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This level of comment tends to make his context itself thematic, so
that a structural term like process seems, when explicated, to exhaust the
problem of structure. Miller's elaborating poem, or poem as substantial
echo, is not really so different from Yeats's beggars, Eliot's marriages or
the dead
in
Thomas. We are back, I think, with philosophy as context,
and poetry as mimesis. For all Miller's interest in "enactment" and the
"dynamic visual," we have in the end the image of a project rather than
the project itself. And the whole Aristotelian world we struggled so hard
to escape is, despite God's sacrifice, smuggled in again. What we have
here is not poetry but philosophy. Instead of concrete perceptions (as we
have, for example, with his phenomenologist master, Jean-Pierre Richard)
we have a frenetic floundering in evidence. And instead of a critique of
a new space in modern poetry, we have a space in which that poetry
might take place.
Aaron Rosen
ORIGINS OF FASCISM
THREE FACES OF FASCISM.
By
Ernst Nolte. Holt. $7.95.
In Hannah Arendt's
Origins of Totalitarianism
and in a spate
of other books, we have been asked to confront the terrible truth that, as
a consequence of the fascist era, " the subterranean stream of Western
history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our
tradition." Professor Nolte's book, which represents a marked departure
from the attitude found in the historiography of the past twenty years,
is a sign that we are coming near to the time when an appraisal of the
disaster will be possible.
Although Nolte acknowledges that the theory and practice of fascism
in France, Italy and Germany was rooted in certain tendencies of West–
ern history since the French R evolution, he does not believe that its
existence necessarily brings into question the values and possibilities of
our culture. He discusses fascism on three levels: in terms of its historical
origins and internal political doctrine, as an anti-Marxist nationalist
movement which employed the methods of mass appeal, first developed
by
Marxism, to destroy Marxism; in regard to its external policy, as the
"life-and-death struggle of the sovereign, martial, inwardly antagonistic
