Reading word, image, and the body of the book: Ted Hughes and Leonard Baskin's Cave Birds

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Dissociation of sensibility under the pressure of Western abstraction is for Hughes, as for Lawrence, the tragedy of modern man: the rational has suppressed the nonrational human capacities, the mind has gained ascendency over the body, empathy has given way to the exercise of power. "The psychological stupidity, the ineptitude, of the rigidly rationalist outlook--it's a form of hubris, and we're paying the traditional price," Hughes said (Fass 200). The hero of Cave Birds cracks under the strain of his own pride; he is brought up short at the end of the poem, suddenly unable to talk, bereft of the language that had allowed him to rationalize and so evade "the inane weights of iron," life's tragedies. He tries to speak, but "a silence wedged my gullet." He can voice only a primal cry: "The scream / Vomited itself."

As this poem suggests, language, for Hughes, has been the instrument of the rationality that distances feeling and suppresses the physical life of the body. In the anti-Socratic argument, central not only to Cave Birds but to his larger poetic project, "idealistic attempts to isolate abstract conceptual principles" have historically worked by "identifying Good with God as Logos," as Graham Bradshaw succinctly puts it (215). This is a familiar formulation, and throughout Western history it has been routinely accompanied, as scholars have shown (Mitchell, Iconology; Paulson; and Gilman, for example), with a valuation of the image as the word's challenging opposite. In the history of Western discourse about the arts, the image as present, replete, silent, and irrational contends with the logical, symbolic, and "civilizing" discipline of the word. "The history of culture," comments W.J.T. Mitchell, "is in part the story of a protracted struggle for dominance between pictorial and linguistic sign" (Iconology 43). Fear of the power of the image (and what it might make people do) underlies the periodic episodes of iconoclasm that mark Western history (see Freedberg), including, of course, the Reformation, the origin for Hughes of modern dissociation. In their bodiliness, images make men desert rationality in favor of base instinct. The dichotomy is routinely gendered: "Time [language] is a Man Space [image] is a Woman," Blake said (qtd. in Mitchell, Iconology 95), echoing the common cultural notions that lie behind the most influential attempt to delineate the differences between the arts, Gotthold Lessing's 1766 Laocoon. Such thinking is so pervasive that the conventional figuring of the image as female and subversive can be seen in the criticism of Cave Birds itself. Explaining what he finds the uneven quality of the poems in the volume, one critic remarks, "the story, seduced no doubt by Baskin's drawings, seems to lose its way, dissipating the energy" (Sagar, Art 179). "The decorum of the arts at bottom has to do with proper sex roles," explains Mitchell, glossing the underpinnings of Lessing's argument that words and images should stick to their own spheres (Iconology 109).