Review

Author(s): Hans Kellner

Review by: Hans Kellner
Source: MLN, Vol. 101, No. 5, Comparative Literature (Dec., 1986), pp. 1249-1253
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2905720
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 1250 REVIEWS

critics and psychological critics. The quality of the work is high; it could
serve well as a teaching anthology in recent critical theory. To be sure, the
issue of "the identity of the literary text" is broached in so many and
oblique ways that it loses much power as an informing concept, but that
was to be expected. The very vagueness of the subject makes the collection
possible.
Most of the names in the collection are familiar ones; the positions taken
have been prominent for almost two decades. The principal message I
derive from the volume is that the landscape of criticism has been more or
less fully mapped, that the participants are all capable of producing inter-
esting critical work on their own terrain, and that, although the possibility
of conversions and defections exists, these movements of individual alle-
giances will not seriously affect the nature of the critical enterprise. In
short, the foreseeable future of criticism looks a lot like the recent past;
what seems new today is an even older past. This is hardly the advertised
"crisis" of criticism; it more closely resembles a settling down to "normal
science," albeit the peculiar normality of a centerless pluralism. It comes as
no surprise that J. Hillis Miller can offer a brilliant deconstructive reading
of Hardy's "In Front of the Landscape," or that Patricia Parker, in a sim-
ilar vein, will find that the proliferation of names in Wuthering Heights calls
into question not only the propriety of names, but of property itself,
creating a text that is always other to itself, inhabited by its own ghosts.
Hans Robert Jauss's assertion that the identity of a text is found in the
fusion of the horizons of text and reader, and Paul Ricoeur's notion of
emplotment as the creator of the dynamic identity of the text are equally
well-known to hermeneutic readers.
In this company, ironically, the most "radical," unconventional message
comes from Felix Martfnez Bonati who contends that readers can indeed
"reproduce the work" by mastering even alien cultural codes. It is the
"deeper and unchanging nature of man" based upon shared human expe-
riences (of which Bonati lists an impressive array) that makes possible the
demanding task of reading, and guarantees that literature has not only an
identity through time, but also a right to endure. "Their [literary texts]
signifiers as well as their constructs of meaning are made to last, to be
repeated identically" (245). Another surprise is Geoffrey Waite's forth-
right depiction of the "criminal insanity of all [Nietzsche's] proposed solu-
tions and cures" to the cultural problems of his time, and the "proto-fas-
cist" nature of his attitude to style. In other words, it is the positions which
might have been defended fifty years ago (although in very different
terms) which are novel in this volume. The more up-to-date is ever so
familiar.
Still, the ability of the current critical families to produce impressive
practical criticism may be the best indicator that American criticism, which
this collection represents despite its Canadian provenance and primarily

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 M L N 1251

non-American personnel, retains its traditional pragmatic and antinomian

identity. It may well be, as Jonathan Culler puts it in his introduction, that
"the literary text is interesting because it doesn't have anything as defining
as an identity" (15). The interest of Peter Nesselroth's treatment of inter-
textuality in Apollinaire's "Lundi rue Christine," or Michael Riffaterre's
discussion of Rimbaud, Ponge, and Proust, is considerable.
Cyrus Hamlin and Robert Weimann situate the discussion of the iden-
tity of the literary text. Hamlin sandwiches a reading of Coleridge's
"Kubla Khan" amidst two mini-debates between a critic, a student, and a
sceptic (who turns out to be a long-winded and decidedly dogmatic her-
meneuticist). Weimann soberly recounts some "historical" perspective on
the questioning of the identity of the literary text, noting the crisis of the
definition of literature itself and of the criteria of poeticity, the rejection
of a traditional canon and of traditional notions of the author, the changes
in the role of the critic and of the place of literature in liberal education.
In the end, he, too, settles on a hermeneutic definition that textual iden-
tity is found at an intersection of discursive systems. Least successful, it
seems to me, are the attempts to bridge between positions. The essays of
both the editors, Owen Miller and Mario Valdes, attempt, in one way or
other, to mediate between the Scylla of text-oriented identity and the
Charybdis of reader-oriented identity, but their sensibly argued papers
fall flat; compromise is not to the point here. In this environment,
nothing succeeds like excess.
Although not, properly speaking, a book about literature at all, Norman
Holland's The I cannot escape a certain ambiguity about its own nature: an
exposition of identity psychology in the last two decades, it is everywhere
implicated in its author's literary career, in spite of his evident mastery of
the psychoanalytic literature in this tradition. The book is meant to be this
way, of course, serving as yet another demonstration of the sheer brutal
fact of human identity, which Holland presents as so ubiquitous and un-
avoidable as to silence any possible doubt. I am I. You are you. That is
that.
The I has four major sections: The Aesthetics of I, A Psychology of I, A
History of I, and A Science of I. On this last matter, identity theory as a
science, Holland takes an ironic stance. He welcomes the demise of the
assumption that psychology must seek a cause-effect model, and describes
his science as "holistic," achieving its success from an ability to accommo-
date ever more details in a coherent identity description. Rhetorically, this
has led Holland to proceed through examples rather than exposition of
theories; his "introduction to psychoanalysis in the 1980s" (xiii) often takes
the form of an anthology of stories.
Holland encapsulates the psychology of I in the sentence "I ARC
DEFTly." He characterizes that I as an ARC, an agency, representation
and consequence. DEFTing refers to the use of defense, expectation, fan-

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 1252 REVIEWS

tasy, and transformation by which individuals lend meaning to the situa-

tions and texts they encounter. (The examples here are the "readers
reading" found in Holland's earlier work.) His model of mind emphasizes
feedback loops as the image of the I's ability to vary itself within the con-
fines of its identity theme, a theme which remains the same through such
powerful traumas as brainwashing or psychoanalysis.
The odd, awkward ring of Holland's use of the term "the I" has the
salutary effect of reminding us (as Bruno Bettelheim has done) how
Freud's cast of mental characters-the I [Ich], the Over-I [Ueber-Ich], and
the It [Es]-sound when they are not distanced by latinization as Ego,
Super-ego, and Id. But Holland's I is not Freud's Ich, in dubious battle
with the Es and Ueber-Ich. Indeed, these dangerous enemies of the
Freudian "I" become somehow its allies in Holland's view. The "turmoil of
the 1960s" created a topsy-turvy world in which the Id and Super-Ego
respectively help "affirm one's own reality" and "become a way of claiming
for oneself the authority the elders once had" [148-9].
Holland notes that his ideas about identity differ in one regard from
those of Freud and Heinz Lichtenstein, his major sources. This point is
"identity as representation."

By the very act of interpreting someone, a representer of identity does some-

thing which thereby becomes part of the representer's style or identity. "Identity"
thus has the same ambiguity as "history." It claims to say how things actually
were, but it is necessarily someone's account of how things actually were. [36]

This suggests that every self-representation changes the identity as part of

the feedback loop model, but it does not answer the problem of represen-
tation as such. Where is a representation of identity? Is it a fluid fiction? If
a text has as many identities as it has readers, why doesn't Scott Fitzgerald
have as many identities as he has psychological critics?
The dedication of the book also sounds a discord, at least to my ears.
"To my favorite I, Jane," a dedication to Mrs. Holland, suggests a peculiar
unwillingness to articulate otherness. Can one have a "favorite" I, a least
favorite I, any preferences among I's at all? Has not one access, on Hol-
land's own argument, to only one I, one's own? Are not, then, all other
identities not I's, but you's? This stylistic decision to appropriate as a met-
onym another's I in order to return it in the form of a tribute inaugu-
rating one's own work certainly re-enacts the analytic process Holland de-
scribes, in which the analyst or critic fashions an identity and presents it to
the patient or text as a representation for consideration.
Holland's argument draws its authority from his own very strong sense
of self, which shows itself uninhibitedly throughout his book. He takes
personal responses to things, how they make him feel (or others, unless
they are professional critics), as proofs, here and in his recent literary
work, that there is an identity at work, feeling. The problem with this

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 M L N 1253

sense of self-identity is that it cannot be easily transferred and made rhe-

torically persuasive to those who do not share it.
Here, I think, is the abiding difficulty of recent discussions of identity,
whether literary, human, or cosmic. No rhetoric exists, or can exist, which
is not implicated somehow in a response to the issue; consequently, no
common ground can be found on which to debate the point. Classical
rhetoric, of course, found in the study of identity one of the common
topics available to all discourse, but it was not posed (at least by Aristotle)
as a dual system of same and different. The topos of degree was added to
similarity and difference; a continuum was created rather than a para-
digm. As Shakespeare wrote in quite another context, it is degree that has
been lost, and with it the ground for argument.

Michigan State University HANS KELLNER

J. M. Bernstein, The Philosophy of the Novel: Lukdcs, Marxism and the Dia-
lectics of Form.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. xxiii + 296 pages.

Through his hermeneutical analysis of Lukacs's Theory of the Novel (1916),

Bernstein sets out to reconstruct a Marxist philosophy of the novel that
would avoid the pitfalls of reification characterizing modern (bourgeois)
philosophy. Although written before History and Class Consciousness (1923)
and despite its explicit, non-Marxist premises, Theory of the Novel, Bern-
stein claims, already practices the dialectical and historical method of anal-
ysis later outlined in properly Marxist terms in History and Class Conscious-
ness. The latter text is also crucial to Bernstein's reading of Theory of the
Novel, because in it "Lukacs identifies Kant's critical philosophy as the phi-
losophy of our age, as the theory which most completely articulates our
experience of ourselves and the world now" (xiii). The novel, according to
Bernstein, is the aesthetic counterpart of bourgeois thought and is thus
Kantian in form. A dialectic of form-giving and mimesis, interpretation
and representation, the novel's structure corresponds to the "Kantian
worlds of freedom and causality, ought and is; the dialectic of the novel is
the attempt to write the world as it is in terms of how it ought to be" (xviii).
This dialectic structurally parallels a Kantian synthesis of the manifold
with one key difference, namely, in the nature of its necessity: whereas the
Kantian synthesis has an epistemological justification, novel narration, ac-
cording to Bernstein, arises in response to an ethical exigency.
Following Lukacs, Bernstein links the rise of novel form to the develop-
ment of the institutional autonomy of art. In the world of the epic, the
novel's ancestor, life was meaningful because logocentrically structured,
and art reflected normative social values. The world of the novel, by con-
trast, is one "in which the immanence of meaning in life has become a

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