448
EDWARD W. SAID
The kind of sociological criticism Goldmann writes, however, concerns
itself only with works of high esthetic value. He presumes, rightly I
think, that "world visions" are best expressed by men with the furthest
verbal, emotional and intellectual reach, and these men are always great
writers: they are as much a cause of as they are caused by
Weltanschau–
ungen.
The special value of Goldmann's work, once we become inured to
the occasional propagandistic outbursts in his writing (on page 195, for
example, Stalin is slipped in along side of Hegel and Engels as a dialec–
tical thinker) is that it is proposed to us as a rigorous and continuing
intellectual effort, that it is itself a model of the coherence it describes,
that it dramatizes and makes explicit an "interpretive circle." For an
"interpretive circle" is formed when man faces and is faced by, interprets
and is interpreted by, his works, and if Goldmann objects to the pheno–
menologists' stubborn positing of the lonely ego, he is at least with them
in asserting the primacy of perception and the value of historical con–
sciousness.
Edward W. Said
AMERICA, AMERICA
BEEN DOWN SO LONG IT LOOKS LIKE UP TO ME. By Richard Farina.
Random House. $5.95.
THE CRYING OF LOT 49. By Thomas Pynchon. lippincott. $3.95.
OMENSETTER'S LUCK. By William H. Gass. New American Library.
$5.95.
THE LAST GENTLEMAN. By Walker Percy. Farrar, Straus
3<
Giroux. $5.95.
Although the scene shifts once to Cuba on the eve of revolu–
tion, most of Richard Fariiia's picaresque first novel is set in a city
which, with intimations of Cambridge, resembles Ithaca, New York (it
is called Athene). Like almost any college scene, Athene affords its in–
habitants escape routes ranging from fraternities to acid, and while it
depends upon its nonmatriculating hangers-on to provide it with a neces-
