Dollimore's Challenge (Sociologist Jonathan Dollimore‪)‬

RADICAL TRAGEDY, which was first published by Prentice Hall / Harvester Wheatsheaf in 1984, was indisputably one of the most original and influential critical books of its time. But I want to argue here that the different and much more neglected position Jonathan Dollimore has developed in recent work is even more singular and challenging. It's also more radical in the sense of going to the root of something, its aim being no less than to uncover a constitutive dilemma of human history and self-experience as it is revealed in the arts in general and in literature in particular. This painful truth, Dollimore argues, has been especially complacently evaded by contemporary critics; but then, as he demonstrates, it has typically been avoided by criticism, as perhaps it must be by any human rationalization of art or life experience. Dollimore claims, therefore, to have identified, or returned to, the real challenge of art. Shakespeare plays a central if not unique role in his argument, which--even if he's only partly right--has extraordinary and comprehensive implications for contemporary critical practice. Radical Tragedy was a fierce and (as it turned out) effective assault on an essentialism in English studies that Dollimore perceived as complacent and inherited (rather than freshly thought) and as lazily conservative--aesthetically, existentially, and politically. One reason still to value the book more than twenty years after its first publication is that it has atmosphere: a complex and affecting mood of grim, melancholy desire, come to think of it, not unrelated to the affect of Jacobean tragedy itself. The passion for the future that propels Dollimore's debut isn't simple; it's always born out of and dialectically intensified by a lucid apprehension of the deep structures of the world we inherit. Dollimore stresses, in his introduction to the third edition, that "the historical conditions of thought matter" and it was Thatcher's Britain that hurt intellectuals like him into hope as burning as it was beleaguered. (1) Radical Tragedy reads Jacobean tragedy for the complication, contradiction, and disorder where the promise of an alternative life lies lurking, but that promise is never overestimated: Dollimore recognizes the amazing contingency of the social order--that which isn't natural CAN be changed!--only to realize simultaneously that the social order, contingent though it is, may be harder to refashion than nature itself. And Radical Tragedy is a historical book, so its epiphanies have to be regarded as moments of possibility that Opened like flowers in the night of what actually, historically prevailed. Dollimore resists the temptation to elaborate these into anything more, in implicit recognition perhaps of the almost unprecedented luck and labor needed to redeem such lost potentialities in the actual achievement of a better world.