“It opened with that northern brass band music which sounds like it marched to its own funeral more than a century ago, music whose every note is a lamentation for its having become extinct” (76).
“Except extinction no longer means ‘no longer in existence’. Plenty of extinct things are still around. Brass bands, for example: they’re still going strong even though they are extinct; even though they’re extinct they’re still going strong” (77).
“In no time at all theory had become more of an orthodoxy than the style of study it sought to overthrow” (100).
“Any lecturer worth his weight in corduroy was fluent in discourses, could signify-and-signified till the cows came home” (100).
“That is the hallmark of academic criticism: it kills everything it touches” (101).
“If you want to see how literature lives then you turn to writers, and see what they’ve said about each other, either in essays, reviews, in letters or journals – and in the works themselves” (102).
“‘The best readings of art are art,’ said George Steiner” (102).
“Spare me the drudgery of systematic examinations and give me the lightning flashes of those wild books in which there is no attempt to cover the ground thoroughly or reasonably” (103).
“That’s why Lawrence is so exciting: he took the imaginative line in all his criticism, in the Study of Thomas Hardy or the Studies in Classic American Literature, or the ‘Introduction to his Paintings’. Each of them is an electrical storm of ideas! Hit and miss, illuminating even when hopelessly wide of the mark (‘the judgment may be all wrong: but this was the impression I got’). Bang! Crash! Lightning flash after lightning flash, searing, unpredictable, dangerous” (103, italics added)
“Once I know enough about a subject to begin writing about it I lose interest in it immediately” (105).
Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence (2014)
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