Terry Eagleton is, among other things, professor of cultural theory at the National University of Ireland, Galway. His latest book is Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate.
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Vol. 23 No. 8 · 19 April 2001
pages 9-10 | 3079 words
Having one’s Kant and eating it
Terry Eagleton
- Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks 1982-90: Volume One edited by Robert Denham
Toronto, 418 pp, £45.00, September 2000, ISBN 0 8020 4751 3
- Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks 1982-90: Volume Two edited by Robert Denham
Toronto, 531 pp, £45.00, September 2000, ISBN 0 8020 4752 1
If someone were to ask why art and culture have proved so vital to the modern age, one might do worse than reply: to compensate for the decline of religion. It is certainly a more convincing response than claiming that modern society finds art particularly valuable, as opposed to richly profitable. What modernity finds precious is less works of art, which are just one more commodity in its marketplace, than the idea of the aesthetic. And this reverence for the aesthetic reflects the way in which art, or at least a certain exalted notion of it, is forced in the modern age to stand in for a religious transcendence which has fallen on hard times.
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Letters
Vol. 23 No. 11 · 7 June 2001
From William Benemann
As an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley in 1969 I attended lectures given by Northrop Frye, then a visiting professor. One graduate student after another challenged him with obscure fragments of literature, trying to trip him up and prove that his maddeningly perfect system of literary criticism, described by Terry Eagleton (LRB, 19 April), simply could not fit every case. Almost apologetically, he shot down every saga and veda hurled at him. Not daring to speak up in the lecture hall, I decided to try his theories on Gone with the Wind. The novel opens with Scarlett sitting in the Garden (Tara) in the centre of the universe, with a Tarleton twin on either side. She sins by trying to keep Ashley from marrying Melanie, and is expelled into the World of Experience (Atlanta). She continues to sin by lusting after Ashley, and descends into the Demonic World (the burning of Atlanta, the destruction of Twelve Oaks, the horror of her homecoming). By labouring to pull her family together she expiates her sin and merits a return to the World of Experience (postwar Atlanta), but never ceases to long for the lost Garden of her youth. In this cyclical Adonis-Eros journey the one person who sees her sinning and loves her anyway is Rhett Butler – making him, of course, Christ.
William Benemann
University of California, Berkeley
