Literary Review - December 2005 / January 2006

Page 52

GENERAL

P ETER W ASHINGTON

ISLANDS UNTO THEMSELVES

C RUSOE ’ S S ECRET : T HE A ESTHETICS OF D ISSENT

★By Tom Paulin (Faber & Faber 400pp £20)

T OM P AULINTELLS us in his introduction to Crusoe’s Secret that the book had its genesis in a desire to write about Defoe, but many of the essays he reprints here began as reviews of other writers. This is a louring prospect for reviewers, not least because it involves them in the postmodern cliché of reviewing a book of reviews which are themselves about reviewers reviewing reviews ad infinitum. Fortunately, a germ of the Defoe book survives in the theme linking these essays, which explore dissent in English and Anglo-Irish culture. This is a fascinating, wide-ranging brief which takes Paulin from seventeenthcentury religion to twenty-first-century politics. The subtitle derives from the author’s attempt – halfhearted, it must be said – to formulate a general theory of art as dissent, not a simple task when you are dealing with figures as disparate as Emily Dickinson and David Trimble (who isn’t often mentioned in the same sentence as the word ‘aesthetic’). It can also be difficult to tell what Paulin means by dissent. At times he narrows it down to a specific tradition of English political writing; at others he widens it to include any resistance to an authority perceived as unjust. The first meaning carries the embarrassing luggage of Puritan authoritarianism, while the second makes it too easy to equate serious rebellion with a five-year-old’s refusal to eat spinach. Like the good liberal he is, Paulin opts for something in between, while occasionally flirting with the fun of putting up two fingers for the sake of it. Many of Paulin’s subjects – Lawrence, Dickinson, Hopkins – resist inclusion in any scheme, aesthetic or otherwise, since they are inclined not so much to dissent as to bloody-minded individualism or indifference to prevailing ideologies. Others are members of recognisable minorities, and it is really with minorities that Paulin concerns himself. The problem is that minorities define themselves as such in relation to the majorities they wish to change. But how do they achieve their ends without losing their identity as minorities, or becoming oppressors in their turn? Perhaps the solution to this problem is to be an Irishman. Everyone knows that the English and the Irish are inextricably entangled by history, by blood (in every sense), by culture and by language. Above all, they are united by their arguments with and about each other, which are

now so far advanced that the two peoples have, as it were, started to exchange identities: more often than not, the English now find themselves in a minority, both within the UK and internationally. Paulin claims an interest in invisible borders, especially in Ireland and Palestine (the Arab–Israeli conflict being the subtext of this book), and borders are permeable: Israel is full of Arabs, England of Irishmen. The English in this book often turn out to be closet Irishmen (Hazlitt and Tony Blair both had Irish mothers), while the Irish – Burke, Yeats, even Synge – could be said to have achieved their fulfilment not only in the English language but on the hated mainland itself. Their transformation from dissidents to conformists is completed when they are translated to the even greater mainland of America, where the English are outsiders, the Irish a culturally ascendant minority. Majority and minority statuses need each other. They can even be different hats worn by the same person. Paulin the Oxford don may be in a persecuted minority, but the wild Irish poet and the media star belong unmistakably to fashionable majorities. Such doubleness is exemplified by the Englishman who haunts every essay in this book, even when he isn’t mentioned. Milton’s work and its influence form the basis for Paulin’s shots at an aesthetic, and it is Milton who strengthens the author’s thesis while undermining it. Milton is a notoriously ambivalent figure: hierarchical libertarian, Puritan aesthete, exquisite turned iconoclast, uxorious denouncer of female weakness, republican celebrant of God’s absolute monarchy. Above all, he was an English patriot of the most uncompromising kind, the laureate of the new Israel who vindicated Cromwell and by implication his Irish policy – that bloody crushing of a Catholic ‘minority’ (a majority, of course, in their own country) which has stood as a symbol of oppression ever since. Had the Commonwealth survived in 1660, Milton would surely have been a pillar of its Establishment. Thus he might be said to embody in his own person the problem of formulating a politics and an aesthetics of dissent. Both involve the dissenter in an unresolvable contradiction between rebellion and domination, if only because the very act of positing a theory implies a will to power which is at odds with the eternally fugitive, protean nature of dissent. Paulin would have us believe that the Miltonic contradiction itself can provide the basis of his proposed theory by making aesthetic virtues of conflict and instability, change, fluidity and openness. These take the place of what he sees as the essentially static, backward-looking qualities of establishment culture exemplified by writers such as Eliot – though he does scant justice to the revolution in English poetry effected by this self-proclaimed conservative, AngloCatholic royalist. Paulin’s theory is hardly new (step forward Heraclitus), but he puts his own spin on it. In one essay he describes Lawrence as a celebrant of the present, one who

LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006

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