This thesis looks at the work of Tony Harrison: his poetry, "from The School of
Eloquence", and "The Mother of the Muses", his theatre works, Yan Tan Tethera and
Medea: A Sex-War Opera, and his televisual documentary-poems, "v.", The
Blasphemers' Banquet, Loving Memory and Black Daisies for the Bride.
I examine these works in the light of their incorporation and manipulation of 'external'
voices and cultures: of his working-class Leeds background, discourse feminine,
Muslim fundamentalists, literary 'blasphemers'. In later works, this technique is framed
in terms of supplementing absences, first of voice, then of the human self-presence that
voice figures: of the dead and the mentally non-present.
I look specifically at how this representation of elements generally seen as impropre to
the media he occupies on their part, as a public poet, enables the inserted material he
appropriates from its pro pre milieu a platform from which to comment on its
conventional, marginalised status. Conversely, I investigate how the gesture of representation
takes Harrison's work further from the 'original' he is seeking to
incorporate as in supplying their 'lack' he occupies their propre space, increasingly in
effect removing them from the discourse.
This double process, presented in terms of Derrida's ideas on supplementation and
joining-as-separating, is seen to be effected by Harrison's manipulation of codes -
oral/typographic, restricted/elaborated. His claimed philosophical positions, with
regard to phallogocentric discourse versus 'discours feminine' and theocentric theatre
versus theatre of cruelty, are interrogated. This brings in Lacanian-psychoanalytic
notions of subjectivity, Harrison's and those of the real people he invaginates into his
texts. His giving freedom to these unbounded forms and their propre occupants is
seen as ultimately a reframing of governance, a re-drawing of boundaries, which in
turn are overrun by the properly ungovernable properties of film/video, human
subjects, and language itself.