Slip's bluff

Neil Chudgar

pp. 127-134

in: Scott T. Cummings, Erica Stevens Abbitt (eds), The theatre of Naomi Wallace, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

Early in Naomi Wallace's The Inland Sea, Asquith Brown interrupts a flirtatious conversation between Slip, a shipbuilder hired to dig, and the rural woman Hesp. The conversation is about dancing; Asquith, uninvited, takes hold of Hesp and starts to dance with her. As they dance, Asquith turns his attention to Slip: "Have you had a read of Burke's Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful?" Slip, who cannot read, tries to bluff: "Course I have." Asquith, cruelly, asks Slip what he thinks of it: "I think, sir, that it is about one man's ideas … of love." Asquith, still dancing, pounces: "Love? Nonsense. It's about the sublime. Read in conjunction with Hogarth's Analysis of Beauty, it might give a man an idea or two" (Wallace 2002, 36).¹ Asquith knows whereof he speaks: Edmund Burke, later a profound theorist of conservative politics, and William Hogarth, already a famous painter, provided the foundation of aesthetic theory that underlay the sweeping revisions of the English landscape that Wallace's play dramatizes. But Slip's bluff—that Burke's Enquiry is, "about one man's ideas … of love"—is closer to the truth than Asquith knows. Indeed, The Inland Sea requires us to understand that aesthetics, its most ordinary modern manifestations, derives from certain men's ideas of love.