The
human hand is the summary of the whole human. It carries the traces of one’s
life experiences, memories, and culture. Our palms harbour the forms of life we
choose to live, our self that sets forward the life we lead, and existence we
bear in this world. The human hands do a hard day’s work, produce literature,
create art, show love and humaneness. Predominantly, the hand is the most
distinctive instrument of human body, which is regarded as the major tool for
skills, artistry, handwork, and capacity of mind of human beings.
The
Oxford English Dictionary offers twenty-four different definitions for the word
‘hand’, the foremost of them is “the end part of a person’s arm beyond the
wrist, including the palm, fingers, and thumb” (Hand). On the other hand, “the
first OED reference to hands as metonymy for labour is from 1655: ‘a person
employed by another in any manual work; a workman or workwoman’” (Zandy XII).
In other respects, the metonymy of hand usually refers to emotion, activity, skill,
control, and giving (Ahn, and Kwon 207), while the old
ontological metaphor of the hand relates the organ to possession, control,
cooperation and attention, and implies that the hand is a container and
something in hand is to be considered an entity (Ahn,
and Kwon 201).
Undoubtedly
the human hand signifies many meanings, not only according to the interpreter’s
background or point of view, but also to the contextual usage of the word, such
as historically, culturally, religiously or linguistically. While speculating
about the instrumentality of the human hand, Ronald Polansky states that “the
body is organic through being composed of parts that provide instruments for
the soul” (Polansky 160), of which hands are alleged to be the most
instrumental part by Aristotle since he describes the hand as “an instrument
that a man doth especially make use of, because many things are done by the
hands, and not by any other part” (Aristotle 235). On the other hand, Martin
Heidegger attempts to describe the existence of human beings through the human
hands and their relationship with the outer world by famously saying that the
interpretation of the structure of Dasein
is only possible through the interpretation of the relationship between human
existence, the readiness-to-hand, and
the entirety of equipment, the World
(107). Moreover, the human hand is also regarded holy by the major religions.
Although they require different worship conventions with diversified methodologies,
all of them demand a requirement of a kind of worshipping by lifting up one’s
hands. In Bible, for example, it is stated that “I want the men in every place
to pray, lifting up holy hands, without wrath and dissension” (The Holy
Bible: King James Version, 1 Tim. 2.8). On the other hand, hands
are also thought to be the agency of work in Bible. For instance, the holy name
Noah[1] is
adapted to ease the working conditions and labour of hands as the story tells
that “Lamech lived a hundred eighty and two years, and begat a son: and he
called his name Noah, saying, This same shall comfort us concerning our work
and toil of our hands…” (Gen. 5.28-29). It is clear that the human hand is seen
holy and pure by Christianity in a way that a considerable amount of importance
attached to the labour produced by the hand. In line with these ideas, it can be
claimed that one of the most distinctive features of the human hand is that it
constitutes the labour.
Labour
and culture are inextricable in the way in which the human hand not only
creates culture but also carries and represents it, while at the same time preparing
the conditions for the reproduction of cultural signifiers and the reproduction
of the relations between the cultural signifiers that form the culture, in
particular the working-class culture. In this short essay, two poems entitled
“Becoming” and “It’s About the Labour” by William Letford are concisely
analysed to show that the human hand is a symbol of human agency within the working-class
culture and it is one of the most significant instruments through which the
working-class culture distinguishes itself in its own particular entity and
therefore in its existence.
2.
The Hand in Bevel
One
of the up-and-coming young Scottish
poets, William Letford, who “has worked as a roofer, on and off, since he was
fifteen years old” (Letford 1), presents us poems from the life itself,
reflecting the daily routine of his working days as a working-class man.
Combining the contextual elements of realism and early fragmented stylistics of
modernism, his first and yet only book, Bevel,
published in 2012, is an experiment of poetry. The book has the euphony and
rhythm of workaday, while at the same time questioning the formation and sustainment
of the working-class culture in the contemporary world. Throughout the book,
Letford’s poetry reveals the secret hints about the daily routine and thoughts
of a Scottish worker; at times through the monologues of metaphysical
questioning, and occasionally through the dialogues between the speaker and his
colleague, Casey.
3.
“Becoming”
After work my grandfather would wash his hands in the
kitchen sink.
He would use Fairy Liquid as lather, and as a boy I’d watch
him scrub stains
from his skin, clear dirt from his fingernails. Where have
these hands been
I’d wonder, what is out there? Not, after each working each
day I stare
at my own hands in my own sink. It’s a powerful sensation.
This mixture
of pride and sadness (Letford, “Becoming” 1-6)
In
his poem “Becoming”, Letford presents us a ritual that is imparted from generation
to generation, from past to future. Yet, the introvert melancholy and nostalgia
that has usually been associated with neo-romanticism is shifted to a new
straight and lucid realism in the poem. The most obvious physical object that
takes readers’ attention from self-enclosed lament to the reality of workaday
is the hands. One can claim that through putting the hands in the middle of
attention, Letford is seeking for his own artistic way to represent the reality
of working-class in poetry. Reflecting the essential manifestation of the
worker’s ritual within the hands, the humble, self-conscious flow of Letford’s
poem gives way to a feeling of humane intimacy and spirited naturalness that
blithely resigns the speaker to his grandfather’s faith. Thus, the
grandfather’s daily routine, unusually centered around the idea of meeting the
reality of working life through hands, is transferred to the young generation
by means of cultural representation.
The
ritual of the worker in the poem involves the after hours cleaning activity of
him who comes home and washes his hands. Although the ritual seems like a basic
activity, it also presents us a philosophical insight as it makes the speaker question
the background of stains and dirt, which, later, brings with itself the feeling
of juxtaposed questioning of one’s culture as a worker in the world. In his
work The Other Heading, Jacques Derrida
asserts that “what is proper to a culture is not to be identical with itself”
(9). While providing an insight into the development and interactions of the European
cultures throughout the history, his statement also draws attention to the
necessity of transfiguration of constituents of culture for every stagnation in
cultural progression is untoward. Ross Abbinnett scrutinizes Derrida’s axiom
and develops it in an attempt to establish a relationship between culture and
identity, and how these two shape each other. One conclusion drawn by Abbinnett
is that “it is only in so far as we identify ourselves through the norms,
values and ideals of our culture that we are able to exercise political
judgement and responsibility” (128). At this point, it can be claimed that
“Becoming” reflects the speaker’s culturally-composed stand towards the life as
we see that the speaker lives through what is inherited from the old generation
and feels a power that is abstract and unknown of origin. The norm of the hands,
on the other hand, is the fact that a worker finds power in them, forming the
involvement of his agency in the world through the power he finds in the hands.
Another conclusion Abbinnett points out is that “at any given time, a culture
is sustained through a process of ‘gathering’, of giving itself a ‘presence’,
which calls together its internal differentiations and constitutes a boundary between
itself and its outside” (128). That being the case, Letford’s poem can be seem
as representing a reality in which, beyond the abstract sensation that emerges
towards the end of the poem, lays the post-modernist belief that the daily
exercises reflected in a worker’s authenticity constitute a ‘presence’ that what
gives the working-class people their identity and the working-class culture its
entity.
4. “It’s About the Labour”
hammers nails
hammers
nails
hammers
nails
heh Casey did a tell ya a goat
a couple a poems published
widizthatmean
widayyemean
dizthatmeanyegetmoneyfurrit
eh naw
aw right
hammers nails
hammers nails
hammers nails (Letford, “It’s About the Labour” 1-13)
In
his realistic and arguably meta-fictional poem, Letford shows us that the daily
routine of the working-class people is represented by the sounds of banging
nails, which is, to a great extent, produced by the activity of the hands of
the worker. The artlessness and lucidity of the dialogue between the speaker
and Casey, his colleague, is carried to an underscoring structure of manual
labour that is reflective of the representation of an inherent vision of a
social organization, namely working-class. In the poem, it is obvious that the
core element that represents the daily routine of the working-class is
generated by the labour of the hands. Again, the hands play a very significant
symbolic role in representing the reality that makes the working-class culture
distinctive in its own particular operation and hence its existence. Consequently,
it can be claim that Letford’s poem presents us the working-class reality
constructed by the hands, and represents the symbolic meaning that the hands have
a substantial share within the culture of the working-class for they are the
essential tool by which a worker makes his living.
For
Letford, it seems, the art of poetry, far from representing an escape from the
rigour and pressures of a workday, presents a tune of naturality and
simplicity, and therefore a latent celebration of working-class life, combining
the contemporary dilemma that the suppression of the working-class culture by
the popular is inherently turned into a disposition that the two forms of culture
merge into one another. Although the repetitive lines of “hammers nails” (1-3, 11-13) indicate a minimalistic
uniformity of the working-class life, the vibrancy and colour of the dialogue
between the speaker and Casey leads us to the revelation of the fact that the
artistic tendency of a working-class man is directly related to the monetary
gain that art could possibly provide. For instance, when Casey is told that a
fellow worker, “…a goat” (4), published some poems, the ultimate question he
asks is if they receive money as compensation. However, shorn of the desire for
aesthetic productivity, Casey still has a naiveness sustained by unconscious
pragmatism. At this point, one can claim that Letford questions the traditional
approach of working-class towards the art of poetry and the relationship between
the working-class and the art. The contrast emerging from being a working-class
man and a poet at the same time is what Letford has been experiencing himself,
and his solution is rather indifferent, predicting a circular return to the
ordinariness of the daily working-class life with the ending lines of
“hammers nails” (“It’s About the
Labour” 13).
Instead
of complaining about the inchoate involvement of the working-class in the art
of poetry, Letford choses to represent the working-class reality with its
ordinary and yet explicit details to suggest that the reality/art opposition is
vanished since both of them have the same ability in presenting the
representational presence of what is known as reality. In his article “Realism
and Power in Aesthetic Representation”, Richard Harvey Brown describes realism
as follows: “Realism is that mode of painting or writing that is taken to
represent the world directly as it is” (134). In the light of Brown’s
description of reality, it can be asserted that “It’s About the Labour” transforms
the succession of sounds into the reflections of the reality of the working-class
people. By doing so, Letford turns the art of poetry into an active force that
not only represents the reality, but also constitutes it and therefore becomes
it. For Letford, as a consequence, the art of poetry is not a flamboyancy but a
fundamental condition of casual existence, as it is not only a mere tool to
represent the working-class life with its ultimate reality, but also an
instrument to bring liberty to the culturally constructed daily existence of
the working-class.
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