard truth won’t go down
We grease the way with subtle quotes,   
Self-determination, paramount, law and order,
All that crap. Old Adolf smashed Slovakia
[Ref 2-50]
To protect his German hordes
Sudetenland [Ref 2-51] must have, he said,
Self-determination for those Nazi bores.  (153-4)

Well informed as he may hope to sound, Sailor 1 not only gets his geography and hence his facts wrong, but resorts to blind quoting himself. Although his citation shows he has understood the fascist undertones of Hitler’s perverse appropriation of the term ‘self-determination’ to signify the tyrannical seizing and re-allocation of land to dictatorially confer ‘independence’ upon others, he is obviously no more in possession of the true sense of the expression than his colleague, despite his belief in his autonomy. That he does not follow his reasoning through is clearly evinced when he nevertheless announces that he will fight, all the while continuing to attempt to reconcile his individual right to think freely with the mindless patriotic obedience demanded of the soldier. His very presence on the submarine contradicts his strident protestations, showing him to be every bit as guilty of compliance as Sailor 2:

Sailor 1

I’ll fight… I’ll hold a gun… I’ll kill
I’ll support the Union Jack, so help me I will
But I’ll not stuff a sock in it
I’ll not become a sponge for all
Just use your brains and think at last
Before it’s blown away because
You kept your brainbox up your ass.   (154)

In fact, the very term ‘self-determination’ is adroitly chosen to illustrate the point being made, as it houses two distinct meanings of which one, upon reflection, clearly influences and therefore nullifies the other. Signifying both ‘the ability to make a decision for oneself without influence from the outside’ and ‘the right of a nation or people to determine its own form of government’ (Collins Concise), the second sense calls to mind all of the socializing decrees that hold a civilization together by regulating the behaviour of its citizens. Hence, the expression’s two meanings actually introduce the hermeneutic dilemma discussed in chapter 2. How can we determine things without influence from outside? How can we envisage something new when every attempt to re-interpret is perversely prefigured by the social discourses that preside over us from the outset? Let us look at some examples from East, Massage and Lunch that illustrate the difficulty individuals experience in perceiving clearly enough to free themselves of their illusions.

7.1 The ‘socializing’ effects of gender-related discourses

 

John Osborne

Despite Berkoff’s declared dislike of John Osborne’s plays, it is possible that the work of this playwright has been more of an inspiration to him than he would care to admit. If a critic felt ‘bruised’ by the ‘verbal artillery’ of Osborne’s Look Back in Anger in 1956 [Ref 2-52], Berkoff’s spectators could just as easily be excused for feeling as if they have been singled out by the firing squad of an actor’s monologue, in which the words are unremittingly pounded out from the edge of the stage much as bullets are sprayed out from a machine gun, atomising everything that lies within their range, only to be superseded by another, whose monologue is just as demanding in its need to be heard, and then another’s and so on [Ref 2-53].

Two advantages to Berkoff’s distinctive way of juxtaposing monologues instead of having his characters speak in dialogue is it gives them the opportunity to divulge their particular worldview and reveal the social discourses that rule them, just as this method also evinces how very little their convictions enable them to effectively perceive the Other and take his or her actions or feelings into consideration. Whereas a great deal of experimental theatre attempts to shock its viewers out of their supposed complacency by demolishing the simple binary oppositions that hold society together, Berkoff juxtaposes both the individual’s personal conflicting perceptions and the incompatible viewpoints of distinct characters attempting to relate, making us marvel at how these binary oppositions succeed in thriving so naturally in internal and external cohabitation.

Considering first the internal life of the individual, if Sailor 1 cannot get off the ‘boat’ of the overriding patriotic discourse that rules him, Sylv of East can no better extract herself from her self-harming delusions. The following passage demonstrates how very rapidly she swings backwards and forwards between her disagreeable perceptions of her environment and her relation to it, and the phantasms she creates to make her experience concord with the prescriptive ideals for women a far more refined society than hers continues to dictate. In this passage she gives her version of the fight between Mike and Les, romantically seeing Mike’s blood as having been gallantly shed for her, despite going on to tell us in the same breath that he has subsequently left her in the belief that she purposely provoked it:

At it they went… it weren’t half fun at first it weren’t my fault those jesting-jousting lads should want a tournament of hurt and crunch and blood and shriek… all on my dress it went… That’s Micky’s blood I thought… it seemed to shoot up from something that cracked… I saw him mimicking an oilwell… though he’d take off many things for a laugh this time I did not laugh so much… they fought for me… thy blood my royal Mick wast shed for me and never shall the suds of Persil or Daz remove that royal emblem from that skirt that many times you gently lifted in the Essoldo Bethnal Green. I was that monument of flesh thy wanton hands would smash and grab, I only clocked [Ref 2-54] the other geezer Mike, and can I help if my proud tits should draw their leery eyes to feast on them… and now a hate doth sunder our strong love and never more will my soft thighs be prised apart by his fierce knees with ‘open them thou bitch before I ram a knuckle sandwich in thy painted boat [Ref 2-55] ’. I miss him true in spite of all and did not wish to see him mashed and broken like a bloody doll… but now the bastard blameth me for all and seeks vile vengeance on my pretty head… which if he tries will sorely grieve my brothers Bert and George who will not hesitate to finish off the bits that Les did leave but all this chat of violence I hate… is ultra horrible to me that thrives on love and tongue-wrenched kisses in the back of MG Sprites with a ‘stop I’m not like that!’… Oh just for now which doth ensure a second date, so hold a morsel back girls and he’ll crave it all the more. (12)

 

Knight

Although her acutely observed caricature of Mike’s mannerisms and speech show her to be fully cognizant of his abusive behaviour, the language Berkoff uses to give her voice clearly indicates the nature of the romantic fantasies she entertains that relegate this knowledge to the murky depths of her subconscious: if likening herself to a fair damsel two ‘jesting-jousting lads’ have fought a ‘tournament’ over remains plausible, her endeavour to make Mike’s violent treatment of her fall within the category of ‘courtly love’ can hardly be said to be successfully achieved by expediently labelling it ‘strong love’.

Berkoff East

In fact, a later instance in which she again quotes him shows her to be fully aware of the single-minded motivation that underlies not his proclamations of love, but his imperial demand for her ‘religious’ devotion, even if her use of the verb ‘quest’ hints that the wishful thinking that reverses their roles in her mind lingers on: ‘(“Doth thou not love me then”) he quests (“nor feel my intense pain, then see me not again, for you must sacrifice thy altar of lust-pink and pornographia to my tempered sullen and purple swollen flesh.”)’ (19).

Having ‘waited’ on Mike for the duration of his ‘dive in and out… more a whip in, like a visit – quick, can’t stay just sheltering from the rain – cup o’tea hot and fast’ (19), her resulting anger has to struggle to be heard above the conditioned maternal ‘instincts’ that come rushing in to revive her devotion:

my tears those holy relics of young love tracing mortal paths to Elysium [Ref 2-56] down my cheeks... while the 'he' with fag choke and smoke... tooth-grin-zip-up... me lying looking at the future flashing across the ceiling. He, flashing his comb through his barnet and reddened cheeks blood soaked (like a saucy cherub, so lovable sometimes you know how boys have this lovely thing about them, some little-boy habit that makes them adorable, crushable-eatable-sweetable-dolly cuddly though sometimes you could kill them) and me lying there a pile of satiate bone and floppy tits flesh-pinched and crack-full of his slop containing God only knows what other infernos but thought I tasted something very strange on his straining dangle which he is wont to offer to me sacrificial like…  (19, my emphasis)

 

Berkoff East

Of course Sylv has never seen the inside of a MG Sprite, let alone effectively made her boyfriends’ libidos, or hers, conform to the rules, and yet the recognizable girlish language that mobilizes the maternal ‘instincts’ that reinstate Mike in her affections shows these last to more probably originate in the closest teenage magazine to hand; the very same that no doubt taught her to recite so glibly the well-worn tenet of holding ‘a morsel back, girls’ and to elevate her sordid reality by taking refuge in dreams.  

 In fact, Sylv proves beyond a shadow of doubt that she has more than adequately integrated the altruistic ‘reflexes’ traditionally required of women (that perversely make their contradictory feminine duty to aspire to virtue so hard to fulfil), by going so far as to munificently call the ‘pile’ of ‘bones’ Mike leaves ‘satiate’. He is not so easily fooled, as his mocking description of her 'fluting gurgled falsettos’ (17) – ‘Mike oh Mike… What dost thou dooo!…’ (17) - indicates every bit as much as it makes manifest how little he cares. Well can he ‘flash his comb’ through his ‘Barnet fair’ (hair), for as far as he is concerned he has been to the ‘adult’ [Ref 2-57] amusement park Sylv’s mode of dress has shown him the way to. Her following description of her appearance in the third person shows to what extent she delivers herself unto the media’s dictates for women, just as this exterior sign of the relinquishment of her autonomy also hints at how conveniently it exempts her from all responsibility for the consequences: ‘Sylv: She were in ingredients of flesh-packed suavely fresh... deodorized and knicker white... lip gleam and teethed... shoes thick-wedged with seam running up the back of her leg as if to point the way to tourists pruriently lost...’ (15):

Mike

She became with me a fun palace in which almighty raging Technicolor and panoramic skin-flicks and three-act dramas would be enacted, a veritable Butlins in one piece of equipment shaped-round-curve and press the button lights flash up… there’s the bell and off to round one… (16)

Preoccupied with watering and feeding his ‘snarling beasty’ (18), Mike hardly notices Sylv beneath him allowing herself to get ‘snarled beneath his bristly glass-edged jaw’ (18, my emphasis). Thankfully Berkoff’s alliteration makes the causal link between these two opposing experiences clear, as the actual participants’ awareness of their own and each other’s lack of presence is well nigh nil. The last line of the indented quotation from page 19 of East cited above bears witness to the extent to which Sylv’s thinking is muddled, as Mike can hardly be said to be offering her a ‘sacrifice’. Accustomed to submitting slave-like to his sexual whims, the first line of the same passage paradoxically reveals her to thereby nurture an image of herself as appertaining more nearly to the land of the Gods than he, even if the state of bliss such a dwelling place is supposed to confer upon its inhabitants is somewhat marred by her tears. By imagining these last to be ‘relics’ of young love tracing ‘mortal’ paths through the land of the dead, Sylv romantically elevates the ache of first love on one level of her consciousness while subconsciously figuring the pain of glimpsing to what extent the chivalrous romantic love a bygone culture ensured her would lead to a ‘future’ of married bliss is absent from her relationship with Mike.

Once again it seems likely that John Osborne’s confrontational juxtaposition of readings from pornography and love poetry in his A Sense of Detachment which took London by storm in 1972 may well have inspired Berkoff’s East three years later, as this last so perfectly illustrates how little the diametrically opposed discourses that respectively target boys and girls contribute to their capacity to relate to each other. Margaret Atwood comments wryly on this difference in her essay entitled “Pornography”:

What happens when boy educated on porn meets girl brought up on Harlequin romances? The clash of expectations can be heard around the block. She wants him to get down on his knees with a ring; he wants her to get down on all fours with a ring in her nose. Can this marriage be saved?

 (Daughters of the Revolution: Classic Essays by Women 144)

Boys learn their concept of masculinity from other men… If word gets around that rapists are “normal” and even admirable men, will boys feel that in order to be normal, admirable and masculine they will have to be rapists? Human beings are enormously flexible, and how they turn out depends a lot on how they’re educated, by the society in which they’re immersed as well as by their teachers. In a society that advertises and glorifies rape or even implicitly condones it, more women get raped. It becomes socially acceptable. (144)

The hero of romance knows how to treat women. …. Nothing hasty, physical. Some heavy breathing. Searing lips pressed against the thin stuff of her bodice. Endearments muttered into her luxuriant hair. “Little things mean a lot”…. Most men know nothing about this female fantasy world because they are not exposed to this kind of literature and the commerce of romanticism. The kind of man who studies this kind of behaviour and becomes a ladies’ man whether for lust or love or cupidity is generally feared and disliked by other men as a gigolo or even a queer.

"Romance” The Female Eunuch 194

Maid

While Sylv is intent on refiguring Mike to make him fit with the image of the hero of her dreams, he is every bit as committed to preserving the street cred of a youngster whose cultural heritage is the legendary stomping ground where ‘blessed Jack did rip and tear in cold thick nights so long ago… those muffled screams and slicing flesh no more than sweetest memories of him that went so humble ’bout his nightly graft.’(7)

Jack the Ripper

Les’s description of his haste to get out of work so that he and the fourteen-year-old Irish girl he has met can get on with ‘hacking away at each other’s goodies’ (23) or of getting ‘some scrubber’ to give him ‘a reluctant J. Arthur [Ref 2-58]… at the point of a seven-inch honed and sharpened shiv menacing her jugular’ (38) shows him to be taking his legacy every bit as seriously as Mike who, as we have seen, is in the habit of viciously raping his ‘girlfriend’. As the circular text of the play insinuates [Ref 2-59], they are caught in a treadmill in which a life of financially profiting from crime and the State’s complicity in the abuse of women is their only hope of making anything of themselves:

We’ll threaten and murder
Connive and rob,
The law’s on our side –
We’ll pay the slobs.
We’ll protect their bit of trade,
The hard porn and tit shows
They’ll give us out pay
Every week.
We’ll eat at
Mario’s where the hairdressers go
We’ll get fat, we’ll kill and we’ll knife
I hate all you pseudo bastards,
I hate you with my life.  (40)

7.2 Canonizing rape

Unfortunately, exploitation of the aesthetics of rape is hardly limited to the business acumen of East End cops and robbers, as Berkoff’s use of canonical literature to portray the workings of Massage Dad’s projection of sexual desire onto two schoolgirls makes explicit. This extraordinarily long monologue [Ref 2-60] that parodies the lyrical ballads of 19th century England satirizes the way in which the myths and legends of ancient Greece and Rome raise the status of rape in the collective unconscious by portraying it to be the pastime of gods and statesmen, while the passage’s aping of the Romantics’ concern for the differing perceptions of the ‘inward’ and the ‘outward’ [Ref 2-61] eye is here employed to figure Dad’s difficulty in successfully differentiating between his external ‘reality’ and the sexual delusions his literary heritage has bequeathed him.

Departing from the genre’s ostensible innocent delight in nature, his ‘pastoral’ is entitled ‘The Nature of Dirt’ and casts himself falling asleep beside ‘a tickling brook’ ‘clutching Wordsworth tenderly’, (207) only to awake as the god of Nature, that old goat ‘Pan’, and to set his lecherous sights upon two schoolgirls who appear to him now as nymphs. Apart from the conventions of the literary genres cited above that give this passage its dreamlike quality, other devices indicate to what extent Dad’s narrative is divorced from ‘reality’. His subjectivity is evoked in the quantity of similes he uses which reveal the type of associations he makes, with the quota of doubt we should accord his comparisons even further accentuated by the typical London slang modifier he uses in this one: ‘cotton blouses bulged apart and pearly buttons seemed to pop as if like young spring roses could not be restrained from opening their petals to nature’s gaze’ (208, my emphasis).

Of course likening the girls’ breasts to ‘young spring roses’ subtly changes Dad’s ambition to ‘pick them’ into the most comprehensive and innocent of desires, even if the particularities of his allusions to the classics simultaneously indicate how, far from these girls yearning for his sexual attentions as he fondly imagines, he is in fact about to commit rape: the name of one of the schoolgirls corresponds to the beautiful wife of Menelaus, Helen, who was abducted by Paris and carried off to Troy; Dad’s heart pounds like ‘Tarquin’s before Lucrece’s rape’ [Ref 2-62] (208); and his description of one of the girls sighing and murmuring ‘in falsetto rippling flute’ evokes yet another story featuring attempted rape. And not only rape, for the fact that it was not Tarquin that raped Lucrece, but his son, would appear to insist upon the generation gap between Dad and the girls, hence adding to his potential felony the imminent expression of his latent pedophilia. Of course this reference also conversely calls our attention to the suspiciously pedophilic nature of the sexuality of the Greek or Roman gods that mythology elevates so, as the last of the above allusions may suggest: it metaphorical alludes to both the extent of Dad’s delusion by evoking his altered hearing, but also to the story of Syrinx, who, like so many of the prepubescent-looking nymphs who have to escape the determined lust of wily old gods by magically transforming themselves into trees or rivers or the suchlike, spurns Pan by sinking into the earth and being transformed into the reeds from which he subsequently makes his pipe. However, if these nymphs’ motivation in shedding their identities by merging with the a-sexual elements of nature was to escape domination, the way in which Pan blows through Syrinx’s ‘body’ to make his music symbolically portrays him to be continuing to configure her to the shape of his discourse even after her sexuality-losing mutation. Hence, while this allusion foreshadows Dad’s advances being repelled as the gods’ were, the girls’ identity and freedom of movement are shown to be determined, in similar fashion to the nymphs’, by a god-like patriarchal discourse that either views women as sexual and therefore as inviting rape, or as a-sexual and hence below notice but safe from harm.

The sense of security of most young women probably fluctuates between these two states according to the rise and fall of their own concupiscence, their ability to dissimulate the upper curves of the latter, and their desired or undesired effect upon others. It is a paradox that women’s libido is still such a well-kept public secret for it is hardly borne out by the grand old age of Western literature’s metaphorical charting of her constant transition between the two states by alternatively depicting her as angelic or diabolic. A Berkoff staple, the movement back and forth between the spiritually high and the satanically low appears in his writing as a form of barometer measuring not only the level of both his male and female characters’ sexual excitement, but also of their corresponding guilt. Often projecting the former upon the object of their desire in the shape of the devil, they thereby absolve themselves of the latter by seeing themselves as victim to darker forces. For instance, City Gent’s appreciation of Mum rapidly drops from the exalting to the deprecatory as he solicits and anticipates her sexual services: ‘pray gentle nymph / thou sweet and foul / thou noxious temptress in these cells of red / tell me thou devil what treasure I might avail myself of’ (192, my emphasis). Similarly, Dad sees the ‘shining schoolgirl flag’ of one of the girls ‘unblemished white’ knickers unpeeling ‘like a second skin does from a snake’, impelling him to creep ‘snake-like’ (209) himself upon them. And Mum of Massage presumptuously imagines the only fantasies that could interest Scot would feature ‘whips and frightened teenagers’ (203), whereas his own actually reveal him to sensually place woman upon high.

However, most of Berkoff’s characters respect the usual polarizing values of society that figure woman as a-sexual and man as sexual by further figuring themselves as angels and devils respectively, despite the fact that their underlying motivations frequently deserve the opposite appellation. For instance, Harry of the short story Say a Prayer for Me [Ref 2-63] senses ‘an awful and sad need to prove his worth’ and the ‘attractiveness’ (13) of the woman he has invited into his room. He grabs her nervously and after sending ‘differing prayers to darker beings for the parole of his cock’ (15), ‘impales’ her with ‘H’ with the ‘slender ambition of merely filling her space for the duration of time it takes to be a bedsitter hero’ (16), only to lose almost immediately his ‘borrowed’ impetus. Far from being the egotistical macho his subsequent actions make him appear, he silently berates himself for not having let the ‘angels of libido feast only after the benedictions of Aphrodite’ (15) and sorely feels how he has ‘failed Doris, …failed himself, and…failed God, …failed fate that had brought them together, and …failed her two-year-old that he surely would have loved’ (17). Sensing well enough that they both have ‘souls that if united would …[conquer] everything’ (18), his wretchedness impels him to throw her out, feeling all the worse when she meekly takes his rejection as her due for having given in to him on her first date. Mistaking himself for the devil for having proceeded so impetuously and insensitively, he just as erroneously elevates her equally damaging docility: ‘she actually apologized (did angels sing her to her sleep?)’ (18).

Conversely, although Woman of Lunch affects great tolerance on hearing Man’s job is ‘selling nothing’ other than ‘empty space’ in a trade book into which a buyer could ‘insert his identity, his wares… his amazing declarations’ (222), she is rapidly shown to attach great importance to such considerations when she compels Man to help her conserve her sense of virtue by pretending to take her by force. The stage directions make it clear that prior to the following passage she makes no attempt to free herself from his embrace in spite of her protestations, switching here to the opposite method of contradicting her actions with her words:

Woman (Weakly) You’re defeating me!  
Man

No quarter – burst through…

(Pause, during which she collects her strength for the climax – to hurt and be hurt. She beats him frantically.)
Woman Bite me. Bite snake! Bite loathsome! Draw blood – drink, drain me – you! You are a loathsome beast – searching and sniffing – your antennae alert as stretched tendrils – sensing out, sending waves creeping through the air, crawling stains of blood through laundered sheets…  

(He puts his hands round her neck and gently squeezes.)

Man I want to murder you – draw your life out into me…  
Woman Murder me – you foul joy – you conquered repugnance! (229)

 

flower flower
flower flower

Berkoff’s taste for eccentric stage directions, such as those requiring the actors who take the parts of Madeline and Usher in The Fall of the House of Usher be lovers, or at least become so at some point during the rehearsals (66), are surpassed by the one demanding ‘the amplified sound of flowers opening’ (229) between the blackout after the last passage and the following disembodied words:

 

Man

I tore into her body’s haven
Ripped off rose-petalled flesh

Sucked from a host of seething fountains

Her sweet rich sanguine life 

Woman

No fragment left he of me sacred
No faint opacity of skin
Not one square white unstained by him   (230)

flower

Of course Man and Woman’s highly exaggerated version of this commonly enacted role playing during courtship is easily seen to be inspired by William Blake’s well-known, not to say ‘household’, poem: “Rose, thou art sick!” 

The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.        (Blake 213)

If anything, this piece of theatre ironically draws our attention to how well-versed man and woman are at enacting the ritual of ‘losing Woman’s virginity’ at the start of each new liaison in order to keep up appearances. Obviously, there is a certain sense of security that keeps both immured in these roles even if the actual enactment of woman’s part not only contradicts the purity of the original role, but also corrodes the force of man’s delivery by pointing to its lack of authenticity. Hence, in Massage we have Scot figuratively signaling his adherence to the proprieties that polarize the sexes by mirror-imaging the syllables in the rhyme with which he metonymically separates the fair sex from the lewdness of man, while concomitantly revealing to what extent he is certain of achieving his ends by having to prompt woman not to forget her part: ‘I would so calmly lift the gentle dress and wait for her to stop my filth caress’ (Massage 204, my emphasis).

bather

And Sylv refuses to relinquish her view of herself as a living oxymoron, a virtuously cold ‘monument of flesh’ that Mike’s ‘wanton hands… smash and grab’ (East 11), by ensuring its perpetuation in the way she dresses herself as ‘dulcet filthed’ (28), to borrow Les’s economical antithetical kenning for a sexually appealing girl who combines innocence and cleanliness with provocation. No doubt as a mermaid would.

 

© Deborah Knight 2001

 

 

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