‘Past Never Found’ – Class, Dissent, and the Contexts of Tony Harrison's v.

摘要

Critics of v. have tended to elide the poem with the historical and political circumstances surrounding the moment of its writing, first publication and subsequent controversial television version broadcast by Channel 4 on 4 November 1987. It is almost as if v. exists more as its reception than as a poem. Crucially, critical desire to read the elegiac aspects of v. as being deployed in the service of a document of crisis has meant that accounts of the poem have ignored to extent to which the poem amplifies pre-existent tendencies in elegy towards what might be termed national critique. Part of the argument of this article involves an exploration of this aspect of the poem. However, the article's primary focus is on the historical contexts of the poem but to a different end from the majority of Harrison's critics. The article argues that a greater understanding of these contexts does more than allow us to characterize v. as, say, ‘a picture of 1980s Thatcherist Britain’. Such understanding is linked to an exploration of what the author argues is the crucial question that arises out of reading v. now, some twenty years after its first appearance: exactly what is Harrison's poem mourning and commemorating? The article explores the extent to which the poem can be said to mourn not only the decline of the working class, but also the decline of class as a social and political conception and signifier and the possibility of dissent.