The Dominion of the Dead

Harrison, a professor of Italian literature, takes us on a wandering, meditative journey through an idiosyncratic selection of his preferred cultural habitats – Thoreau’s cabin at Walden, Vico’s philology, Aeschylus’ Xerxes in The Persians, the Italian poets Leopardi and Magrelli, the Vietnam memorial in Washington, lesser known works by Rilke and Conrad – along with some of the usual suspects: Homer, Joyce, Dante, Virgil and Shakespeare. Included too is Heidegger, whom he clearly admires, but with whom he picks a few small bones.

Harrison’s scope encompasses the nature of place, earth, home and grave, and their relation to burial; mourning and grieving and how these are vocalized; philology as an excavation of the authority show more of the dead; Heideggerrean existential guilt as a form of debt to the dead; Christian theology and attitudes toward grief; the way in which our species is an object of thought and how cultural representations of this incorporate or express our mortality; and the role of the corpse and its relation to the afterlife. The aim of all this wandering – if there is one – appears to be to trace all the ways in which the living and dead depend upon one another.

Harrison is extremely well read, and he drops in for brief visits with a very wide range of literary, historic, anthropological and philosophical sources and ideas. This scholarship is impressive. His writing tends to the ‘poetic’ and aphoristic – which seems equally impressive to start with, but gradually loses its impact, despite the flair for the elegant well-turned phrase.

Some of my discomfort with this ruminative rhetoric may not be simply the relentlessly clever and elegant language, but the assertiveness or conclusiveness of his statements. I suppose we can read these as provocation for our own thought, and helpfully so at times. Harrison says of his book that it is a net with ‘empty spaces for the reader to enter and wander about in.’

Overall this is an impressively scholarly book, but in its wandering and aimless quality, and the seductive beauty of its language at times, requires real effort to stick with, think carefully about, and to avoid falling through his net into emptiness. show less

Although this book had very good reviews when published, I'm finding it infuriating: the writing is pompous, self congratulatory, and wilfully obscure. If you use the word academic as an insult, then that's the right term. Behind the impenetrable thickets of language there are perhaps some interesting ideas trying to fight their way out. We are surrounded by the dead, he argues, they are with us at every turn. Odds on my getting to the end are not good.

Not what I was told it was (i.e., a symbolical analysis of funeral rites).

In any case, the first few pages were very powerful and fascinating. But going on, it started to look like boring repetition of mostly poorly-justified statements.