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  • Perpetual Carnival: Essays on Film and Literature by Colin MacCabe
  • Cleo Hanaway-Oakley (bio)
PERPETUAL CARNIVAL: ESSAYS ON FILM AND LITERATURE, by Colin MacCabe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. xi + 290 pp. $99.00.

"A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery."1 This often-quoted Joycean phrase, spoken by Stephen in the "Scylla and Charybdis" episode of Ulysses, would, for several reasons, make an apt epigraph for Colin MacCabe's latest offering: Perpetual Carnival: Essays on Film and Literature. MacCabe refers, directly, to "the library sequence of Ulysses" in the "Shakespeare" section of his book, arguing that Joyce does a better job than Stephen Greenblatt of conceptualizing the relationship between the Bard's autobiography and writing: "Greenblatt takes many details from Joyce but ducks the central analysis. He relates Hamlet to Shakespeare's dead son, Hamnet, but will not think through how this relates to Hamlet's disgust at his mother's sexuality" (54).2 Like [End Page 202] "the ghost of the unquiet father" (U 9.380), Joyce—the subject of MacCabe's Ph.D. studies and first book, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word—is present throughout Perpetual Carnival, taking on different guises in the different sections of the book.3 With Joyce's influence clear for all to see, a Joycean epigraph would befit this fascinating volume.

Another reason for the aptness of Joyce's "portals of discovery" phrase as a potential epigraph is the emphasis Perpetual Carnival places on MacCabe's somewhat circuitous rise to recognition and fame. This emphasis is present from the outset in Terry Eagleton's "Foreword," the first sentence of which intrigues the reader:

Not long before Colin MacCabe was refused promotion by the University of Cambridge in 1981 for betraying certain alarming post-structuralist proclivities, a rapist had been on the loose in the city. [The latter was] eventually caught and convicted. When the so-called MacCabe affair broke on a bemused world, a cartoon appeared in a national newspaper in which a working-class couple are sitting at breakfast. As the man reads the newspaper, his wife asks him anxiously, "Have they caught the Cambridge structuralist yet?"

(ix)

Eagleton ends his foreword with the following sentence: "It is a tribute to [MacCabe's] resilience and robustness of spirit that he somehow managed to pluck from that sense of an ending a new beginning, as a good many others did not" (xi). MacCabe continues this celebration of obstacles and new starts in his "Introduction," discussing the various twists and turns in his career and, in doing so, giving hope to those of us who are currently attempting to navigate our way to a stable and fulfilling job in academia. MacCabe reminds us that rejections and failures, although painful, are "wonderful for promoting career change" and that work outside of academia should be seen as "valuable fieldwork" (4, 5).

MacCabe goes on to tell his readers how, after a series of fixed-term teaching contracts alongside working at the British Film Institute, he took up a "fractional professorship" at the University of Exeter (4). His inaugural professorial lecture, "A Defence of Criticism," is published in Perpetual Carnival (137-50). If one is looking for a relatively succinct summary of MacCabe's wide-ranging research interests, this fourteen-page piece, nestled in the middle of the book, would be a good place to start. He takes us on a magical mystery tour through a range of written texts by authors such as John Dryden, Salman Rushdie, and Rainer Maria Rilke; cinematic texts, including films by Baz Luhrmann, Derek Jarman, and Stanley Kwan; and hot topics ranging from the government-directed Research Assessment Exercise (now the REF)—which, for MacCabe, prompted "the denigration of [End Page 203] genuine scholarship" (146)—to the current state of English studies. He sets out his definition of the discipline of English Literature via the following formulation: "It is the establishment and evaluation of texts in English" (142). This is where Joyce comes in: MacCabe uses him as a case in point, explaining the ways in which Joyce's work pushes and yet, at the...

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