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University of Notre Dame Press - Denis Donoghue

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111 pages

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W. B. Yeats's poem "Adam's Curse" provides Donoghue with motif and incentive. In Genesis God says to Adam: "Because thou hast harkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life." Yeats put it this way: "It is certain there is no fine thing / Since Adam's curse but needs much labouring." Based on a conversation he had with his beloved Maud Gonne and her sister Kathleen, Yeats's poem thinks about how difficult it is to be beautiful, to write great poetry, to love. In his Erasmus Lectures, Donoghue thinks about the lasting difficulties involved in understanding, and living with, cultural, literary, and religious values that are in restless relation to one another. On these and related matters, Donoghue enters into conversation with a variety of writers, some of them-John Crowe Ransom, Hans Urs von Balthasar, William Lynch, Alasdair MacIntyre, Emmanuel Levinas, Andrew Delbanco, and Robert Bellah-signaled by the titles of the seven lectures. Into the thematic space suggested by each of these titles Donoghue invites other writers and sages to join the conversation-Henry Adams, William Empson, John Milbank, Czeslaw Milosz, Seamus Heaney, Gabriel Josipovici, and many more. The "talk," as you might expect, keeps coming around to the reading of specific literary texts: passages from Paradise Lost, Stevens's "Esthétique du mal," fiction by Gide and J. F. Powers and J. M. Coetzee, to name only a few. In Adan's Curse, Donoghue brings his special intelligence to bear on some of the intersections where religion and literature provocatively meet.

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Literary Criticism

Themes

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Literature

Religion

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Publié par	University of Notre Dame Press
Date de parution	23 avril 2001
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780268159412
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

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A DAM S C URSE
Erasmus Institute Books
A DAM S C URSE

Reflections on Religion
and Literature
D ENIS D ONOGHUE
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
Rights Reserved
undpress.nd.edu
Copyright 2001 University of Notre Dame
Published in the United States of America
Designed by Wendy McMillen
Set in 11/13.5 Stone Print by Em Studio, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Donoghue, Denis.
Adam s curse : reflections on religion and literature /
Denis Donoghue
p. m.-(Erasmus Institute books)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-268-02009-5 (hardcover)-ISBN 978-0-268-15940-5 (paper)
1. English poetry-History and criticism. 2. Religious poetry,
English-History and criticism. 3. Christianity and literature-Great
Britain-History. 4. Christianity and literature-United States-History.
5. Religious poetry, American-History and criticism. 6. Christian poetry,
American-History and criticism. 7. Christian poetry, English-
History and criticism. 8. American poetry-History and
criticism. 9. Religion and literature.
I. Title. II. Series.
PR 508. R 4 D 66 2001
821.009 382-dc21 00-011708
eISBN 9780268159412
This book is printed on acid-free paper .
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at ebooks@nd.edu .
Again
F OR F RANCES
AND THE CHILDREN
C ONTENTS
Acknowledgments
ONE
Adam s Curse
TWO
God without Thunder
THREE
Church and World
FOUR
Otherwise than Being
FIVE
Christ and Apollo
SIX
Beyond Belief
SEVEN
After Virtue
EIGHT
The Death of Satan
Notes
Index
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
I AM GRATEFUL TO J AMES T URNER AND N ATHAN H ATCH FOR inviting me to inaugurate the Erasmus Lectures at the University of Notre Dame in March and April 2000 and for giving me a free hand in choosing a theme. I would like to think that the lectures were at least compatible with the larger purposes of the Erasmus Institute. I am also grateful to Gary Gutting for his help in clarifying some of the issues I raised.
The period I spent at Notre Dame was much enhanced for me by the kindness of Robert Sullivan, Kathleen Sobieralski, and their colleagues at the Institute.
ONE
A DAM S C URSE
O NE EVENING IN M AY 1902 W. B. Y EATS TALKED TO M AUD G ONNE and her sister Kathleen in a drawing room in Kensington while they looked at the moon rising. The theme was poetry, but it developed into a larger one, the difficulty of doing anything worthwhile. The evening is re-called in Yeats s poem Adam s Curse. According to the poem, Yeats and Kathleen did most of the talking. He complained of the labor involved in writing a poem, the inevitable stitching and unstitching, and the need to make the poem seem in the end to transcend the difficulties and become a moment s thought. Kathleen, bringing the issue close to home, said:
To be born woman is to know-
Although they do not talk of it at school-
That we must labor to be beautiful.
Yeats, with love on his mind and Maud Gonne beside him, said:
It s certain there is no fine thing
Since Adam s fall but needs much laboring.
There have been lovers who thought love should be
So much compounded of high courtesy
That they would sigh and quote with learned looks
Precedents out of beautiful old books;
Yet now it seems an idle trade enough.
Maud had good reason to stay silent. Yeats regarded her as his spiritual wife, and thought-or forced himself to believe-that there was an unbreakable bond between them. But it was a tiring relation, with no consummation in sight. He did not know the truth, that Maud had decided to become a Catholic and marry Major John McBride, an Irish hero of the Boer War. The poem does not record any words that passed between Yeats and Maud, but it recites what he would have said to her in private:
I had a thought for no one s but your ears:
That you were beautiful, and that I strove
To love you in the old high way of love;
That it had all seemed happy, and yet we d grown
As weary-hearted as that hollow moon. 1
II
I have called this inaugural series of Erasmus Lectures at the University of Notre Dame Adam s Curse because Yeats s poem points to my theme, the conditions that make any achievement difficult, the shadow that falls-as T. S. Eliot writes in The Hollow Men -between the potency and the existence, between the essence and the descent. The conditions include at various levels of reference the Fall of Man, categorical failure, loss, the limitations inscribed so insistently in human life that they seem to be in the nature of things, like death and weather. There is also, but not as a matter of course, the possibility of putting up with the conditions and turning them to some account.
I haven t approached the theme with an ambition to be comprehensive or even consecutive. I have chosen to produce a few samples or instances, in the hope that each will throw some light, however obliquely, on the theme. If a motto were needed to indicate the governing prejudice of the lectures, Coleridge s remark would be decisive:
A FALL of some sort or other-the creation, as it were, of the non-absolute-is the fundamental postulate of the moral history of man. Without this hypothesis, man is unintelligible; with it, every phenomenon is explicable. The mystery itself is too profound for human insight. 2
But this consideration, true as I believe it to be, is too grand to be locally useful: if we attended to it as fully as it deserves, we would find ourselves appalled, silenced on every passing issue. A more modest theory of difficulty would be helpful.
Gabriel Josipovici has offered one in his On Trust . We live in an age of suspicion, as various writers from Stendhal to Nathalie Sarraute have maintained. Josipovici argues that what suspicion undermines is trust: trust in the world, in other people, in language, and in oneself. Homer and the writers of the Bible had a certain lightness because they trusted to their craft, an inherited body of skill and lore which they took up and practiced without being self-conscious in its possession. They did not worry, apparently, about language or suspect their instruments. They took the instruments on trust. But at some point-if we construe the matter historically-writers lapsed from that trust, or discovered that they could not take their craft or their traditions for granted. Josipovici equivocates between thinking of the issue historically and thinking of it categorically. In some parts of the book he presents Plato and St. Paul as adepts of suspicion. In other parts he seems to think that Shakespeare represents the point at which suspicion, in its bearing on human relations and on language, came to be defined. A Midsummer Night s Dream is based on trust, but Hamlet, Othello , the history plays, and the problem plays are oppressed by suspicion. The rival values meet in Iago s victory over Othello. Suspicion darkens the epiphanies of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and nearly paralyzes the creative impulse in Kafka and Beckett. Nothing is granted to me, Kafka writes to Milena, everything has to be earned, not only the present and the future, but the past too. 3
The crucial proponents of suspicion in modern thought are Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, who respectively troubled the common understanding of economics and politics, morality, and sexual practices. Josipovici adds Kierkegaard, mainly on the strength of the section of Either/Or called The Ancient Tragical Motif as Reflected in the Modern. In that section Kierkegaard distinguishes modern from ancient tragedy by reference to the higher degree of reflection in modern tragedy. When the age loses the tragic, he says, it gains despair. 4
In ancient tragedy the sorrow is deeper, the pain less; in modern, the pain is greater, the sorrow less. Sorrow always contains something more substantial than pain. Pain always implies a reflection over suffering which sorrow does not know. 5
Our age, according to Kierkegaard, has lost all the substantial categories of family, state, and race. As a consequence, there is no value to which an individual may consign his sorrow or his guilt: the age must leave the individual entirely to himself, so that in a stricter sense he becomes his own creator, his guilt is consequently sin, his pain remorse; but this nullifies the tragic. 6 In the second volume of Either/Or the speaker replies to the aesthete of the first volume by associating the aesthetic life with despair and claiming that it is only in the ethical life that despair gains its significance and becomes a metamorphosis. 7 But the movement from Greek tragedy to modern despair is one instance of the suspicion that Josipovici describes-suspicion that remembers the old objective values but will not or cannot maintain them.
The equivocation in Josipovici s book between historical and categorical approaches is not a defect: it leaves us wondering, usefully, whether the movement from trust to suspicion, from craft to virtuosity, from sorrow to pain, and from tragedy to despair is a matter of temperament-Plato rather than Aristotle and Thucydides; Kafka and Beckett rather than Proust-or attributable to historical forces. If it is a matter of temperament, the causes have to be sought in each case and are likely to be hard to find. If historical forces are in question, the likeliest ones are the Reformation and the Enlightenment,