By Danny O'Connor
This ebook is an intensive re-appraisal of the poetry of Ted Hughes, putting him within the context of continental theorists corresponding to Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Slavoj Zizek to deal with the traumas of his paintings. As an undergraduate, Hughes used to be visited in his sleep by means of a burnt fox/man who left a bloody handprint on his essay, caution him of the hazards of literary feedback. Hereafter, feedback turned ‘burning the foxes’. This publication bargains a defence of literary feedback, drawing Hughes’ poetry and prose into the community of theoretical paintings he brushed off as ‘the tyrant’s whisper’ by means of demonstrating a shared drawback with trauma.
Covering quite a lot of Hughes’ paintings, it explores a number of the traumas that outline his writing. if it is evaluating his proposal of guy as cut up from nature with that of Jacques Lacan, contemplating his tough courting with language in gentle of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, seeing him within the paintings gallery and on the videos with Gilles Deleuze, or contemplating his afflicted courting with femininity in regard to Teresa Brennan and Slavoj Žižek, Burning the Foxes bargains a clean examine a well-recognized poet.
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Additional info for Ted Hughes and Trauma: Burning the Foxes
Example text
It is, nonetheless, a perfect example of how he attempted to do so. Of course, although like much of his early work it is tighter than the bulk of his oeuvre, many of the technical and thematic hallmarks of his poetry are also present, noticeably the alliterative music of his lines: ‘I imagine this midnight’s moment’s forest’. Nonetheless, it is his treatment of his animal subject that renders this poem so distinctly Hughesian. He writes of his fox that ‘It is both a fox and a spirit […] the words have made a body for it and given it somewhere to walk’ (PM 20).
12 If the fox is moving towards the speaker from his unconscious, then the speaker is likewise moving towards the fox. This is structurally fundamental to the poem as the fox becomes increasingly apparent, from ‘something else’ to ‘something more near’ to its facial features, its prints, then its body and shadow, and then one eye that is a ‘widening deepening greenness’, as synecdoche, conveys the whole fox’s approach and entrance into the ‘dark hole of the head’. All of this is contained in a single sentence, predominantly structured by a series of colons, with each colon representing the start of a new phase in getting closer to the emerging fox.
More pertinently, it is important to consider whether these childhood encounters with nature are a lost world Hughes tries to recapture in his poems, or a lost world invented by them. This goes to the heart of his ideas about nature and humanity’s traumatic split from nature; accordingly, Jacques Lacan’s concept of the Real and our supposed disconnection from it are particularly useful, since it frames a debate over not only a lost world, but also whether it is a genuine or invented loss. As we have seen, the Real is for Lacan what nature represents for Hughes: an immutable principle, something undeniably true in a world where everything else is flexible.