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

The terms in which the hero's problems are posed in the trade edition, and the insistent pairing that the layout and binding enforce, ask that we read the general relation of word and image in the context of this larger history of discourse about the arts. Baskin and Hughes pursue their narrative of modern humanity not by overturning the terms of the conventional dichotomies but by calling attention to and using them; the book itself dichotomizes--poems on the left, pictures on the right. Simultaneously, however, the binding and the layout urge the prescribed cure by setting word and image (mind and body, male and female) in relation and challenging us to read the exchange between them. Hughes's desire to join his words to images participates in a common sense among twentieth-century poets that images have an immediate embodied presence that language lacks. In "The scream," Hughes's victim is all words with no image because he is the logical conclusion to centuries of rationalizing language misguidedly valued as the good and powerful, and of the concomitant denigration of the image. The reader turns the page, the trial begins, and there stands Baskin's summoner (fig. 4) on the right, a harsh corrective, "Spectral, gigantified, / Protozoic, blood-eating" (8), looking down on the reader, feathers stiffening into daggers, baroque talons menacing, demanding attention by his sheer physicality to the animal life the hero has criminally disregarded. As he calls the hero to account ("Sooner or later--/ The grip"), the spread dramatizes the confrontation: image as body stands up to mind as word. In this Cave Birds, there is no turning aside from Baskin's often sexually charged, physically confrontational images. They dominate every subsequent spread. Sometimes Baskin manipulates the angle of vision to position us at groin level, staring straight at the genitals of his human birds (figs. 4 and 5), testing response to such blatant displays of the body.

Some of the poem-picture pairs thematize the opposition of thought and body. The image functions as concrete corrective to the hero's verbal rationalizing. When the protagonist gathers himself in the third poem, "After the first fright," from round C--" I sat up and took stock of my options. / I argued my way out of every thought anybody could think" (10)--there is Baskin's bird as the body damaged by such rationalizing (fig. 13). The protagonist's linguistic evasions, full of the capitalized pieties of Enlightenment thought, are met by the illustration's insistence on physical torment as their price, the dismemberment of Baskin's bird.

[FIGURE 13 OMITTED]

      When I said: "Civilization,"
      He began to chop off his fingers and mourn.

      When I said: "Sanity and again Sanity and above all Sanity,"
      He disembowelled himself with a cross-shaped cut.

[FIGURE 14 OMITTED]

Later in the narrative, in "The gatekeeper," when "remorse, promises, a monkey chatter" (32) blurt "from every orifice" of the hero, the play of word and image in the codex (unlike the limited edition) emphasizes his attempt to talk his way out of death as a last-ditch effort to make rationalizing logos work against the physicality of life insisted on by Baskin's bird (fig. 14).