Geoffrey Hartman

Criticism as Answerable Style

G. Douglas Atkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134976881
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

`The critic explicitly acknowledges his dependence on prior words that make his word a kind of answer. He calls to other texts "that they might answer him."'

Geoffrey Hartman is the first book devoted to an exploration of the `intellectual poetry' of the critic who, whether or not he `represents the future of the profession', is a unique and major voice in twentieth-century criticism.

Professor Atkins explains clearly Hartman's key ideas and places his work in the contexts of Romanticism and Judaism on which he has written extensively. In Geoffrey Hartman he provides a valuable introduction to a major critical voice who has called into question our assumptions about the distinction between commentary and imaginative literature.

1
Reading Hartman

[T]he so-called arbitrariness of the sign points once again to the free will of the users of language, placing the responsibility for the scrupulous reception and production of words on each person, whatever the odds.

Easy Pieces

A reader’s responsibility is not easily defined. He must decide how much darkness is to be developed…. No one can remove the reader’s responsibility entirely: in this, to each his own conscience.

The Unremarkable Wordsworth

Readers too have to recognize in themselves a will to power, or at least to knowledge, and must either achieve an empirical equilibrium or establish themselves on terra firma by means of theory. We are surprisingly close to an aristocratic type of reader-response (better: readerresponsibility) doctrine…. For each reader is an author in the sense of auctor, an augmenter who helps to “achieve” the work but who may also spoil or disestablish it. Reading…is “l’acte commun, l’opération commune du lisant et du lu”; it is “literally a cooperation, an intimate, inward collaboration…thus a disconcerting responsibility.”

“The Culture of Criticism”

In The Romance of Interpretation: Visionary Criticism from Pater to de Man, Daniel T.O’Hara claims that Geoffrey Hartman “represents the future of the profession” of literary studies.¹ Though attractive and desirable, that prospect seems unlikely, given the responsibility Hartman places on individual readers and critics and the severe demands he makes.

Reading Hartman, one encounters no such progressivistic expectation or hope. Certainly his own frequent asseverations against the usual or “plainstyle” critic point to the enormous difference between him and the vast majority of readers.² If Hartman is sui generis (having no characteristic “approach” or method, he has founded no school of criticism and is not likely to), “plainstyle” critics are legion. He has long argued that exegesis, which he regards as “puerile, or at most pedagogic” (BF 57), dominates critical activity: “The dominion of Exegesis is great,” he declares in Beyond Formalism: “she is our whore of Babylon, sitting robed in Academic black on the great dragon of Criticism, and dispensing a repetitive and soporific balm from her pedantic cup” (56). In Hartman, practical criticism has grown up, but whether the profession is or ever will be able to follow him seems highly problematical.

What Hartman objects to—and usually his rhetoric is more controlled—is criticism’s irresponsibility. That is, commentary so often fails to enact an “answerable style” or to meet the demands of responding to a text’s call. Shifting the attention of critics to critics, he claims that they—we—are “scared to do anything except convert as quickly as possible the imaginative into a mode of the ordinary” (CW 27). Though aware that he “may be overstating the case,” Hartman finds that “the spectacle of the polite critic dealing with an extravagant literature, trying so hard to come to terms with it in his own tempered language, verges on the ludicrous” (CW 155). To be answerable, according to Hartman, and responsible, criticism must be less timid, more assertive. It must “come out,” appear as such: “the problem with criticism,” he writes, “is…that it does not show enough of itself while claiming to show all” (CW 113). Not wanting to “come out,” the interpreter may become “a pedagogue, or what Blake calls a ‘horse of instruction’,” but he or she may also become a critic “who judges only in order not to be judged.” In the latter event, such a critic’s “relation to art is like that of Man, in Blake, to the Divine Vision from which he has shrunk into his present, Rumpelstiltskin form. His professional demeanor,” Hartman continues, “is the result of self-astonishment followed by selfretreat: he turns into a bundle of defensive reactions, into a scaly creature of the rock who conserves himself against the promptings of a diviner imagination” (FR 8–9).

The heavy rhetoric, which, as I have said, is uncharacteristic of Hartman, reveals both an intensity of feeling and his critical difference: unlike the typical critic (at least as Hartman represents him or her), who successfully bypasses “the animal, infantile, or social basis of his needs” (CW 218), accepting “too readily his subordinate function,” and so repressing “his own artistic impulses” (CW 216), Hartman cannot be cool and objective nor “methodically humble” (FR 9). But today’s interpreter, Hartman wrote in 1975, generally

subdues himself to commenting on work or writer, is effusive about the integrity of the text, and feels exalted by exhibiting art’s controlled, fully organized energy of imagination. What passion yet what objectivity! What range yet what unity! What consistency of theme and style! His essays, called articles, merchandized in the depressed market place of academic periodicals, conform strictly to the cool element of scholarly prose. They are sober, literate, literal, pointed. Leave behind all fantasy, you who read these pages. (FR 9)

The essay from which I quote, “The Interpreter: A Self-Analysis,” which opens The Fate of Reading, is anything but “sober,…literal, pointed”; indeed, it is perhaps Hartman’s most “fantastic” essay. It may also be dated, for in the years since 1975 critical style has changed somewhat, becoming more adventurous and risky. Still, plainstyle rules the critical waves.

Hartman’s own way of writing, which, he grants, can be “difficult, or at least experimental” (EP ix), accounts for much of his difference, if not his importance. His style is, as he describes it, mixed and variable, consisting of different linguistic registers, multiform allusions and quotations, and often outrageous puns (“I must pun as I must sneeze,” he declares at one point [STT 18]). Sometimes Hartman appears personal, conversational, and familiar, at other times oracular and prophetic. Such an uneasy mixture of “the conversational or ‘friendship’ style, and the oracular or priestly mode,” he himself finds characteristic of modern writing (CW 136).

As difficult as we may find Hartman’s mixed and impure style, so different from the plainstyle typical of academic criticism, both old-fashioned and poststructuralist, more unsettling is what might be called the paratactic quality of his writing. That he shares with such other writers in the European philosophical tradition as Theodor Adorno, whose style Martin Jay associates with a “refusal to subordinate arguments and observations in a hierarchically entailed manner,” a refusal that “grew out of his unwillingness to privilege one element of the force-field or constellation over another.”³ Somewhat similarly preferring alternatives to exclusions, Hartman engages in a way of thinking Wordsworthian in its adoption of reversal as “the very style of thought” (WP 273). Hartman may, in fact, wish his criticism to achieve what Wordsworth sought, who wanted “his poetry to be like nature in function and effect. It should purge our imaginative belief in the necessity of apocalypse or violent renovation, and purge it gently” (WP 252).

However that may be, Hartman’s prose, like Wordsworth’s poetry, normally reflects a gentleness deriving from avoidance of point. “Point” is a technical term denoting “concentrated reality or concentrated verbal meaning” (FR 229). Hartman describes the pointed style, at least as it developed in seventeenth-century England, as at once sinewy and masculine and “witty and antithetical: everything in it is sharp, nervy, à pic, and overtly like a hedgehog” (BF 47, 45). If, in England, neoclassicism “pruned the hedgehog and smoothed the prosody,” it was Wordsworth who worked “to free the lyric from the tyranny of point” (BF 45). In a style simple and gentle, Wordsworth wrote poems that often have no point. Much more is involved, of course, than a question of style. What, Hartman wants to know, “is achieved by Wordsworth’s creation of so pointless, so apparently simple a style?” (BF 49).

Hartman answers the question in a way that offers insight into his own writing. Noting the reduction entailed by pointing, “as if truth were here or there, as if life could be localized, as if revelation were a property,” Hartman cites Wordsworth’s question in The Prelude: who knows, he asks,

the individual hour in which His habits were first sown, even as a seed? Who that shall point as with a wand and say “This portion of the river of my mind Came from yon fountain?”

“The error in such pointing,” Hartman maintains, even if it “cannot be avoided,” “is not only intellectual, due to that ‘false secondary power…by which we multiply distinctions,’ but it is also spiritual.” For to point “is to encapsulate something: strength, mind, life. It is to overobjectify, to overformalize. It implies,” writes Hartman, “that there is a fixed locus of revelation or a reified idolatrous content” (BF 50). We are, however, “greedy for the spoils of pointing,” specifically the fixity and identity that it promises (UnRW 196). It is precisely here, in such monumentalizing, in which “the spirit continually comes to rest, or arrests itself, in an object,” that we discern an important pattern, if not the core, in Hartman’s thinking (STT 84). Belief in “a fixed locus of revelation or reified idolatrous content” is, of course, anathema to Hebraism, and Hartman’s resistance to and repudiation of such idolatry reflects at once his Jewishness, his affinity with Romanticism (especially Wordsworth), and his commitment to a particular style with all that entails.

Though often witty and even epigrammatic, Hartman’s style is hardly pointed, and that causes difficulty for readers accustomed to critical and scholarly writing that carefully marshals evidence to prove a definite thesis or point—accustomed to the article, in other words, rather than the essay. Reading Hartman is often frustrating and unsettling. Even the essays collected in Easy Pieces, and described as “journalistic,” are, many of them, by no means easy (ix). Typically, Hartman broods intently on texts, often shuttling back and forth between exemplary texts and an idea in critical theory or literary history, looking through texts towards an illumination of some compelling idea. As we read him, or, perhaps better, journey with him in “the adventures of his soul among masterpieces,” we feel in the presence of a mind thinking as it writes, rather than recording carefully prepared arguments or a prepackaged content. (Hartman is an essayist, his writingthinking in this way recalling Montaigne.⁴) The journey itself bears significance: “thinking,” Hartman contends, is “peripatetic” (STT 64), and “it is the commentary process that matters,” the work of reading (CW 270). Intensely Hebraic, Hartman’s spirit does not come to rest, or arrest itself, in an object. On the contrary, it wanders (and wonders), free. And as it does so, we wonder about his point: will he ever come to one, reach a destination, declare himself unequivocally, take a definite stand? Frustrated, we may conclude that he is a modern-day Hamlet sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought. If that is our conclusion, more’s the pity.

Resisting point results in both a slowing down of our reading and a “tender” or “affectionate” (STT 155) theorizing that, if gymnastic, produces minimal sting and reveals little if any arrogance of thought. In this, too, Hartman resembles Wordsworth, whom Keats branded as an example of the “egotistical sublime.” For Hartman as for Wordsworth, surmise is crucial, and what Hartman writes of that poet applies to himself: “Wordsworth, under the impress of a powerful feeling, turns round both it and its apparent cause, respecting both and never reducing the one to the other.” Surmise, moreover, “is fluid in nature; it likes ‘whether…or’ formulations, alternatives rather than exclusions, echoing conjecture…rather than blunt determinateness” (WP 8–9).

Hartman thus not only avoids assertion (‘the aggressive summing up of a person or truth in words”), which is obviously a close kin of point, but he also offers writing permeated by “an atmosphere of thoughtfulness that rejects absolute positions” (EP 99, 134). Suspecting all one-way streets, he is wary of single solutions, stabilizing perspectives, and easy answers (UnRW 153). Typically, Hartman explores problems rather than provides answers; in fact, he multiplies questions and increases rather than resolves a mystery, able to live with “the malaise of never achieving a definitive or more than questioning way of stating things” (EP 218). His apparently offhand and plaintive remark in Criticism in the Wilderness reveals much: “I am not good at concluding” (131).

Continually “emphasiz[ing] the problem rather than pretend[ing] to solve it” (CW 211), Hartman reveals both an intellectual modesty—despite his enormous learning—and a remarkable capacity for remaining “in the wilderness,” which he believes “is all we have,” in fact (CW 15). Exhibiting the patience he urges on readers, Hartman manages, like Maurice Blanchot, whom he greatly admires, “to linger in uncertainty, to stay in the equivocal space of an embraced indeterminacy,” and even to maintain himself “in the negative despite the strongest contrary pressure” (BF 106, 107). To questions hermeneutic, cultural, and political, Hartman’s response is “deliberately hesitant”: “To abide or not abide one’s time, that is the question” (CW 32, 28). He suggests, in fact, that just as the humanities in general are characterized by their provision of “delay time” (EP 178 ff.) so hesitation “is almost the formal principle of literature itself” (STT 79). Thinking of art, Hartman says it is “no wonder some are scared witless by a mode of thinking that seems to offer no decidability, no resolution” (CW 283). Hartman is, fundamentally, essayistic.

It is, then, in and through such differences in style and thought that Hartman appears, “comes out.” Rather than subordinate his commentary to the text being commented on, the critic should understand his or her work as a part of literature: criticism exists “within literature, not outside of it looking in” (CW 1). It in fact drives, Hartman believes, towards just such a recognition scene, implying a reversal whereby “the master-servant relation between criticism and creation” is “overturned in favor of what Wordsworth, describing the interaction of nature and mind, called ‘mutual domination’ or ‘interchangeable supremacy’” (CW 259).

The individual interpreter thus bears considerable responsibility, and responsibility centrally if not primarily involves responsiveness to undeniable burdens and demands. As Hartman puts it, discussing the “echo structure” of Wordsworth’s poetry, the reader

must echo in himself a verse which he can only develop by the recognition that de te fabula narratur. The verse adjures him; demands grace of him; and no poet who reads so easily at first puts as resolute and lasting a demand on the reader. We are asked to read in ourselves. Thus Wordsworth’s echo structure extends itself until we feel a relation between the poet looking “mutely” at the Boy of Winander’s grave and the Stranger or Traveller—that is, Reader—on the horizon who will ponder this verse, the poet’s inscription. Time stretches through this reader into a potentially infinite series of echoes. It is the reader who makes this verse responsive, however inward or buried its sounds: he also calls a voice out of silence. Alone, or as part of a family which includes Dorothy and Coleridge, he redeems the poet’s voice from solitariness. In the ultimate pastoral, voice remains ghostly until it makes even the mute rock respond. “All things shall speak of Man.” (FR 291)

Hartman understands understanding as involving a complex process that includes recognition, reception, and responsiveness to texts. A relationship exists that can only be described as one of “mutual domination” and “interchangeable supremacy,” for the strength of books “is measured by our response, or not at all,” and so “if certain works have become authoritative, it is because they at once sustain, and are sustained by, the readers they find” (CW 177, 170). In Virginia Woolf’s words, “books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.”⁵ The fate of books lies with us, who keep the dead alive, preserving them by elaboration as we accept our obligation to the concert of voices before, around, and presumably after us. “How much responsibility is on the respondent, on the interpreter” (STT 134), we exclaim with Hartman.

That is a burden difficult to bear. In a highly technological age, which prizes speed and efficiency (in A Philosophy of Composition E.D. Hirsch erects “relative readability” as the criterion for evaluating writing), the news Hartman brings, stressing the work of reading and the labor of the negative, as well as patience, is not good. Transmitted by this Bad News Angel is “the superficiality of all progressive schemes that cover up the old order, that try to lay it to rest” (CW 81). The “hermeneutic reflection” in which Hartman engages disables “the one-dimensional, progressive claims of conqueror or would-be conqueror” (CW 75). What remains, is precisely the issue, and Hartman is a profoundly conservative thinker, accepting the responsibilities of “the inspiring teacher in the humanities,” represented at the close of Criticism in the Wilderness, who

will always be pointing to something neglected by the dominant point of view, or something blunted by familiarity, or despised by fashion and social pressure. He is incurably a redeemer—not in the highflying sense but in the spirit-embedding sense. His active life is spent in uncovering and preserving traces of the contemplative life—those symbols and inscriptions buried in layers of change. Like Wordsworth’s poet, the humanist recalls forgotten voices, arguments, artifacts, “things silently gone out of mind and things violently destroyed.” (CW 300)

For Hartman, the Wandering Jew, there is no rest, only more travel, more travail, more work (of reading and writing) to be done.

Whether or not he “represents the future of the profession,” the difference that Hartman’s work of reading makes stems from the fact that he is not merely a critic, at least not as we are accustomed to regard critics. His concern does not come to rest in books, crucial though they be. What he is about was well described long ago by Georg Lukács in his well-known “On the Nature and Form of the Essay,” to which Hartman has admitted being “drawn strongly” (CW 195): the true critic, writes Lukács, is “always speaking about the ultimate problems of life, but in a tone which implies that he is only discussing pictures and books, only the inessential and pretty ornaments of real life—and even then not their innermost substance ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Editor’s foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations of Hartman’s Texts
• 1: Reading Hartman
• 2: A matter of relation, a question of place: Hartman and contemporary criticism
• 3: The Wandering Jew: Hartman’s relation to Judaism and Romanticism
• 4: Calling voices out of silence: criticism as echo-chamber
• 5: “Dying into the life of recollection” the burden of artistic vocation
• 6: Estranging the familiar: Hartman and the essay, or the cat Geoffrey at pranks
• 7: It’s about time: negative hermeneutics and the fate of reading
• Appendix I
• Appendix II
• Notes