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PARTISAN REVIEW
recent essay,
Der Waldgang
(The Forest Pathway), whose title and
emotional tone is obviously influenced by Heidegger's postwar col–
lection of essays,
Holzwege
(the lonely paths made by the woodcutters
in the trackless forest). In this latter book, Heidegger demolishes the
whole of Western philosophy as one gigantic error, caused by the con–
fusion of
Sein
(Being) with one or another form of
Seiende
(that–
which-is); and he announces, in suitably apocalyptic tones, that the
task of the modern philosopher can only be to pursue his solitary journey
along the
Holzwege
and wait for a new revelation of
Sein.
It is regrettable that Mr. Stern should have allowed his under–
standable antipathy toward Junger to degenerate, at times, into apoplec–
tic incoherence. Even more regrettable is that he devotes most of his
limited space to an analysis of Junger's style, which is certainly the
least illuminating approach for a non-German reader. Junger, as Mr.
Stern remarks, is now "second only to Martin Heidegger in his in–
fluence upon a supremely impressionable younger generation" in Ger–
many, and a discussion of his themes and their ideological implications
would have been far more interesting and valuable.
Joseph Frank
SENECA IN THE MEAT-HOUSE
BROTHER TO DRAGONS.
By
Robert Penn Warren. Random House. $3 .50.
To read
Brother to Dragons
is to experience the uneasy sense
of familiarity we have sometimes in a repeated dream, the impression
that we have moved through the same climate before in other utterly
forgotten nights. The fable is new: the brutal murder of a Negro by
two brothers for a trivial reason and their agreement to shoot each
other over their mother's grave; and the reaction to that event of the
murderer's uncle, Thomas Jefferson. The event is historical, the reaction
imagined; the crime in time, the reflection upon it in a limbo of memory
where the participants in the action and the poet can converse together.
It is the rhetoric which seems familiar, the pitch of terror, the resonance
of the words that try to encompass it.
To one who has followed Warren from nightmare to nightmare,
his new poem is a reminder that there is only a single bad dream from
which he has always striven to awake to art, a suggestion that perhaps
for all of us there is a single archetypal experience of terror, unsayable
