Marechera and the Harrowing of Hell

-


The First Epistle of Peter speaks of Christ’s entry into Hell. This was an early commonplace of Christianity. Within the literary tradition, the concept became significant within Anglo Saxon literature and then Medieval literature. From the Old English hergian though the Middle English herwen, this descent by Christ became known as the “Harrowing” of Hell.

 The Harrowing of Hell lasted three days…from Christ’s death on Friday to his resurrection on Sunday. In true ironical vein, Marechera picks up this detail in Black Sunlight and re-works it as his protagonist’s entry into Devil’s End. Marechera’s Christian education and his English studies at Oxford University would undoubtedly have acquainted him with the “despoiling”and its sources:

 I followed him into the tunnel. We passed through huge rooms in which vague human figures were
poised in very excruciating postures. (One hung upside down and dangled by his testicles). Some were on a red hot treadmill. Some were transfixed upside down by huge nails driven into the rock passing through their ankles or their knees. Others—
“Don’t dawdle man…How long are you here for?”
"Three days."
(BS, p.53).

Seemingly, the protagonist of Black Sunlight, whose anti-self is called Christian (during the Devil’s End episode), and whose guide into Devil’s End is named Chris(t), has entered the catacombs for a period of terrorist training. Again, this is a sublime joke by Marechera, one that shows the verbal depth that underlies Black Sunlight. As Christ entered Hell to harry/attack and liberate the good souls, so the initiate in Black Sunlight enters Hell to acquaint himself with modern terrorism and methods for liberating the human spirit. This connection between terrorism and freedom of thought is represented by the mysterious “Franz’s brother”…a double who incarnates the political stance of Franz Fanon. Rather more than this exists, however, for there is a theme that once more extends the mock-Christian framework of Black Sunlight. Marechera was aware of the Surrealist writers who came to believe in writing as an “automatic” process, as something more than a learnt, conscious craft. Christian at his type-writer is literally a type for the artist and his/her struggle for words…words that take many forms and don’t always (as in the case of Black Sunlight) take the form an audience might like. What Marechera enacts within the Devil’s End episode of Black Sunlight is nothing less than a liberation of language. But Marechera pushes beyond Surrealism…more into the realm of Bataille and Bonnefoy, who believed that Surrealism had become a form of conservatism. It isn’t automatic writing, a total surrender to the unconscious , nor an example of paranoia, what Beckett described as feverish writers “covering sheets of paper with complaints against their treatment or verbatim reports of their inner voices”… it is an act of uncrucifying language, an act of terrorism upon parole and the Novel. In essence, Chapter 7 of Black Sunlight is the redemptive chapter amidst a Decalogue of Chapters— it focuses on writing, how the writer leads himself “to the slaughter, to the typewriter (BS. P.77)—to THE GREAT CUNT, the whore of Babylon, Mater-Matrix— yet seeks to harrow, violently fight the encyclopaedia that is reality, and so resurrect a different reality.

Comments

Nora Black said…
Appreciate youu blogging this
November 04, 2021 11:25 am
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Sonnets of Richard Barnfield.

-
Image
The term “gay”draws a number of elements around it: the homosexual, the homoerotic and the homosocial. It is not a term used easily. The matter isn’t helped much by using the term poet of a “gay sensibility”. That too often implies a poet who is gay, but writes about other things such that gay aspects appear here and there. The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse (1987) was a curious mish-mash, not only in terms of “gay” but also in terms of poetry: it included a lot of verse-and-worse. Heavily featured poets included the Classical, Catullus, Strato, Martial and Meleager, the pseudo-classical, Cavafy, and Shakespeare and Barnfield. To include 12 sonnets by Barnfield lifted an almost unknown poet into a major Classical league. It has always puzzled me if this was justified. Is the poetry of Barnfield so important in the history of “gay” poetries? Richard Barnfield was born in 1574. He was in every way a contemporary of Shakespeare. Barnfield’s The Affectionate Shepherd (1594) mi
Read more

Jared French. Artist and Hermeticist.

-
Image
Jared French was born on February 4th, 1905, in Ossining, New York. Aquarian by birth. He studied music, visual art and literature at Amherst College from 1921-1925. The Amherst motto  Terras Irradient would stand as a sign for his life as a painter, "Bring light to the Earth" as would his birth image. French's paintings in egg tempera are lit by radiance and the flux of water is a key archetypal symbol in his visual language. French became the lover and friend of Paul Cadmus and it is Cadmus' small and intimate portrait of him, in 1931, that introduces French to the world.  In this portrait much is coded. The viewer is placed in the lover's position, gazing down at a rumpled bed, suggesting rest after activity. The flowing, rotating hands intimate fluid energy in balance. And the fingers are bookmarks in an early edition of James Joyce's Ulysses , a book which was smuggled into the USA for the literary minded French. The illegal novel stands for anothe
Read more

Poetry and Cannibalism.

-
Image
Thom Gunn’s Boss Cupid (2000) contains a disturbing sequence of poems about the serial killer, Jeffrey Dahmer. Reviews at the time of publication acknowledged Gunn’s daring imagination in this sequence. This was a poetry of bravado (even machismo, yet another example of Gunn’s fearless, masculine worship of Eros and power). Reading the sequence eight years later, they seem nonetheless disturbing. Why? Firstly, they link poetry and its relationship to beauty with acts of incredible ugliness. Secondly, they use an ironical strategy that is awkward. The strategy is in bad taste— unpalatable— phrases that suggest exactly what the sequence is about. Not just Eros and power, but the taste of civilisation, its consumption of sex. Gunn was no stranger to Pound. He did, of course, edit an introductory volume on Pound for Faber, and the title of Gunn’s cannibal sequence, "Troubadour", plays with the Poundian world view of poetry. As Pound said, hermetically, punning in “Visitin
Read more