Limina, Volume 13, 2007

Interview - Catherine Belsey

Interview
Attention to Language: An Interview with Catherine Belsey
In late 2006, a Distinguished Visiting Teachers Grant enabled the Discipline of English and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia to benefit from the temporary residence of Catherine Belsey, an influential Shakespearian, feminist scholar and cultural critic. Catherine Belsey is a Research Professor of English at the University of Wales, Swansea. Her work including Desire: Love Stories in Western Culture (1994), Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden (1999), Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction (2002), Culture and the Real (2005), and Why Shakespeare (2007) is characteristically engaging and intellectually provocative.1 Professor Belsey spoke to Karen Hall and David Nel on a wide range of topics, from the persistent relevance of Shakespeare to the (apparent) abstractions of cultural theory and the intersections of teaching and scholarship to the ongoing relevance of the humanities.

KH: In your most recent book, Culture and the Real, you signal a number of different, seemingly incommensurable theoretical positions, whose proponents would no doubt argue for a strict categorical division between, say, marxist thought and psychoanalysis. Do you see these positions as retaining a theoretically useful value, or do you tend towards a more pluralistic model in which theories are contextualised and placed in dialogue with one another? CB: I certainly prefer to be eclectic. I like to bring theories together if I possibly can as long as theyre not inconsistent with each other. (I d rather not contradict myself if I can help it!) My test of a theory is whether it enables me to do something I couldnt do in any other way, and in that sense Im not so worried about who thought the thought in question or who theorised that area. In other words, Im not much concerned with theory as an object of knowledge. People who are may need to compartmentalise Lacan and Derrida, say, not to mention psychoanalysis and marxism. But from my point of view, these theories produce insights that enable me to read in a different way, to interpret cultural objects with more subtlety. If I can bring theories together productively to produce better readings that works for me. As for marxist thought and psychoanalysis in particular, I feel that the discrepancies between them have been exaggerated. It has suited some historicists, either old marxist historicists or new anthropological historicists, not to have to bother with psychoanalysis, because psychoanalysis has complicated the process of interpretation, and a more complex version of interpretation would complicate what they do. It is easier to proclaim that psychoanalysis is incompatible with history because it makes universal propositions. I disagree. Of course, psychoanalysis has its silly side, and there are forms of psychoanalysis that wouldnt work with historicism, but theres nothing in the nature of the two disciplines that makes them ultimately incompatible. DN: I find that quite interesting. Im interested because Im not familiar with the accusation of that characterisation of incompatibility. CB: Ive come across the problem among cultural historians who are implicitly saying, I dont need to bother with all that difficult theory, which would be hard for me to master, because I already know what Im doing and what Im doing is grounded in marxism or anthropology or some such. 

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Interview - Catherine Belsey

Their repudiation of theory is a way of evading difficulty. It is legitimate to see psychoanalysis as including certain universal propositions, and to contrast this practice with a respect for historical specificity. But in my view, the universal propositions of psychoanalysis are at such a high level of abstraction that they dont conflict with historical specificity. For example, Jacques Lacan would say that all human cultures have language. Well, yes they do, and surely the most historicist of historicists would not want to dispute that. Alternatively, I might propose that all known cultures have stories. But I would go on to say that the form and content of these stories (like the languages theyre told in) might be radically distinct at different times, or in different places, and that is where historical specificity comes in. In that sense, these so-called universal propositions dont conflict with historicism. DN: In Culture and the Real you argued for an awareness of the presence of the Real capital R real which, rather than seeking to elide it through extreme culturalism or return to objective truth, retains uncertainty and some degree of anxiety. How do you feel this awareness can manifest in everyday life? CB: My project in that book was to contest the current preference for a fashionable culturalism, sometimes called cultural constructivism. Culturalism urges that the limits of our culture are the limits of our world. For culturalists, what we know is all there is, or what a culture knows is all that exists for it. This is a form of relativism so pure as to argue that what is not recognized does not exercise determinations, or that cultures are not affected or influenced by anything they dont have names for. This is nonsense, but very pervasive nonsense, derived in the end from Hegel, and it surfaces in the work of theorists as influential as Judith Butler and Slavoj Zizek. There are many counter-examples: tribal cultures, for instance, are not immune to Western diseases just because they dont have names for them; sailors who thought the world was flat didnt fall off the edge of it. We are human animals in a material world at least as much as we are part of culture, and what culturalism seems to me to ignore is that material part of what we are, the organic component of the human being which exercises certain imperatives, whether we like it or not. I want to contest culturalism by invoking Lacans account of the real, which I dont necessarily think needs a capital R, though Lacans is a specific use of the term. Lacan appeals to the real to differentiate what were not aware of, what isnt named, what is unmapped for a particular culture and for every culture the real, the unknown, will be different. Scientists make incursions into the real: they map space, or quarks. Medicine advances into the real: there was a time when penicillin was part of the real, but now its part of culture, part of what we know and thus of what Lacan calls reality. The real, as the unknown, is marked by anxiety. Its not that we know theres something out there; its that were not sure whether theres anything out there or not. It seems to me that anybody anywhere in the modern world who doesnt have some sense that there are things we dont know is living in cloud-cuckoo-land, or suffering from severe hubris. We need a way of acknowledging what we dont know. Obviously we cant define it, but we need, in my view, a framework that allows for the possibility that beyond our knowledge there resides a terrain thats unmapped and therefore unpredictable. Theres nothing supernatural about this. On the contrary. But to allow that there are limits to our knowledge seems to me an important corrective to the reduction of everything to culture. DN: From your description of spatial terms in Lacans cultural example, it seems a little bit like a form versus content division, that language, that all cultures have this thing, but that the precise content or distribution of its various fields differ from culture to culture. CB: Yes, Lacan had roots in structuralism, though he broke with it in crucial ways, and structuralism laid down the law about all cultures. I suppose structuralism wasnt all bad, in a sense. What was boring about it was the reduction of all structures to a single structure, or all stories, say, to a single shape. It may be fun for the person who reduces all the stories to one story in the first place, but its very dull for the rest of us, who have nothing left to do but rediscover the same old structure time and again. Poststructuralism doesnt erase what was useful about structuralism; instead, it moves things 

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on a bit and reintroduces the notion of difference. So I suppose, yes, all societies have language; and they all have culture, which is the inscription in language of meanings they live by, enabling them to interpret their world; but the worlds delineated by these languages and cultures differ. All cultures recognise specific knowledges, even while the content of those knowledges differs from one culture to another. But equally, all knowledges are subject to limits, and the real is what resides outside those limits, but may have consequences in peoples lives, just the same. DN: Desire: Love Stories in Western Culture remains an influential and intellectually provocative work. Looking back now at that book, are there areas that you would approach differently now or directions you would like to pursue? How do the ideas from Desire continue to inform your later work? CB: Ive never given up on desire. I still think its probably the most fascinating thing about human beings, and its the effect, Lacan would say, of the drive, which resides in the real. He would also resist confining desire to sex. In fact, he says sex just occupies the field of desire, which can go anywhere, producing imperatives too strong to be resisted. I stopped writing the book when I had produced as many pages as I thought I could count on anyone to read, and not because Id exhausted the literature. Id have been very happy just to go on looking at desire in different ways. But I think what interests me most now is what I might call the desire of the reader (or the viewer, of course). This is the desire that flows between the reader and text, or the viewer and the work of art. What motivates us to go on reading? What fascinates us about this movie? Why is it that we go back to this picture again and again? When Lacan identifies the objet petit a (object little a, in English, but he doesnt want it translated), he names the something thats missing from the work. This is what puzzles the reader or the viewer, the enigma, the elusive element, whatever isnt resolved in the text or in the painting. The objet petit a is the object-cause of desire. DN: So youre including this in a formal study? CB: Yes, Ive written about it in my new book, Why Shakespeare? But I think the objet a also operates in the classroom and it could affect pedagogy. Im going to confide in you and I need you to tell me if Im completely insane. This idea has come to me as a result of being very closely involved in the course taught by Tony Hughes-dAeth, which is focused on Culture and the Real.2 Ive been attending his lectures and some of his tutorials as well. And it seems to me that a lot of desire is circulating in both contexts. In other words, were putting in front of students or theyre putting in front of us, since they contribute their own examples pictures or cultural objects of various kinds that are enigmatic, in certain ways unresolved, or leave avenues to be explored, and in the process elicit the desire Lacan talks about. That produces a sort of energy in the course which is fascinating. The way that its taught is not to close off meaning, produce closure, bind it all up and say, heres the package, now master it. On the contrary, that closure would be defeating the point of the whole exercise, which is to enlist the desire of the students in pursuing for themselves the questions the course raises. Tonys course has made me think that desire could be a component an explicit component in the teaching process. Yes, its a bit dangerous, especially in a culture that so readily reduces desire to sex. But it might be interesting... DN: Many of your publications draw together texts from a wide range of categories which are usually kept separate; for example high cultural theory, popular film, Shakespeare, and sculptures. What utility does the approach have for you? What are the problems and possibilities of this approach? CB: Its just an accident of history that popular culture ever got separated off from so-called high culture. In English departments by about 960 the fact that Shakespeare and Dickens were once the popular culture of their own day was effectively forgotten. The canon was designed to take the place of Virgil and Ovid, Aeschylus and Sophocles in the old classics courses. (Actually, of course, Aeschylus and Sophocles were the popular writers of their own age.) But, in the 960s, people started demanding that popular culture should be analysed in its own right. The only way for cultural 
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Interview - Catherine Belsey

studies to validate its existence as an academic discipline was to have its own independent field of study, and at that time the only space left for cultural studies was whatever was not high culture. What wasnt tackled by English departments was popular culture and contemporary culture, so cultural studies focused on those. One justification of this practice was that cultural studies taught working people what they were interested in. That was perfectly true, but contemporary mass culture wasnt all that interested them. Instead, it was all that was left over institutionally, all that English departments didnt already cover. And so, sadly I think, these two disciplines developed side by side, English on the one hand and cultural studies on the other, dividing the terrain of culture. The University of Western Australia has got it absolutely right in having English and Cultural Studies together in a single department. In my own way, I have tried to do something similar with what I call cultural criticism, which is concerned with both high culture and popular culture, but without making an a priori distinction between them. Cultural criticism simply studies culture in any or all of its instances. If culture is understood as the meanings in circulation at any given time, these meanings are to be found in productions of Shakespeare, or in postmodern art, or in cinema and pop music, and they circulate in all these genres. And we, most of us, engage with most of them, participate in most of them. I cant imagine anyone so canonical that they never go to a movie, never watch television. It would be depriving themselves of a pleasure. Its also a pity to isolate the visual from the textual. Film studies necessarily brings the two together. I believe that cultural historians can learn a great deal from visual artefacts. So, it seems to me that its time to bring the forms of culture together again, to begin to trace the continuities between, for example, postmodern conceptual art, certain aspects of popular cinema and contemporary poetry. Why not? There are places where different genres meet, and if we can find those places, we are more likely to illuminate the issues if we look at the genres side-by-side. The only regret I have about the loss of the canon is that it provided a common repertoire of references, so that if you were making a theoretical point and you wanted to illustrate it, you would give an example from King Lear, say. But now you cant count on a familiarity with the old canon of Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth and the Victorian novelists. It was useful to have a body of shared knowledge, and it does bother me very slightly that we may be producing generations of students who are not able to recognise the intertextual illusions in the texts they encounter, which are composed by people who were familiar with the canon. There is a problem Ive noticed in my classes, that students gravitate time and again to what they know, which is contemporary popular culture, and this comes to exemplify everything for them. My anxiety is that perhaps we ought also to be expanding their horizons. It is difficult to read King Lear in your spare time when youre an accountant, or a personnel officer in later life. Not many people are likely to read Samuel Beckett at weekends, it seems to me. So if we dont introduce students to Samuel Beckett now, will they ever see what a difference he made? KH: Yes, I think its important to realise that the canon is not a series of boxes to tick off of cultural things that you should do, but actually contains a lot of rich and enjoyable texts. CB: Oh, yes, theres no better read than George Eliot or Charles Dickens and theyre not hard. If what were doing in giving so much attention to contemporary cultural forms is erasing that potential pleasure, it would be a serious pity. KH: In your recent publications you traverse both the abstractions of contemporary critical theory and more traditional work, in terms of both methodology and the Shakespearian canon. Is that an apt description of the different subject areas and methodologies in literary study, or do you see a continuity between the contemporary critical theory and the traditional approach? CB: I think my idea has been to bring theory to bear above all on traditional material. There is a real challenge in finding new ways of reading Shakespeare, or any of the canonical works that people have writing on for years. There are endless books on Hamlet already, so to see Hamlet in a different 

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way is that much more difficult. Its much easier to say new things about works no one has read for years, because everything you say is new. You could tell the plot, really, and it would still be new. But in Shakespeares case you cant get away with telling the plot. Shakespeare has been read in ways that have reaffirmed unfortunate ideological and political positions and he needs to be rescued. Take, for example, individualism. For many years Shakespeare was read as if he were a Victorian novelist interested primarily in depicting character. The plays were understood to ascribe tragic outcomes to flaws in the character of their protagonists: character was destiny, as A. C. Bradley put it.3 Shakespeare was also credited with telling universal truths which carry over into real life. And the implication of these two views put together was that whatever happens to individuals in life is also an effect of their character: that if people dont seem to get things right, if they dont succeed in life, its their fault. What this Victorian view eliminates is the possibility that the situation might be to blame. In this context I would say that we need to read Shakespeare in such a way that we can see individuals confronting problems that are not of their making, which come from outside them, and are not easily resolved. What theory helps me do is read differently. Theory is not something I do for its own sake, but to enable me to understand Shakespeare, for instance, in ways I might otherwise miss. In that sense, bringing theory together with traditional material - and traditional scholarship - is not odd. But I do see where your question is coming from, because, sadly, theory has been high-jacked. Its become a succession of isms, and the saddest thing of all is the mechanisation of the reading process that follows from mastering isms. This approach takes a single text and says In Chapter One, Ill read it in a marxist way, and in Chapter Two Ill read it in a feminist way, and in Chapter Three Ill read it from the perspective of formalism . I cant think of a better way of killing stone dead any of the pleasure of discovery. In King Lear there are questions of property and power relations. There are also questions about gender relations. But you dont want to think, this morning I do Marxism, tomorrow I do feminism. You might want to look at property and power and gender in relation to each other in making sense of King Lear. And in any case, the main contribution of theory is elsewhere. What Freud and Lacan, Roland Barthes and Jaques Derrida have in common is not an interest in a particular content or set of themes but an attention to language, its flexibility and opacity. DN: Thats right, the sort of unspoken assumption that I get from some Shakespearians is that reading these texts is somehow just a matter of commentary, that they produce these aporias in an especially unique way that makes it subject to reinterpretation after reinterpretation. CB: Thats it, youve put it wonderfully. Its as if Shakespeare wrote so that critics could keep on disagreeing with each other and students could keep writing essays. The pressing question, though, is why other people, non-academic people, also come back to Shakespeare again and again. Why was Baz Luhrmans Romeo + Juliet so successful? I met someone the other day who said, I dont like Shakespeare, Shakespeares boring, but I did like that movie! Hollywood loves Shakespeare: look at West Side Story, or the chick flick which rewrote Taming of the Shrew and, more recently, Shes the Man, which rewrites Twelfth Night with Duke Orsino as the captain of the soccer team.4 Doesnt this suggest that theres something special about Shakespeares plays that theyre worth rewriting? I couldnt disagree more with the cultural materialists who say that its only because weve all been indoctrinated that we imagine Shakespeare is special. DN: While were talking about specialness, this brings to mind a broader question about the value of the humanties in general. In an institutional climate where paradigms derived from scientific research are governing the way funding is distributed, what relevance do the humanities continue to have? Should we be even be talking in terms of relevance or other forms of value, and what these may be? Does the traditional model of the individual scholar sitting, pondering and enquiring still hold value? CB: Theres more than one question here, and Im not sure which one to start with. Ill take them one at a time.

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Interview - Catherine Belsey

The official answer in the UK to the question of the relevance of the humanities is that our degrees feed the leisure industry and the tourist industry. We train stage directors and museum curators; this brings in money from tourists; and that justifies government funding. We usually mention the reconstruction of the Globe Theatre as a tourist destination. My own view, actually, is that our relevance is much broader and also deeper. A culture that doesnt understand itself is doomed. Well never sell this idea to any government, but we need cultural analysts and this is what we all are to understand where we are as a society, how we got here, and what we might do about it to make it better (assuming that one can imagine things being better than they are in Western Australia, which is hard!). The assumption has been that social improvements can be left to sociologists and anthropologists. But my own sense is that if culture consists of everything we believe, our values, the way we relate to each other and present ourselves to the world, the way we organise our institutions and our corporations, then its important to analyse culture. The way things are is attributable in all kinds of ways to culture, and we can take deliberate steps to change the world for the better in the light of our understanding of the way it is now. From that point of view, as cultural analysts, we are indispensable. I think that feminism, for instance, would never have advanced as far and as fast as it did without academics theorising it, writing about it, unearthing its history, as well as feeling it. Thats not to say that women would not have risen up and protested without humanities departments, but I think we also did lots of good work. We demonstrated, for instance, that women had shown all sorts of capabilities in the past, and by this means we produced the evidence that the idea of a better world in terms of gender relationships was not irrational, or unnatural, but could actually come into being. And guess what, things have changed radically! Feminism was a group project, though it was mostly carried out by individuals working to a common cause. You ask about the lone scholar. Im very disturbed about the way research funding in the UK is becoming conditional on people doing research in teams. Teams are fine where they are appropriate, but Im not sure the science model always works for the humanities, where the traditional form of research is the individual scholar sitting in the library, poring over the archives and producing information. I would passionately defend the right of the individual scholar to continue to be funded and supported. If I have an idea, I go for a walk, think it through, come back, reread the text to see if it works, and no team can really help me do that. It isnt something I can do better jointly. When scientists put chemistry and biology together they got biochemistry, a whole new discipline with attendant questions and answers. Joining two fields together was productive. But science has one advantage we dont: the methodology is shared; the hypothetico-deductive method entails producing a hypothesis and testing it by objective criteria. But that isnt necessarily how we work. In the humanities what passes for evidence varies from one person to another. Its not clear that there are criteria everyone could agree on. (That isnt a covert way of saying that in our field anything goes! I like high standards of scholarly accuracy, myself, but not everyone always agrees on exactly what those are.) KH: The teaching-research nexus is a catch-phrase around UWA at the moment. How do you experience the intersection between research and pedagogy, and do you see this as something that universities, at an institutional level, can enable and support? CB: I hope so. I think my best teaching what seems to be my best teaching has always been about what Im engaged in at that moment. People whove been teaching for a while know, deep down in their heart of hearts, that what they teach year in and year out can become a little mechanical, a bit automatic, and the energy goes out of it. But I find its quite different when I am still engaged in solving problems. So my idea is that we teach best when we teach just short of the edges of what we know. I dont mean to be too prescriptive or too specific about this. I dont think we necessarily need to be teaching the exact field that constitutes our research. On the contrary. But its good to be able to bring to bear on our teaching some of the same questions that also confront us as scholars. It must be a mistake to separate teaching and research radically. Students are extraordinarily intelligent in my 6

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experience. If theyre enlisted, if their curiosity is engaged, they can do almost anything. And they are more likely to be excited about the work if we are. This is one advantage of the fact that we no longer need to worry about covering the canon. We can let people teach where their interests are (which is not always confined to the exact field of their research, of course), and that works best for all concerned. DN: Great! In Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden, you note that one of your aims in writing the book is to historicise and thus denaturalise family values. In what ways is your work informed by current issues? What effects can your research have on areas such as family values? CB: Not a lot, in practice, it turns out! Despite my best efforts, the family remains the great silent coercion. The reason why I wanted to tackle the family was that its worth was taken for granted. Family values appear natural; and the family is seen as a place of warmth and affection, the heart of a heartless world. My view is that no cultural institution is completely natural, and the family can be a place of great cruelty and oppression. In the West the family represents a motive for working for eight hours a day, whether that work is valuable or not. Some of what people are paid for is exploitative, cynical, or downright corrupt. But such work is seen as acceptable to the degree that the income derived from it is for the good of the family at home. In that sense, the family legitimates the social order to a very high degree. Meanwhile, conditions at work can be very poor, because the warmth of the family compensates for the coldness of the marketplace. All this has two consequences. First of all, it puts immense pressure on people to value the family, between clenched teeth if necessary. And in the West that is particularly demanding because the family is founded on the most intense and unstable of emotions. Romantic love, aka desire, is wonderful, but its also a kind of madness. Psychoanalytically speaking, it is the place where we reenact the love and hate we learnt in early childhood. So, the family can be the location of raw and dangerous emotion, aggression and rage. That makes it extraordinarily difficult to sustain, as we see from the number of divorces, the number of broken families. The family is also where the majority of murders take place; most violent crimes are domestic; most child abuse takes place in the home, not with passing strangers. Incest and psychological cruelty are sheltered by the sanctity of the family; they take place behind closed doors. At one level, everyone knows this. But the unhappy families are thought to have failed. My idea is that the institution itself is set up to fail. Too much is expected from it. The family is justified by reference to nature, but actually very few species in nature live in monogamous pairs with dependent young. On the contrary, the loving nuclear family was culturally constructed for specific reasons in the the early modern period. I wanted to situate family values in history, and Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden is about that moment when the notion of the affective nuclear family was brought into being. It didnt exist in the Middle Ages, or not significantly, not as a social form or an ideal. But it was not until the Victorian period that the values of Shakespeares period were cemented as absolute truths. Shakespeare was interesting, by contrast, because in his plays it is possible to trace the reservations, the difficulties that attend the construction of a new morality centred on the family. In his comedies courtship ends in marriage: thats the happy ending culture prescribes. Marriage and happiness are the same thing in the comedies. But the tragedies and The Winters Tale show what can happen inside marriage and how badly things can go wrong. In the plays its the very intensity of the family relationships that makes them go so intensely wrong when they do. So that was the main project of Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden, to denaturalise the family itself and the values we invest it with. DN: It almost seems like a sort of anthropological statement, using Shakespeare to look at kinship, and how these systems of kinship relate to larger structures. CB: Yes, in a sense it is. But what I dont find in anthropology and that may just be my ignorance, but I dont find it in its offshoot, new historicism, either is any real sense of the complexity and the sheer contradictoriness of culture. What anthropologists seem to me to be doing and this is very much subject to correction, because its not my field what they seem to me to want is to make sense, 

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a single sense, of another culture. And what they look for is coherence and internal consistency, not splits and fractures and contradictions. My project, in contrast, is to locate in fictional texts that I can isolate on a page or stage the textual instabilities, uncertainties, even incoherences that reveal the ambiguities of the culture they inscribe. In effect, fictional texts crystallise culture, freeze it for inspection, and in the process they enable us to look at cultural splits and fractures in the places where they seem to be saying one thing but, read another way, are actually saying something else, or the moments when they recoil from the very proposition theyve just put forward. Thats what anthropology doesnt seem to me to do. DN: If I read you correctly, I think what youre saying is that narrative, literary texts are special in the way that they crystallise cultural forms, and perhaps Shakespearian texts are much more pure form of that kind of representation, that they are a bit abstract. CB: Yes. This is very uncertain ground for me. I began my career convinced that all texts were equal, and I do still think that all texts are worth the attention of cultural critics and cultural historians. I dont want to revert to the idea that some works are essentially more valuable than others. At the same time, I do think theres probably something special about, say, Shakespeare. If I compare Shakespeare with, for example, a supermarket romance, the specific quality of the romance is that its easy to read. Its the sort of thing you can read when youve got flu; it doesnt make intellectual demands on a reader who wants to follow the plot. How does it achieve that degree of simplicity? By familiarity, by predictability. The vocabulary, for example, recycles the commonplace. Meanwhile, a regular reader will know where to find the big sex scene (about the middle); therell be another sex scene several pages from the end in which the heroine recognizes that this is true love, not just a matter of compatible bodies; and there will be a happy ending (marriage). Shakespeare, conversely, is relatively unpredictable. In the first place, he invents a huge number of words: his writing is full of coinages. Then the imagery is often extraordinarily inventive, bringing together unexpected categories (Theseus says the moon is like a withered old stepmother, for instance; the Sonnets define love in terms of money). Then the plot doesnt always go where it seems to be pointing. In all the previous versions of King Lear, for instance, theres a happy ending, but the play doesnt stop at the reconciliation scene, and people have traditionally found it the bleakest of the tragedies, possibly for that reason. So, in Shakespeare the unexpected word, conjunction, moment invites a special kind of attention. I dont want to say, as the Victorians did, that Shakespeare is just better. But I do want to say that his texts are very interesting. KH: But in some ways it might be that the fact that a fictional text isnt embedded in tradition in a way that lived culture is; its written down, its heard again and again. In a way we can leave it to be enigmatic, without the drive to make it completely understood. CB: Exactly, you can reread it, or you can watch it; you dont have to intervene. At the same time, as an academic, I cant help being interested in trying to theorise the kind of pleasure it gives. KH: I should move on. Youve mentioned in the past that youre wary of your work being characterised as lucid, as reducing complex ideas to a simple format. Nevertheless, how do you view the relationship between the humanities in academia and the world outside the university? Is there a duty or responsibility for academics to write out of the academy? CB: Ironically, that question follows on very nicely from what weve just been talking about in a curious way. I think what I called in the past the tyranny of lucidity registers a fear of the obvious. Once an idea becomes obvious, it no longer challenges thought. In the same way, a difficult idea reduced to ordinary, everyday language becomes less challenging in the process. Less challenging is in one way good: the idea becomes accessible to students and readers can get hold of it. And as long as they go on to see the difference between an introduction to poststructuralism and the truly challenging original texts, to read the hard stuff as well, they will see its whole complexity. My fear was that in reducing difficult ideas to the obvious, domesticating them, I was also erasing their 
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challenge. To rephrase that, I was afraid of making them everyday, leaving everything just as it was. Poststructuralism isnt everyday; it changes the way we see things. On the one hand, there are Lacan, and Derrida and Lyotard, and theyre brilliant and inventive. If we take them seriously, they overturn the existing commonplaces. But on the other hand, it is really not much use to sit students down with Lacan and ask them what they make of him, because the answer in most cases is going to be not a lot. The only way you can really learn to read theory is by a process of total immersion; you have to read it and read it and read it; and students havent got time. So theres a sense in which theory has to be made accessible, but in the process theres a loss. And I just wanted to put on record that we should be aware of that loss. At the moment, what I feel is that theres no one thing that everyone ought to do, theres no single ethic of writing. The world needs a plurality of kinds of work. Theory is important; so is scholarship. Some people write best for other academics; some are happier addressing a more general audience. My own preferred way of writing at the moment its not always like this, but its what I like doing now is to try and make difficult ideas intelligible. I try to write in a way that reads fairly easily, but at the same time puts a new thought on the agenda. I dont claim that theres any particular virtue in that, but I do like to communicate beyond the universities. If Ive got something to say that seems to me interesting, I want to tell people about it, I want the world to know. Of course, success is not guaranteed, but I can try to cross the dividing line between the purely academic and the purely popular. At the same time, I recognize that Im often drawing on work written for a much narrower audience. I dont think theres a contradiction or a clash of values there. There are all sorts of different ways to be useful.

Notes
Catherine Belseys works include: Desire: Love Stories in Western Culture, Blackwell, Oxford, 99; Shakespeare & the Loss of Eden: The Construction of Family Values in Early Modern Culture, Rutgers University Press, New Jersey, 000; Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 00; Culture & the Real: Theorising Cultural Criticism, Routledge, London, 00; Why Shakespeare?, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 00 (forthcoming). 2 Dr Tony Hughes-d-Aeth is a lecturer in the department of English and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia. He coordinated the unit Reading Theory in semester two, 00. 3 A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, nd edn, Macmillan, London, 90. 4 Romeo + Juliet, (dir. Baz Luhrmann), 996; West Side Story, (music, Leonard Bernstein, lyrics, Stephen Sondheim, book, Arthur Laurents), 9; 10 Things I Hate About You, (dir. Gil Junger), 999); Shes the Man, (dir. Andy Flickman), 006.
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The Limina Editorial Collective http://limina.arts.uwa.edu.au