BOOKS: Return of the gruesome twosome

DEATH, DESIRE AND LOSS IN WESTERN CULTURE by Jonathan Dollimore, Allen Lane pounds 25

It is all too easy to say that our attitude to death is the exact equivalent of the Victorian attitude to sex, and vice- versa. The Victorians literally wore their grief in the street with an etiquette of mourning dress which would inform a passing stranger of not only whom you had lost but how recently.

We now dress to display our sexual history, from the male wedding ring, to the more intricate arrangements of jewellery which state particular homosexual practices. Jonathan Dollimore shows that this apparent opposition should not surprise us and that Sex and Death - Eros and Thanatos if you prefer - trip happily together, hand in hand, along the highway of Western culture, just like the toddlers in the Start-Rite poster.

This is an obvious conclusion, but one of the premises of this book is that the obvious merits investigation. It is easy to think of examples of the presentation of death and decay as erotically intriguing. This is a subject that could discover genuine correspondences between high and popular culture, but Dollimore concentrates on the literary, drawing on philosophers and novelists and critics. This is not so forbidding as it sounds: his intention was to make the formative ideas of our culture accessible to everyone, and he has succeeded.

Few readers will be able to claim intimacy with all the names chucked around here - Hegel, Nietzsche, Bataille, Foucault - but such is their general familiarity that everyone will have encountered some and recognise Dollimore as a clear, honest and insightful interpreter. The great names are necessary to achieve a perspective over the enormous time-scale embraced here.

Some of the chief witnesses are those who have attained a degree of immortality by disowning it entirely, usually by producing an enormous book on the subject of their own insignificance. Despite their appearance in roughly chronological order, this is not exactly a history because one of the major themes to emerge is that we are not as free of the past as we imagine. The gruesome twosome pop their heads up where they are least expected. Dollimore traces the origins of their apparently unlikely partnership in Platonic Idealism. The separation of truth and illusion into the spheres of the eternal and the temporal respectively led to the value of life being questioned, to the point of wondering whether it was worth anything at all. Meanwhile the source and end of life were pushed closer together.

Dollimore assumes that the difference between eternity and oblivion was always ambivalent and that over time it is eternity that has become worthless, until in our own century we arrive at Heidegger and the assertion that our essence is nothing, and all we are left with is Eros and Thanatos taking it in turns to gobble each other up. In the course of their play they create the concept of identity.

Paradoxically, thoughts of the ultimate futility of all action are often the spur to it. By the time of the English Renaissance this paradox has become the root of the self and a narcissistic contemplation of its end. As the belief in the soul begins to fade, death becomes the reason for life. This evolves into the rugged individual of the 19th century who projects the threat to its existence outwards in the form of the threat to society from social degenerates and their reputed energetic capacity to breed (an idea which lingers in the fairy-tale of the supposed under- class). Even as life triumphs, it is haunted by the fear it might be swamped by its own vitality. Death is in life once more, just as life found itself through death.

The same drama lies behind the contemporary intellectual movement vaguely known as Post-Modernism, vulgarly called Political Correctness, and satisfactorily identified here as Anti-Humanism. Close examination betrays that its attempts to demystify identity are built from the age-old anxieties. Yet another paradox then: the school of thought which claims to have broken free of its past is in fact its most eloquent expression. Western culture will be genuinely in decline when we all cheer up, but our fear of decline ensures we won't.

As something of an Anti-Humanist himself, Dollimore takes it for granted that while Eros and Thanatos shift into one another, culture and nature remain in permanent and separate opposition. This is the foundation of the idea that cultures are inter-changeable and maintain their ascendancy only through the domination of powerful elites. This is to ignore the role of experience, an important consideration here because the entire argument is based on the assumption that the ideal of Eternity will collapse into Oblivion because Eternity is only accessible through the present moment and that is, by its nature, ungraspable. Mystics would disagree. Mystical experience is by its nature idiosyncratic but it does wield an enormous influence. More people have read Blake than Hegel.

Similarly, Dollimore argues that the eroticism of death is a male idea imposed on women. Wuthering Heights, Beth in Little Women, and the career of Christina Rossetti would suggest otherwise.

Not that women get much of a look in here. The book opens and closes with the Aids crisis, an event where the drama of Eros and Thanatos was acted out for real, which perhaps explains why male homosexuality exerts such a fascination over the rest of us. Dollimore shows that the idea of the dissipation of the self, through excessive sexual activity, was thoroughly embedded in gay writing long before it became a terrible possibility. An uncomfortable idea for some, but no doubt the inspiration for this book which offers much for anyone who has ever shivered at the thought of encountering darkness as a bride.