Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State by Tom Paulin (review)

98Rocky Mountain Review were you to read "King Lear and the Perilous Claim: ? am Your Host' " without having your awareness of the play extended and deepened in fresh and valuable ways. I offer an extension to Palmer's discussion of Sir Thomas Posthumous Hoby and the hospitality extended by Sir Thomas and his Lady to the wild group of tall fellows from the Catholic household of Ralph, Lord Eure. This Sir Thomas, first cousin to Sir Robert Cecil and to Sir Francis Bacon, would seem to be the initiator of the Star Chamber matter (1610-13) of the Lord Chomley's Players, the Catholic households of the Yorkes, Inglebys, and Chomleys, and the performances of Shakespeare's King Lear and Pericles. Finally we come to reflections on chapter 1, "Hospitalities: Practices and Representations." Palmer is engagingly candid in linking his theoretical perspectives to the new historicism and cultural materialism. Scholars and students who, having devoted days and nights to Terry Eagleton's lucubrations , are still somewhat baffled as to how much blindness has been remedied and how much insight has been gained will find this study to be an oasis in what are often Arabian sands; I refer to the Empty Quarter. And so, I applaud Palmer's use of Jameson and Greenblatt. We certainly must deessentialize cultural forms; the immediate intuition of essences by the cogito is bankrupt. But the writings of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) ask us to recast our entire intellectual effort on new lines, that of a freshly considered reflection on the nature and perfusion of signs and sign-practices in which being and logic tend to converge as an esse in futuro. As the critic seeks to move from practices to representations of practices, I urge that semiotic, in the Peircean sense, be an alternative in the study methods of our time to Saussure's semiology with its endless and pointless harmonious reciprocity of the signifier and the signified. Duns Scotus and John of St. Thomas pointed in rewarding directions; Thomas Sebeok, Roman Jakobson, Michael and Marilyn Shapiro and their many associates are fashioning the new Mercator maps. Peirce's Interprétant, especially a prolonged consideration of markedness, will redeploy our energies in seeking more fully to delineate the circulation of social energies, past and present. We must break free of the dyadic sterility of dialectic from Plato and Aristotle to our time. The sign, its object, its interprétant, and the real relations which come into being offer a current of new and fresh ideas to our aporias of synchrony and diachrony, space and time, structure and history. JOHN MURPHY University ofColorado at Boulder TOM PAULIN. Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. 298 p. As a poet, Tom Paulin has used the dialects of his native Ireland, of Great Britain, and even of America to create some beautiful, difficult, and scathing verse. As the author of a study of Thomas Hardy, Ireland and the English Crisis, and of The Riot Act: A Version ofSophocles'Antigone, Paulin Book Reviews99 has often mulled the "Irish problem," balancing Ulster Protestant roots with revolutionist sympathies. And in these essays, most of which appeared as review pieces in TLS and the London Review, we find the well crafted, uncluttered work of an experienced poet-critic at the top of his powers. The title of the volume refers in the first instance to Shelley's character, "Minotaur," a personification of empire in Oedipus Tyrannus (1820). Thereafter, though "Minotaur" himself hardly appears on stage, the theme ofindividuality vs. the state unifies the book. In some essays Paulin attacks those who align themselves with constituted authority. "[N]o one reading Larkin," he writes, "can fail to notice that there is a gruelling, punitive, desperately joyless quality to his imagination" (249). Eliot's notion of tradition he describes as "an artificial and polemical construct that . . . still weighs like a nightmare on English literary studies" (290). He tries to rescue the current poet-laureate: "Hughes is obsessed by the pain which his historical state has inflicted in countless wars" (266). But he seems to shudder at Hughes' Nietzscheanism. Paulin, oddly, reminds me a little of the Eliot he...