Donoghue The Correction of Taste

The Late Fiction of Henry James
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-84351-947-8
Verlag: The Lilliput Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 194 Seiten

'Donoghue was alert to the idea of the unsayable, as he circled around the idea of language itself as pliable material, all the more beautiful for that and worthy of our full consideration, but yielding at times to further levels of mystery...' from foreword by Colm Tóibín    In this last written work, the internationally renowned Irish literary critic Denis Donoghue brings an acute critical intelligence to bear on the late novels of Henry James. One of the greatest novelists in the English language, Henry James (1843-1916) was an American-British author who is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism. James's The Portrait of a Lady (1881) was the central achievement of his early period. The Turn of the Screw (1898) was a high-point of Gothic literature. In The Correction of Taste, Denis Donoghue offers a close reading of James's final novels, taking as his starting point an observation by T.S. Eliot about the function of literary criticism. Exploring a succession of works such as The Ambassadors (1903), The Wings of the Dove (1902) and The Golden Bowl (1905), Donoghue brings into sharp focus the complex layers of James's literary genius.

Denis Donoghue (1928-2021) was one of the world's leading scholars of Irish, English and American literature. He was the first lrish literary critic to gain international prominence. His specialist interests included the work of W.B. Yeats, Jonathan Swift, T.S. Eliot, Henry James and modern American poetry. A brilliant thinker and teacher, he was a prolifi c author who published over thirty books of literary criticism. Among these were The Ordinary Universe (1968), Ferocious Alphabets (1981) and Words Alone (2000). He also published a memoir, Warrenpoint (1990). Born in Co. Carlow, he grew up in Warrenpoint, Co. Down, where his father was a sergeant with the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Appointed in 1966 to the fi rst chair of Modern English and American Literature at University College Dublin, he went on to hold the Henry James Chair of English and American Letters at New York University from 1978 until his retirement in 2010.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Donoghue, Denis

Leseproben

Foreword

Colm Tóibín

The man who came to the podium in the large modern lecture hall at University College Dublin in October 1972 was exceedingly tall. He seemed steely and distant and formidable. Despite his name, which was an ordinary southern Irish name, his aura bore the hallmark perhaps of a great house, a place of custom and ceremony with a vast library, old books and pictures.

A year later he would write that he had come to believe that each of us, students embarking on the study of English literature, should, before we were allowed into the department, be asked a simple question upon which everything might depend: to name a passage from a poem or a novel or a play which would make our hair stand on end, which would make us shiver. He imagined, with a sense of wondrous disbelief, what would happen should one of us quote these eight lines from John Crowe Ransom’s ‘The Equilibrists’:

In Heaven you have heard no marriage is,

No white flesh tinder to your lecheries,

Your male and female tissue sweetly shaped

Sublimed away, and furious blood escaped.

Great lovers lie in Hell, the stubborn ones

Infatuate of the flesh upon the bones;

Stuprate, they rend each other when they kiss,

The pieces kiss again, no end to this.

It was hard looking around Theatre M, part of the recently built complex, modern and anodyne, of the Arts Block of University College Dublin, that October morning and studying the students, the accidental and incoherent presences who had left their breakfast tables to come to their first English lecture, and imagining that either the tone or the sentiments in Ransom’s poem would have fired them. But all of us, in some way, had been fired by something, some sense of the mystery and beauty of language or some sense of ourselves as readers, or potential readers, to cause us to be here rather than in the science lab cutting up frogs or at the commerce lecture cutting up ledgers.

We lived, some of us anyway, in a state where those eight lines from Ransom, or lines like them, might potentially move us more than we could say, and the gap between that emotion and its due expression would, we would soon learn, be enough to puzzle us and contain us for all of our lives.

The man, the professor, had by this time taken command of the lectern. There must have been a microphone because the hall was very large but I have no memory of his voice as amplified or in any way distorted. I remember only his first words. He began without explanation or introduction:

One evening coming in with a candle I was startled to hear him say a little tremulously, ‘I am lying here in the dark waiting for death’. The light was within a foot of his eyes. I forced myself to murmur, ‘Oh, nonsense!’ and stood over him as if transfixed.

Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn’t touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror – of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision – he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath –

‘The horror! The horror!’

I blew the candle out and left the cabin. The pilgrims were dining in the mess room, and I took my place opposite the manager, who lifted his eyes to give me a questioning glance, which I successfully ignored. He leaned back serene, with that peculiar smile of his sealing the unexpressed depths of his meanness. A continuous shower of small flies streamed upon the lamp, upon the cloth, upon our hands and faces. Suddenly, the manager’s boy put his insolent black head in the doorway, and said in a tone of scathing contempt –

‘Mistah Kurtz – he dead.’

Denis Donoghue’s voice was dramatic but the tone was not declamatory – it allowed for mystery and quietness. The accent might have been Irish, but the pronunciation of some consonants was strange, almost American, but not quite, and not English either. But as he began to speak, having announced that the passage he had just read came from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the accent ceased to matter as much as the vocabulary mattered, the heightened tone, the not reading from a script, the lack of hesitation, thinking aloud as fierce and eloquent activity, and the sense also that this was important – this attempt to analyse and define and almost imitate layers and levels of feeling, of imaginative energy, of tonal nuance.

Donoghue was alert to the idea of the unsayable, as he circled around the idea of language itself as pliable material, all the more beautiful for that and worthy of our full consideration, but yielding at times to further levels of mystery, offering itself up on an altar where sacrifices would be made to the strange God of our yearning who would deliver us – by virtue of the thunderous action of a sentence – ambiguous meaning and a sense of what lurked or crouched beyond meaning.

As the weeks went on, Donoghue’s style of delivery could vary. At times, the mystery could be cast aside, the veil lifted, as it were, and a sharp and precise intelligence applied to the actual meaning of a passage. As he went on to deal with the work of D.H. Lawrence and William Faulkner, we learned to pay due attention to the facts and offer due attention to the rational. This lay somehow at the basis of everything and could be appealed to, without warning, while more sensuous and transcendent matters were left aside.

One of the reasons, indeed one of the excuses, which Henry James Senior, the father of the novelist, had offered his neighbours for gathering his young family up in the 1850s in America and taking them constantly to Europe was that their ‘sensuous education’ was not being properly looked after in the United States. With one or two notable exceptions, all of us listening in Theatre M that year, while having benefitted from as full and plentiful an education as the Republic of Ireland could provide, had not had a sensuous education at all, or anything like one. Indeed, our parents and guardians would have viewed a sensuous education and what it implied with the same level of disapproval as the old Presbyterian William James of Bailieborough and Albany might have felt had he lived to see his fortune squandered thus on his young grandchildren.

This reading in Conrad and Lawrence and Faulkner was for some of us the first serious and concentrated glimpse of a sensuous universe. The weather outside was grey, the campus was not beautiful. There was, as far as I remember, not a single painting or print to lighten the concrete. The lake in front of the library was said to be ornamental, but it was in fact brutal. Thus the striving of Ursula Brangwen in The Rainbow and Women in Love for a transforming glimpse of another universe, with other knowledge tempered by the body’s radiance, her hunger for possibility against the dullness and the brutality of what was fixed and finite and offered to her, was our striving too against our background, our hunger, and was our reason for being here.

In that same month, October 1972, when Denis Donoghue gave the T.S. Eliot lectures under the title ‘Thieves of Fire’ at the University of Kent, he alluded to the drama and the extent of Ursula’s desires and quoted from Lawrence’s version of this: ‘In coming out and earning her own living she had made a strong, cruel move towards freeing herself. But having more freedom she only became more profoundly aware of the big want. She wanted so many things. She wanted to read great, beautiful books, and be rich with them; she wanted to see beautiful things, and have the joy of them forever; she wanted to know big, free people; and there remained always the want she could put no name to.’

In that season, the autumn of 1972, some of us learned to the tune of certain lectures on what was then called the modern novel that the last-mentioned want, the one which Ursula could put no name to, was not an ignoble condition, nor a fleeting glimpse of something which would not matter, but once it had descended on us, as it did on her, it would have serious implications; it would mean that we could not go home again, or if we did, having been brushed by the wings of thinking itself as a sensuous activity, we could not sit easily at the family table.

Home for me was Enniscorthy, fourteen or fifteen miles south of Tullow, where Denis Donoghue had been born. An aunt of mine lived close to Tullow and my grandmother had been born not far away, so we often passed through the town, driving along the Slaney to Bunclody and then to Kildavin.

In one of those weekends at home in my first term at University College Dublin, Denis Donoghue’s origins in the town of Tullow were casually mentioned by my mother, and the fact that my aunt had briefly done a line, which was the phrase used at the time, with his brother was added as an afterthought. This seemed strange to me and I remember asking if the Donoghues were not rich, from one of the big houses along the valley, and I remember my mother saying that she did not think so.

I learned that a poem was a living thing, not merely a form of action but close to being the performer of an action. I have Denis Donoghue’s voice in my mind as I write this. He is saying: ‘A poem does not mean; a poem does.’ This was a...