Vol. 21 No. 10 · 13 May 1999
pages 25-26 | 3031 words
Missing the Vital Spark
Mark Ford
- Prometheus by Tony Harrison
Faber, 86 pp, £8.99, November 1998, ISBN 0 571 19753 1
The first literary appearance of the mythical figure of Prometheus (whose name means ‘foresight’) is in the writings of Hesiod. Hesiod’s Titan is something of a trickster, of ‘intricate and twisting mind’ in Richmond Lattimore’s 1959 translation, who first affronts Zeus by trying to cheat him of his sacrificial dues: Prometheus slaughters an ox, but instead of offering the meat to the father of the gods, he gives it to men, presenting Zeus only with the animal’s bones, concealed beneath a thick layer of fat. As punishment, Zeus decides to deny mankind the use of fire, but Prometheus cleverly manages to steal the sacred flame, which he smuggles down to Earth by hiding it in the hollow of a fennel stalk.
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Letters
Vol. 21 No. 11 · 27 May 1999
From George Braddon
According to Mark Ford, the miners in Tony Harrison's Prometheus are 'all figured as salt-of-the-earth types, while Hermes
… sums up everything Harrison dislikes about New Labour' (LRB, 13 May). Having thus oversimplified it, Ford proceeds to criticise the film for being too simplistic: 'the contest for the audience's hearts and minds between the Old Man and Hermes is so obviously set up in the Old Man's favour that it never manages to generate any convincing intellectual tension or dramatic suspense.' But isn't the fact that Ford found himself 'rather tempted to side with Hermes' evidence of some kind of conflict? We recoil from the Old Man's jingoism over the Dresden bombing; it's hard to dismiss Hermes' ecological arguments as just so much spin. V offers ample evidence of tension between Harrison's classical education and his coal-mining roots, between Hermes and the Old Man, and this tension persists in Prometheus. It's impossible to dispute that Ford found the film 'rather dull', but that matter of taste doesn't justify his representing it as a bit simple-minded. I find D.H. Lawrence something of a struggle, but that doesn't mean he's no good.
George Braddon
London SE1
