BOOKS
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De Man does not appear to wish to participate in the traditional critic's
enterprise of mediating between great classics, on the one side, and
their modern readers, on the other. He does not wish to contribute to
the morai or aesthetic uplifting of the ordinary modern reader by
revealing the " timeless" value of the literary works of the past and
present. His criticism serves as an instrument of a more specifically
philosophical purpose. Or rather, metaphilosophical, even antiphilo–
sophical purpose. For the message of de Man's work is that the
millenial hope of Western man to grasp reality clearly, to represent it
unambiguously in language, and to discern its nature by the exercise of
a sovereign reason, the hope which Nietzsche discerned as the worm in
the apple of Socratic optimism, this hope, de Man tells us, is as
"illusory" as that religion which Freud dismissed in his later works as
a product of a state of "blissful hallucinatory confusion."
Unlike Freud, however, who sought to replace religion with the
relatively more benign insights of psychoanalysis, de Man consigns
both philosophy and literature to the status of products of a "blind–
ness " which language itself induces. His celebration of this "blind–
ness " appears to be offered as an antidote to that multitude of "in–
sights" which Western humanism since the Renaissance has falsely
provided as its preferred pedagogical currency to its uncritical clientele.
In
de Man's work, the chickens of humanism have come home to roost,
and their homecoming is attested in the glorification of rhetoric as
both the hidden content of all previous philosophy and the instrument
of that philosophy's current "deconstruction."
HAYDEN WHITE
THREE POETS
BLUE WINE AND OTHER POEMS. By John Hollander.
Johns Hopkins
University Press. $8.95.
THE STRENGTH OF FIELDS. By James Dickey.
Doubleday. $6.
AN EXPLANATION OF AMERICA. By Robert Pinsky.
Princeton Uni–
versity Press. $7.50.
We demand a lot from our poets: they must grow and
develop, hear new voices, yet be true to themselves, find their singular
