528
PARTISAN REVIEW
The last essay, subtle and learned as it is, forces the text into an
allegorical model. The story becomes the "trap of an aesthetic educa–
tion , which inevitably confuses dismemberment of language by the
power of the letter with the gracefulness of a dance ." I am also
disconcerted by de Man's flight of fancy with no basis in the text,
when he speaks of the "white, colorless world of statues suddenly
reddened by a flow of blood ." He has become extremely finespun in
his argumentation and given to dogmatic assertions, which strongly
condemn other people's misreadings, though in the theories of the
deconstructionists, there cannot be any standard of correct interpre–
tations.
Paul Boves
Intellectuals in Power
(Columbia University Press,
1986) is a strange , ambiguous book which argues that a "new criticism
can wrest the knowledge-producing apparatus away from the inter–
ests it now serves." Edward Said and Michel Foucault are Boves
heroes.
I.
A. Richards and Erich Auerbach are presented as expo–
nents of an heroic humanism which fights a rearguard battle, trying
to recenter authority in an elite of "mandarin" professors . Oddly
enough, Bove admires both Richards and Auerbach greatly, distort–
ing, however, their points of view grotesquely. He speaks of Rich–
ard's "monumental and antiquarian historicism," though everybody
should remember that Richards , when coming to Cambridge to
siudy history, said , "I didn't think history ought to have happened ."
Richards is the most antihistorical critic one can imagine. Auerbach
is distorted by making him an intellectual of great power, a sublime,
heroic figure who has become a master of American criticism, though ,
as I can testify from personal acquaintance, Auerbach was a most
modest academic specialist, completely absorbed in his medieval
studies, with no political pretensions or even views. Naturally, as a
refugee from the Nazis he shared in general antifascism and the pes–
simism about the fate of Western civilization, which was common in
Germany . After all,
Mimesis
was written during the darkest years of
the war. There is no evidence that Auerbach wanted to recenter
authority in intellectuals or that he had any important impact on
American criticism. Where is a book which would show the influence
of
Mimesis ,
except possibly Thomas M. Greene's
Descentfrom Heaven?
The main argument asks us critical intellectuals to work against an
"essentially imperial and oppressive hegemony" and to overcome the
"unavoidable complicity of historical humanism in fascism and the
other Western barbarisms of the twentieth century."
It seems a strange situation that puts American intellectuals into
