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Ophelia Author(s): Brenda Hillman Reviewed work(s): Source: The Threepenny Review, No. 10 (Summer, 1982), p.

9 Published by: Threepenny Review Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4383117 . Accessed: 19/04/2012 01:22
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his epigraph from Arnold's famous essay, "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time." Hartman flatly rejects the distinction between literature and criticism. Instead, he asserts that both are kinds of "writing." Throughout the volume, he alternates between analysis or "reading" of conventionally literary works and of criticism with no apparent alteration of method: in one chapter, for example, he discusses his colleague Harold Bloom right alongside Thomas Carlyle. He acknowledges that most criticism is secondary in the sense that it is about other writing, but he firmly resists the inference that this necessarily makes it inferior. As a result, reading-the work of critics-becomes a heroically strenuous activity. Instead of a respectful effort to divine and interpret the author's intentions, it is a struggle between author and reader-critic for control of the work. The results include greatly expanded opportunities for critical pyrotechnics-and some of Hartman's are breathtaking. They are also mischievously unpredictable. He often departs from some idiosyncratic, punning construal of the text-as when he uses the initial lines of Blake's "And Did Those Feet" as a springboard for a discussion of the foundations of art. He gets there by means of feet, without which "nothing can stand." It is interesting that Hartman's interpretation begins with a "misreading" (a term of Harold Bloom's that he elsewhere finds "more spirited than helpful") of a fairly basic kind. He misquotes, "And did those feet in ancient time/ Walk upon England's mountains green," by substituting "pleasant" for "mountains." An easy enough mistake fqr a master critic who carries a great deal of poetry in his head-but the alteration does Blake a significant disservice, draining the lines of energy. Perhaps this is a minor victory in the war between reader and text. It is often hard to say what is accidental and what is intentional caprice. Oddly, at the center of this whirling mass of theory, there is not so much a scholarly method as a relentlessly personal intuition. The more profoundly a brilliant, solipsistic critic like Hartman engages with his subject, the harder it is for his readers to assess what he has to say-unless they engage equally profoundly with his writing. That is, unless they read his criticism as they would a poem. When critics make such claims for their own writing, the normal process is inevitably reversed. There is no judging the quality of a critic from the value of his or her criticism of particular works. The reader must somehow make a preliminary judgment of the critic's intellect and sensibility, and then surrender to the idiosyncratic and knotty text. One consequence of the newly theoretical criticism has been to make professional reputations both more formidable and harder to pin down. Both Hartman and Lentricchia like to conjure with names. The thin ribbon of names (Adorno, Pater, Burke, Freud, Empson and DeMan, among others) that adorns the cover of Criticism in the Wilderness jumbles the critical heavyweights of two centuries: Hartman's antagonists as well as coadjutors, forebears as well as contemporaries and Yale colleagues. Although it is presented as an analytic history of contem-

porary theory, After the New Criticism is also a tissue of names. (The index includes nothing else. Hartman's is mentioned 22 times, perhaps the first fruits of his doctrine that critics should be treated as "creative"writers.) The first half of Lentricchia's book, "A Critical Thematics, 1957-1977," seems to take up the significant intellectual movements one by one, but even the chapters on phenomenology or post-structuralism tend to explain ideas by enumerating a succession of advocates. It is not at all clear how Lentricchia decided to put some critics in Part I and others in Part II, which is called "FourExemplary Careers," although it discusses far more than four. Throughout the book, high intellectual judgments intermingle with social and personal history that sounds something like department gossip. For example, the chapter on structuralism opens with a rather sour deconstruction of why the MLA awarded its James Russell Lowell Prize to Jonathan Culler's Structuralist Poetics in 1975. To be sure, Lentricchia has strong views about literary theory. He is, in a general way, all for it; he is widely read and well-informed. Because he is part of the phenomenon, he tends to couch his analyses in the same language as the works they explain. On the whole, he is more impressed with the European originators of the various theories than with their American adherents, and he seems to regard the post-structural historicism of Michel Foucault as a kind of final solution. He regrets that Foucault has not been as widely appreciated in America as Derrida. (This situation appears to be changing. A National Public Radio program on Foucault aired last year, and a multidisciplinary conference on his work was held last fall at the University of Southern California's Center for the Humanities.) He deplores the self-indulgent hedonism-the noholds-barred interpretive idiosyncracies -of the most prominent American post-structuralists, including Hartman and some of his colleagues at Yale. But finally it comes down to people. The abstractions of literary criticism cannot be separated from the all-tooconcrete institutions of their academic environment. Hartman's grand claims for the critic have been implicitly granted in large measure, and not just by scholars like Lentricchia, who take the writings of Hartman and his ilk for their primary texts. The major critical theorists have achieved a kind of superstar status within the academic community. They are not the first distinguished critics to command a wide and respectful audience, but the tone and the intensity of their relation to their audience is new. They project a charisma that may reflect an intellectual style less characteristic of the Englishspeaking world than of France, where high intellectual debates stir fashionable interest and their protagonists are media celebrities. Granted, the ideas that Hartman exemplifies and Lentricchia expounds have made an enormous difference to the professional study of literature in the past decade. Does it make a difference anywhere else, or is all this merely a tempest in a teapot that has long been relegated to the back of a high shelf? Certainly post-structuralists and others have been redefining literature and literary criticism without much concern for the views of those who don't speak

their arcane language. But this is not to say that they have renounced all ties to the rest of thinking humanity. If Shelley could assert that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, why not claim as much for literary critics? At the end of Criticism in the Wilderness, Hartman makes a more prosaic claim on the rest of society. He asks for money and influence comparable to that accorded lawyers and businessmen. Acknowledging that those pursuits are commonly perceived to be more useful than his own, he hopes to "find some doors. . . that lead from the humanities into society." But he is not willing to make concessions. Instead, he suggests that professional schools require advanced literary study in addition to their vocational curricula, that highly trained humanities graduate students take jobs in the business world, that English professors reclaim the territory they have ceded to social scientists, and that in general they exact the authority accorded them within their own profession from the world at large.

fallen by the wayside. Most undergraduates are now excluded; some graduate students and professors of literature have withdrawn voluntarily-which is not, of course, to say that any of these people have stopped thinking, talking, or even writing about literature. But instead of circulating in open, manysided discussion, ideas are confined within closely drawn circles, accessible only to those who know the passwords. The more criticism becomes a technical discipline, specialized and isolated, the less humane it will be. In his title, Hartman implicitly abandons Arnold's claim, the claim of much traditional non-academic criticism, that criticism has a moral and social function. Nothing could be further from the practice of those American deconstructionists whom Lentricchia characterizes as "hedonists." Indeed, in some ways post-structuralistcriticism reflects the values of the so-called "me generation." It recognizes no external standards for judgment; it resists establishing a canon of classic texts; it turns ferociously on the New Criticism, its predecessor and in some sense its parent. T HIS IS a visionary and unrealistic The best critical minds have been program,but distinguished professors narcissistically engrossed in the Millike Hartman won't be the only ones to tonic obscurities of theoretical debates, suffer if the current isolation of ad- while general literary and linguistic vanced literary study continues. They standards have degenerated-and only have exaggerated academic criticism's a few self-appointed vigilantes, testily pre-existent tendency to restrict the au- defending Western civilization, have dience for serious literary discussion. even noticed. Perhaps it is just a coThe common readers have long since incidence. D

Ophelia

Mr. G., my instructor, with wild eyes And feet like a pigeon's, stands In the shadows of the high school stage Directing my speeches with his hand In his hair. I'm his Ophelia this year, naming the fistful Of herbs that isn't there, Trying to imagine my brief life closing In this lunacy. Tomorrow, says Mr. G., You will fall in the river, free Of Hamlet's intelligent disdain. Enunciate. 0 how the wheel becomes it! You must see The fennel and the columbines. It's after school; the janitor's cart Squeaks down the hall, then his soft wide Broom sweeps the sawdust backstage. Mr. G. comes closer, I am 16, he loves me a little. He looks at me with infinite sorrow Then he straightens his glasses. In a few years he's out of there, selling Insurance. I can still do That Ophelia he'd know anywhere, Stumbling, stuttering, never too clear.

-Brenda Hillman

SUMMER 19829

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