V a l u e1 8 5Memoriam frets about evolutionary theory, as most of us today do
not. There are some problems that are simply no longer problems,
even if they have not been adequately resolved. On the other hand,
works which have fallen into near- oblivion may be jolted into fresh
life by historical developments. In the crisis of Western civilisation
that culminated in the First World War, metaphysical poets and
Jacobean dramatists who had also lived through a time of social
turmoil were suddenly back in favour. With the rise of modern
feminism, Gothic novels with persecuted heroines ceased to be
regarded as minor curios and acquired a new centrality.
The fact that a work of literature deals in permanent features of
the human condition, such as death, suffering or sexuality, does
not guarantee it major status. It may deal with these things in a
supremely trivial way. In any case, these universal aspects of
humanity tend to assume different forms in different cultures.
Death for an agnostic age like our own is not quite what it was for
St Augustine or Julian of Norwich. Grief and mourning are
common to all peoples. Yet a literary work might express them in
such a culturally specific form that it fails to engage our interest at
all deeply. Anyway, why couldn’t there be a great play or novel
about the failure of a sewage system in Ohio, which is scarcely a
permanent feature of the human condition? Why might it not be of
potentially universal interest? After all, the feelings inspired by
such a failure – anger, alarm, guilt, remorse, anxiety about human
contamination, fear of waste products and so on – are shared by
many different civilisations.
In fact, one problem with the case that all great works of litera-
ture deal in the universal rather than the local is that very few
human emotions are confined to specific cultures. There are, to be
sure, some instances of what one might call local emotions. Modern