Keston Sutherland’s Stress Position pt2

I’ve now spent a bit more time with Stress Position and feel able to say a bit more about this remarkable work. I haven’t yet mentioned the wedding reception which occurs during the second part of the prose section. I’m not entirely sure who is addressed in this but it’s a very  penetrating depiction of rage expressed in a dream-like manner.  What this has to do with the rest of Stress Position isn’t entirely clear unless we are being taken on a tour of the inside of Sutherland’s head in order to be reminded of our individual complicity in the scheme of things.

There are a number of proper nouns in Stress Position, some of which may need explication. Al-Mansur was the founder of Baghdad in 762 and controlled all of the Muslim lands from North Africa to Pakistan.  Diotima also makes an appearance, she was the name Holderlin gave to Susette Gontard, the love of his life, who was the wife of his employer. She is addressed both in Holderlin’s poetry and his novel ‘Hyperion’. Holderlin named her after Diotima of Mantinea, who was a seer in Ancient Greece and is mentioned in Plato’s Symposium, scholars aren’t sure whether or not she was a real historical character but Plato attributes to her the concept of Platonic love. Diotima doesn’t make a big appearance- Sutherland refers to her as ‘anagrammatic’ and I’m still trying to work that one out.

Diotima occurs on the same line as ‘Vietstock’ as in “To the anagrammatic Diotima I am a bare intuition of Vietstock / so we split” Vietstock is the name given to the Vietnamese stock market and I’m a little concerned that the line is included because it sounds good rather than having any ‘real’ meaning. It could of course be that Sutherland is just too clever for my limited brain. I just don’t see how anyone can be an intuition of a stock market.

Hakagawa also gets a mention, the only reference that I can locate to him is in Eliot’s Gerontion. In Stress Position he grimaces in sympathy but not much else, unless Sutherland is referring to Eliot’s interest (via F H Bradley) in how the internal workings of the mind relate to reality. If that is the case then it’s reasonably clever but I’m not aware that Sutherland is overtly sympathetic to Eliot’s particular brand of modernism.

We now come to the hadjiavatis- Wikipedia tells me that the name refers to a character in Greek shadow-puppet theatre who “has a tendency to flatter the powerful and his name in Greece is associated with the eternally compliant person towards the occupying and dominant establishment”.  The hadjiavatis appears first in quotes- “the hadjiavatis who stands / for sacrifice whether he eats or is famished, the need whatever his need / absorbed into or when you disappear, for passion in everything / where you disappear”. Sutherland refers to these as ‘famous words’. They’re not famous enough to me. The second occurrence is in the last section of the poem- “Akinfemiwa: all the better to ignore you with / hadjiavatis vaticilectrix vs Barbie arbitration / the apparition of a frozen heart  grasped in fish fingers”. Akinfemiwa is a fairly common surname in Nigeria, which is referred to in an earlier stanza, but I’m not going to speculate further. Barbie could refer to the doll or Klaus Barbie (the ‘butcher of Lyon’) who was put on trial in France for war crimes. I’ve got a feeling that it refers to the latter but it could be both. Vaticilectrix is a compound word (vatic and ilectrix) but I’m still working on the second part.

We now come to Lucas Manyane Fritzl, type this into Google and you get loads of stuff on Josef Fritzel, the Autrian who raped and kept his daughter captive for 24 years. Two lines later he is referred to as ‘Joey’ but I’m still fairly mystified.

There’s also Black Beauty (the horse) who appears as part of the funniest line in the poem and the al-Rashid which is a posh hotel in downtown Baghdad. Mention must also be made of various generals whose names always appear in block capitals- VAMPIRE, GAS ECHO HEDGE TRIMMER etc. ‘Vampire’ seems reasonably straightforward but the second is far too oblique for me.

Sutherland is known as the main Prynnist, if that’s the right noun, and Jeremy appears as a footnote in the fourth part of the prose section. This is a rewrite of part of the prose in verse form with ‘Prynne’ inserted. The entire footnote is crossed through as if we aren’t meant to read it. Sutherland is either being far too self-aware or just precious- the vast majority of people who read ‘Stress Position’ will be aware of the Prynne/Sutherland lineage anyway and will have made their own minds up on that particular score. If the act of elision is meant to be clever then it isn’t clever enough.

Meat Loaf gets a mention because Bat Out of Hell was played whilst the Americans were torturing prisoners in Abu Ghraib. Sutherland asks rhetorically which of the various versions of this album were used.

There are other names which I haven’t started to tackle yet and there’s an inevitably lyrical description of the dialectic which I’ll deal with next time. The work itself is mentioned as not being available in WH Smith which may or may not be a reference to the Prynnist stance on publication or may refer to the fact that Sutherland runs Barque Press (with Andrea Brady) and is therefore part of the ‘witty circus’.

I’ll finish this with a quote from the last section- “Because the first metaphor is the deepest” which is only funny if you like the song from which it is stolen.

Stress Position is available from Barque Press. Try buying it now.