Sir, - Yet again Dr Patricia Coughlan has shown (April 30th) that she either cannot or will not draw just conclusions - and by that I mean logically warranted conclusions - from what I say.
In my letter of April 21st I quoted from Chapter 14 of the account of Peig's life. I concluded from this memorable cleamhnas scene that "with not a little justice and some reification a person might conclude that in this scene we are observing the patriarchy at work". Reading this, Dr Coughlan concludes that I approve of what is going on. Very obviously I do not. My concern is that we do not violate the text by making it conform to ideological desiderata.
I am further charged with keeping literary texts in glass cases. There is nothing in what I said to support such an inference. Indeed, in my encounters with some of the great texts I discover that I myself am or have been in a glass case. A great and unexpected poem such as Eliot's The Waste Land and a great and unexpected novel such as Joyce's Ulysses can shatter that glass case. In this they are comparable to great scientific books such as Copernicus's De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium and Darwin's The Origin of the Species. They so revise and extend the geographies of inwardness and outwardness that they literally leave us gasping. Memorably, Keats has left us an account of such an effect when he first looked into Chapman's translation of Homer.
So no, I do not wish to put great texts in glass cases. I merely wish not to be ideologically immunised against them. And now I bow out of this argument. - Yours, etc., Pat Moore CC,
The Presbytery, Gneeveguilla, Co Kerry.