Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture by Jonathan Dollimore Allen Lane/The Penguin Press 384pp, £25 in UK
The Fall of our first parents, itself a consequence of the desire for knowledge and identification, brought sexual desire and death upon us as a form of punishment. Western culture is pervaded by the paradoxical and perverse interpenetration of sexuality and death, a theme that swells to its climax in the Libestod that closes Wagner's Tristan und Isolde (1865). Jonathan Dolli more, author of Radical Tragedy, Political Shakespeare, and Sexual Dissidence, has compiled a very personal overview ("as I wrote it this book became a daily memento mori") of the history of this trope from Anaximander and Ecclesiastes, through Freud's codification of the death-instinct, to Foucault and Oscar Moore.
Dollimore's theme is not merely the history of mutability, but of the bifurcations of that history into issues of transgression, deviance and degeneration; he explores some of the ways in which an ideology of death has been used as an instrument of social control, and interrogates the "extraordinary redemptive potential" with which homosexuality is supposedly invested in our age of AIDS, "even as it is also the focus of intense cultural, psychic and political anxieties about degeneration and death".
Dollimore disculpates himself in advance for the selectiveness of his account - "I hope my subject exonerates me from the task of trying to be exhaustive" - so it's perhaps a little cranky (and even masochistic) of me to complain nonetheless about some of its omissions. In this age of multiculturalism, is it sufficient to deflect potential criticism of the book's "Western" bias (particularly given the Asiatic provenance of some of the earliest texts cited) by stating almost parenthetically that by " `Western' culture I do not mean a bounded entity culturally distinct from other cultural entities adjacent or prior to it, but something with shifting horizons . . . perceived hesitantly . . . from inside rather than confidently from without"?
Although continental philosophy is given much space, the literary references (with exceptions such as Mann) are predominantly Anglophone. French writing on sexual dissidence focuses on Bataille and Foucault, but omits Sade. Wagner is linked predictably with Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, but little mention is made of the whole German romantic tradition (Novalis, Tieck, Hoffmann . . .) that preceded these great figures, and was equally drenched in death and mutability. What about Poe and the fertile boneyards of Gothic necrophilia? What of Rilke (particularly Malte Laurids Brigge)? What of Gottfried Benn, whose critique of the over-evolution of western humanity and ironic espousal of biological regression ("Oh that we were our primal ancestors. A lump of slime in a warm moor.") led to a disastrous flirtation with Nazism? What of Canetti, the most ferocious denier of death in recent times (absent from the text but mysteriously present in the bibliography)?
Having complained about these omissions (and perhaps it's a strength of the book that it brings them to mind in the first place), it may seem perverse to wish that Dollimore had abbreviated some of his synopses and devoted a little more space to his own reflections. There is an important but sporadic critique of post modernism here, in particular the notion that there is anything novel about "the Death of Man" (William Drummond anticipated this, and unlike "some postmodernists . . . intellectually speaking, he at least knew where he was coming from") or the dismantling of the so-called "unified subject" (his discussion of David Hume is illuminating).
Yet as the book draws towards its close, I at any rate become impatient for a more determined drawing together of strands. Having disapprovingly cited Hegel's wish to transcend wonder ("a contradiction in which objects prove themselves to be just as attractive as repulsive") he proceeds to pit "the fragile reed of wonderment against the massive rationalist edifice of the Hegelian system", Cavafy's self-effacing lyrics of anonymous homosexual encounters being an unlikely vehicle for this unequal struggle. "The promiscuous encounter . . . enact[s] the possibility of a simultaneous identification and disiden tification, which, together, may then involve a reidentification - ceasing to be the fixed, tyrannised subject and becoming . . . becoming what exactly?" What indeed? Although Dolli more assures us that "Erotic wonderment could never be unique to gay writing", heterosexuals may well be left wondering whether they and their writing definitively lack any further "extraordinary redemptive potential". Perhaps such speculation is salutary.
Raymond Deane is a composer and author living in Co Dublin