314
JOE DAVID BELLAMY
By seeing Derrida's recent work as the "final moment of Structural–
ism," however, Jameson closes off his argument a bit hastily. And in his
final pages, he presents an argument from historical design which seems
to me the only cheap maneuver in the book. After suggesting that
Structuralism remains a prisoner of the Kantian dilemma of the unknow–
ability of the
Ding an sich,
J ameson hopefully conjectures that time will
take care of the dilemma:
At the conclusion of our examination, such an unconscious recapit–
ulation of the philosophical tradition does not seem altogether
without its advantages. For we know, in a sense, the sequel to the
story, and are well aware how a kind of historicizing and dialectical
thought was able to convert the static Kantian description of the
mental categories into historical moments in an unfolding logic or
process.
Such a solution to the dilemma of Structuralism appears to solve that
dilemma only by hypostatizing history as a new unknowable
Ding an
sich.
But even though this argument is rather lame, it interferes only
briefly with my conviction that Mr. Jameson is eminently capable of
producing a very subtle and thorough scheme of the relationships be–
tween literature and history. One finishes
The Prison-House of Language
with great expectations for his next book.
Frances C. Ferguson
FIRSTS
HAWK MOON. By Sam Shepard. Black Sparrow. Limited edition
$15.00; paper $4.00.
THE ENTOMBED MAN OF THULE. By Gordon Weaver. Louisiana
State University Press. $6.95.
Best known for his script work on Antonioni's
Zabn'skie
Point,
Sam Shepard has written a curious and disturbing first book in
Hawk Moon: A Book of Short Ston'es, Poems and Monologues
--
full
of perverse, often gratuitous bloodlust, moodiness, retribution fantasies,
Indians, run-on sentences, pop mysticism, and intensely imagined frag–
ments.
