토니 해리슨의 웅변의 학교: 계급의 갈등과 문화적 투쟁의 장으로서의 (시적) 언어

Abstract

This study examines Tony Harrison’s “central achievement,” The School of Eloquence (1978), and discusses how language is “a terrain of struggle” where opposing voices intersect, how in a “class-divided” society language itself is cultural and political warfare.Harrison is one of the most original and “genuine” working-class poets in the postwar Britain. Harrison’s originality and authenticity seem to originate from his roots. Harrison’s most sustained account of the growth of a working-class poet’s mind is to be found in The School of Eloquence, written in the form of 16-line sonnets. The sequence contains poems on political and historical issues as well as autobiographical subjects. In the sequence, the political and the private are closely linked, and those links are expressed as linguistic ones: they are all about mastering language or languages. Harrison, an “eloquent” poet lifted by talent and education out of his own “inarticulate” class, feels guilty at having somehow betrayed his roots, yet unable to deny his intellectual gifts. Many poems in The School of Eloquence focus on the poet’s family whose lack of education and confidence left them inarticulate. At the same time, however, those seemingly self-absorbed poems dramatize a personal crisis as representative of larger problems. Thus Harrison’s poetry can be seen as an extended meditation on language, class, power, and generational differences, and an examination of the guilt and pain involved in cultural mobility. In brief, much of the energy of individual sonnets stems from conflict among contending voices.