NECESSARY WOBBLES: Simon Armitage and reader-author relations.
by Alexis Harley
© 2001, Alexis Harley

The invidious position of the author, as contemporary theoretical discourse has it, obliges every text to ask anew whence it has sprung. Recent orthodoxy has answered this question by turning from the now jettisoned author to the most obvious alternative, the reader. But to say with Roland Barthes that "the birth of the reader must come at the cost of the death of the Author",(1) is to assume a stance that seems now drastically naive. While Barthes offers a model in which the univocal author is made redundant by a community of readers each breathing meaning, the fact is that the reader in the text has become as saturated with fictions as the author. This is not intended as a claim that both reader and author are nothing but textual constructions; rather, it is to suggest that if one is, then both are. The oppositional relationship set up between author and reader is a longstanding, but not a necessary, one, and indeed one of the possibilities that Simon Armitage's poetry models is that of the author's and reader's co-generation of the text. If this model is not viable, then we are forced to entertain the possibilities that the author is a creation of the reader, the reader of the author, or both of the text, possibilities which, from the point of view of someone currently immersed in an act of writing and reading, are both disorienting and counter-intuitive in the extreme. Having said that, it is beyond the scope of this essay to offer a definitive theoretical framework elucidating the places of reader and author, nor does it aspire to do any decisive battling with the proponents of the relevant theories.(2) What it does propose to do is to explore the mechanisms by which the poetry of Simon Armitage engages with the author and the reader, with the figures of author and reader, and with the issues surrounding their place in the text.

This task presents some methodological problems, not least of which is the one illustrated by the preceding sentence, the need to find terms with which to refer to the various textual and extra-textual instantiations of reader and author. Armitage's poetry, as we shall see, uses the trope of the author's death in order to register its interest in the death of the author. But Armitage responds ambivalently to the idea of the death of the author, seeming, at some times, to be opposed to it, at others, indebted. In order to demonstrate a sensitivity to this ambivalence - an ambivalence, moreover, that Armitage is yet, if ever, to resolve - this essay needs to remain open to the possibility that Armitage's poetry flatly opposes Barthes' argument, but also to the possibility that, in engaging with, or entertaining his ideas, the poetry valorises them. Maintaining this openness is jeopardised by the fact that the terms of reference for the author and reader implicitly advantage either of these possibilities to the detriment of the other. If the terms with which the author is referred to are repeatedly problematised (as in, "the author", "the Armitage", "the poet", "the writer" or even, as in, the figure of the author, the Armitage figure, the speaker, the scriptor, the narrator, or the implied author), then they may easily be taken to entail an acceptance of the idea of the author as a textual figuration. If, on the other hand, the terms are not problematised, it may be inferred that in speaking of Simon Armitage or the author as identities existing independently of their instantiations in the text, Barthes' critique of the author's reputed transcendental existence has been ignored.

The terms used to denominate the reader are not quite as vexed. As Armitage's poems rarely address the reader with anything more definite than a second person pronoun, there is no need to differentiate between a reader called, for instance, Katherine, and a "reader" called "Katherine". Nevertheless, there is an array of terms, from "addressee" to "mock reader" to "audience" to "implied reader", each of which has its specific valency, and each of which makes the perhaps invalid assumption of the reader's singularity. Beyond saying that the use of such words here is accompanied by a consciousness of their inadequacy, the dilemma is insoluble. And the fact of its insolubility is largely attributable to Armitage's relish for delicately pivoting his poems on points of ambiguity.

The vacillating positions he sets up are several. Armitage's lack of commitment to a sustained pitch of poetic formalism achieves a constant shift in the level of his poetry's aesthetic self-consciousness. On the one hand, he deploys trenchant rhyme schemes, heavily articulated metrical patterns and exaggerated rhetorical devices in order to draw attention to the poemliness of the poems. On the other, his diction includes robustly colloquial elements, demotic idioms and popular images, which anchor the texts with a familiarity that works against the estranging impact of rarefied (or parodic and exaggeratedly contrived) poetic forms. But while this poetry errs in the direction of doggerel, it does so in a very erudite manner. Armitage's work is similarly indecisive in its relations with other texts. Snuffling in the trough of popular culture or sitting at high table with Shakespeare's finger bowl, posthumously canonised, become much of a muchness. This is poetry very reticent to declare in any sort of static way its literary status; and very reticent to declare the status of the texts with which it interacts. The intertextuality established through Armitage's poetry seems at some points intended to do homage to the texts that his poems reference, at others, to travesty them. (3)

The simultaneous concealment and revelation of the poems' intentions marches in step with the simultaneous concealment and revelation of the figure of the author. The overstatement of poetic forms and the exaggerated engagement with the contents of various cultural canons has an ironising effect, so that even in the presence of autobiographical details, the level of actual personal revelation is minimal. This is an author who does not open up his personal space for public scrutiny, does not open it up, in fact, to such an extent that there is almost a noli me legere effect, and the critical reader reads critically only while experiencing a sense of trespassing on private property.

A lot of these qualms derive from a fear that the poems are either not as theoretically astute as they seem to be or that they are more so. The number of Armitage's poems in which the author talks of his dying (thus engaging with ideas of the death of the Author), or of looking at himself or his twin (developing tropes for self-reflexivity), or of the dissection of the authorial body (suggesting the work of the critical reader on the text's anatomy, and thereby on its producer's), or in which he metatextually involves his poems with others, implies an acute understanding of some of the most problematic concepts from contemporary theory - validity, intention, meaning, text, authority - at the same time as implying that "doing theory" on his poems is tantamount to a vivisection of their author. A language that is rough and no-nonsense, the vernacular of Yorkshire, that selects its subject matter from amongst the most pedestrian of scenarios, forbids an esoteric treatment, and forbids it all the more when the speaker is born in 1963 and still sufficiently alive to raise objections.

And yet Armitage's poems do talk about textual relationships. They are self-reflexive. They are theoretically aware. The precarious ambivalence about authorial intentions that they set up is intended as a comment on the nature of authorial intention. This essay will look closely at five of Armitage's poems: "I thought I'd write my own obituary. Instead", "I've made out my will; I'm leaving myself", "I Say I Say I Say", "Gemini" and "The story changes every time". All of these poems, which have in common the thematic treatment of death or of an absent self, will comprehensively demonstrate their own uncertainty about their author and their readers. These are poems in which absence becomes a presence.

The first of them follows, untitled:

I thought I'd write my own obituary. Instead,
I wrote the poem for when I'm risen from the dead:

Ignite the flares, connect the phones, wind all the clocks;
the sun goes rusty like a medal in its box -
collect it from the loft. Peg out the stars,
replace the bulbs of Jupiter and Mars.
A man like that takes something with him when he dies,
but he has wept the coins that rested on his eyes,
eased out the stopper from the mouthpiece of the cave,
exhumed his own white body from the grave.

Unlock the rivers, hoist the dawn and launch the sea.
Set up the skittles of the orchard and the wood again,
now everything is clear and straight and free and good again.(4)

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