CRITICS' CHOICES FROM THE UNIVERSITY PRESSES
Mills, Nicolaus & LeClair, Thomas & Ripley, C. Peter & Hahn, Claire & Eishtan, Jean Bethke & Lynch, William & Samway, Patrick
BOOKS Critics'Choices from the University Presses My selection for the "best" or most distinguished book aoblisfaed by oni-WHity jass ia 1975 ray-qufte ooin-eid jotafeo be the most expensive. I...
...His Day of the Leopards: Essays in Defense of Poems (Yale University Press, $12.50) k Wimsatfs final defense of poetry, of whole poems, against the anarchy of critical dissolution...
...He documents the assaults oa humanity, but his prime interest is in the survivors' responses...
...The text runs to some 571 densely packed pages which are not readily summarizable in a short "notice" and I shall not make the attempt...
...There is a danger here...
...Surely one of the most noteworthy aspects of the current "craze" lies in the fact that flights of the Owl of Minerva have been increasing rapidly over Great Britain and the United States following an almost total eclipse of a half-century or more...
...It is the critic's work to respect that meaning and to describe its excellence, to protect the temple from the periodic incursion of the Leopards who, says Kafka, drink the sacrificial chalice dry...
...Human csofoafmess for Hegel is always rted**it can be abstracted neither from this world nor from history...
...The questions Taylor poses go far beyond whether or not one agrees with Taylor that "the magnificent Hegelian synthesis has dissolved" or that "no one actually believes his [Hegel's] central ontological thesis, that the universe is posited by a Spirit whose essence is rational necessity...
...Walter Kauf-ma%, one of America's leading Hegel schirs, estimates that over a thousand artidjas and books on Hegel have been pustfd thus far in the 1970s...
...Here Wimsatt demonstrates not only his special knowledge of the achievement of Pope and Johnson, he also makes the reader aware that this achievement resulted from the discipline of "imitation.'' As Wimsatt puts it, he describes what the poet accomplishes In virtue of fee enabling restraints of his bondage...
...Faulkner wrote two different novels and to try and bridge the literary and psychological gap without stressing sufficiently the overall structure of each novel is, in a sense, to discuss a book that Faulkner never wrote...
...Wimsatt was a Christian humanist concerned with the preservation of the values of civilization...
...If one accepts- Hegel's arguments, as developed by Taylor, that there will always be some gap between social consciousness in any society, one puts pressure on the positions of those an-alysts, who, in the name of Marx, describe a future society in terms not ualifce those used by Mary Popping to describe herself: it will be "practically perfect in every way...
...By tackling head-on the empty mystifications and romanticized destructiveness of all visions and versions of a "situationless freedom," Taylor's Hegel makes a powerful contribution to that theoretical dialogue and debate which helps to constitute our social and political reality...
...These experiments in mass death demonstrate the Worst about man: we also need the truth...
...Or might the centers topi be With circumferences reversed...
...in fact I was surprised at the degree of contact...
...The, proponent of change who confronts fiegei comes to recognize that to capse social being and social consciousness into one another, to presume the total and non-problematic union of the two in an idealized future, is te presuppose a stalk society within which the human subject's consciousness, is robbed of any critical edge...
...In all, Irwin has pioneered, well equipped, into an area of Faulkner studies that is on few literary maps...
...THOMAS leclak is an assistant professor of English at the University of Cincinnati...
...Although this is one of the most intriguing books to appear on Faulkner in recent years, the methodology employed is not as rigorous as it should be...
...An Anatomy of Life in the Demth Camps (Oxford University -Press, $10), ?Terrence Des Pres treats life in Wortd War II death camps with the same compassionate precision Robert Jay liftofc brought to the survivors of atomic attack in Death in Life...
...Abattoir Editions, The University of Nebraska at Omaha, $7.50)-a thin wood veneer that feels like tree bark, is extraordinary...
...Peter's College, Jersey City...
...Many preserved a sense of personal dignity, and most who Survived did so by achieving a darit> with their fellow victims...
...Nicolmis Mills Even the cover of this book-Poems and Woodcuts by John W. Wright...
...and The Sound and the Fury are part of a single continuing story...
...The truth is not the nihilism we may extract from the experience but an irreducible humanness, even a sense of community...
...And the inside is even more a surprise to see and touch...
...c. peter ripley is Lecturer in History and Afro-American studies at Yale...
...His achievement is showing that humanity did not totajjy aollapse in Ais extremity...
...For John Wright's Poems and Woodcuts deserves a far wider audience than it will ever receive or that will, I suspect, ever feel easy with his work...
...The unconscionable price tag is a pity as die book deserves a wider readership than it will get-particularly now, in the midst of what Anthony Quinton, in a series of articles for the Ifltfy York Meview of Books, termed "two Hegd . craze...
...Human subjectivity, in Taylor's words, is "necessarily situated in life...
...FATHER WILLIAM LYNCH, S.J., teaches in the English Department at St...
...he is also, like some measure of Virgil or Beatrice in the Commedia, a good guide to further and common reaches of poetry and philosophy...
...Poetry is a stay against chaos, for "Freedom is poetry- and poetry is meaaingr-or excellence of meaning...
...uses more than seventy books of original testimony by survivors to present a synthesis and analysis of life in the camps...
...Instead, I shall focus on certain issues raised by Taylor's concluding chapter, "Hegel Today...
...A Speculative Reading of Faulkner (The John Hopkins University Press, $8.95) John T. Irwin has discerned with incredible clarity the future of Faulkner studies: a blend of structuralism with French psychoanalytic criticism...
...If only the last page didn't say, "This is number . . . of an edition of one hundred and eighty copies...
...perhaps climbing higher for a wider perspective might help us all to see and" appreciate the terrain a bit better...
...Gutman's major premise is that Time m the Cross "is a profoundly flawed work...
...Des Pres does not cheat, refuses sentimentality...
...V In The Survivor...
...William Lynch I do not know which of these two men-James Collins or Francis Fergus-son-I think more highly of as workers, writers, thinkers...
...Socio-biology than traditional cultural terms...
...He would reject this view of himself, but ;t is not in Iris power to prevent it...
...the immediate experience of modern poetry...
...MSGR...
...also, in this case, my own task as reader quickly became the task of investigating how closely the world, the thoughts, the style of this historian of modern philosophy on the one hand and this altogether literate and humane man of the imagination on the other might come together and discover each other...
...But if anyone thinks he can do better let him try...
...For the complex human subject cannot be abstracted from history and from the dense tissue of relationships within which he is lodged...
...Patrick Samway In Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge...
...In Part I, as Wimsatt tells us, he "pursues a medley of theoretical topics," the most interesting of which is a marvelous joust with the mythopoeia of Northrop Frye...
...Columbia University economist Peter Passell, reviewing for the New York Times Book Review (28 April 1974), recorded typical hyperbole: "if a more important, book about American history has been published in the last decade, I don't know about it" Heady stuff...
...and The Sound and the Fury when addressing oneself to important issues in these novels in order to appreciate how these precise issues fit into the larger Faulkner vision...
...In Day of the Leopards we witness the play of an amazing and incisive intellect...
...Its creatures twist and turn, Stoop, stretch and bend to see it, Yet it somehow looks reversed...
...Part II consists of a series of eighteenth century essays...
...Whom gropes after who...
...Claire Hahn When he died in December of 1975, William K. Wimsatt, Jr...
...tlcdr Ours is the century of smoke: the mushroom, over Hiroshima, the pall over Auschwitz...
...Taylor argues convincingly that, for anyone who takes Hegel seriously, there can be no easy assumption mat "come the revolution" the individual human subject will, as it were, transmute automatically in order that he might fit neatly within the contours of his altered social world...
...It is imperative, it seems to me, to look at the complete contexts of bath Absalom, Absalom...
...in a setting of social practices and institutions.'' Self-knowledge must always be cast in historical form...
...As Irwin thematically develops such concepts as the brother seducer or the brother avenger, he presupposes that Absalom, Absalom...
...Gutman, a labor historian now completing a history of the black family, brought to &e critique the skills of a quantifier ajel ajeweoeiwe for traditional historical research...
...It would be good to read him as he pursues this study in Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hegel, Nietzsche, Hume, Locke, Berkeley, Kant and others...
...At a time when American literary criticism hesitates before the theorizing of the French structuralists, staggers under the strobe lights of Harold Bloom's "strong misreadings," or kneels awkwardly at the shrine of Freud, Professor Wimsatt's powerful argument for the values of formsm offers a welcome moment of sane balance...
...It also suggests a middle path through the emerging debate surrounding those two schools of historical scholarship...
...Pert III concerns itself with "the problematic status of poems as whole objects...
...claire hahn is an assistant professor of English at Fordham University...
...Could it an really be the same Correctly seen, we wonder, The same right-left things There seen left to right...
...C. Peter Ripley This is a review of a book about a book...
...Gutman's study is essential reading on the American experience, particularly for those who were seduced by the aggressive publicity generated by Time on the Crow...
...It is also a thoroughly engaging literary study, the most important I have read this year...
...So I rush to praise Francis Fergusson...
...FATHER PATRICK SAMWAY, S.J., teaches American Literature at the University of Nantes, France, denis donoghue is professor of modern English and American Literature at University College, Dublin...
...What Collins is talking about, not in an occasional sentence but in the whole of Interpreting Modern Philosophy (Princeton University Press, $4.45) is the relation between modern philosophical inquiry (beginning with Descartes) and the human, moral, active, passional life of the inquirer...
...Before or after Literary Landmarks: Efsays on the Theory and Practice of Literature (Rutgers University Press, $9) one should read or re-read his The Idea of a Theatre and Dante's Drama of the Mind, rich examples of his desire, and ability, to rise, with poetic care and limit, to the widest reaches of the mind...
...I was not disappointed...
...To posit, with certain Utopian Marxists, an abstrac&Mt"tiimfctfi human n&tutt and to mystify and distort both <be* realities of rthe present and the hopes of (*e fotore...
...In the ensuing pages Gutman challenges both the -evidentiary base and conclusions of Time on the Cross, leaviag little of either intact...
...For him, poetry is the nucleus around which such Values are structured...
...Where there is an unnecessary loss of contact -for example because of the overly ratified style and vocabulary of Collins --that is not good and to a degree prevents mutual discovery...
...A more important book is the one reviewed here-Herbert G. Gutman's Slavery and the Numbers Game: A Critique of Time on the Cross, University of Illinois Press, $7.95) published in the Journal of Negro History and then by the University of Illinois Press...
...If there are such points as this, where the philosopher and the literary imagination will have more meetings, it will be due to such men as Francis Fergus-son...
...Indeed, the world John Wright offers is anything but a comforting one...
...was Sterling Professor of English at Yale University, an outstanding and influential scholar, and one of the most articulate defenders of the American Formalist school of literary criticism...
...Bolstered with massive computerized research and economic wizardy, Time-on the Cross promised to debunk accepted ideas about slavery and to show that slaves internalized the American work ethic and lived lives of "achievement under adversity"-in short, slaves worked hard because they received in return positive incentives and rewards which allowed them to lead decent lives...
...To trace, for example, Faulkner's imaginative genealogical descent starting with Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" to Twain's Puddnhead Wilson to James's "The Jolly Corner" to Jeffer's "Tamar," even for the purpose of citing literary analogue, m to overlook the fine studies done on source material and influences on Faulkner's fiction beginning with the comprehensive research done by Joseph Blotner in his biography of Faulkner...
...Day of the Leopards is divided into three sections...
...Flaws of fact and interpretation aside, continues Gutman in his intro-duction, the "essential evidence . . . does not make the case that enslaved Afro-Americans worked hard because they wanted to work hard" (1-2...
...Never does Wright think to save us from or by pain: when we rush to see it is at last What lie offers instead are lines of thought, "etching and harpischord/ thornbush and sunlit altar," which insist that bewilderment must be the mortar we use to hold our lives together...
...by two economist-historians, Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, was promoted as the new and very revised truth about black American slavery...
...Professor Wimsitt's collection of essay* must bcj considered seminal for any continuing academic dialogue about the nature and function of literary criticism...
...The original study, Time on the Cross: The ' Economics of American Negro Slavery (Little, Brown and Company, 1974, two yob...
...REVIEW JEAN BETHKE ELSHTADi IS assistant TOProfessor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst...
...Relying on such models as Levi-Strauss's The Raw and the Cooked, Irwin has focused his attention with great subtlety and finesse on the relationship between Quentin Compson and bis father as found in the two novels, Absalom, Absalom...
...Des Pres...
...It is a world in which ttte familiar constantly turns nofamar and the artist's task is to insist ok Ihe logic and permanence of human bewilderment: Sometimes the world looks all Reversed, as if cast off to us From some unbounded mirror...
...In addition, Irwin could well have profited from some modern studies on literary genre in the Old and New Testaments rather than his heavy reliance on Guy Rosolato's Essais sur le symbolique...
...nicolaus mills is the author of The Great School Bus Controversy (Teachers College Press...
...And the Critique is stimulating, While, rejecting Time on 0 Cross, it offers powerful insights by a provocative historian who combines the best that quantified and traditional history has to offer...
...Somewhere St Thomas says it is a venial sin to omit praise where praise is due...
...Time on the Cross was released with a round of television interviews for the authors and was praised* by the public press (such as the Wall Street Journal) as few other historical works have been...
...Why is Taylor's Hegel of particular moment...
...He is a master of...
...E. HAROLD SMITH, a priest Of the Archdiocese of New York, is a long-time contributor.riest Of the Archdiocese of New York, is a long-time contributor...
...Since we so badly need such contact between what we may call the two cultures, this is all to the good...
...I rifet to Gharies Taylor's awesome study, Begel, published by Cambridge University Press at the awesome price of $36...
...and The Sound and the Fury, especially as this relationship concerns the interlocking problems of spatial and temporal doubling, incest, narcissism, the Oedipus complex, the castration complex, repetition, sameness and difference, recollection, repression, revenge, substitution, reversal, sacrifice, and mediation...
...The fundamental approach to modern philosophy depends considerably upon biographical materials, which are more for this age than for ancient and medieval philosophy...
...Twenty poems-and on the page facing each poem, a woodcut made from the poet's original blocks, printed on Mochizuki paper with a Washington hand press...
...1*0 be alive now is to bev a survivor of these legations, for they .dominate our moral imagination...
...fortunately we have a rule that we should not compare the saints...
...Still, The Survivor is a remarkable testament, an eloquent demonstration of man's survival in the very worst of times...
...Working from the belief that Faulkner, Freud, and Nietzsche were related to each other as writers whose works can be treated as literary texts, Irwin tries to show how the above psychological categories are simultaneously present to one another in these two novels so as to form a holistic structure...
...What kinds of institutions and Mal arrangements will ctaracturfee ifc ttn-alienated mode of life...
...The image of humanity he presents is minimal and is explained more through E. O. Wilson's...
...indeed they are central-and thus far inadequately addressed-for all politkal theorists and activists committed to social reconstruction and renewal Briefly, Taylor's Hegel forces proponents of social change to confront fundamental questions: What will a transformed polity look like...
Vol. 103 • May 1976 • No. 11
