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less concerned with the question, only less explicit. And so the
intersection of Lawrence with Joyce or anybody else of his time and
place goes unexamined, as does the question of what happens to the
apprehension of identity when it is not conceptualized but integrated
into a substantial work.
Whatever the intricacies of Yeats 's private mythology, and it is,
God knows, intricate and private, as Langbaum 's discussion , roughly a
third of the book, demonstrates, a considerable clarity emerges, not all
of which is due to Langbaum 's exegetical skill.
If
one is in quest of the
idea of identity, however, no such clarity emerges from-one chooses
almost at random- Faulkner, Nabokov, Genet, Butor, Grass, and Boll,
even though all of them scarcely wrote a page which can not be said to
be "about" identity.
In
short, when the nature of the self is isolated and
contemplated by a writer, it takes on a certain form, a certain restricted
set of anxieties and problematics. I t is certain poin ts in the history of
that contemplated idea, realized in literary works , that Langbaum
treats, leaving untreated, for good or ill , that imp licit sense of identity
that every writer of consequence since Wordsworth ha integrated. And
so it is that a reader of Yeats, hoping to understand him within a
historical continuity, will understand him better for the fine intelli–
gence of Langbaum . But a reader of Hawkes or Bellow, hoping to find
a wedge into
their
mysteries of identity, will find that his inquiry and
Langbaum's are not the same.
PHILIP STEVICK
