Manchester’s Mozzerabilist Messiah

Morrissey: The Pageant of His Bleeding Heart, Gavin Hopps (Continuum Books 2012)

In a way I was an ideal reader for this book, because I was impressed by it despite myself. Gavin Hopps is described on the back cover as “the Research Council’s UK Academic Fellow in the School of Divinity at St. Mary’s College, the University of St. Andrews, Scotland.” He takes people like Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari and Žižek seriously. He uses words like “focalization” and “performative” and phrases like “the gendered subject” and “etceterizing gestures”. I thought his book would be a particularly ugly example of breaking a butterfly on the wheel.

I was wrong. I have to agree with something else on the back cover: the claim that this book is “at once erudite and accessible”. It’s highly erudite and despite the occasional intrusion of po-mo jargon it’s highly readable too. Beyond that, it does Morrissey a very great service. It proves that he is much more than a butterfly. Yes, there is shimmering beauty and tantalizing elusiveness in his work, but there’s profundity and intelligence too. And even muscularity. To adapt one of his own lyrics: the more you dismiss him, the larger he looms.

And Hopps is well-equipped to discuss all sides of his work, because he knows a lot about music, not just about literature and popular culture. When he’s discussing the chordal structure of Johnny Marr’s guitar-playing, he can drop asides like this: “The nineteenth-century musicologist Karl Meyrberger famously described the ‘Tristran chord’ – the radically ambiguous combination of F-B-D# and G# with which Tristran und Isolde begins – as a ‘Zwitterakkord’, that is, an ‘androgynous’ or ‘bisexual’ chord (see Nattiez, Music and Discourse, pp. 219-29).” (ch. 1, “Celibacy, Abstinence and Rock ’n’ Roll”, note 77, pg. 32)

But Hopps wears his learning lightly: he isn’t showing off, he’s trying to analyse Morrissey and the Smiths with the seriousness that he thinks they deserve. He doesn’t fall into the trap that he identifies in “Mark Simpson’s Saint Morrissey – which is a book about Mark Simpson that occasionally digresses to say something about Morrissey” (ch. 1, note 19, pg. 17). If you’re a fan of Morrissey and the Smiths, this book will enrich your understanding and enhance your enjoyment, sending you back to the music with new and more sensitive ears.

And unless you’re very well-read, it will introduce you to some new authors and new ideas: “The phrase Sprachskepsis or Sprachkritik refers to a radical loss of faith in language, which results in a sense of existential estrangement, the celebrated account of which is Hugo von Hoffmanstahl’s The Letter of Lord Chandos” (ch. 3, “The Art of Coyness”, note 74, pg. 163). Oscar Wilde, Philip Larkin and John Betjeman won’t be new to many readers, but Hopps does a good job of explaining how Morrissey has incorporated their work into his own. Morrissey is a magpie as well as a maker. But there’s a curious omission in Hopps’ study of his influences and predecessors: A.E. Housman, who offers even more similarities than any of those three. Wilde might be Morrissey’s greatest hero, but his art was much more elaborate, artificial and upper-class than Morrissey’s or Housman’s.

Like Morrissey, Housman wrote lyrics about lads and laddish crimes, not mannered prose about rich decadents and London clubs. So why is Housman not discussed in this book? I don’t know. So much of what Hopps says about Morrissey applies to Housman too: the elusiveness, the irony, the sadness, shyness and feeling of being “a foreigner on the earth”. Housman has an entry in Simon Goddard’s Mozipedia: The Encyclopedia of Morrissey and the Smiths (2010) and although that’s not in the bibliography here, I assume Hopps has read it. Not that he needed to: Housman would be an obvious forerunner of Morrissey even if Morrissey had never been influenced by him or referred to him.

And Hopps could also have learnt from Housman how to wear learning even more lightly, because Housman was a highly learned man who wrote simple, clear prose with vigour and insight. Fortunately, the worst prose here is in the notes, as in this quotation from Matthew Bannister’s White Noise, White Boys: Masculinities and 1980s Indie Guitar Pop (2006):

New Pop discourses were mainly concerned to demonstrate how postmodernism, poststructuralism and postfeminism as manifested in MTV, Madonna, Prince and digital sampling celebrated a shiny new androgynous semiotic wonderland, where continuous self-invention through artifice and intertextual pastiche eased sexual differences, problematized authorship and created polysemic and polysexual possibilities. (note 6, pg. 14, ch. 1)

Hopps only gestures towards writing as bad as that. He doesn’t make the jaw-dropping connections that Dr Miriam B. Stimbers makes in Can the Cannibal?: Aspects of Angst, Abjection and Anthropophagy in the Music of Suzi Quatro (2004), but I assume that Morrissey has been flattered to have someone as intelligent and erudite discussing his work. Not all erudition is valuable, of course, but if you’re a fan of Morrissey and the Smiths, you should try this book and see if you agree that Hopps rocks. He has a lot to say and says it well as he explores every facet of Morrissey’s art, from falsetto and flowers to melancholy and melisma, from no-saying and nonbelonging to eccentricity and embarrassment.

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Elsewhere other-posted:

• Musings on Music

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The Cult of Cthulhu

H.P. Lovecraft: The Classic Horror Stories, edited by Roger Luckhurst (Oxford University Press 2013)

Lovecraft has come a long way. From the margins to the mountebanks, you might say, because he’s getting serious interest from American and British academics nowadays. In France, he got it a long time ago:

In the late 1960s, the French academic Maurice Lévy wrote a thesis on Lovecraft as a serious fantasiste, continuing the French love of all things tinged with Poe. In turn, the radical philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari used Lovecraft as a touchstone for notions of unstable being and becoming-other in their revolutionary manifesto, A Thousand Plateaus (1980). (“Introduction”, pg. xiii)

I didn’t realize it was as bad as that. Then again, I already knew that the Trotskyist gasbag China Miéville had been influenced by Lovecraft and had intensively interrogated issues around Lovecraft’s racism and xenophobia. Roger Luckhurst interrogates them too. After all, they’re a glaring flaw in an important and highly influential writer. How could HPL have been so egregiously wrong and in such an offensive way?

Well, perhaps he wasn’t wrong and perhaps he wouldn’t have written so imaginatively and powerfully without his crime-think. The psychologist Hans Eysenck suggested that psychoticism — which is distinct from psychosis – was essential to genius. But was HPL a genius? In his way, I think he was. It wasn’t a purely literary way and perhaps HPL is bigger than literature. He wasn’t a genius like Dickens or Kipling, because you don’t read Lovecraft for literary skill, psychological subtlety and clever characterization. No, you read him for sweep and scale, grandeur and grotesqueness, darkness and density. You should also read him for humour:

In February the McGregor boys from Meadow Hill were out shooting woodchucks, and not far from the Gardner place bagged a very peculiar specimen. The proportions of its body seemed slightly altered in a queer way impossible to describe, while its face had taken on an expression which no one ever saw in a woodchuck before. (“The Colour out of Space”, 1927)

Like J.G. Ballard, Lovecraft is often misread as lacking humour. In fact, like Ballard, he’s often very funny. This book is a joke he would have appreciated: there’s something blackly humorous about his posthumous elevation to hard covers and high-quality paper under the auspices of the Oxford University Press. His work is now getting more care than his body did: as Luckhurst notes in the introduction, HPL died of stomach cancer at 47 as “an unknown and unsuccessful pulp writer” (pg. xii). Is he better in a pulp paperback, with battered covers, yellowing paper and no notes? Yes, I think he is, but he’s best of all when he’s both paperback and hardback. I don’t like literary studies in their modern form, but Roger Luckhurst doesn’t slather HPL in jargon or suffocate the stories with notes.

So the notes aren’t intrusive, but they are instructive – for example, about HPL’s modesty and self-doubt. Did he really think “At the Mountains of Madness” (1936) “displayed evidence of a ‘lack of general ability’ and a mind corrupted by ‘too much reading of pulp fiction’” (“Explanatory Notes”, pg. 470)? Then he was a giant who mistook himself for a pygmy. But that’s better than the reverse. Most of his greatness is collected here, from “The Call of Cthulhu” to “The Shadow Out of Time”, though I would have dropped “The Horror at Red Hook” and included “The Music of Erich Zann”. I would also like to drop China Miéville and include J.G. Ballard, but unfortunately HPL didn’t influence Ballard. I wish he had. Mutual influence would have been even better.

Nietzsche did influence Lovecraft and Lovecraft’s work can be read as, in part, an attempt to confront the death of God. Spirit departs the world; science invades. Where are wonder and horror to be found now? In “The Call of Cthulhu” or “At the Mountains of Madness”, stories that draw on astronomy, geology and biology to awe us with space, time and organic possibility. And Lovecraft, unlike Nietzsche or Ballard, recognized the importance of mathematics. That’s most evident here in “The Dreams in the Witch-House” (1933), which mixes trans-Euclidean geometry with ancient superstition. But maths isn’t the only influence on this story: so is M.P. Shiel’s novel The House of Sounds (1896). I didn’t know about that and I’m glad to have learnt it. That’s good scholarship, introducing readers to older authors and deeper influences. It still doesn’t feel right to read Lovecraft on clean white paper in a heavy book, but it’s good that he’s come up in the world. Let him bask in the sun before the Übermensch arrives.

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