PREFABRICATED CRITICISM
Hyman praises Burke, however, for the same reasons he praised
Blackmur: "Our faith here must lie in Burke's genuine humility, the
ironic humor that keeps him backing away from his own machinery."
Such statements explain the real grounds for many of the personal
attacks in
The Armed Vision,
and they become fully evident in the
brief concluding section in which Hyman constructs, hypothetically, "an
ideal modern literary critic out of plastic and light metals." Hyman
would syncretize the virtues of all the critics he discusses, but would husk
away Eliot's "religious and political bias," "Winters' obsessive morality,"
"Miss Bodkin's mystic and religious emphasis," which he speaks of as a
crotchet, and so on. This is not so much because he disagrees with these
particular ideas. He uses the same tone in referring to Wilson's "ob–
sessive theme of Stalin," and in declaring that Marxism, to be useful
in criticism, must be
neutral
in character. Hyman is fascinated by the
idea of the elaboration of a detached, impersonal, self-sufficient meth–
odology for the analysis of literature and for the multiplication of mean–
ings, a methodology that can become more and more collaborative and
institutionalized. What he is disturbed by-and this explains the intensely
personal nature of many of his attacks in the book-is the idea of criti–
cism as a man judging a work, a man fully human, fully implicated in
life, with purposes and beliefs, and making a total response to the book
he is reading. For this no categories suffice.
Robert
~orham
Davis
REGARDS TO THE ACTUAL WORLD ·
REFLECTIONS ON THE WORLD TODAY. By Paul Valery. Translated
by Fran cis Scarfs. Pantheon. $3.50.
Paul Valery's strongest habit of mind was an exact and
exacting meditation on itself, or through itself upon the actual world.
It was a basic bias of his mind, and part of his charm, to affect never
to write for the public except by request, for some occasion. He was
an
occasional
writer, but a mind as strongly thematic as his could hardly
have made a fragmentary writer. He liked to take some event, in all
its local circumstances, and weave around it his kind of logical reverie
until the event stood fixed for us in its universal relations and validity.
For he believed, and said repeatedly, that all the essential factors of
European civilization, all recognizable universal values are the products
of local circumstances. And he saw it as the special mission of French
831
