16. Geoffrey
Hartman1
[1. The key for Hartman citations is: CW: Criticism in
the Wilderness (1980); DC: “Preface” to Deconstruction and Criticism
(1979a); SAV: Saying the Text: Literature, Derrida, Philosophy (1981);
and WOR: “Words, Wish, Worth: Wordsworth” (1979b).]
When I
approached Geoffrey Hartman about the problems of portraying his work, he
suggested I was having trouble because he “never comes clean.” Toward the
middle of one book, he peers out at us with “Where am I going, you wonder” (CW
119); and I sure did.
'For truth to be dialectical,” he says, “I must
engage to he I; but here my conflicts and rhetorical complexities betray me,”
and “the playful or evasive quality of my words” (CW 260). “Hartman is
merely art-man.
Proceeding on the
assumption that Hartman can reliably be said to have a consolidated personal
project is a calculated risk. Whether he is endorsing the theoretical positions
he invokes or merely playing off or against them is hard to determine. His
rhetoric can be fitful and mutable, like the calling of a prodigiously erudite
mockingbird in a dense thicket of literature, “philosophy, theology,
linguistics, sociology, and psychoanalysis” (CW 240), plus, of course,
criticism. More than the other Yale-birds from the prison-house of language, he
seems to illustrate his vision of being haunted by alien voices and beset by
“the “ghostly” question” of “who is speaking, to whom, from where”
(cf. SAV xxi).
The cunning
inconsistencies of Hartman's strong mind are even more complexly striated than
Bloom's. One of Hartman's is “to insist on the priority of reading over theory
even while insisting on the importance of theory” (CW 175).2
[2.This “insistence” is attributed to “the avant-garde essay” (CW 175),
a category which may include Hartman's own writings, though it would be out of
character for him to say so.] He
agrees with Ransom (1938) that “theory” “always determines criticism, and
never more than when it is unconscious” (CW 174). Yet he is “sceptical about
the possibility of a truly comprehensive literary theory,” let alone “a
comprehensive theory of verbal artefacts, comprising prose and poetry, ordinary
and extraordinary language” (CW 299, 40).3 [3. This statement
appears in Hartman's much-favoured format of the rhetorical question, a device
whereby he can leave us guessing what answer to prefer. We will be encountering
many more.] “Theory-making”
“can only provide finer mental and verbal instruments”; “the act of
reading” and of “specific and “self-reflective interpretation remains
essential” (CW 3). Instead of merely 11 adding to the heap and increasing the
burden it was supposed to remove,” “theory is (in theory) supposed to do
away with itself, and lead to more exact, concrete, focused insight” (CW 238f)
“Since
the neoclassical period, criticism has been primarily an “ordinary language”
movement,” a “prose of the centre,” a “middle or conversational style”
“developed for” “drawing room or salon” (CW 163, 155, 135). In its
adherence to “neoclassical decorum,” such “enlightened,”
“over-accommodated prose” threatens to “reduce literature to formal
conversation,” and to “reduce art” “to a single principle” or
“standard” (CW 137, 85, 155). “New Criticism,” for example, “limited
the critical essay by reducing its sphere of competence to specific, formal or
evaluative, remarks on art” (CW 6).
After the “Arnoldian
concordat,” “criticism no longer had a standing or creative potential of its
own” (CW 6f). The “concept of literature” was “unduly narrowed” by an
“anti-self-consciousness principle” fostering an “unfortunate and purely
hypothetical separation of thinking and feeling” (CW 174, 20, 44). The
“genteel tradition” encouraged a “pseudo-classical reduction of the
critical spirit” and an “assignment of criticism to a non-creative and
dependent function” (CW 14). “Great talent” gets “reduced to quarrelling
about what interpretation (evaluation) is or is not correct” (CW 248). “We
have caused our own impotence by allowing the concept of practical criticism to
reduce to its lowest social or utilitarian value” (CW 2910.
One “recent revival of
methodology” is “due to the para-scientific disciplines of structuralism and
semiotics” (WOR 187). They promote “close reading and “formal analysis,”
and “sensitise the reader to complexities hardly noticed before” (CW 6).
Still, the “formalist and structuralist” approach to “style” is “an
evasion if it rests with a distinction between the language of description and
the language of the object described, and privileges the former as a scientific
metalanguage, instructive because rarefied”; but not “if it discloses the
demand for order and organization in both art and science” (CW 156).
“Technical criteria or forms of analysis are useful in a preparatory way,”
but “their scientific virtue” does not “make of every user an efficient
critic” (CW 162) -- which, of course, no method can do.
“Science” has had an
“obvious success” “in turning its provisional mastery of the world into a
real imposition,” but “what goes under the name” of “a science of
language is more like a methodological miscellany, a pleasingly ordered chaos”
(SAV 2). “To compile an inventory of meanings in their structural relations
(“structuralism”) or of the focusing and orientative acts of consciousness
in their relations (“phenomenology”) seems rather distant from what we do as
critics” (CW 270). We should “take back from science what is ours” and not
“depend on the physical or human sciences for the model of a mechanism that
fascinates by its anonymous, compulsive, impersonal character.” In this
spirit, Hartman “favours moving “indeterminacy” from the area of
grammatical, semiotic, or phenomenological reduction to that of humanistic
criticism.”
“At present,” Hartman sees four “‘other
worlds’ that tempt the interpreter: (1) the midrashic or polysemous world of
biblical interpretation, where extremely bold hypotheses and strict rules of
exegesis keep company; (2) existential hermeneutics,” “in which the
authentic text is always strange and requires interpretation”; “(3)
transactive or dialogic theories of reading, which stress the importance and
complexity of the “orders” of speech that the literary work encodes, as well
as the close link between language, community, and understanding”; and “(4)
the conceptual, even noumenal, rhetoric that Parisian movements” “are
developing” in order to “motivate the deconstruction of reality (social or
mental)” while “providing the only instrument for analysing, articulating,
or criticizing it” (CW 237f). He supplies the names of Hamann and Heidegger
for (2), and of Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida for (4). Elsewhere,
names are listed for (3), the “dialogice", “'dialectic,” or
“transactive” model”: Gadamer, Jauss, Iser, Holland, Fish, and Jameson (CW
226). Among the critics I survey, Frye is probably intended for (1) along with
Bloom, in whose visionary company Hartman had long lived and whose spirit haunts
Hartman's Wilderness so pervasively at times that to credit him for every
influence might convey the impression of repetition-compulsion.
Hartman is generally more
sympathetic toward the scholars in groups (1), (2), and (4) than toward those in
(3). He disputes Fish's belief that “indeterminacy” “merely delays the
determination of meaning” so as “to slow the act of reading till we
appreciate” “its complexity” (CW 270). For Hartman, “the delay is
intrinsic”; “to keep a poem in mind is to keep it there, not to resolve it
into available meanings” (CW 274). Holland is decried for “evangelizing the
very difficulty of gaining an interpretation” (CW 269) though Hartman
evangelizes the same thing in a different way. The “objective” and
“subjective” “criticisms” of Hirsch and Holland both “leave art
behind”; they “ignore equally the resistance of art to the meaning it
provokes.”4 [4For Holland, and for Bleich as well, the
resistance is in the mind, not the art, except insofar as art is shaped by
“defense.” Hirsch, we recall, describes initial reading with
Scheiermacher's term as a “divinatory moment”; Hartman and Bloom envision a
divination as well, but one that is not to be recontained by validation
procedures.] This complaint too is strange, since that very resistance was their
starting point and motivation.
Strangest of all are
Hartman's charges that reader-response critics do not attend to “the history
of interpretation” and the “great movements in theology or political
philosophy”; and do not consider “the reader both intrinsically, or as he is
in himself, and historically as someone set concretely in a changeable field of
influence” (WOR 186). Jauss, lser, and Jameson do exactly that (Chs. 17, 8,
18), though again in a different way from Hartman. Though he protests “the
resistance to theory in Anglo-American criticism” (CW 297), he deprecates some
of the more prestigious and accomplished theorists on the literary scene.
Hartman has a particular
affinity for deconstructionism, although he professes himself “barely” a
“deconstructionist” and “even writes against it on occasion” (DC ix).
The approach he favours “acknowledges the deconstructionist challenge as
necessary and timely, if somewhat involved,” yet “only occasionally
reflective of analogies to its own project” (SAV 121). He offers “not a
refutation but a different turn in how to state the matter.” Like Bloom, he
would be an eccentric post-post-structuralist who is at once modernist and
conservative. Both critics use deconstructionist arguments as backdrops for a
countermovement toward a bizarre decorum.
One area of deconstructive
influence can be seen in Hartman's view of language. “Language appears as a
restless medium that both transcends and negates its relation to the phenomenal
world” (CW 152).5 [5. This portrayal is presented during a
discussion of the “style” of Hegel, who is treated rather like a
practitioner of deconstruction.] “Words” “are maddeningly complex and
equivocal”; their “very existence” “indicates a breach with the
phenomenality” and “evidentiality” of “things” (SAV 122, xvi).
“Words can only be words by not being things, by aiming referentially at
things yet overshooting them” (SAV 3). “The signifier” “cannot attain,
touch, transmit”; “words remain words while striving for definitive,
transcendent status” (CW 80, 90; compare Bloom, BF 9).
Therefore, “all
statements are potentially over-determined and have a circumference larger than
their apparent reference” (CW 265). “The more pressure we put on a text in
order to interpret or decode it, the more indeterminacy appears” (CW 202). The
“textual surface” is “always in movement, always betraying or exceeding
synthesis, as if language had a life of its own” (CW 88). “In any
significant act of reading, there must be (1) a text that steals our consent;
and (2) a question about the text’s value at a very basic level”: is this a
“forged” of an “authentic experience?” (CW 25). Correspondingly,
“writing is a calculus that jealously broods on strange figures, on
imaginative otherness”; “no writer who goes through the detour of a text
gets himself unmediated” (CW 27, 48).
It is the essential
“hollowness” in language, an abysmal or unsoundable quality in it, which
keeps the old quarrel between rhetoric and dialectic alive” (CW 231). “A
fresh literature” can “limit that feeling of a hollowness”; but “our
finest readers” keep “demonstrating over and over again that everything
natural or spontaneous in language is a rhetorical device, and that behind the
appearance of originality there is bricolage, or the canny embezzlement of
previous art” (CW 230f).
Still, Hartman doesn't seem disposed to adopt the “mode of criticism”
“fashioned” by “Derrida and de Man,” because it remains “helplessly
ironic in its emphasis on displacement, on words rather than the Word” (CW
112). Hartman would be more inclined to agree with Burke, for whom “the turn
from words to the Word is the very place where artist and critic dwell”; or
with Eliot, who is said to “seek to move us from words to the Word” (CW 90,
153). “For Derrida, the rhetoric of representation” “is a sham,” and his
theory “tries to free rhetoric from representational ends” (SAV 120). Again
like Bloom, Hartman prefers to propose “a restored theory of
representation”; “criticism deracinates itself when it evades the issue of
representation in its many, including theological, aspects” (SAV 121; 113).
“Anti-representational modes of
questioning disturb the alliance of signifier with signified by deconstructing a
stable ‘concept,’ or by undoing the ‘unique’ charm of particular texts:
the illusion that they have a direct, even original, relation to what they
represent” (SAV 121). “Yet how good an antidote” is “this
deconstructionist reversal, which claims” ‘that when we talk of reality we
are dealing with a
metonymic charm, the substitution of cause for effect, or
with an illusion of depth built up” “by “intertextuality?” “The
problem” “with anti-representational theories” “is that they are more
referential than they know”; “they have secretly declared”
“representation itself, the very force and pathos of mimetic desire and
envy,” to be “the bad magic”; yet “they consistently and rigorously
doubt that it can be remedied by the good word, or any word-cure” (SAV 120).
“Whereas for deconstructionist criticism, literature is precisely that use of
language which can purge pathos, which can show that it too is figurative,
ironic, or aesthetic,” Hartman feels that “the ethos of literature is not
dissociable from its pathos” (DC ix).
Unlike many of our
critics, Hartman can't decide on a label for the approach he sponsors. The
“diversity” of “the post-new critics” or “the latest grouping of
critics” sees to it that “no one can agree on what to name” them (CW
239f). “Are they ‘revisionists’ or ‘hermeneuticists’ or
‘deconstructivists’ or ‘Yale’ rather than Russian ‘formalists’? Are
they formalists or anti-formalists? Do they really have a common program, or is
their unity simply that of achieving a ‘critical mass’ at Yale?” (CW 240).
Elsewhere, he lists de Man, Miller, Bloom, and Derrida as “the new
“revisionist” or “hermeneutic” critics,” but adds at once that the
grouping is a “mere polemical convenience” (CW 226). Far from announcing his
personal credo in a Bloom-style manifesto, Hartman is a hard man to pin down,
like the speaker in a radio receiving several channels at once, some in foreign
languages, along with bursts of static.
Hartman advocates a
“hermeneutics” that “tries to understand understanding through the detour
of the writing/reading experience” (CW 244). “There is no other way” than
a “detour,” because “writing is a labyrinth, a topological puzzle, and a
textual crossword; the reader” “must lose himself” “in a hermeneutic
“infinitising” that makes all rules of closure appear arbitrary.” “The
process of understanding, of hermeneutic revision,” is “endless” (CW 299).
This factor has been overlooked in “the attempt to establish an objective or
scientific hermeneutics” as “an act of defensive mastery” over “an
unruly, changeable language” (CW 247).
“Revisionism” is now
extolled as an “extraordinary language movement” that “urges readers to
take back some of their authority and become creative and thoughtful” (CW
161). 6 [6 Elsewhere, an “extraordinary language movement”
is said to include writings of Coleridge, Carlyle, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Burke,
Bloom, Derrida, and Frye (CW 85, e.d.). Contrast the “ordinary language”
movement” Hartman dates from “the neoclassical period” (CW 163).’ This
method will not “make art stranger or less strange than it is” (CW 26). The
“otherness” of art “demands of understanding an extraordinary, even
self-altering effort” (CW 27). We face the “spectacle of a critic’s mind
disoriented, bewildered, caught in some “wild surmise” about the text and
struggling to adjust” (CW 20).
Performing his own version of a
move we observed de Man and Bloom, Hartman “shuttles between” “works of
art and works of reading” in order to “suggest that criticism is within
literature,” “not outside it” (CW 5f, 298). “Art” “allows a response
as free, imaginative, and self-tasking as its own must have been” (CW 62).
Schlegel is called to witness that “the work of criticism is superfluous
unless it is itself a work of art as independent of the work it criticizes as
that is independent of the materials that went into it” (CW 159). “All
criticism entails a rethinking, which is itself creative, of what others hold to
be creative: a scrutiny of the presence of the fictive” “in every aspect of
learning and life” (GW 14).
“The revisionists”
are credited with “challenging the attitude that condemns the writer of
criticism or commentary to non-literary status and a service function” (CW 9).
The way to “attack the isolation of the critic” is to “disclose in a
radical way” the “variety and indeterminacy” of “the relation of
creativity to criticism” (CW 9). Instead of the “subtle idolatry” in
“the automatic valuing of works of art over works of commentary,” we might
attain a (Wordsworthian) “interchangeable supremacy” between “criticism
and creation” (CW 103, 259). “How criticism is a genre, or primary text,”
Hartman himself “hopes to show by suspending the a priori valuation of art
over criticism and reading even the critical work closely” (CW 6). For
instance, “the theory” of “the avant-garde essay” “is a textual entity
to be worked through like a poem or prose artifact” (CW 175).
Once equated with
literature, criticism no longer has to be “less radical” “than art” (CW
113). “Great art is radical” because it “slanders an established order,
good or had, by not conforming” (CW 98). “Art” “gives the lie to every
attempt to impose a truth by state-sponsored power.” “No formula may preempt
what the effect of its openness will be” (CW 99). “Major art in its very
negativity or terrifying respect for exact witness cannot be co-opted” (CW
183). Hence, the “reader-critic is deeply involved in not allowing art to be
shunted aside or co-opted by the newest ideology” (CW 99). The evasiveness of
Hartman's writings might be a reflection of this involvement; for him,
“critical thinking respects heterogeneity” and “keeps in mind the
peculiarity or strangeness of what is studied” (CW 26; cf. Frye, AC 348;
Bloom, ANX 86).
“Each work of art, and
each work of reading, is potentially a demonstration of freedom: of the
capacity” “for making sense by a mode of expression that is our own” (CW
2). “Visionary poetry” in particular attains “freedom over rather than
from sources” (CW 103).7 [7. Here too, Bloom's outlook is
rendered with considerable sympathy, ranging from his early Visionary Company
(1961) up to “his later and openly gnostic phase” (CW 103f.).]
Correspondingly, “criticism is freed from neoclassical decorum” (CW
85). Critics no longer need to be “scared to do anything except convert as
quickly as possible the imaginative into a mode of the ordinary” (CW 27). They
can abjure the old “historical reflection” with its “fine and fruitless
dialectic, calculating the influences, establishing by fiat what is positive and
what is negative, and aiming at a doubtful synthesis” (CW 102f). The
“hermeneutics of indeterminacy” aimed at by “contemporary criticism”
“has renounced the ambition to master or demystify its subject (text, psyche)
by technocratic, predictive, or authoritarian formulas” (CW 41). In return,
“the quality of reading” might “increase to preserve the great or
exceptional work as something still possible” (CW 165).
However, Hartman's
confidence in such utopian prospects is uncertain: “can reading be all that
watchful now?” (CW 165). “The more conscientious it is, the more besieged
and burdened it is. “ “Criticism as a kind of hermeneutics” “reveals
contradictions and equivocations, and so makes fiction interpretable by making
it less readable” (CW 32; cf. CW 188). “The strangeness of fiction” cannot
be “understood” by a “careful” “explication” (CW 31). “Critical
commentary” resembles “fiction” by trying to “contain” the
“bewilderment” in “the critic's mind” (CW 20, c. d.). Yet
“criticism” also “differs from fiction by making the experience of reading
explicit” and “showing how a reader's sympathies, defenses, are now
solicited, now compelled” (CW 50).
As history shows, “the
critical spirit” “does not automatically place itself on the side of reason,
enlightenment, or demystification” (CW 40). “Returning to a larger and
darker view of art as mental charm, war, and purgation” may call for a
“terrorist style” in which “humanism” is “attacked by name” (CW 101,
151). Derrida for one “does not fear the seemingly absurd or anomalous idea a
strong theory may bring to birth,” and “often values nonsense” in
“theories that have tried to make sense of sense” (SAV 46f). Or, Bloom
“restores” “complexity” to the “interpretive relation”: “the
disguised text asks us to woo it in the name of what it is, but appears not to
be” (CW 61). “He will not believe that art is consolation, or that poetry
can endure as an abiding force unless it can survive a greater degree of probing
than the New Critics, even with their criterion of toughness, applied.” He
“puts poems up against interpretations so different in their verbal decorum
that the disjunction becomes alarming.”
So we have been warned
not to expect the “prose of the center” Hartman diagnosed in conventional
criticism (CW 155). “The essays of the more intellectual practitioners of the
art of literary or philosophical criticism make greater demands on the reader”
than “poems” do; and “make the text a little harder to understand” (CW
197). Because “it does not see itself as subordinated in any simple way to the
books on which it comments,” “critical commentary” “that challenges the
dichotomy of reading and writing” (as do Bloom, Blanchot, Derrida, and
Barthes) “puts a demand on the reader that may cause perplexity and
resentment” (CW 20). “Whenever a critic fudges the line between commentary
and fiction,” “the psychological drama of reading” – “centering on”
an “aroused merging: a possible loss of boundaries, a fear of absorption, the
stimulation of a sympathetic faculty that may take over and produce
self-alienation” -- “is felt to be too threatening” (CW 50f). When a
critic like Bloom “seeks to break the illusions of art by subjecting them to
the extremest, the most reductive aspects of Freudian or Nietzschean
analysis,” “the entire enterprise of criticism becomes unreal: no longer a
distinct, well-fenced activity” (CW 61, 58).
Such methods indicate
that “if we respect the language of art, it is often because of critics whose
language is but a lesser scandal” (CW 157). As Horkheimer remarks, “it may
not be entirely senseless to continue speaking a language that is not easily
understood”“ (CW 64).8 [8. An illustration might be the
“crowded language” of Walter Benjamin, which is “curiously unprogressive
or exitless” (CW 64).] In Hartman's own hands, criticism inherits from “English
poetry” “a promiscuous intermingling of various linguistic inheritances, a
jostling of high and low styles” without much in the “middle” (cf. CW 88,
135). He delights in sneaking expressions like “jazzed up,” “junk,”
“old codgers,” “paydirt,” “highjinks,” “bad vibes,” and so on (CW
119, 226, 96, 264), into a polyphonic scholarly discourse bristling with more
than enough solecisms, foreignisms, and neologisms to stump the readers such
slang feigns to address. And he frantically strews puns about, not merely as if
they were going out of style, but as if to make us wish they
jolly well
would.
Once more like Bloom,
Hartman has many sources and yet feels anxious about sources. “Our problem,
basically, is that of holding fast to the faculty of understanding as our one
genuine source of apodictic knowledge, an understanding always in danger of
being alienated by religious or scientific or practical attitudes” (CW 166).
He “prefers to remain unsystematic when there is so much exploration still to
be done” (SAV 44).9 [9. This “preference” is offer as a
reason for not attempting a “systematic analysis” “starting with Freud's
understanding of the rebus in The Interpretation of Dreams” (SAV 44).
Though Hartman professes to be a “non-philosopher” (CW 166; SAV 1), he
insists that the “only program of “contemporary criticism,” namely the
“revaluation of criticism itself,” should “hold open the possibility that
philosophy and the study of art can join forces once more” (CW 41). Both
“literary and philosophical inquiry” have “always” been concerned with
the “relation of language to thought” (CW
3). Also, “philosophy” has the attraction of making “less of a
distinction between primary and secondary literature” (CW 20; cf. CW 211,
298).10 [10. “Philosophical criticism in the European
tradition,” “breaking down” “the distinction” “between creative and
discursive modes,” is attributed to “Sartre, Heidegger, Ortega, Lukács,
Derrida” (CW 298; cf. CW 211).] “Ask a philosopher what he does and he will
answer philosophy”; “it could be argued, in the same spirit, that what a
literary critic does is literature” (but surely this equation demands
“criticism”?). Hartman envisions a “philosophical literature” or a
“philosophic work of art,” as exemplified by writings of Pater, Coleridge,
and Schlegel, and, apparently, Shelley, Kleist, Emerson, and Derrida as well (CW
45, 38, e.d.).11 [11.
Few” “intellectual poems” “exist
in the sphere of literary or cultural criticism” (CW 196). Those of “Arnold
or Pater” survive, despite “dated remarks,” as “part of the heaven of
English literature.” Yeats and Stevens are claimed to “echo Pater's mode of
philosophic criticism” (CW 45). Kleist's Marquise
of O could be his contribution to “philosophic art” (CW 38). For
Schlegel, the Athenaeum fragments” are cited as “synthesizing
criticism that would combine art and philosophy” (CW 38; cf. de Man, BI 80,
219ff).] “What is required is a work of power in which philosophy recognizes
poetry” (CW 38).
Of course, not all of
philosophy is amenable to Hartman's project. He is not concerned with its
“quest for an absolutely logical, nonpoetic or purified kind of prose” (CW
235). “Neither pure logic nor a cloudy empiricism can get hold of the workings
of our language” (SAV 15 5). At certain times, “philosophy claimed to ground
its truth on the right use of language” and “wished to curb the
quasi-magical effect of strong figures, and perhaps a religious ‘enthusiasm’
associated with that effect” (CW 149). Even “Derrida and de Man” see
“philosophy” as “a mode of writing that tries to achieve the break with
representational values through scrutinizing or purging all figures”; but for
Hartman, “philosophy remains a bleached sort of poetry, figurative discourse
despite itself” (CW 112). “Some of the difficult critics,” including
Derrida, may be “frustrated poets” (CW 198) -- a common suspicion about
critics of all stripes (if you can't do, preach).
Hartman seems to propose
a “philosophical criticism” whose “most peculiar feature” is the
“difficult alliance” between “speculation and close reading” (CW 174).
“Considered as a development in the history of prose, it tends to reject
previous rules of expository spareness, pedagogical decorum, and social
accommodation.” “Yet the critical essay, while recouping its freedom to
theorize, continues to bind itself to close reading,” and “the
post-new-critical critics remain close readers” (CW 175, 248). This way of
reading enables the “close-ups” in “the critical essay today” that
“show what simplifications, or institutional processes, are necessary for
achieving any kind of unitary, consensual view of the artefact” (CW 196f).
Hartman does not feel in
need of “recourse to a special interpretive system like psychoanalysis” or
“speech-act theories,” though he is sometimes “prompted” by them and
“appreciates” their “areas of concern” (WOR 208). Also, “semiotics”
“may produce an unfeeling language of description” and fail to reach “the
affective power of voice,” or “the relation of particular words to that
resonating field of pathos and power” “we call the psyche” (SAV 154, xxii).
For Hartman, “the relation of “text” and “soul” (or “psyche”) is
the true “province of a theory of reading” (WOR 186). Hence, he uses
“psychoanalysis” after all as a way to “reduce” things “to something
prior and deeper” and to search for “universal” “givens of human
nature” (WOR 207f).
In such matters as “the
hypothesis of a primal word-wound,” he declines to “worry the question of
the relation of empirical evidence to theory” and prefers to be “cautionary
rather than assertive about the clinical aspects of word-therapy” (SAV 154,
122). “Psychoanalysis” “reveals once more the unresolvable ambivalence of
passion as both suffering and ecstasy”; “we are made to realize how easily
the psyche is punctured by image, photo, phantasm, or phrase” (SAV 97). The
term “wounding” is used for “the expectation that a self can be defined of
constituted by words, if they are direct enough,” and for “the traumatic
consequences of that expectation” (SAV 131). “Because” “life is as
ambivalent in this regard as words are equivocal, the psyche may have to live in
perpetual tension with its desire to be worded.” “Lately,” though, “we
have been accustomed to” say that “the self has its boundaries fixed or
unsettled by language” (SAV 2). “The ego is dethroned as the magisterial or
controlling centre,” but “a new illusion surfaces”; “those who put
author or ego down are still potentially mastered by the idea of presence”
when they “accord” “privilege” “to voice” (SAV 5).
Hartman
wonders: “is psychoanalysis” “a form of art, on the basis of the
“universal thing called playing”?” (CW 263). Or, does “art constitute a
region” “in which the human desire for omnipotence is still in force, but as
a counterneurosis?”; if so, “psychoanalysis merely defines the place of art
in “the complex structure presented by the compensation for human wishes” (CW
218). Either conception could suggest parallels between “a literary or
historical perspective” and “the psychopathology of everyday life” (SAV
155).
One such parallel
compares the “frame” of “writing” to the “voices that enter through
dreams and psychotic states” (SAV xxi). “Lacan and Derrida develop” their
“indeterminacy principle” “from dream logic and literary language,
beginning with the Id” (SAV 98). “Freud's genial analysis of the latent
content of dreams” is a “persuasive mode of allegoresis”; his “Eros and
Thanatos are drives with the names of gods” (CW 180).
Another parallel compares
“wit” to “lust” as “two infinities” that have always plagued the
decorum of social existence” (SAV 48). “Neoclassical theories of decorum”
“attacked” “wit,” fearing that “an infectious or promiscuous
variety” might “bring a leprous insubstantiality into language and nature”
(SAV 45f). If “Freud showed clearly enough that wit is language-libido,” the
startlingly witty Hartman could be a lustful or libidinous figure, a devotee of
“pornosophy, so at home in France” (SAV 48, 97). His pastiche of styles does
at times seem to enjoy “wild pairings without a priest” (cf. SAV 48).
And the priest's may
indeed be one of his own changeable faces. Certainly, religion and theology seem
to be Hartman's centre of gravity just as much as wit is his centre of levity.
More like Frye than Bloom for once, he does not openly profess a personal
theology. Of course, he seldom declares himself anyway, but he may also be
showing some deference toward the orientation of “contemporary thinkers” for
whom “theology remains a junkyard of dark sublimities” “littered with
obsolete and crazy, or once powerful now superstitious ideas” (WOR 206). He
concedes that “after Marx and Freud, there is a tendency to make religion part
of the problem rather than of the solution and to expel it from the enlightened
analysis of the human experience” (CW 63). “We fear” “the danger of
being suckered by charismatic persons and their miracles of rare device” (CW
83).
And yet behold: “the
sacred has so inscribed itself in language that while it must be interpreted, it
cannot be removed” (CW 248). “As all poetry, and indeed all writing -- not
only that of prima facie religious eras -- is scrutinized by the critical and
secularizing spirit, more evidence of archaic or sacred residues comes to
light.” “It would be a great relief to break with the idea of the sacred,
and especially with the institutions that claim to mediate it”; “yet the
institution of language makes every such break appear inauthentic” (CW 249).
“So vast is our inheritance of an art immersed in myth and religion, and so
steeped is our language in their terms, that any project of secularization
becomes invested with the pathos it would expel” (CW 181). Critics might
undertake, like Bloom or Burke,” “a perplexed return to the personal and
oracular vein”; or, like Ricoeur, a “restorative criticism” that
“discloses the identity” of “the concepts of immediacy and the sacred” (CW
155, 42).
“The subtle tyranny of
secularization” is blamed for “making us forget until recently the analogy
between criticism and theological discourse” (CW 180). “The immense
energy” that “theology” “expended” upon “sustaining and perpetuating
canonical texts” is “focussed” “today” by “criticism” “on a
literature that -- a crucial difference -- cannot be set off as holy and
inspired.” “Literary critical discourse,” is “like literature itself, a
profane “troping” (CW 180f). “The consciousness of profanity overshadows
at present the critical rather than the creative writer”; “criticism seems
unable to achieve an easy conscience about the secularisation it is struggling
toward” (CW 181). Frye's “theory of formulas (archetypes) is presented as a
scientific or structural project of description, but it saves art in a world
split between scientific and religious (or ideological) imperatives” (CW 182).
It is “the most liberal theology or justification of art the modern
professional has managed to devise” (CW 184).
Quite unlike Bloom's
thunderous, prophetic embrace of Kabbalistic ancestry, Hartman's own liberal
theology is subtly woven into his striated rhetoric. His writing style seems
designed to reflect his view that “religion” is “a mixed matter, a complex
phenomenon not easily reduced to ideals of purity, totality, or ascesis” (CW
99). Besides, he needs to respect his own view of “art” that “no formula
may pre-empt what the effect of its openness will be.” All in all, though, the
tenet that “criticism is a contemporary form of theology” (CW 54) has a
decidedly positive import for Hartman.12 [12. For Bleich and
perhaps Culler too, the theological groundings of criticism are manifested in
its claims for truth and are a liability (SC 33f, PS 160). Hartman abruptly
adopts an analogous view in his critique of the profession: “the emphasis on
correctness in interpretation “ “is as close to theology as to science” (CW
297f).
Also, “the concept of organic form” is also called a “secular”
“equivalent to the check imposed on knowledge by religious faith” (CW 296).
That Hartman should make theology both a reproach and a resource is perhaps his
most cunning inconsistency.]
His stylistic shuttle
entwines theology with art in elaborate and parti-coloured patterns. “Art is a
radical critique of representation, and as such is bound to compete with
theology” (CW 115). “However opposed art may be to religion, hierarchy, or
the very idea of the sacred, it exhibits the kind of energy, concentration, and
compulsive structure we associate with its despotic opponents” (CW 98).
“Arnold” “predicted that only the poetry implicit in religion would
remain”; “one is tempted to reverse it”: “what remains of poetry is its
heterodox theology, or mythmaking” (CW 180, 248).13 [13.
“Myths” are associated with “religion” and “sacred patterns” and
thus with the “logos” (CW 181; SAV 48f; cf. CW 249; Note 10).]
Also, the voice of this shuttle is raised to quote other voices: “the
arts have taken on a prophetic function in society” (Frye); “the Religions
of all Nations are derived from each Nation's different reception of the Poetic
Genius, which is everywhere called the Spirit of Prophecy” (Blake); and so on
(CW 95).
Hartman's (unmediated?)
vision perceives “in our own century, countless if less vigorous testaments
for the rebirth of the supernatural through intellectual or even technological
means” (CW 43). “Technique is a modern and demystified form of magic”; and
“technology is theology modernized and made aesthetic” (CW 34, 83).
“Investing technology, and perhaps inventing it, is the old desire for mastery
and dominance” -- the “cultic desire for control of self and others” (CW
82f). In the very midst of “our fascination with technique” we unexpectedly
find ourselves looking homeward to angels and adoring a holy “ghost in the
machine” (cf. CW 83).
“Religion and
“language” are juxtaposed as the “major battlegrounds” for “purity”
(CW 117). “The language of religion especially; but also the religion of
language.” “Unless you abandon words altogether,” “the project of
purification accrues strong religious overtones” (CW 181). Poetry is important
here to the degree that “good poetic diction is felt to be a language within
language that purifies it, restoring original power” (CW 117). Yet “any call
for purification is dangerous”; “it is always purity having to come to terms
with impurity that drives crazy.” Resulting aberrations, at least in Hartman's
view, might include “the puritanism” of “critical writing” in “its
modest but unconvincing subservience to art”; or its attempt to “gain”
“purity” “through a technical “language of description” clearly
separate from the “object language” of the work of art” (CW 161, 235). He
asks: “should we give up the entire idea of purification and illustrate or
adorn the language of criticism until it achieves a character of its own?” (CW
235). Like most of his rhetorical questions, this one goes unanswered, except
insofar as his whole oeuvre may be one huge be-wildernessed affirmative. If
“literature” “represents and belies” the “language trajectory” of a
“purifying desire” for “absolute diction” (CW 142), so must a criticism
that is “within” literature.
The signs for a new bond
between criticism and theology, though numerous, are often intricately
delineated in Hartman's prose. Criticism may be expounded in terms that are
linked to theology in other contexts. We read, for example: “criticism is
haunted by an archaic debt, by the eccentric riches of allegorical exegesis in
all its curiously learned, enthusiastic, and insubordinate modes” (CW 85).
Elsewhere, we read: “allegorical exegesis” makes Freud's approach into “psychotheology”;
“the issue of enthusiasm is not separable from that of religion”; and so on
(CW 180, 49). Such subtle procedures again reveal Hartman as a master of
weaving, a re-resartor showing that “wit and mystery go together” (cf. CW
47).
If, as Hartman's
contends, the separation of art from criticism is unjustified, then critics
would be not merely interpreters of a sacred Word, but its dispensers. At one
point, he opines that a truly “watchful” “reading would have to become an
endless prayer or jeremiad” (CW 165). But his ambitions do not coincide with
Bloom's, whose Kabbalistic model, as we saw, sees “restoration” as “man's
contribution to God's work” (MAP 5). For Hartman, “it is unrealistic to vest
the critic with a religious aura” in a “flamboyant style” which “points
to a wildish destiny that cannot be sustained in this manifest way” (CW 11).
Perhaps if we watch
Hartman engaging a literary work, we may get some idea of the “aura” his
kind of critic radiates. As with most of our critics, his practice serves to
advocate his theoretical program. As we saw with de Man and Bloom, this tendency
is particularly strategic for a criticism striving to merge with the literary
work. The creativity and openness of the interpretive process as expounded by
Hartman, and his complex, incorporating rhetoric, readily enable him to
appropriate a poem as an instantiation of his own ideology. Even when the end
result is surprising (as is the case in his treatment of Derrida’s Glas
(see below), we can scarcely say just where his drift leaves the work behind.
Like the original, his critical text itself “steals our assent” and yet
leaves a “basic” “question” whether it is “authentic” (cf. CW 25).
The chain from allegory to allegory makes his upward fall” by subtle degrees
very hard to gauge. 14 [14. The term “upward fall” was
used in Hartman's 1964 essay on Marvell's “sense of temporality” (CW 254,
238; cf. de Man, BI 46; Bloom, ANX 104; Note 10 to Ch. 14).]
When he remarks about a poem that “no easy, integrating path leads from
the absolute or abrupt image to the mediation that preserves it” (WOR 186f),
he might be describing the genesis of his own commentary.
His discussion of
Wordsworth's poem “A Little Onward Lend Thy Guiding Hand” is a revealing
instance. The fact that the poem opens with a genuine quotation (in its title),
one coming from Sophocles via Milton, is taken to be a sign that “the effaced
or absorbed memory of other great poems motivates its own career” (WOR 179).
In that “sense,” “perhaps every poem” “begins with a quotation and
develops against the shadow of it,” though “not as directly as here.” A
level of psychoanalytic overtones is duly added. “Poetry” is a “working
through of voices, residues as explicit and identifiable as the usurping passage
from Milton, or as cryptically mnemonic as rhythm and dream phrase” (WOR
190f).15 [15 Frank Heynick of the Technical University of
Eindhoven (Netherlands) has collected many samples of authentic dream speech
that utterly disconfirm Freud's conjectures.]
Because Wordsworth knows
that “imagination may not be on the side of nature,” he “both acknowledges
and refuses” the “vehicular, visionary power” of “the voluntary or
involuntary utterances that rise in him”; “imagination” yields to
“quotation,” so that “an unmediated psychic event turns out to be a
mediated text: words made of stronger words” (WOR 185f). Such “poetry”
might be “echo humanized, a responsive moment represented here in schematic
form” (WOR 195). Yet “the “power in sound” cannot be humanized by a
sheer act of will or the arbitrariness of metaphorical speech.” We now find
out that Hartman's prison-house of language is a haunted one: the poet's
“voice” is set against “his experience” of “mutterings, sobbings,
yellings, and ghostly blowing echoes” (WOR 195; cf. CW 122, 146).16
[16 Compare the invocation of haunting noises in CW 61, 68, 97, 100, 152,
266.]
Still more insistent is
the echo of theological overtones. “The doctrine of the Logos” “evokes a
parallel enlightenment,” but “the Logos dwells with God and when it comes to
men is not understood” (WOR 195). Wordsworth “sought to convert a divine or
willful imperative into a responsive or timely utterance,” but “utterance
itself” “blocks or delays the wish or alters it” (WOR 199). Moreover,
“the fiat is waylaid on its way to utterance because the poet is anxious lest
he speak the opposite of a creating word” (WOR 201). “The creative will, or
the wish to respond with timely utterance” “may become wilful and turn
against what it wishes to bless”; and “thereof comes in the end despondency
and madness”“ (WOR 203). “The assumption of visionary status by the
poet” might “revive” “ancestral, fearful, unenlightened” “voices”
(WOR 202).
Wordsworth himself is
therefore “evading the divine Word, or a privative imagination” (WOR 185).
Such “poetry” is “undecidably” both “a purely reflective, mediated
kind of language” and “oracular-visionary speech” (WOR 179f). “The
poet's voice is usurped by a visionary reflex” (WOR 180). He “continues to
live in this problematic area of divine intimations,” though he is “free of
guidance, and the source rather than dupe of oracles. “ His “psyche” is
“preoccupied” by “a recession of experience to a boundary where memory
fades into myth, or touches the hypostasis of a supernatural origin” (WOR
183). The “turn from words to the Word” (“the place in which both artist
and critic dwell”) (CW 90, 153) is transparent in such commentary.
Poetic influence travels
through comparably theological channels. “Milton's use of the Classics
recalls” to Wordsworth “a more absolute beginning,” “a “heavenly”
origin perhaps” (WOR 183). Yet Wordsworth was “defensive” toward the
“Classics,” which “recall to him a more absolute beginning: a point of
origin essentially unmediated, beyond the memory of experience or the certainty
of temporal location” (WOR 204, 183). The “voice of Samson-Oedipus” (in
the poem's opening quotation) “rising so forcefully from the mind's abyss,
could represent the felt though repressed power of pre-Christian literature,”
which points to the possibility of unmediated vision.”17
[17. Both Oedipus and Samson attained some divine status but were blinded for
having violated the order of things -- a grisly staging of de Man's formula
“blindness and insight.”]
The same source gets a
psychoanalytic twist. “Reintegrating the Classics” is compared to
“reintegrating a childhood conceived as the heroic age of the psyche” (WOR
182). “Childhood, or its continuous role in the growth of the mind, is the
truth Wordsworth discovers”; “heroic and classicising themes” “return”
“as a yet deeper childhood, capable of reaching through time and renewing
itself in the poetic spirit” (WOR 184).
Though I have greatly
abridged the detailed richness of Hartman's analysis, some powerful tendencies
should be evident. He proceeds on several levels that he allows to flow easily
into each other; but the controlling level remains the theological one. He can
even detect the “Logos” or “divine Word” by virtue of its absence as
something the poet is “evading.” The “shift” from “visionary voice to
visionary text” via “a vast metaphoric activity identifiable with creative
power itself” (WOR 202) is restaged in Hartman's criticism. “Creation and
response merge” (WOR 199) -- his dictum on Wordsworth might fit his own work.
The stakes are not modest: “creativity appears as metaphoricity,” which
“lodges” “in the formulaic and performative utterance of a sacred voice”
(WOR 202). And the “imagination” brings “vertiginous power” (WOR 178),
as Bloom also claimed (MAP 67f)
Hartman's bid to raise the authority
of the critical text becomes also dizzily complex when he “takes”
“Derrida's Glas,” one of the most advanced self-deconstructing texts
in wide distribution, to be an “example of literary commentary as
literature” and “criticism” “in an extreme contemporary form” (CW
204). Confronted by the deconstructive unravelling of the text, Hartman counters
with an ingenious strategy for “saving the text.” He reads Glas with
the same engagement and intensity he would expend on a great literary work. He
forwards his project of merging criticism with literature by relentlessly
adopting and adapting Derrida's rhetorical ambience, and even has fun doing it
(though I had no fun reading it, but then I was being paid on a grant). Saving
the Text could be a “strong misreading” of Glas
in a Bloomian sense, except that here the precursor had yearned to abdicate the
power -- had pre-cursed it in fact -- that the successor seeks. For the very
text that enlisted such striking mannerisms in its will to non-power, in its
drive toward self-dissemination, to get unexpectedly, parodistically yet somehow
religiously “saved”; surely that would be a miracle for a “restorative
method.”
Since
Hartman had been hovering on the borders of the deconstructionist camp, which
had after all been pitched at the same university, his interweaving was not too
difficult. Is In fact, it's no small matter to recognize where Hartman swerves
from Derridean argument and where he merely expropriates or extends it. Even
close paraphrases of Derrida may have a familiar Hartmanian ring. But I think we
may uncover in Hartman's exegesis a very different intention, related, I said,
to authority and power.
Derrida
is given the title of “the leading philosopher in France” (SAV 6) (quite a
title considering how France is crammed with philosophers, and one Derrida would
certainly nit claim). He has created “a new, non-narrative art form,” which
“like art,” “begins by confusing and estranging” (SAV 2, xix) --
Hartman's idea of philosophy merging with art (cf. CW 41, 204; and Culler, OD
147, 181). “Derrida deconstructs not only others, but also himself, the
activity, that is, of philosophizing in general,” although “as a
philosopher,” he ought to “honour” the “totalization of knowledge as an
encyclopedic system” (SAV 23, 4).19 [19. Here Hartman
implies that philosophy is more devoted to totalization than he implies if he
makes deconstruction central to philosophy. On De Man's similar inconsistency,
see Ch. 13, Note 10.]
Derrida “writes
“between styles” and constructs sentences by bricolage, “ that is, by
“the canny embezzlement of previous art” (SAV xxiii; CW 231). He “strives
for elegant opacity” by “multiplying citations and texts, framing them in
unexpected ways” (SAV xxv). “The seriousness with which an intelligence of
this order employs devices that may seem to be at best witty and at worst
trivial” may help to “foreground language” and to demonstrate a “totally
non-mystical professional understanding of style as the personal appropriation
of the impersonal medium of language” (SAV 22, xxv). Hartman speculates that
“style may be a continued solecism,” a “habitual transgression,” an
“apparent deviation from natural speech” (SAV 144, 156) -- a view many
stylisticians have held, within a vastly different rationale (cf. Ch. 2).
“Derrida knows that
philosophy is in language, and that its style is radically metaphoric”; and
“he doubts that philosophy can get beyond being a form of language” (SAV 46,
23). “Verbal prestidigitation can create an apparently ordinary, yet totally
constructed, prose that would be hypocritical (since it has nothing ordinary
about it) if it did not expose itself continually as resolutely overdetermined
words that slip the leash of meaning without escaping meaning” (SAV xxiii).
“Verbal tricks” “make us aware” of “language” “as the only
subject, compared to which ego and author are episodic notions discarded by an
interminable demonstration” (SAV 22). “The re-entry into consciousness of
contradiction or equivocation through such “freeplay” appears to be
unbounded”; “there is endless material at hand” (SAV 22f). No danger of
putting yourself out of business here.
“A desacralising and
levelling effect” ensues from filling “one's prose” with
"puns,
equivocations, catachreses, and abusive etymologies,” “ellipses and purely
speculative chains of words and associations” (SAV 22). “The contemporary
Anglo-American reader” might wonder if “such licensed puns may not cheapen
and weaken an argument of importance” (SAV xxiii). Yet “every pun, in
Derrida's style, is philosophically accountable.” “Puns” help “raise”
“our consciousness of words” “to the point where an embarrassment of
riches returns us to a state of reserve and uncertainty, to an appreciation of
the mute letter” (SAV 46).
The form of an argument
pinned together with puns is instructive, especially for “a theory that could
deduce texts” “from a “sacrifice” or “dissemination” of the
identity-feeling encased in one's proper name” (SAV 17). Derrida's “broken
phrase ‘je méc…’” (from Genet) becomes the “German word” “Ecke,”
“meaning corner, or French coin, and may introduce a bilingual pun via the
English coin, which is what circulates in an economy”; “but Ecke is also the
word for angle or German Winkel” (SAV 85). “All these meanings” and
“some others (e.g., the German word Stück, in French pièce or morsure, piéce
reintroducing the idea of coin or money) are joined in the Wartburg dictionary
to the matricial word Canthus, from which also the German word for board
or edge, Kante, and, by autonomasia, Kant, the philosopher, who now emerges as
Winkel-mann (Angle-man).” These loopy acrobatics “bring in”
“Winkelmann” and make a “commentary on Hegel and Genet” also be “a
commentary on Kant” -- the more so as “in Glas, words are always failing off the page,” i.e. over the
“Kante as edge.” Is this morsure-code more cant than Kant, more shtick than
Stuck? Or a inkantation using names for a magical counter-spelling?
Puns allow “images”
to “enter philosophical discourse casually” for “illustrating an
argument” (SAV 3). The “book of textuality” goes to the German equivalent
“Buch” and thus to “bush.” “Other images” then “suggest
themselves: ambush, web, trap, labyrinth.” These “instances” “compensate
for a felt abstractness or loss of immediacy in philosophical discourse.”
Moreover, though seemingly “marginal, supplementary, accidental,” they
“tell us that the essence is missing; the thing instanced” becomes “a
disgruntled representative of the absent thing, and paradoxically gains more
authority than the argument it was intended to supplement.” “Literary
studies” does the same when it “seizes on” “images” and “reflects on
whether this allowance of dream or icon may not be closer to the real
subject.”
As such techniques
indicate, “the rhetoric that interests Derrida derives solely” “from texts
in which language discloses its groundlessness,” as contrasted with the
“traditional rhetoric” that, “as the art or persuasion, relies on a smooth
consensual calculus of means and ends,” or on a “correspondence” between
"specific verbal devices” and “specific mental or affectional states” (SAV
120). He “wants to liberate language from a doctrinal effectiveness that is
honorific rather than authentic.” “But can Derrida's analysis justify a
massive displacement of interest” “from the conceptualisation that
transforms signifier into signified” over toward “those unconceptualisable
qualities of the signifier that keep it unsettled in form or meaning?” (SAV
119). At times, “a series of slippery signifiers” “establishes itself on
the basis of the problematics of the subject, its construction and subversion”
and his “freeplay reaches” a “methodical craziness” (SAV 62).”20
[20. Statements like this
madden Culler, who hears them repeated by Wayne Booth
(OD 132). Culler “alerts” us to Hartman's “remarkable scenario”:
“chastened and purified, criticism can turn to Saving the Text”
“from a frivolous, seductive, and “self-involved” deconstruction that
ignores the sacred” (OD 44). Hartman's term “Derridadaism” (SAV 33) serves
to “blot out Derridean argument” (OD 28).]
“We tend to suppose
that every act of speech, spoken or written, has a specifiable frame of
reference” that “allows us” to “synthesize or disambiguate” the
“words” (SAV xxi). “Should the frame be lost, so that the speaker or the
addressee becomes indeterminate, then the meaning also becomes less settled. The
“ghostly” question arises of who is speaking, to whom, from where”; “a
basic structure of orientation -- everything we subsume under the concept of
“intention” -- is put in doubt.” This Halloweenish reading of Derrida (as
a Jacques-o-lantern?) bears a haunting resemblance to Hartman's own obsession
with “ghosts” (CW 56, 58, 59, 61, 83, 104, 138, 152), one we just beheld in
his analysis of Wordsworth.
Language itself seems
menaced by death. “Derrida's commentary” “is so radical” that it
“forces on the reader a sense of the mortality of every code, of every
covenanted meaning,” and “undermines both spatial and temporal perspectives,
until we are left with no single unifying theme” (SAV xvi, xix). His “art
form” is also the “most acute of impersonality theories”: “if
predecessors” are “capable of interacting with successors through texts or
reliques, then they are, to that extent, contemporaries”; “and the concept
of ‘person’ or ‘individual’ becomes socialised into a complicated blend
of symbolic -- and sometimes negative or depersonalizing --properties” (SAV
xxv). The “ultimate eschatological desire for presence or embodiment”
encounters an equally strong “sense of ghastliness, of “atrocious
exclusion,” “depersonalization, of an otherness that is too intimate” (SAV
xxvi). The previously mentioned dissolution of the self into language ties in
here.
Hartman is happy to
notice how deconstruction both dismantles and constructs (cf. de Man, BI 140).
“Deconstructive work” “magically conserves the texts it works through”
as “fragments with the force often of aphorisms,” like extracts from works
now lost” (SAV 28). “Deconstruction may lead to new construction, of which
we are here seeing a first instalment or prelude.” “Derrida's aphoristic
energy disseminates given texts as epigrammatic fragments but also reconstitutes
them into a seemingly interminable, insatiable web of his own” (SAV 4) -- just
what Hartman is also doing. “The idea arises” that “the energy or sensuous
presence of speech must be restored by some” “magical or restorative”
“counterentropic, revolutionary science” (SAV 43) --created by Hartman
perhaps, though not “credited” by Derrida?
The argument leads to the
“ingenious” “characterization” of Derrida, the writer of “radical”
“commentary,” as “a conservative thinker” (SAV xvi, 24). “The
“Monuments of unageing intellect” are not pulled down” (SAV 24). “They
are, in any case, so strong, or our desire is so engaged with them, that the
deconstructive activity becomes part of their structure.” Again, the merger of
commentary with art work is proudly displayed, though naming Derrida as
conservative is an startling judgment. The “Monuments” are after all held in
place by a correspondingly monumental inertia. Derrida's “subversive
devices” at least “trap us into rethinking a great many texts,” whereas
genuine conservativism lulls away all impulses to rethink.
Also a bit surprising,
though prefigured in Bloom (MAP 43), is the comparison of Derrida's text to
“the Hebrew liturgy that quotes God against God to plead a covenant in
danger” (SAV 19). Derrida “quotes words against words to save the contract
between word and thing.” His “method” of “deconstruction”
“reveals” the “wrong turn, at once rhetorical and conceptual,” “being
taken, not only against the will of the author, since it is pre-inscribed in
language, but because any author who stands in that turn cannot express” the
“experience” of “impersonification, except by words that sound,
willy-nilly, mystical, like a displaced or negative theology” (SAV 7).
Such arguments are
emblematic of the way we are induced to see, through a Glas
darkly, Hartman's own concentric image, his self-portrait in a complex mirror.
Derrida sets about exposing and undermining the theological groundings of voice
and speech, and ends up within the purview of a “negative theology,” as if
deconstructive discourse were intended to un-create via anti-divine fiat, still
in the Maker's image, but reversed, like Satan (Bloom's master poet).
“Dissemination” is said on the one hand to “substitute the image of a
creative self-scattering for the “collected” imitation of a divine pattern:
the “legein” of the logos”; but is likened on the other hand to Bloom's
“quasi-divine creation” (SAV 48, 56). And Bloom is, in a way, a
counter-exorcist who casts new spirits in even while he drives old ones out. Is
revisionism to be the new restoring Ararat after a deconstructive deluge?
Abruptly, Hartman's term “creative criticism” resounds with cosmogonic
overtones.
“By calling this book Saving
the Text,” Hartman says he does “not imply a religious effort in the
ordinary sense: the allusion is to the well-known concept of ‘saving the
appearances’ (sozein ta phainomena)” (SAV xv). But is this reassuring when Saving
the Appearances is the title of Owen Barfield's book that, together with
works of Burke and Bloom, is extolled by Hartman for “indicating a new
awareness of how learned or mystical systems of theology sustained and
perpetuated canonical texts” (CW 180)? “To call a text literary” is “a
way of ‘saving the phenomena’ of words that are out of the ordinary or
bordering on the nonsensical-that have no stabilized reference” (SAV xxi). It
is “to trust that” the text “will make sense eventually, even though its
quality of reference may be complex, disturbed, unclear.” “Modern
hermeneutics” may be “a negative hermeneutics. On its older function of
saving the text, of tying it once again to the life of the mind, is superimposed
the new one of doubting, by parodistic or playful movement, master theories that
claim to have overcome the past, the dead, the false” (CW 239). Yet “even a
negative commentary tends to save the text by continuing it in our
consciousness” (CW 268).
Negate and save, curse
and bless, disperse and gather -- Hartman's vision of criticism is rife with
uneasy inconsistencies and polarities. They carry over into his aspirations that
criticism can regenerate both itself and art by assuming a different role. He
presents a gloomy picture of its traditional function in order to promote the
more creative function he advocates. He is obliged to oscillate between a grim,
realistic estimate of the current woes of the profession and an inspirational,
unrealistic vision of “a new epoch of creativity” that “modern
criticism” not merely finds in art, but appropriates for itself (cf. CW 204).
“Arnold's”
“prediction” “that our errand in the wilderness would end: that a new and
vital literature would arise to redeem the work of the critic” “stands as
the epigraph” to Hartman's own book (CW 14f). But a provision is added:
“what if this literature is not unlike criticism, and we are forerunners to
ourselves?” (CW 15). For Arnold, the “new epoch” was “the promised land
toward which criticism can only beckon” and which it cannot “enter, and we
shall die in the wilderness”“ (CW 204). For Hartman, “perhaps it is better
that the wilderness should be the Promised Land, than vice-versa” (CW 15).21
[21, With his typical coquetterie, Hartman says “Ah, Wilderness” (CW 204)
and leaves us to recall the rest of the quote that makes “wilderness” into
“paradise enow” if the wine supply holds out]
“The great divide between creation and criticism” is therefore put
“in dispute” (CW 204).
Whether or not it
happens, the assimilation of criticism to literature has interesting
implications. If, as several of our critics argue (e.g., Frye, Iser, Jauss,
Jameson), literature is free to present alternative realities, then criticism
too might attain a greater freedom than it had. One step in that direction is
the now prevalent abdication of the search for the “correct” meaning or
intention, in which Hartman only too readily joins. Yet what about his anxiety
that the text should somehow be “saved”? He has “sometimes thought”
“that we have genuine criticism only when interpretation reinforces
perception, or does not erode it” (SAV 150). “The ideal act of criticism
would circle back, in that case, to the design (the partial or complete object)
that stimulated it; and this circling would take on a form of its own, closed
enough to be recognizable as form, open enough to be extended.” “The form of
interpretation rather than a positive content would respect the sense of closure
associated with art.”
Now, he is hesitant about
“theologies or theories of reading” that “evolved” “to subordinate art
to a regulated principle of imitation” and to impose “closure” in the name
of “harmony, identity, and reconciliation” (SAV 50, 149). “Criticism in
the past was able to invent new types of closure to stem the drive toward
endless interpretation” (SAV 149). “Plain-sense theories counter
allegoresis; and concepts of organic form or Classicist distinctions between
genres and media prevent limitless experimentation.” “Today we retain an
interest in the ‘aesthetic’ dimension of art”; “we also tolerate
presentational and often meretricious devices that restore immediacy, though not
always beauty, to art.” Yet when “interpretive readings” like Burke's
“erode forms of closure in art and concepts of beauty,” it seems as if
“the aesthetic charm” may “gradually disappear from the interpreted work
of art, and leave us but an intellectual construct, one with a fascinating,
fallacious, teasingly evasive mode of being.” “In significant art there is a
generalized sensitivity to premature closure, one that delays or multiplies
endings and creates limits that prove to be liminal” (SAV 150).
In consequence, “our
broadened historical perspective” makes us “more helpless about
interpretation as it stretches toward an infinity of statements and contaminates
art itself” (SAV 149). “Liberal and thoughtful” “reading”
“discloses” “indeterminacy” as a “conflict of interpretations or
codes” that “can be rehearsed or reordered but not always resolved” (CW
265). “We have no certainty of controlling implications that may not be
apparent or articulable at any one point in time.”
Living with such dilemmas
has inflicted Hartman with a peculiar condition: “brooding of the eyes” and
“brooding of the ears” when “art” “shapes his consciousness” (CW 1).
In tribute to his erudite spirit, we might coin learned terms for the condition,
such as “ophthalmoepoiasis” and “otoepoiasis,” whose “epoiasis” stem
(“brooding” in the chickeny sense) 22 [22. The forms are
in the fifth-century Attic dialect Plato might have used. I am indebted to D.
Gary Miller and Una Hatzichronoglou for the coinages.] could be slyly punned
with “poiesis” (“making” in the poetic sense, especially when the poet
lays an egg). “That writing is a calculus that jealously broods on strange
figures, on imaginative otherness, has been made clear by poets,” but not, so
far, “by the critics” (CW 27). “The English habit of practical
criticism” “does not brood over questions that perhaps cannot be answered”
(CW 245). “The circle” of “interpretation” “limits the word as a
subject of endless brooding; closure formally seals that brooding” (SAV 150).
The “anti-self-consciousness principle” recommends “the use of art to
limit the brooding, self-exposing, restless emission of speculative ideas” (CW
241). For Hartman, though, “we begin with” “a confusion in thought and
language; we brood over that chaos to purify it, or to produce order” (CW 3).
“Theory-making is part of this brooding and ordering.”
Hartman's brooding
has been, erm, egged on by Derrida, who “tells literary people only what they
have always known and repressed” (SAV 23). What he “tells” them is
presumably this: “there is no knowledge except in the form of a text -- of écriture
-- and that is devious and dissolving, very unabsolute, as it leads to other
texts and further writing” (SAV 24). “For Derrida,” “the conceptual
given is always, already, a text,” “mediated by other texts, whether past or
to come” (SAV 29). “The unity or autonomy of the text becomes uncertain”:
“using words that have been used already, we trace or cite or echo them in
ways that change and perhaps distort” (SAV 8). “Texts stand interminably
between us and absolute knowledge” (SAV 30).
Such a viewpoint is
certainly likely to be “repressed” by “literary people” who consider it
their job to explain what a text “means.” They develop “reading
techniques” that “exploit” “the text” and make it, in Hartman's view,
“too readable” (CW 188). So he is pleased when “the text” “is made”
“unreadable again” “by “deconstruction.” If “through the work of
reading the work of art never comes to rest” (CW 186), then Derrida's
“interminable” “analysis” (SAV 22) should keep the text in motion or,
using fashionable parlance, “in play” (jouissance). Hartman “raises”
“the question”: “what connection is there between playing and thinking,
playing and interpretive criticism?” (CW 261). “What reality belongs to
play, and especially wordplay?” His “conclusion” is that “the notion of
play is too radical to fit any totally secular and empirical scheme” (CW 264).
But then his scheme is, we have seen, hardly “secular” anyway, and far less
“empirical.”
Hartman's “restored
theory of representation” (SAV 121) does not in any case lead to a criticism
that simply reverses or abolishes the deconstructive process. 23
[23. Hartman sheds new light upon the “charges” “against”
“deconstruction” by noting how they were once “uttered” by Van Wyck
Brooks “against the New Criticism” (CW 267).]
Deconstructed, then restored, the literary work is doubly transformed,
first out of itself and then back into a far stranger version of itself than we
had perceived -- the same pattern of breakage and perverse reassembly found in
Bloom's approach. 24 [24. Hartman stresses that “combat and
play are interactive,” citing Huizinga (CW 262). The Yale critics make us
wonder how to keep the two apart. On the violence of Yale styles, see Note 31 to
Ch. 14; Note 27 to Ch. 15; and Note 21 to Ch. 20.].
Such criticism is
“creative” in the way it produces the work with its specialized vision and
thereby grafts itself onto the text's texture. The “Monuments” that “are
not pulled down” by Derrida (SAV 24) get refurbished in the Yale architectural
style (a campus whose buildings reminded me of cathedrals). When “the sounding
word has reverberations that transcend the economy of clarity and form,”
“contradictions arise that shake the “temples of wisdom and science”“ (SAV
xxii); yet when the dust clears, the temples have resettled into even solider
shapes.
Questions about the
authority of the critical text scatter and regroup themselves in puzzling ways.
To refuse the quest for validated interpretation is, in Hirsch's eyes, an
ethical breakdown; yet could not a rejection of Hartman's mode of interpretation
be sacrilegious? Is the famous “suspension of disbelief” for the art work to
be revisioned in a fresh affirmation of belief in criticism? Are Hartman's
readings of Wordsworth on the same plane of credibility as Wordsworth's readings
of nature? Is this union generally proposed for all criticism, so that to
quarrel with Dr. Johnson's or T.S. Eliot's portrayals of Milton is as captious
as to quarrel with Milton's portrayal of God and Satan? Are Eliot's conservative
critical works as indisputable as his progressive artistic works?
Rhetorical questions, as you can
tell, force themselves upon the exegetist of Hartman's work. He himself uses
them almost compulsively and lauds the device for an “'open-endedness” that
“discloses a freedom of thought” (CW 273). Just as they clustered around his
refusal to select a label, they dominate his meditations on how “every
developed theory attempts to separate criticism from sheer nihilism” (GW 268).
“The diversity” of ways for doing this “is perhaps not totally reducible.
Can we understand anything without an inner movement of assent? Is that question
best approached through a “grammar,” “through existential dialectics or
through speech-act theory?” “Should we perhaps be content with hints derived
from fusion or identification theories,” or with “debates concerning the
relation of understanding to belief?25 [25,. “Vico, Dilthey,
Poulet” were “fusion” theorists; “Richards, Eliot, and the New
Criticism” were concerned with “belief” (CW 268).]
Don’t expect Hartman to
answer all this: he says: “In terms of systematic thought, I have nothing to
add.” But he seizes the moment to remind us how he had already asserted, in
Beyond Formalism (1970: 74), that “the problem of meaning cannot even be
faced without considering the necessity or fatality of some primary
affirmation,” of which “the founding of a fictional world” and
“religious belief” are two examples. He now reaffirms this “insistence”
as part of an argument that “the destinies of fiction and criticism are
joined” (CW 268). Here, “criticism” fills the slot of “religious
belief”; the displacement is no accident. So we might have foreseen that
deconstruction would provide Hartman just one more occasion to perform his
characteristic, though devious, turn to theology. The effect is all the more
striking because deconstruction is avowedly anti-theological in novel,
relentless ways. You'd think critics who live in Glas houses shouldn't stow Thrones and Cherubim inside.
Hartman's Wilderness
concludes with a sombre estimate of “the literary humanities” (CW 284).26
[26. Hartman understandably feels “unused to this open kind of rhetoric”
found in his critique, whose style lacks his usual arabesques. On his about-face
on theology in this piece, see Note 12.] The main “preoccupation” is “the
lack of interaction between their profession and the mainstream of society.”
“This lack,” “is, we think, our own fault: we have not done enough” (CW
286). “We have not been able to persuade ourselves” “that what we are
doing is as essential to society's well-being as law or business or the
performing arts” (CW 287). “Instead of deepening the idea of interpretation
we turn against it” (CW 286). “A new science, whether structuralism or
semiotics, is called upon to curb the adventurism or subjectivism of the reader;
and it joins with those who denounce multiplying interpretations, seeing them as
an economic need of the publishing professor rather than as an authentic
literary and intellectual task” (CW 286f).
The origin of the malaise
is announced: “We have caused our own impotence by allowing practical
criticism to reduce to its lowest social or utilitarian value” (CW 2910. “We
claim, for example, that the only function of hermeneutics is to aid close
reading in its quest for correct or verifiable meaning” (CW 297) -- to be
Hirsched up, so to speak. “Practical criticism,” which is “more of a
pedagogical and propaedeutic than mature activity,” “wrongly usurps the
whole of literary inquiry” (CW 296). “We live with a false conception of the
rift between theory and practice”; and “our antipathy to theory” has
“seriously weakened” “English” “at the advanced level” (CW 297, 295;
cf. WOR 187). A similar “resistance” fends off “imported ideas from
non-English countries or from other fields of inquiry” (CW 297).
“What can be done?”
Hartman wonders. (CW 292). “The economic realities seem overwhelming.” He
proposes that “to encourage contact between the professions, the concept of
liberal education should be carried upward into the graduate and professional
schools” (CW 294). An "advanced course in literary interpretation” should be
provided fro students of “law” (called Saving the Tax?) and “medicine”
(called Saving the Thorax?), while the literary students “would do well to
have a seminar with a clinical psychiatrist, or a professor of law dealing with
legal interpretation.” Moreover, “joint programs” could be
“established,” as well as “continuing education supplements” and
“small research centres encouraging faculty seminars.” Funding could come
from the “money” “presently being channelled into interdisciplinary or
cross-disciplinary programs at the research” and “undergraduate levels” (CW
295).
Notwithstanding his
pleas, Hartman's work displays little awareness of how to approach the other
disciplines. Having myself lectured or participated in conferences where I was
virtually the only academically credentialed “literature person” -- the
others being mostly psychologists, engineers, linguists, or educational
researchers – I can testify that other disciplines are interested in
literature or literary study because these domains are, like their own, focused
on problems of communication and interpretation.27 [27. For
his interdisciplinary project, Hartman says: “If we give special attention to
fiction and poetry, it is because they are insufficiently examined elsewhere,
and not because they are privileged” (CW 296). This disclaimer is not merely
inconsistent with Hartman's critical practice, but gratuitous, since I find
researchers in other fields are typically willing to grant some such privilege.]
But hermetic styles like those of the Yale critics, wherein the problems are
posed, acted out, and played with rather than resolved, is not a very productive
idiom for addressing these disciplines. Hartman admits that “forms of critical
commentary” “challenging the dichotomy between reading and writing” “may
cause perplexity and resentment”; and that “the new theoretical criticism”
may create the impression of “philosophical pretensions,” “conceptual
armoury, and galloping jargon” (CW 20, 287, e.d.).
Quite apart from style,
the Yale critics sometimes imply that communication simply can't be done.
Picture lawyers, physicians, and natural scientists thronging into our halls and
being edified with the thesis that “understanding is like a frame or context
always beyond the horizon” (CW 266). Or that in “hermeneutics,” evidence
fails or is disabled, and unusual or ungovernable types of interpretation come
into play” (CW 283). Or being reminded of “the artificial nature or purely
conventional status of formal arguments or proofs.” Will they be gratified
when, thanks to the appearance of Bloom,” “the entire enterprise of
criticism becomes unreal” (CW 58)?
At the end of a thick Hartman
volume, we are rewarded with the aphorism that “our life remains a feast of
mortuary riddles and jokes that must be answered” (CW 301). By then, we aren't
surprised. In Hartman's writings, and Bloom's too, the “dead” rise up so
often that their collective momentum threatens to accidentally trigger the Last
Judgment, catching God and his Angels totally off guard. Hegel is not the only
author whose arguments “raise the spectre of an interminable mode of analysis
that could make a ghost, or a verbalism, of every phenomenon” (cf. CW 152).
Hartman too avers that “every voice with presence” is “already speaking
from the realm of the dead” and hence is “a ghostly effet de realité
produced by words” (SAV 121).
As Hartman concedes,
“to ask the literary humanities to take back their own, to re-enter an
abdicated sphere, is not specific enough and may be mind-bogglingly
unrealistic” (CW 292). In my view, the unrealistic part is to expect the
discourse dispensed by critics like him to be adequate for “allowing the
humanities to play a full rather than a service role in the university and
national affairs” (CW 295). However restorative a Hart-mania or a Bloomanism
may be vis-a-vis deconstruction, much more integration will be needed before
their insights can be effectively communicable in transdisciplinary discourse.
Meanwhile, we would all agree, I think, that “literary studies must rejoin the humanities” (CW 295f). “It must become what it hoped it would be: the training, in the fullest sense, of personal judgment, by passing the student through the fires of interpretation and exposing him not only to literature narrowly conceived, but also to important texts in philosophy, history, religion, anthropology, and so forth.”
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