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PARTISAN REVIEW
not sure why this should be so .
It
is not true of any other period in history .
What Steiner and Adorno and Kafka have had to say surely has something
to do with it. And the pull toward the grotesque, which Langer celebrates,
but which in fact is a way of not seeing and only pretending to feel, is pretty
clearly irresistible. I remember how shocked I was to learn (from Raul
Hilberg's
The Destruction of the European Jews)
that the Nazis most
probably did
not
manufacture soap from human fat. (I have always thought
that the rendering of humans for soap and the flaying of them for lamp–
shades revealed perfectly the barbarians' contempt for, and parody of,
civilization-with its love of cleanliness and quest for light.) Those brown
bars of soap, some of which are actually in museums, have been brought
into existence by a universally felt need for horror , to which the writers
under examination here, no less than the rest of us, have responded . More
time, it seems, will have to pass before we are free enough to imagine the
facts. Meanwhile, we do have Des Pres, and in bold type throughout Des
Pres's book, as well as in hundreds of books of their own, the plain speech of
the witnesses.
LESLIE EPSTEIN
OUR CONTEMPORARY
THE ILLUMINATED BLAKE. Annotated by David V. Erdman. Doubleday.
$25 .00 ($7 .95 in paper).
WILLIAM BLAKE: ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF SIR GEOFFREY KEYNES.
Eds. Morton D. Paley and Michael Phillips. Oxford. $33.75.
BLAKE'S SUBLIME ALLEGORY. Eds. Stuart Curran and Joseph Witt·
reich , Jr. Wisconsin. $17 .50.
BLAKE'S NIGHT. By David Wagenknecht. Harvard. $12 .00.
If the elevation of Donne into the rank of a conspicuously major
poet was one of the more notable consequences of the critical revolution
which began in earnest in the 1920s, the enormous growth in William
Blake's reputation over the past thirty years has surely been accompanied
