Before I read back on most recent comments, which I'll do anon, here's my round-up from a perusal of the book.
Here’s a book that lets us off the hook. The media will lampoon and the trolls ululate, but Gavin Hopps has sketched the measure of our man in ‘The Pageant of His Bleeding Heart’. In the comings and goings of Morrissey’s world, the author has managed to articulate the ‘unspeakable’, armed with an extensive vocabulary, a love and mastery of his material and a skill for an innovative turn of phrase.
Unawares, a recent excavation of Wilde’s ideas, which appear regularly throughout, proved for me to be an ideal preparation for reading this book. As a physical object, in its binding and cover design, it is a little work of art, worthy both externally and internally of its subject. Hopps draws from many sources, and essentially, to use a Ken Wilber phrase, ‘embraces and transcends’ all previous speculations on the singer, while adding much rich intelligent commentary. Keep a good dictionary to hand on approaching it!
Here’s the keynote theme: “What makes his [Morrissey’s] work so extraordinary, though, is the way he seeks out and heroically holds himself in embarrassing situations – suffering as it were sacrificially in front of us on behalf of humanity. ‘Ecce Homo’, his characteristic posture suggests.” (p. 5) (I stood under that arch on the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem in 2008. You can see it at this link -
http://www.sacred-destinations.com/israel/jerusalem-via-dolorosa - Just west of the entrance to the Lithostratos is the Ecce Homo Arch, where Pilate identified Jesus to the crowd saying "Ecco homo" ("Behold the man" - Jn 19:5). The arch is part of a gate dating from Emperor Hadrian's time and was given its present name in the 16th century.)
“For it was in the midst of this fantasy world of hedonism, glamour, flamboyance and plenty, which was covertly shored up by the cynicism that unmasked it, that The Smiths emitted what Morrissey described as ‘a complete cry in every direction’ (p.45) Their cry was not to buy into the misleading illusion.
“…there was always something playful and arch about Morrissey, and he still reaches towards us with heartfelt urgency and ‘outstretched voice’.” (p. 58) ; the implication being that he is still finishing what he started.
When discussing the camp qualities of the album ‘Kill Uncle’, Hopps suggests that camp is like deconstruction – “which takes place discreetly within a system and on its own terms, like a parasite or virus, showing how they can mean ‘more, less, or something other than’ what their author intended them to mean, and which does not annihilate the system or context it speaks within, but effects a trembling ‘which nothing can calm’ that spreads throughout the entire inherited order.” (p. 113) Camp is one tool that allows Morrissey to keep toppling hyped values projected from elsewhere.
Hopps identifies in him “a subversive desire to force ‘high art’ to make room for the ‘lowly’, and a determination – however bleak and incongruous the result – faithfully to represent contemporary reality” (p. 118). This sets him apart from most of Oscar Wilde’s philosophy. Also, “…in spite of the sense of pathos and privation that pervades his lyrics, they are filled with moments in which everyday things and experiences are affectionately preserved, and elevated by their preservation; moments which, if they are not epiphanies, nonetheless allow such phenomena to ‘put off’ their ephemerality and exceed their commonplace appearances in the direction of an epiphany” (p. 119). We can only concur with this well-coined observation.
Morrissey’s various acts of clumsy social nakedness on stage constitute, says the author, “such impropriety [that] may in fact be a fidelity to a more fundamental set of principles, from whose point of view the conventions of polite society are themselves a transgression” (p. 125) Difference is what is championed, not normalcy.
In trying to understand why Morrissey beats around the bush so much in his lyrics, Hopps guesses, “that there is something at stake which is kept secret out of self-protection, in the face of hostile forces from without, or which cannot be told because it is of its very nature in some sense ineffable – which is to say, incommensurate with the available categories – and would be falsified by the telling” (p. 135). Hopps would make a sympathetic assistant for a mute witness!
Of Morrissey’s fondness for playful double entendres, Hopps proposes that ‘its appeal might also lie in the fact that innuendo is the mirror image of hypocrisy – a vice for which the singer has a particular dislike – in that it intimates behind all fine appearances an ‘embarrassing brotherhood’ in corporeality…is reflexive and, like carnival laughter, includes those who are doing the laughing” (p. 142).
Morrissey hawks “an art of refusal, which characteristically entails a withholding of consent, a nonparticipation, an abandonment of conventions, and an obstinate no-saying. However, another way of refusing alternatives is by saying yes to all of them” (p. 156). In either case, he personally holds onto a sovereign freedom of response to whatever life throws at him.
After expressing awe at Morrissey’s ability to “stage a romantic epiphany within the parameters of a three-minute pop song”, which is contrasted with his miserable stereotype, Hopps quips, “to avoid any further damage to his reputation, let us turn to our ‘etcetera’ of excessive darkness”! (p.160).
...t.b.c.
I certainly appreciate the seriousness with which he's handled Morrissey's material though.
