Textual Practice

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Desire: a memoir

Andrew Gibson

To cite this article: Andrew Gibson (2018) Desire: a memoir, Textual Practice, 32:3, 551-559, DOI:
10.1080/0950236X.2018.1449381

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2018.1449381

Published online: 19 Mar 2018.

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TEXTUAL PRACTICE, 2018
VOL. 32, NO. 3, 551–559

REVIEW ESSAY

Desire: a memoir, by Jonathan Dollimore, London, Bloomsbury, 2017, 175

pp., £19.99 (pbk), ISBN: 9781350023109

Jonathan Dollimore’s memoir is mainly about four kinds of desire: desire for
danger, largely via speed, largely via motorbikes; desire for books, literature,
learning and thought; sexual desire for men; and the desire for death, largely
via suicide, largely because of depression. Other kinds of desire, or yearning, alco-
holic or narcotic, for example, also appear. (Interestingly, and symptomatically,
morphine would apparently be Dollimore’s drug of choice.) But they either
figure as adjuncts to the main ones or are kept carefully on the margins of the
book, though desire and addiction tend to coalesce, and Dollimore has an
acute understanding of addiction. So, too, he is avowedly bisexual and a father,
but makes little mention of the desire for women and children. To readers with
an itch for something deemed to be ‘the whole life’, this may seem question-
begging, and I’ll come back to it at the end. But to pose the question too intently
would be to neglect both what Dollimore is trying to do and how he should inter-
est us. For his focus seems to me to turn his book into a quite remarkable account
of a historical experience.
What was ‘the sixties generation’ (‘was’, because, cue a wicked historical laugh-
ter, in the UK at least, by now it is the Brexit-voting generation, propping up a
peculiarly wretched Tory government)? Was it remotely as unusual as it some-
times seemed to think it was? What has that strange phenomenon, ‘sexuality’,
been? The word had long existed, of course, but took on a new set of resonances
in the 1960s. What, if anything other than an ignorable media confection, was ‘the
sexual revolution’, how does it look, particularly now, when the Weinstein wave is
crashing down on us and some kind of reckoning, some kind of closure of a
period seems close at hand? Under the familiar bluffness, Larkin’s irony was deli-
cately judged: ‘Sexual intercourse began/In nineteen sixty-three/(Which was
rather late for me)’.1 You don’t have to read around in the twenties and thirties
for very long to feel that the sixties perhaps saw less of a revolution in than a
democratisation of a particular awareness of sex. But was the working class, at
least, ever sexually thwarted and inhibited? Certainly not consistently, as what
Dollimore tells us to some extent bears out.
Dollimore would quite probably not think these the questions most relevant to
Desire, and, according to him, the sixties mainly passed him by. But he was born
in 1948 and, whilst his class background positions him within the generation in a
specific way, Desire reads like the work of a ‘60s product’, and Dollimore does say
that ‘to be worth writing about the personal needs to have a meaning beyond me’
(p. 75; one wishes more contemporary memoirists thought that way). Other
552 REVIEW ESSAY

people are better equipped to write about other aspects of his book than I can, and
it seems to me that Desire may tell us more about what was at stake in our culture,
especially British culture, from the late sixties to the early nineties (the period the
memoir covers) than many another book that may address the theme in a more
deliberate and learned fashion. Indeed, if future historians think that the ques-
tions I just raised are worth asking, there may not be many first-hand accounts
that will tell them as much as, in its own keen, pungent and open-eyed way,
does Dollimore’s. This in turn provokes the thought that half the story of the
period – at least half of it is women’s – may be best told by a man with a lot of
gay experience. According to Dollimore, he has ‘always seen gay subculture as
embodying truths larger than itself’ (p. 154). If nothing else convinced me of
that, Desire would.
To some degree, the power of Desire has to do with the felt accuracy of the
record. Dollimore was from a working-class family, left his sec. mod. at 15 and
began by going straight into a factory. Motorbikes and sex were already his
main interest – it is heartening to find, by contrast, that he is indifferent to foot-
ball and doesn’t fancy footballers (partly because of their shorts); here, as so often,
Dollimore feels stubbornly and gratefully singular – and he evokes the early
sixties, with its mod-and-rocker feeling for motoring on two wheels, with love.
The befoggingly dreary grind of factory life in a declining industrial culture;
the almost equally dreary atmosphere of the small-time provincial office
culture of the time (via journalism); the glum, petty narrowness and corruption
of municipal life (via journalism, again); the kind of liberation (via education)
that the new world of universities still benefiting from the Robbins-era dispensa-
tion seemed to hold out; the disillusionment with that world that often ensued, at
greater or lesser length; the Dionysianism, the half-lit, anonymous thrill of those
new, democratic pleasure-domes, discos and gay bars; the rock music that, every
now and again, given its ‘link with [contemporary] desire’ (p. 4), pulses into Dol-
limore’s writing; what must have been the extraordinary but, in a certain way,
compelling outlandishness of the New York bath-house scene in the eighties; Dol-
limore conveys all this with a vividness and frankness that never cease to grip.
Dollimore’s honesty reflects his determination to have us know his truth,
within the focus he has chosen, unadorned, however, awkward it is for us (and
sometimes for him). He has a shrewd understanding of his own mind, as in his
assertion that ‘you quickly learn the skills that give you a fighting chance of sur-
viving the dangers you actually court’ (p. 9). But he also has an exact sense of the
doubtfulness of any self-knowledge, the point at which understanding no longer
works. He seldom if ever fudges the facts or consults his vanity (striking, in a
writer who so readily confesses to narcissism. Is fleshly narcissism one thing
and literary narcissism another? Or are vanity and narcissism two quite different
psychic traits?). He has a thoroughly laudable dislike of received wisdom and a
relish for troublesome questions: ‘It is often said, especially of relationships, we
only fully realized what we had when it was lost, when it was too late. Yet suppos-
ing it was only that losing that made it truly wanted?’ (p. 121). At moments like
this, there is a kind of Dostoevskean integrity to Desire, an intransigent refusal to
be fobbed off with a commonplace logic. In the same vein, Dollimore recoils from
 TEXTUAL PRACTICE 553

the sentimental automatism of the contemporary moraliser, as in the account of

the family friend (and seducer) with which Desire begins: ‘The cultural influence
that Tony exerted on me would now be construed as “grooming”; and maybe it
was, but it was also what made me want to learn to write’ (p. 1). Would that not be
sufficient bargain? Statements like this, tough-minded but also thoughtful, not
easily gulped down, seem rooted in the priorities of an earlier era, not those of
the 2010s; in other words, historical.
Indeed, if we set him in today’s context, Dollimore offers us a better, starker
consciousness. On the one hand, at a time of a new set of colourless, bourgeois
domestications of sexuality, he obstinately insists that sex can be scary, daemonic,
that it is by no means necessarily merely ‘exciting’ or ‘fun’ or easily reconcilable
with normative views of how things generally work out. However much it might
sound like a pathologisation, desire, gay desire can involve abjection, ‘compulsion
and torment’ (p. 154). On the other hand, he wants to remind us that, for untold
numbers, life is and remains appallingly hard – it has been appallingly hard for
Dollimore, at times, certainly if one takes his suicidal depressions seriously,
and I do – and does not cease to be so because yet another liberal palliative is
now in vogue. One of Dollimore’s most attractive intellectual traits is that he
has never had any truck with doxa, which these days means what Jack/Judith Hal-
berstam calls ‘toxic positivity’,2 the theodicean tendency in contemporary life and
its pervasive hyperbole, coming as they do out of advertising, commerce, the
media and technology. This is important, because universities seem increasingly
vulnerable to it, and even intellectual life is starting to look that way (if one thinks
of the likes of Steven Pinker and Dacher Keltner as intellectuals).3 Dollimore is
exemplary, and genuinely intellectual, in resisting vicarious uplift, because resist-
ance is where his kind of gay experience has pointed him. The price is that he
begins to sound as though he is speaking from another world.
But perhaps he is, in a sense, because his is a haunted book. The intensity of
Dollimore’s physical responsiveness made him extremely alive to human
beauty, above all, male beauty – he seems less concerned with other kinds of
beauty, in classical music, painting, landscapes or the cinema of the period;
perhaps he would say that that was a question of class – and beauty means you
want it. This, again, seems important, both in Dollimore and what he is telling
us about his culture. In an age given over to the imperatives of possession and
consumption, the arrière-pensée that once made the contemplative satisfaction
at least thinkable appears to have died. How often does anyone now suppose
that the word ‘contemplation’ might have a seductive charm? Dollimore is
about other seductions. Though there are all-important exceptions for him,
and he underlines them, beauty tends to drive you at it, make you want to grip
hold of it, or enter it, be inside it, or have it inside you. Beauty ingests you, or
you ingest it. But this need to get an intimate hold on beauty spells suffering,
for you grasp beauty only to have it fade from you – ‘to love is to love what inevi-
tably vanishes, turns to dust’ (p. 26) – or leave you thirsting for ‘the more that
wasn’t there’ (p. 2).
In effect, as its frequent quotations bear out, in Desire, the reader encounters, if
you like, a late twentieth-century, democratised, somatic version of what began as
554 REVIEW ESSAY

a modern – Baudelairean, Yeatsian, Proustian, even Keatsian – literary predica-

ment. Desire itself, constructed in this way, which is perhaps the only one the
recent and contemporary scene has truly had, is predicated on a lack or
absence (as opposed to a difficult but achievable possibility). Dollimore broods
continually on ‘a sense of loss always in excess of anything in particular’
(p. 23). He is fertile in speculation as to why, rightly suggesting, for example,
that the fact that a generation of immediately post-war parents were disinclined
to talk much of their pains and losses did not mean they did not transmit them to
their children, even as they thought they were protecting them, and neatly and
ironically noting that, over the past few decades, the war has come ever closer.
But, as with the ‘causes’ of his homosexuality, the explanation finally moves
beyond him. The case remains unsolved, and indeed Dollimore is capable of
turning it on its head. Is loss depletion, or gain? After all, Freud thought that
the ego itself ‘is a precipitate of abandoned object choices’; in which case, ‘you
are what you’ve lost’ (p. 119).
But if you dwelt with Dollimore’s kind of beauty at the time that he did, you
also came to know, not just that it would inevitably vanish, nor just that it must
die, but also that it was rather likely to die sooner rather than later. Surprisingly,
perhaps, desire turns out to have little to do with ambition, at least, in any ordin-
ary sense of the word. Dollimore’s desire was no doubt partly to keep on extend-
ing his horizons and the range of his experience, but not to scramble up the greasy
pole. Because he was unambitious, he seems to have felt no need to anaesthetise,
conceal, temper or practically exploit one of his most engaging features, a capacity
for unusually ready expressions of simple, honest, spontaneous, straightforward
affection. This, too, probably owed something to class. He hails the ‘loyal and self-
less friendships’ that can exist between young working-class men (p. 17), and
describes himself ‘weeping uncontrollably’ over other victims of motorcycle acci-
dents that he encountered in hospital, and the graves of his little dead sisters
(p. 11, p. 27). Desire turns out to be repeatedly vulnerable to unfeigned, ordinary
pathos. Initially, pathos enters the book quite inconspicuously, as for example in
the case of his touching perception of his old mother’s frailty as she walks into the
sea in New Zealand. But for a gay man who felt anything very much for the men
he was with, cruising the gay scene in the late seventies and eighties was always
going exponentially to increase the chances of bereavement, and therefore
sadness, and this sadness leaks steadily into Desire and spreads throughout it.
The longer the book goes on, the more it begins to sound like a threnody or
requiem. One after another they die, the beautiful things, and not just them,
but, even more movingly, the awkward, the neurotic, the compulsive, the shy.
The groundswell of melancholy steadily gains ground, redoubling in force as Dol-
limore repeatedly evokes the sense of loss accompanying the general disappear-
ance of transient contacts. For all its fleshliness, Desire becomes a ghost story.
By the end of the book, all this seems to have been ineluctably pointing in one
direction: Marek. The book is dedicated to him: it has been anticipating him from
the start. Marek is a young Slovakian migrant in Sydney whom Dollimore bumps
into, befriends and beds, only to find himself ‘in thrall’ to his beauty and changed
by it (p. 147). He is abruptly overcome by a love that is special, but content to
 TEXTUAL PRACTICE 555

remain on the surface, free of the ‘desire to possess, to devour the other’ (p. 148).
After one night, however, for all the efforts he makes, he never sees Marek again.
The dedication suggests that, for Dollimore, there is something exemplary, or at
least paradigmatic, about this particular, fleeting liaison, and indeed there may
well be, though, again, it may be more historical than Dollimore seems to
think. The particular mixture of what, certainly then, was geographical remote-
ness, imaginative response, sensual intensity and evanescence was something
that post-sixties culture made available as never before, save, in a certain mode,
to comparatively few, the Byrons. And yet there is an enigmatic aura to Marek,
an air of unhappiness, an incertitude – his status in Australia seems unclear,
his account of his contacts a little unsettling, he may be ‘in the country illegally’
and subject to exploitation (p. 150) – that belong rather to a more recent world
defined as such partly by its relation to migrancy. Marek, or the night with
Marek, belongs in Dollimore’s period from beginning to end, and beyond. The
tone of this near-final episode is, certainly, one of delight. But it is also, again,
deeply melancholic.
Does it help to know that part of us is death-drive and wants oblivion? Cer-
tainly the Freudian argument in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ attracted a
degree of attention during the period. But did people get anything very useful
from it? Perhaps, at least, a slightly better sense of what was going on. The
post-war period has witnessed the spread of one of the most striking and repre-
sentative phenomena of our era, depression. Whatever the previous understand-
ings of it, the recent currency of depression has been so marked – according to
Andrew Solomon, it is by now a scourge, perhaps ‘the biggest killer on earth’
(p. 102)4 – as to warrant thinking of it as specifically involving ‘a new subjectivity’,
in Dollimore’s phrase (p. 100). Dollimore knows a very great deal about the
demon of noontide. Yet again, he brings us up sharp against the final unknowabil-
ity of causes, the final absence of the whole rationale, but one thing is for sure:
here the pleasure-seeker confronts his or her limits. Hedonism and sexual
release hold no answers at all. Actually, as Dollimore says, what psychic health
probably requires is not pleasure but closure, even selfishness, a more or less reso-
lute will to defend oneself against the real. The trouble is that, as he also says, by
the same token, as others from Roland Barthes to Franco Berardi have suggested,5
there may be something ignoble, in our world, at least, about not being depressed.
Contemporary depression is born of a new kind of exposure to the world at large,
opening up a gulf between feeling and the seeming impossibility of acting on it.
One of the most resonant images of the period is of Liv Ullmann, surrounded by
at least a modest degree of bourgeois comfort, shrinking in horror from the tele-
vised image of Thích Quảng Đức, the monk who set fire to himself on the streets
of Saigon in 1963, in Ingmar Bergman’s extremely ‘depressed’ Persona. Is there
any good reason to think that Bergman got things wrong?
The academy was hardly likely to serve as a bulwark against a depressive
knowledge, and universities seem never to have been very important to Dolli-
more; indeed, he is rather scathing about them. His work, he tells us, remained
‘boring’, ‘unmemorable’, a ‘day job’ (p. 48). One might object, I suppose, that
this sounds a little like biting the hand that fed him and, more importantly,
556 REVIEW ESSAY

that, whatever one feels about universities, particularly in their latest incarnation,
the fact remains that, the contemporary scene being what it is, the major and sig-
nificant intellectual work of the period is likely to come out of and certainly to
have some kind of connection with institutions, as Dollimore’s still does,
however loosely. Yet at the same time, it is clear that Dollimore got away, and
has doggedly insisted on staying away, from a familiar British-academic uneasi-
ness about the supposed bloodlessness, the etiolation of the intellectual and scho-
larly life, its disconnection from experience or that other ineffable object of desire,
the ‘real world’.
This is very much in line with the orientation of Bloomsbury’s intriguing
Beyond Criticism series, in which the book appears. However, the position gener-
ally at stake in the series is not without its problems. Isn’t ‘experience’ a thing of
the past? Well, maybe not altogether, as Dollimore proves; Desire gives all the
necessary evidence that Dollimore can claim to have had it. But how many
others in the series will be able to make the same claim? Is there much ‘experience’
around? You don’t see a lot of it. You’d be more convinced if you heard of more
televisions being chucked out of windows; and that’s just for starters. In general,
in a culture like ours, given what it makes of lives, can the value of ‘experience’ be
smoothly revived without any compromising sense of striking an attitude? But
equally, is there not a risk of identifying the idea of ‘experience’ with the dramatic
and the extreme? Aren’t we returning to rather old-fashioned notions of authen-
ticity that are as questionable as ever, thereby giving an unexpected leg-up to
humanism, and even religion, all over again, whilst avoiding the truly urgent con-
temporary questions?
Dollimore, at least, is not to be caught in these traps. He is never a posturer. He
is also completely resistant to grandiosity. He knows that what he describes is
sometimes just sordid (though the Dostoevskean Dollimore recognizes that the
sordid can be ‘cathartic, even invigorating’ (pp. 90–1). He is good, for example,
on the nauseous allure of louche metropolitan zones). He knows about the
relationship between desire and disgust and acknowledges the necessary banality
to expressions of love. Once again, there is a kind of refusal to take refuge in illu-
sion, the result being that one becomes certain that, yes, Dollimore does have a
reality to write about, but that that is because, whether consciously or not, he
feels for it as a historically particular reality. As for any return to authenticity: aca-
demic or not – he now tends to refer to himself as a writer not a professor – Dol-
limore is far too much an intellectual, or simply both too fluid and angular a
mind, to be open to that charge; which is not to say that, in its candour, Desire
is not everywhere distinguished by a certain authenticity of mood.
So what, finally, can be said either of or for the sixties generation, as they stea-
dily and increasingly die out? Little, I think, other than intellectually, for what was
briefly an exhilarating politics, but rapidly turned out rather pitifully. Something
happened between the workers’ return to their jobs in Paris in 1968 and the
Rolling Stones’ dysfunctional, post-hippie concert at Altamont in 1969 that effec-
tively killed that politics stone dead, though it took some a lifetime to know it.
Perhaps it was just reality that happened. Indeed, we might follow Tony Judt’s
prompt,6 and suggest that the sixties generation were actually responsible for a
 TEXTUAL PRACTICE 557

lot of what followed, not least the success of neo-liberalism. This makes sense:
after all, who else, increasingly, was around to be responsible? At all events, what-
ever the political or moral idealism of the period, those involved in sixties rebel-
lion never had a clue as to what to do. As time would show, they left that to ‘the
other 60s people’, first John Major, the Norman Normal of the sixties under-
ground press; and then came Blair and his gang. Desire seems, if not precisely
to reflect this declension, at least to be in tune with its logic. For all Dollimore’s
reputation as a radical, even an extreme one, there is startlingly little reference to
politics in his book.
To begin to grasp the sixties, you need to turn in a different direction. Ronald
Knox once wrote that the fear that arrived with modernity was that there ‘might
be an indeterminate element in the heart of things’.7 For Britain as a whole, mod-
ernity proper arrived only in the sixties and seventies, and the two decades
involved a widespread, unusual and unusually intense experience of indetermi-
nacy. Identities, definitions, psychological states, class, gender and sexual
relations, cultural forms were all up for grabs. Certain consequences of this are
abundantly evident today. It was no accident that indeterminacy became a
buzz-word in the generation’s literary theory and criticism. When the power of
understanding and causal explanation runs aground in Desire, Dollimore effec-
tively confronts what he calls ‘the hinterland of indeterminacy where meaning
thins out’ (p. 173).
But the sense of indeterminacy produced what I take to be the major virtue of
the sixties generation. This was not political. It was rather a will to experiment,
whether with politics, love, sexuality, identity, art, literature, ideas, influences,
travel or drugs (that what were specifically called arts laboratories appeared at
the time was indicative). One saw the creative potential, even the beauty of inde-
terminacy most in the women of the generation, some of whom went on, and
continue with, special journeys of (discovery and) self-discovery; but after them
it was gay men. The sixties might have adopted Petrarch’s motto (or supposed
motto; in fact, he was having problems with his vines): Placet experiri, it
pleases me to try things out. That’s what Dollimore in effect did. He says that
‘learning should make us less obedient’ (p. 52). He praises ‘non-conformity’
and the struggle with ‘convention’, two words very much in circulation in the
sixties. But the result of experiments in dissidence is a kind of self-dispersion:
‘If I experience myself at all’, he writes, ‘it’s as something contingent and provi-
sional, held together precariously by a shifting, conflicted consciousness’
(p. 25). Dollimore is appropriately dismissive of identity politics, rightly recognis-
ing its essential conservatism, the blind alley down which it is currently leading
us. For sex, he tells us, is not about identity, but losing identity or, at least,
opening it to question. Sex makes possible ‘a bewildering, exhilarating, radical
transformation of the self’ (p. 54). There is serious sexual feeling, he says,
again, rightly, where there’s complication, not the reassuring simplicity of iden-
tity. What other reason was there, ever, for all those ferocious fights?
In its serious dimension, sex means risk. At their best, Dollimore’s generation
were risk-takers, experimenters and therefore resisters. I wonder if anyone has
conveyed this better than him. The experience is not self-evidently available to
558 REVIEW ESSAY

later generations, and so they will not always get him, or intellectuals like him.
They exist in and through networks and are automatically subjected to a much
greater degree of socialisation than their parents were, almost without being con-
scious of it, whatever the increasingly astonishing opportunities they now have for
crossing the Antarctic dressed as a banana or hurtling over Niagara in a coracle. If
the sixties talked a lot about non-conformity, the 2010s are about ‘risk avoidance’.
The sixties generation grew up partly before television starting squatting in the
corner, before the empire of the media properly began, before identity turned
digital. It allowed them a certain freedom of mind and imagination hardly think-
able now; though even with the sixties generation, we should ask how far, or at
least how often, it was really prepared both to go up in the balloon and cut the
rope that bound it to the ground. Politically, it was certainly not.
There are just two questions, it seems to me, that are important and that Dol-
limore might have raised, but doesn’t. Firstly, there is a way of thinking about
depression that he misses. Kierkegaard asserted that depression was ‘a hysteria
of the spirit’: the spirit ‘cannot break through, and yet it requires a breakthrough’.
Hence it ‘masses within … like a dark cloud’.8 Translate that into unambiguously
non-theological terms, and it means that, without some kind of larger aspiration,
since hedonism and sexual release hold no final answers, whatever our epicurean
skills and satisfactions, we choke. The great political aspiration of the sixties gen-
eration, its political destiny, if you like, died with its decade. Thereafter, the gen-
eration was left to pleasure and enrich itself, whilst also ensuring that it found
sufficient salves for its conscience, political theory being a major one. R.S.
Thomas wrote, of the later twentieth century, that man ‘has paused/now for
lack of the oxygen/of the spirit’.9 Seen in this light, the increasing prevalence of
depression is actually testimony to a kind of moral asphyxiation. Unlike the
risk mentality, this state can very well persist, and seems more and more likely
to grow stronger. Should one not be seriously depressed, after nearly 40 years
of the triumph of neo-liberalism, and our collusion in it? With Trump and
Farage at the end of them? No wonder entropy is back in vogue.
Secondly, to return to my anchored balloon: we know from Desire that, for
much of his cruising period, Dollimore had a reassuringly stable relationship
‘back home’ (it provided him with the best sex of his life). Then, at the end of
the period, he got involved with a woman and became a parent. Without
prying or flouting his respect for others’ privacy, I would have liked him to
bring these relationships into focus, if only in an abstract manner which safe-
guarded them. For in the end, the desire for security was part of the problem,
too. Many were living doubly-directed lives, as Dollimore clearly was, and that,
too, was an aspect of the historical experience and the difficulties it brought in
its train. People wanted both to be safe and to take risks or enjoy the pleasures
that came with insecurity, both to know where they were and to ride the whirligig.
This meant hurt. There were many casualties, casualties of various kinds, most
obviously in gay culture, but by no means only there: HIV/Aids casualties, of
course, but also drug-and-alcohol casualties, rock ‘n’ roll casualties, lifestyle
casualties and, by far the most extensive of all, emotional casualties. There was
pain all over the place. We should take that seriously. Angst and grief seemed
 TEXTUAL PRACTICE 559

hard to avoid. But it would be mean-minded to take Dollimore to task for leaving
out a single part of the picture, and he certainly tells us more about contemporary
suffering than most do, which is very much to the good, since we need more such
tales. What he also demonstrates is how central an account of gay life is to under-
standing contemporary suffering. In that sense, one might claim, without dimin-
ishing its tragedies, that, as Dollimore shows, gay culture stands in for all of us.

Notes
1. Philip Larkin, ‘Annus Mirabilis’, High Windows (London: Faber and Faber,
1974), p. 34.
2. Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC and London: Duke
University Press, 2011), p. 3.
3. For California-airhead thought, see in the first instance Steven Pinker, The
Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity (London:
Penguin, 2012); and Dacher Keltner, The Power Paradox: How We Gain and
Lose Influence (London: Penguin, 2017).
4. Dollimore is quoting Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of
Depression (New York: Scribner, 2001).
5. Part of what is implied in Barthes’s limpid ‘fou ne puis, sain ne daigne, névrosé
je suis’. Le Plaisir du texte (Paris: Seuil, 2002), p. 7. See also Franco ‘Bifo’
Berardi, After the Future ed. Gary Genosko and Nicholas Thorburn, trans.
Arianna Bove, Melinda Cooper, Erik Empson, Enrico, Giuseppina Mecchia
and Tiziana Terranova (Edinburgh, Oakland, Baltimore: AK Press, 2011), p. 64.
6. See Tony Judt, ‘The Ironic Legacy of the Sixties’, Ill Fares the Land (London:
Penguin, 2010), pp. 85–91.
7. Quoted Evelyn Waugh, The Life of Right Reverend Ronald Knox (London:
Penguin, 2012), p. 294.
8. Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, Part II, ed. and trans. with an
introd. and notes Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Prince-
ton University Press, 1987), p. 186.
9. R.S. Thomas, ‘Relay’, Collected Poems 1945–1990 (London: Phoenix, 1990),
p. 269.

Andrew Gibson
Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
a.gibson@rhul.ac.uk
© 2018 Andrew Gibson
https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2018.1449381