Vol. 20 No. 8 · 16 April 1998
pages 13-14 | 3048 words
Good dinners pass away, so do tyrants and toothache
Terry Eagleton
- Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture by Jonathan Dollimore
Allen Lane, 380 pp, £25.00, April 1998, ISBN 0 7139 9125 9
Literary theory is in love with failure. It looks with distaste on whatever is integral, self-identical, smugly replete, and is fascinated by lack, belatedness, deadlock, self-undoing. Works of literature catch its attention once they begin to come unstuck or contradict themselves, when they unravel at the edges or betray an eloquent silence at their heart. Like some remorseless therapist, the theorist is bent on exposing just how spiritually dishevelled such texts really are, despite their pathetic attempts to appear plausible and coherent. Literary theory is an aesthetics of the underdog, championing the humble particular which plays havoc with the structure of an epic or the intentions of a novelist.
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Letters
Vol. 20 No. 9 · 7 May 1998
From John Bayley
In his review of Jonathan Dollimore’s Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture (LRB, 16 April) Terry Eagleton makes the startling claim that ‘literary theory is an aesthetics of the underdog.’ We are all, naturally, on the side of the underdog – it would be incorrect to be anything else – but is there no end to what the once excitingly arcane doctrine of literary theory will do to stay with it? Will it soon reach the Lawrentian and Leavisian verdict that Life is the thing to be on the side of? Or join Dryden and Bradley in praise of Shakespeare’s verbal magic and comprehensive mind? New-model Blairite criticism may come up with many such novel and thrilling perceptions. Now it seems literary theory is ‘championing the humble particular’ too. Canny students used to be advised to do this for exams, many years ago, and to supply appropriate quotes from Chaucer or Defoe or Jane Austen.
John Bayley
Oxford
From Charles Mayo
I think Terry Eagleton is mistaken when he suggests that Yeats’s epitaph -
Cast a cold eye On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!
- disdains ‘death as a vulgarity fit only for clerks and shopkeepers’. Yeats is buried in Drumcliff churchyard, at the foot of Ben Bulben, and spent much of his childhood climbing and walking and fishing on the mountain. He loved it and knew its mythological history; he brought it into his work and one of his last great poems, ‘Under Ben Bulben’, dealt, in part, with him and it. So what was Ben Bulben to him, that he should have desired so much to be buried in its shadow? It was the home of Queen Maeve and her followers and, by extens-ion, a centre of Irish myth. The epitaph is addressed not to the reader but to Queen Maeve’s horsemen, who are invited to observe us, to cast a cold eye on us and pass by. Of course, we read it, but even as we do so Yeats passes us by and speaks over our heads to the ghosts riding the top of Ben Bulben. His thoughts are with them and with the continuity of Irish cultural imagination they exemplify.
Charles Mayo
Polperro, Cornwall
