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EDWARD W. SAID
just as the revealed God, or Totality, is a hope for the future on whom
the Christian can only wager. The final tragedy for Pascal, and for Ra–
cine in
Phedre,
Goldmann argues, is that their Jansenism effectively cuts
them off from the future, for Port-Royal is a celibate community that
denies the future by standing apart from historical process. Goldmann
thus can make the following points: the
pensee's
strange tone and
its
appearance as a fragment makes it an isolated unit in a hidden or im–
plicit whole, one a tom of "a solitary dialogue"; the Racinian tragedy is
the drama of an individual set against society; furthermore, the rep–
resentation of that conflict is itself circumscribed by the rigidly enforced
unities.
Let me return now to Goldmann's ideas about coherence, ideas
which seem to me useful and plausible--and not only because they are
used here to give an authoritative reading of Pascal and Racine. Gold–
mann presumes that most individuals have an awareness of the "whole
world," of a total reality of which they are a part, but that they cannot
be said to h ave a full intellectual grasp of the world itself because it is
simply too big. What they do, then, is to create a working notion of the
world-out-there, a "world vision," in which they locate themselves (Gold–
mann is here following J ean Piaget ). Not only are individuals limited by
the finite human mind, but also by the concrete circumstances of their
national, economic and political existence. Thus a "world vision" devel–
ops out of the interaction of the human mind with its surroundings and,
of course, with other minds in similar circumstances. A "world vision"
permits people to assume that their activity in the future will be carried
out within a framework common to them and to others like them; in
short, they wager on the existence of a more than personal reality that
includes them but to which they also contribute. The importance of
these notions to a literary critic is considerable. It permits him to speak,
as Goldmann does, of the historical meaning of a writer's life, of the
inner coherence of his work and of the integrity of his vision. Gold–
mann does this by explaining how a writer's life and work are a dynamic
polity-if he is a great writer: Pascal's tragic vision, for example, is sup–
ported by his life and the development of his work.
For Goldmann the tragic vision precedes the dialectical vision and
is a static, ·sterile paradigm of it, yet he is quite hazy about the real
historical connection between the two, and he offers no suggestion as to
how Pascal and Marx link up. Perhaps this is one reason why
The Hid–
den God's
major fault is its failure to state finally whether we are to
take the tragic vision as an atemporal mode that simply recurs in time
or as a particular historical development and occurrence. In Gold–
mann's reading the stasis of the tragic vision is the result of a feeling
