The Extinct Scene by Thomas S. Davis

Author:Thomas S. Davis [Davis, Thomas S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT004120, LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, LIT006000, LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2015-08-11T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 4.4 Henry Moore, War: Possible Subjects, 1940–41.

Reproduced by permission of the Henry Moore Foundation.

Moore’s technique of exposing and subsequently collapsing oppositions generates its most macabre effects in those sketches where the deep shelter of the Tubes mutates into its opposite—a mass grave. Fear of live burial in the shelters wasn’t baseless fantasy. In one week in October 1940, three Tube shelters and those within them suffered gravely from the air raids. Damages to Trafalgar Station on October 7 and to Bounds Green a day later buried twenty-six shelterers beneath debris and injured another eighty-five.35 Tube historian John Gregg recounts the worst of these incidents:

But the greatest tragedy to visit the Tube dwellers in 1940 came at Balham station on 14th October, when a very heavy bomb fell in Balham High Road, about 200 feet north of Chestnut Grove at a point immediately over the Board’s northbound station tunnel. The cover of ground over the top of the tunnel where the bomb fell was about 30 feet and in a position where a cross passage connects the two station tunnels. As a result, a crater was formed some 60 feet in diameter occupying the full width of the High Road. Into this a bus fell, providing for photographers one of the most enduring and dramatic images of the Blitz as well as a shield against onlookers viewing the ghastly scene below. The explosion, which a policeman on duty at the time recalls “lifting me off the ground,” caused a deluge of ballast and sludge to enter the platforms where over six hundred shelterers were gathered, burying sixty-four of them as well as four station staff.36

More structurally sound and purportedly safer than any other type of shelter the state doled out, the perceived security of the Tube shelters has its dialectical counterpart in the threat of live burial.

A longstanding gothic trope, live burial names the vanishing lines between life and death, surface and depth, and interior and exterior.37 The contrast between protected slumber and live burial appears weakly in one of Moore’s drawings from 1940–1941 (figure 4.5). The top portion of the drawing features two couples rendered monochromatically, sleeping soundly with no indication of violence or any impending threat. Below them Moore creates an altogether different scene: awash in pink, a figure’s head and body peer through a pile of rubble. Faint outlines of buildings in the background assure us that this potential death scene has not taken place in any of the shelters. A similar motif recurs in another sketch, Landscape with Wrecked Omnibus (figure 4.6), from the same time period that may reference directly the Balham station disaster and the numerous photos of that bus crashed into the gigantic bomb crater. At the top of Moore’s page, a bus teeters over on the left hand side; on the right, wild lines combine with green, yellow, white, and pink colors and shapes to lend this sketch its chaotic atmosphere. An open crater swells below the bus and just beneath we see shelterers in a subterranean space.

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