ABSTRACT
Harr ison writes from the gap between, shot across by the different socio-cultural registers which may collude on the written signifier but collide on the oral. He exploits the tension between the demotic and the patrician, confronting them across a v. until they enact on the page the class struggle he believes they articulate.5 At the same time he breaks down the anti-social, anti-political monologue which Sartre anathematized in the poetic ‘I’6 and creates a chorus of voices at a carnivalesque feast of language at which the first to eat are the linguistically dispossessed, the inarticulate to whom history has never listened; they are served, in carnivalesque reversal, by ‘their betters’, the linguistically rich who, if they are not sent empty away, certainly have to wait their metrical, semantic and phonetic turn. That the dishes are not always to their liking was demon-
strated by the hordes of disgusteds in Tunbridge Wells who protested at Richard Eyre’s televised version of v. on Channel Four in 1987.
