Keston's post a good read, and not taken wryly. Reminds me a little
of 17C Puritan discourse against worldliness, but that increases the
interest. I am fascinated by the phrase "compunctious disappointment"
a sort of deliberate going awry - I'd like to trace what it produces.
It must be more than a substitute for "shame" or "shame as shock
effect", but "disappointment" seems to reinscribe into the cycle of
desire - a disappointment that opulence can't satisfy, together with
a lingering interest. Whereas compunction per se might austerely
deny (too late) that there was anything there to disappoint
or be disappointed by (depends whether the word is taken as remorse
or milder regret). When an "inability faithfully to be disappointed"
applies its roam to poetry it fairly surfs: can "disappointment" be
read as low expectations of modernism here, a sort of pre-
assimilation of anything but aesthetic opulence, an audience making
do with scarce returns. But to be "faithfully" disappointed is
something else - preferring the rule of disappointment to anything
that might relieve it in the wrong way, for the wrong thing.
I suppose what I'm hinting is that this fruitful use of
disappointment modulates quite unevenly through the moral and
asthetic registers (the word might be an aestheticisation of
purgatory shame in any case). Can it be that a moral is austere
within an art that is generous?
Peter
Peter Larkin
Philosophy & Literature Librarian
University of Warwick Library
Coventry CV4 7AL UK
Tel: 01203 528151 Fax: 01203 524211
Email: [log in to unmask]
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