This is one of the most remarkable books when it comes to a detailed description of western literary and cultural tradition. Dollimore has done a great job of keeping the most essential cultural tendencies intact while still being quite meaningful and interesting at the same time.
The introduction of the book gives a clear picture of how the concepts and ideas of death, desire and loss have been portrayed and viewd in Western culture by innumerable writers, theorists and critics for several ages. Dollimore begins the introduction with the depiction of the protagonist Hugo from Oscar Moore’s “A Matter of Life and Sex” (1991) whose journey includes being a narcissistic erotic adult to dying from AIDS by the end. Dollimore compares this story with the supposed real life story of Foucault who after getting diagnosed with AIDS, wanted to infect as many people as possible before taking the last breath. The supposed link between homosexuality and death has been portrayed over and over by many writers and critics in literature and other forms of art as well. Moore along with other writers brought about a sense that gives rise of a certain feeling that sex, desire, death and disease go hand in hand.
This connection between death and desire perhaps found its most extreme statement during Renaisance but it is an endemic to Western culture whch later got associated with homosexuality. For Jacobeans, what connects death and desire is mutability.
In his poem “Logs on the Hearth”, Thomas Hardy recalls a childhood memory of his sister climbing the tree who is now dead. His sister hence, is recalled in a moment of unselfconscious happiness now frozen forever.
“To his coy Mistress” is one of the most famous of all carpe diem (sieze the day) poems that makes us keen to sieze the day and at the same time prevents us from doing so. This narrative is not only about seizing the day but it also makes the readers realize how time and change drive us towards a horizon of oblivion which makes it hard for us to sieze anything.
As Freud puts it “the aim of all life is death”, Western tradition has always been in crisis which is driven further by mutability and death.
Including Freud, there had been ,many critics and theorists who put forward an unusual image of death in a scandalous way, what the philosophers call the “principle of individuation”. Death has been famously eroticized in works like “Tristan and Isolde” and “Ode to a Nightingale”.
While discussing the representation of these concepts through gender, Dollimore brings forth how “The Second Sex” by Beauvoir brought a new direction in the field of feminist criticism. It not only changed lives of thousands of women but also posed each of the problems the feminists are dealing with today.
In Bronfen’s Over her Dead body, she draws an imaginary line to show the aesthetic connection between death and femininity. She also claims gender constructions are supplementary to the division between life and death.
Dollimore moves on to discuss a certain fear of failure that causes social death. The extinction questions caused by internal and mostly external forces generally cause this fear that leads to a certain anxiety of social death among people. Social historians also speak about the increasing tendency of denial of death in modern times. But when revolution fails, the preoccupation of death returns. Considering the wide angles of western tradition this book covers, it would be highly recommended to anyone who is willing to take a look at the “West world” in a brief yet a detailed account for the betterment of their vision of the world.
– Suvasree Bandyopadhyay
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