History and Reason in the Work of Ted Hughes
Résumé
Ted Hughes's impressive recent work of research Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being has been welcomed with mixed feelings. The reason for the fits of hardly indifferent cold-shouldering this thesis of his has raised may very well be due to some misunderstandings. For indeed, the ideas he develops in that work are the very same which have won him outstanding poetic success. What was found powerfully thought in poetry is now found more difficult to stomach when translated into plain English. And it is all the more so, perhaps, because it touches such dear issues as Shakespeare, or Reformed Christianity. It would obviously be ridiculously presumptuous to boast an easy solution, but a foreign observer may hope to make some helpful contribution to the debate. An impartial reader, a devil's advocate pleading alternately for one and the other of the parties concerned, might have a chance to cast some useful light on some key notions of Hughes's philosophical theory. The first apple of discord concerns Adam, indeed, since it is Hughes's opinions on Christianity. A clear-sighted effort to try and explain his Anti-Christian views must lead to taking into account his approach to rationalism, and to show how those two notions are, rather paradoxically, related. This amounts to an idiosyncratic vision of history, since Hughes, to put it cum grano salis, considers Christianity and rationalism as a dark period of the religious history of mankind, to be overcome as soon as possible. In the history of art and literature, this for him corresponds to tragedy, from ancient Greece to Shakespeare's England, of which the history of the 20th century has been giving an apocalyptic off-stage happening version.
Domaines
Littératures
Origine : Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s)
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