As I have
had occasion to note in this blog before, towers turn up in both Morris’s early
poetry and late romances: the former offers us ‘The Tune of the Seven Towers’
and ‘The Little Tower’, while the latter contains, for instance, the evil Baron
of the Seven Towers who oppresses the citizens of Whatham in the unfinished
‘Kilian of the Closes’. However, towers
do not crop up in his utopia News from Nowhere, which is a notably
‘horizontal’ work compared to Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, the book that inspired it (albeit by intense
dissent). William Guest sees a good deal
of Nowhere from a boat on the river Thames, and you can’t get much more
horizontal than that; while Julian West, in Bellamy’s volume, is very early on
sitting high up on Dr Leete’s belvedere taking an aerial survey of the new
Boston.
So if there
are fires in Morris’s utopia, as I suppose there may be from time to time, just
as there are other mishaps, they will not be of the alarmingly ‘vertical’ nature
of the Grenfell Tower fire that we have just witnessed in the London borough of
Kensington and Chelsea. The literary
concept that keeps being trotted out by the mainstream media for this appalling
event is ‘tragedy’, but this notion, as Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton
have shown, brings a whole ideology along with it: of fatalism, of
inevitability, even of nobility in suffering. ‘Tragedy’ in this context is a
deeply passive and depoliticising concept; it thus fits in
well enough with what I believe to be the media and authorities’ early efforts
to downplay the number of dead in this event, which will surely exceed one
hundred.
For the Grenfell
Tower inferno is political through and through; Labour MP David Lammy is
absolutely right to say that this is ‘corporate manslaughter’ and that there
must be resulting arrests and prison sentences.
The avoidable deaths of so many poor people in the richest borough of
one of the richest cities on earth, after the whole sickening history of
ignored warnings, cheap and dangerous building materials (the cladding), and
failures to update planning and safety laws, is a vivid index of the neoliberal
England of austerity, inequality and deregulation which both Tory and New
Labour governments have bequeathed to us.
‘Another emblem there!’, if we may borrow that memorable phrase from
W.B. Yeats’s ‘Wild Swans at Coole’ – just as Theresa May’s aloof and sanitised
visit to the disaster scene is an emblem of her crippled psyche in contrast to
the human warmth which Jeremy Corbyn was able to communicate during his. No doubts there, then, about who the real
British Prime Minister should now be.
Posts
