A.D. Nuttall

Why do we enjoy tragedy? It may be thought that our best hope of answering this question lies in the psychology of Freud, who disclosed the dark side of the psyche. Behind this darkening of the mind, however, there lies another darkening, of our picture of the ancient sources European literature. Antiquity, formerly given over to the Ego, becomes the province of the Id. Roughly speaking, a sunlit, rational, enlightened world – peopled as it were by marble figures in a state of tranquil felicity (think of Winckelmann) – was replaced, retrospectively, by an opposite world: blood guilt and sacrifice, dream and vision, orgiastic music, unreason. One way of expressing this change is to say that the pretence of Augustianism was dropped: instead of assuming that antiquity was somehow full of 18th-century rationalists having either no religion or a religion etiolated and simplified to the point of minimal Deism, it was at last noticed that the ancient world pullulates with spirits and deities, is crammed with unreasonable, alarming powers. This, by the way, is simply true.

The idea has got around – among ‘advanced’ thinkers of various political persuasions – that realist epistemologies are a thing of the past, that truth values in criticism have now been discredited (or shown up as just a figment of bourgeois ideology); that history and politics are textual ( = fictive) phenomena on a par with poems, novels, or whatever other ‘kinds of writing’ you care to name; and that henceforth the only ‘discourse’ that counts is one that cheerfully acknowledges all this, along with such assumed faits accomplis as the ‘deconstruction’ of the humanist subject as a locus of ethical choices, conflicts and responsibilities.’

‘Greece, having been subjected, subjected her wild conqueror and introduced culture into boorish Rome.’ The poet Horace, himself a Roman, can take a stylish pleasure in describing the Roman conquest of Greece, even though – or rather because – it piquantly entails the intellectual and artistic near-humiliation of the conqueror. Rome is notorious for its brutality, but it was not so brutal that it could not see that, when confronted by the poetry and sculpture of Greece, it must fall to its knees. The paradox of a conquest of iron mirrored and almost eclipsed by a converse conquest of discourse is deliciously Greenblattian. But in Marvellous Possessions Stephen Greenblatt is dealing with the Spanish conquest of the New World. This time the conqueror’s assurance of superiority is brutally uniform: a superiority of arms, together with a superiority of spirit, consisting in the possession of the True faith, produce an inertly predictable result.’

‘The French call it pain, the Germans call it Brot and we call it bread; and we are right, because it is bread.’ So wrote (I have been told though I have not been able to verify the reference) an English theorist of language in the 17th century. The thought is at once robust and lunatic. The writer believes that there are true words and false. His is an extreme case of what Anne Barton calls cratylism.

In the Cathedral at Christ Church in Oxford, between the recumbent knight with the false nose and the tomb of Saint Frideswide, who eluded her too amorous suitor by hiding among pigs, stands the funerary monument of Robert Burton. Already, it will be noticed, I am giving more information than is strictly necessary. My excuse must be that it is a habit I have caught from Burton himself. A schoolboy, asked to produce a review, is said to have written: ‘This book tells me more than I wish to know about this subject.’ The story is usually told as if it counted against the schoolboy; it can, however, without too much straining, be turned against The Anatomy of Melancholy.