The Poetry of Terror: the case of the Shandon

The Poetry of Terror:
the case of the Shandon Dragon
Dr Stephen Horton
Urban Research Program
Research Paper 36
August 2014
THIS PAGE HAS BEEN INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK
The Poetry of Terror
the case of the Shandon dragon
Stephen Horton
Urban Research Program
Research Paper 36
August 2014
ISBN 9781922216496
© Stephen Horton
Urban Research Program
Griffith University
Brisbane, QLD 4111
www.griffith.edu.au/urp
The views and opinions contained within Urban Research Program publications are solely those of the author/s and do not
reflect those held by Griffith University or any other relevant party. While the Urban Research Program endeavours to provide
reliable analysis and believes the material it presents is accurate, it will not be liable for any claim by any party acting on the
information in this report.
Copyright protects this material. Except as permitted by the Copyright Act, reproduction by any means (photocopying, electronic,
mechanical, recording or otherwise), making available online, electronic transmission or other publication of this material is
prohibited without the prior written permission of the Urban Research Program.
About the Urban Research Program
The Urban Research Program (URP) was established in 2003 as strategic research and
community engagement initiative of Griffith University. The strategic foci of the Urban Research
Program are research and advocacy in an urban regional context.
The Urban Research Program seeks to improve understanding of, and develop innovative
responses to Australia’s urban challenges and opportunities by conducting and disseminating
research, advocating new policy directions, and by providing training assistance. We aim to make
the results of our research and advocacy work available as freely and widely as possible.
Urban Research Program publication series
URP Issues Papers tackle current problems and challenges, and advocate potential new directions
in Australian urban policy. URP Research Papers impart findings and conclusions from our
research program.
The Issues Papers and Research Papers are edited by Stephen Horton, Centre Manager and Adjunct
Research Fellow in the Urban Research Program. Email: [email protected].
All URP publications and can be downloaded from our website free of charge:
www.griffith.edu.au/urp
Hard copies are available for purchase. Contact via email, [email protected].
About the authors
The author of this report is Stephen Horton
Email: [email protected]
THIS PAGE HAS BEEN INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK
Argument
The case for a literature in ‘brotherly concord with science and philosophy’ is advanced. Poe’s
Murders in the Roue Morgue (1841), the world’s first detective story, sets the drama in industrialising
Paris. Poetic analysis of the crime report suggests a brutal alien nature escaped into the new
(modern) city. The Shandon dragon, enacted on Halloween night in the city of Cork (Éire),
shows in harmless parody the social nature of the contemporary city – where everything, homo
sapiens included, is for sale.
i
Table of contents
Argument .............................................................................................................................. i
1. Investigating (modern) urban space. ................................................................................ 1
2. Mise-en-Scene ................................................................................................................... 1
3. The Poetry of Terror .........................................................................................................2
4. Fetish City .........................................................................................................................3
5. The Dragon of Shandon ....................................................................................................4
List of figures
Figure 1: Bar at the Folies-Bergère (Manet 1881) .................................................................................... 3
Figure 2: The Long Dead: Firkin Crane and the Butter Exchange....................................................... 5
Figure 3: Ur-Dragon of Shandon (2006) .................................................................................................. 6
ii
1. Investigating (modern) urban space.
In the Paris of the Second Empire, when Haussmann blasted boulevards through medieval
‘faubourgs’ rife with social memory and local power; when Napoleon III disfigured the memory
of his uncle with financial corruption, vulgar largesse and the secret police; production-forexchange and consumption-via-the-market came, for the first time, to define the political
economy of the nation’s capital. Charles Baudelaire, a man of these new times and the first
modern urban-poet, prophesied: “The time is approaching when it will be understood that a
literature which refuses to proceed in a brotherly concord with science and philosophy is a
murderous and suicidal literature.”1 For Walter Benjamin — declared (by Hannah Arendt) to be a
poetic thinker — “The detective story, the most momentous of Poe’s technical achievements,
belonged to a literature that satisfied Baudelaire’s postulate.”2 The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841)
is, not only in publication date and setting, in the first rank of Parisian detective stories. On
Benjamin’s word we can expect poetic reading of Poe’s text to be rewarded with scientific and
philosophical understanding ― of the new modern city; where everything, people included, is for
sale.
Dupin, the ur-detective of capitalist Paris, pictures the focus of poetic investigation.
Truth is not always in a well. In fact, as regards the more important knowledge, I do believe
that she is invariably superficial. The depth lies in the valleys where we seek her, and not
upon the mountain-tops where she is found.3
In the companion Dupin mystery The Purloined Letter (1844), the letter of truth is hidden in the
open — on a mantelpiece — for all to see. In brief, the vital focus of a Dupin reading is the
superficial ‘letter’ in full view; not, as is the case for much contemporary crime mystery, occluded
truth hidden down the well of microscopic information (e.g. DNA-trace).
Dupin reads the truth not in ‘facts’, but in a text of signifiers. A signifier is, precisely, not a sign.
A sign is meant for somebody; it carries information. A signifier is meant for no-body. “A
signifier is that which represents a subject. For whom? - not for another subject, but for another
signifier.”4 Carrying no information, a signifier can only be read at face value — superficially —
and must be linked with other signifiers to conjure significance. The linking of signifiers —
lacking informational dimension — is the specialized work of poetry.
2. Mise-en-Scene
A mother and daughter are murdered behind the locked doors of their dwelling on the Rue
Morgue. The criminal is unseen; seemingly materialising in the heart of the dwelling before
disappearing into thin air. This virtual criminal, however, is not unheard. Separate witnesses
report alien sounds. All agree it is a language they, as ill chance would have it, neither speak nor
understand — the sounds are meaningless.
Dupin traces the physiognomy of the unknown, virtual being: "Keep[] now steadily in mind the
points to which I have drawn your attention — that peculiar voice, that unusual agility, and that
startling absence of motive in a murder so singularly atrocious … Here is a woman strangled to
1
Cited Benjamin, Walter (2003) ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’, in Selected Writings, Vol. 4,
Belknap Press, 23.
2
Benjamin, op. cit. 23.
3
Poe, Edgar Allan (2008) {1841} ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, in The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume
1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition, Guttenberg Press, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2147/2147-h/2147-h.htm
4 Lacan, J (1977) The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis Trans. Alan Sheridan (W.W. Norton:
New York), p. 198.
1
death … and thrust up a chimney, head downward. … you will admit that there was
something excessively outræ … the body up such an aperture … The throat of the old lady was not
merely cut, but the head absolutely severed from the body”.5
3. The Poetry of Terror
In fact, it transpires — the information down the well — that ‘the murderer’ is an ‘OurangOutang’; illegally brought to, and escaped in, the city.
Poetic thought taking things at face value reads the ‘unmotivated murders’ of the Rue Morgue that
appear to erupt ― ‘how great must have been that strength’ ― into the domestic space of women
as an expression of a secret, illegal — excessively outræ — Force; a powerful, alien nature — at
large in the new industrial city.
“Upon the floor were found four Napoleons, an ear-ring of topaz, three large silver spoons, three
smaller of mætal d'Alger, and two bags, containing nearly four thousand francs in gold.”6 Theft,
however, does not motive the crime; the various money-forms remain behind to be seen, as if to
decorate the crime scene.
The detached view that is not overwhelmed by brutality notices the younger woman’s body, on
this alien stage, is the wrong way up (i.e., head down). Human perspective requires the body
stand on its own two feet. It, consequently, rotates the scene 180° around its horizontal axis.
Now a surreal chimney pipe rises out of the ground; thrusting up and over the body.
Manufactured pipe couples with the fertile body of daughter in familiar, but pathological, fashion.
The criminal desire for Mother is equally fatal. “With one determined sweep of its muscular arm
it nearly severed her head from her body.”7 New urban nature, sadistic, it would appear, perhaps
misogynist, desires not only the reproductive body of Daughter but also Mother-without-a-head;
incapable of speech or thought ― a zombie ― (un)dead Mother.
While the European Middle Ages hold as law Stadtluft macht frei (city air makes free) the
nineteenth century gives birth to the modern myth of the city as a place of secret malevolence.
Balzac (dying on the eve of the Second Empire and Marx’s favorite author) reports from the
mythic heart of Paris:
The poetry of terror that pervades the American woods, with their clashes between tribes on
the warpath—this poetry which stood [James Fenimore] Cooper in such good stead attaches
in the same way to the smallest details of Parisian life.8
The conflation of untamed nature with a secret savagery of the city conjures literary Apaches
tracking quarry on the boulevards, and rewards ambitious writers of such fare as “Mohicans de
Paris” (Dumas 1854-59). This myth, in translation, openly declares: “There is a woman in every
case; as soon as they bring me a report, I say, 'Look for the woman!'”9
The poetry of urban terror is also the central motif of literary and film noir. It gives life to the
‘hard-boiled’ detective — first incarnated by Dashiell Hammet in anonymous, everyman antihero ‘The Continental Op’. Often led astray by femme fatale, Sam Spade, Phillip Marlowe and all
5
Poe, op. cit.
Ibid.
7
Ibid.
8
Cited Benjamin, op. cit, 22.
9
“The phrase has come to refer to explanations that automatically find the same root cause, no matter the
specifics of the problem” (Wikipedia). This view, its head down the well of piety, if not profundity, is blind to
the truth, hiding in full view, of superficial discourse.
6
2
kindred spirits, are locked in fated struggle with opaque, seemingly omnipotent forces of
darkness.
It is science fiction, however, that has long been the discourse of alien fear. Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein (1818) — widely seen as “standing in for the coming of industrialization to Europe”10
— tells of a man who awakens the dead into (un)death. He succeeds in reconstituting primal
being: machine-made nature; a “monster [who] steals into Elizabeth's room and strangles her.”11
The 1982 film The Blade Runner, widely admired by post-modernist opinion, also concerns itself
with the erotic dimensions of the un-dead. The screen play of Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids
Dream of Electric Sheep explores intimacy between human and machine-human. This time,
however, the monster — thing-woman; object of desire — is not destroyed or driven away.
Rather, she-it is loved.
4. Fetish City
Manet’s last picture, the modernist masterpiece A Bar at the Folies-Bergère stages the nexus of
modernism; and illuminates its consequence.
Figure 1: Bar at the Folies-Bergère (Manet 1881)
Reflection, the medium of thought and deception, dominates the picture. The vast background is
nothing but image-in-a-mirror. Stage left (or is it right?) back-of-Woman confronts front-of-Man.
The vital — because reproductive ― human relationship is shown in reflected image where left is
right and right is left. In virtual image, the realm of look but do not touch, where the direction of
causality is reversed, Manet pictures the essential encounter between modern Woman and
modern Man — in their marketplace.
10
Cliff Notes, http://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/f/frankenstein/book-summary-2. Cliff Notes and Wikipedia
are, for the superficial eye, excellent aids.
11
Ibid.
3
In the foreground — as first-image — there-to-be-seen and now centre stage, are ‘things for sale’
— including, most prominently, the barmaid herself. A modern worker, like every waged
employee, she has, for a certain time, sold herself to her employer. Lest things not be taken at a
sufficiently vulgar level she has another (most ancient) profession. “The poet Maupassant said the
barmaids were 'vendors of drink and of love'.’” 12
Flanked by fellow things-made-for-sale, thus stands city worker: modern human-for-sale. Isolated
— intoxicating ‘things’ are her only familiars — she is not only alone but — the particular
burden of modernism — she is ‘alone with her thoughts’— alone with her guilty reflections.
Marx, in his value-based investigation of the new world of industrial-production-for-market
reports on ‘The Fetishism of The Commodity and its Secret’. He concludes: “[T]o find an
analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There products of the human brain
appear as autonomous figures endowed with life of their own, which enter into relations both
with each other and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of
men’s hands. I call this the fetishism that attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they
are produced as commodities.”13 At the level of culture the modern city, found on wage labour
and the generalised production of things-for-market, conjures a virtual, mythic realm of estranged
(un)dead-things.
5. The Dragon of Shandon
The Dragon of Shandon shows itself once a year in the inner city of Cork, Éire. Its lineage traces
back to ancient Samhain; a Celtic festival staged at the end of the autumn harvest (sustaining the
life of the people) and in preparation for winter (the death of nature). Between life and death it is
“a liminal time when the spirits or fairies (the Aos Sí) could more easily come into our world.”14
The pagan rite was assimilated into the mythology of medieval Christianity; being now (latently)
commemorated in the feast of All Souls. Observed on the 2nd of November, All Souls is a day of
prayer for the dead. Out of Samhain by All Souls the Shandon Dragon, a modern monster, is
born into Halloween — a festival of Poe’s motherland, the born-modern United States of
America. On the evening of the 31st October, iconic Jack-o-Lanterns light a re-versed stage of the
(un)dead, where witches and, more lately, vampires and zombies, and now dragons, cavort in
comic guise.
Shandon, a working-class precinct, was consigned to the past by the globalization of market
production, that, served by the politics of neo-liberalism, gathered pace in the last quarter of the
twentieth century. Close to the city centre — “a mix of buildings from the eighteenth to twentyfirst centuries [] an eclectic mix of Georgian, medieval, Victorian and more modern
architecture”15 — Shandon’s decay ripened into fallow opportunity. The indifference of the city
administration “prompted a groundswell of activities directed by the local community, including
residents, traders, and artists. This movement was keenly aware of the importance of exploiting
the area’s tourism and economic potential, while conserving its local heritage and architectural
character (Cork Corporation, 2000).”16 Re-vitalized Shandon, the dragon’s playground, is thus a
stage of money-making (‘exploiting the area’s tourism and economic potential’) acted out against
a backdrop of the visual poetry of the past (‘conserving its local heritage and architectural
character’).
12
http://www.courtauld.ac.uk/gallery/collections/paintings/imppostimp/manet.shtml
13
Marx, Karl 1976 {1867} Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Trans. B. Fowkes (Penguin Books:
London), p. 165.
14
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samhain
15
Grant-Smith, D and Matthews (2014) ‘Cork as canvas: exploring intersections of citizenship and collective
memory in the Shandon BigWash Up murals’ Community Development Journal Advance Access p.5
16
Ibid.
4
In 2009 the Shandon stage was populated with images of the past. “Through this consultative
process, the collective memory of a community inspired over fifty temporary images, each of
which told a story of Shandon’s cultural past.”17 Community artists deployed ‘shawlies’ and
‘corner boys’ and other ghosts of the long dead in a Big Wash Up that “…featured a series of
temporary washed-wall murals showcasing Shandon’s community and cultural history. … The
walls of the Firkin Crane and the Butter Exchange building [long a commercial hub of Cork]
hosted some of the more spectacular murals.’18
Picture: Tony Matthews
Figure 2: The Long Dead: Firkin Crane and the Butter Exchange
Cork’s theatre of the (un)dead, for purposes of the present, summons the past from rest. A ready
audience waits. “Some viewers reported being unsettled by these images the first time they saw
them at night … the area’s low lighting caused some people to momentarily interpret the images
as looming phantoms.”19
17
Op. cit. p. 6.
Ibid.
19
Op. cit. p. 11.
18
5
The first emperor of the global market appears at the Shandon festival, where things and humans
cavort in communion, as “a beast [] a skeletal dragon … [m]ore than 36 foot long and 10 foot
high” attended by a train of 14 skeletal (un)dead. 20
Picture: Bernie Keeting
Figure 3: Ur-Dragon of Shandon (2006)
Issuing forth from city portal, phallic monster of the otherworld, surely related to Dupin’s
‘Ourang-Outang’, writhes through city streets. The ‘arts director’ of the festival “enjoyed raising
hell in Shandon”; and “the voluntary arts initiative [] paid tribute to the local credit union and the
Business Association of Shandon through whom they received funding.”21 Credit, commerce and
community conjure, in comforting parody, the monstrous lord of (un)dead things; the god of
fetishism.
Once a year only do the people dare look upon him; on the day of festive reversal when terrifying
alien may wear the mask of comic familiar. Social parody that hides uncomfortable truth
invariably enacts at least one scene that drags it out into the open. Such is the Halloween custom
of ‘trick or treat’. Servants of Master Death extort, with threat of cruel tricks, tribute from the
living. The tribute, be it comic suffering at the hands of witches or ‘sweets’ for warlocks, leaves a
stripe on city dweller; the mark of suffering tribute to be paid every day of the year.
20
O’Connell, Frank (2006) ‘Dragon gets warm reception after firing up crowds in Belfast’,
http://www.dragonofshandon.com/2006.html
21
O’Connell, Frank (2006) ‘Dragon of Shandon hits the streets’, emphasis added.
http://www.dragonofshandon.com/2006.html.
6
On the word of Revelations [13:17] and Karl Marx22:
And so no one can buy or sell, unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast, or the
number of its name.
The spread of Halloween through the globe, accompanying the capitalist market, has coincided
with a steady erosion of the unlawful, transgressive aspect of the festival. The Halloween space is
now policed ‘for the safety of children’, and payment of tribute has been reduced to ‘sweetcommodities’, purchased for the occasion. The debt owed to the dead is seamlessly paid in the
very coin of the one-dimensional god of things-made-for-exchange.
The lash of tribute, the banner of resistance, has all but disappeared from most-modern
enactments of festival. In the celebration of the Shandon Dragon, if not entirely absent, it is
unreported. The globalised, inner-city ‘community’ would settle its debts to the dead cheaply.
The cult of the Shandon Dragon is thus an anathema for poetic-thought:
Doesn’t a breath of the air that pervaded earlier days caress us as well?
In the voices we hear, isn’t there an echo of now silent ones? Don’t the
women we court have sisters they no longer recognize? If so, then there
is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one.
Then our coming was expected on earth. Then, like every generation
that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak messianic power,
a power on which the past has a claim. Such a claim cannot be settled
cheaply. The historical materialist is aware of this.23
22
Cited Marx, op. cit., p. 181. For Marx the reduction of social value to one-dimensional number (of abstractlabour equivalents; the epiphemenonal form being price) at the dictate of generalized exchange was of decisive
issue.
23
Benjamin, Walter (2003) {1940} ‘On the Concept of History, Thesis 2’ in Selected Writings Volume 4,
Harvard University Press, Massachusetts, p. 390.
7

Download Report