Sean Burke, Irishman

Sean Burke: one of my most gifted university tutors, and most likely to go off the rails and end up dealing arms in Ethiopia or serving up runny eggs in a transport cafe somewhere in the Outer Hebrides.

He was tall, and somehow both diffident and arrogant in bearing, as if unsure of others, how people would react to him, but sure of himself. Later i decided this may have been a posture designed to counter the effects of booze on his coordination.

He’s fairly famous within academia, as author of the beautifully-written Death and Return of the Author, a takedown of Literary Theory bullshit. i didn’t understand most of it, having not read any of the assholes from France he refutes, but his lectures and seminars were generally worth attending. His lectures were often nearly inaudible, owing to his habitual mumble, and he radiated difficulty – as if standing before 200-odd students was extremely unpleasant, as was speaking. Provided one sat near the front, however, the lecture itself was well-presented, and ranged from the interesting to the fascinating. i often had the suspicion that only will power kept him from collapsing. Like me, it seemed he was a night owl, and morning lectures were probably tough. It says a lot for his lectures that i often dragged myself out of bed to attend the 1000 am Lit Theory lectures, having not dropped off till 0500.

i chose his ’self and text’ module for my Taught MA, and had much fun with St Augustine, Plato, Proust, Nietzsche, and others. He was a good tutor.

We went out drinking once, after i ran into him in Safeway’s. His basket, as i recall, contained sausages. He commandeered me for the evening and we spent a few hours talking in his local. He told me he hadn’t slept in a couple of days, because he’d once more tried to give up cigarettes, and so couldn’t sleep. He seemed on the edge, weary, but very accustomed to this state. i wondered, however, how long he could sustain this physical and psychic brinksmanship. i felt that he did not exist easily; that not just living but being was a difficult matter for him, that he was caught between demanding forces, wrenched this way and that.

Perhaps encouraged by my savage trashing of Theory in my undergraduate Lit Theory exam (i got something like 45%), he told me that if he ever did any real writing, not just Lit Theory stuff, he’d like to write on Shakespeare. i was surprised, since he was a specialist of the ‘modern’ period, but also intrigued as to what his imagination, coming from philosophy and Modernist literature, would make of Shakespeare. It also saddened me a little, that he wasn’t writing what he really wanted to write, successful though he undoubtedly was.

i think that was the last time i saw Sean. He disappeared from Durham a couple of years ago, and seems to have gone into the wilderness. i came across the above photograph on his publisher’s website while running a Google search to see if he’s turned up dead or in another university. Dead seems possible, given the Seanlike protagonist of his dark novel Deadwater ends up committing suicide.

i took the photograph myself outside Elvet Riverside, the ugly university building that housed the English Depot back then. i was then in the habit of carrying my camera with me most of the time, and have some technically flawed but interesting photographs of people that i’d take in the middle of conversation. Girls used to freak out, no doubt imagining i’d Photoshop their heads onto Sylvia Saint’s naked flesh, but ladies i’m in it for the art, not the porn.

i hope Sean is still alive somewhere, and if so, not unhappy, and possibly even writing about Shakespeare.