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PARTISAN REVIEW
Secular Midrash
A CRITIC'S JOURNEY: LITERARY REFLECTIONS,
1958-1998.
By Geoffrey
Hartman. Yale University Press.
$35.00.
MANY OF THE ESSAYS COLLECTED in Hartman's anthology take us back
twenty years, when it still seemed daring to assert the right of criticism to
be as perplexing as the primary texts of literature. Hartman reprints ver–
sions of his well-known manifestos to liberate the critic, such as "Under–
standing Criticism," from
Criticism in the Wilderness
([980):
"The
spectacle of the critic's mind disoriented, bewildered, caught in some 'wild
surmise' about the text and struggling to adjust-is not that one of the
interests critical writing has for us?" This characteristically benign rhetor–
ical question belongs to Hartman's quite aggressive promotion of
"hermeneutic perplexity" to supplant what he still in the
I
990S
derides as
the "speak-easy" quality, the "teetotaling style" of the Anglo-American
tradition. ow that the perplexing discourse of Continental hermeneutics
has become so easy to speak, at least within literary academe, different
kinds of perplexity about Hartman's own writing move to the fore.
The first "hermeneutic perplexity" in
A Critic's Journey
comes from
the seductive bonhomie of the book's title, itself strangely at odds with the
antibiographical, antinarrative thrust of the criticism Hartman earlier
advocated. The title word "Journey," in an anthology of this sort, carries
the promise of a travel account, whose chronological itinerary will be nar–
rated by a guiding voice. Many of Hartman's co lleagues have produced
such narratives: Alvin Kernan, Frank Kermode, Denis Donoghue, Robert
Scholes, and William Pritchard come to mind. Hartman, however, is reti–
cent about his prominent role in the professional traumas featured in
recent academic memoirs. Though briefly glancing at the past twenty-five
years of turbulence in the humanities, Hartman's abbrev iated account and
joking metaphors tend to demote it all to a tempest in a teapot.
Hartman is equa ll y reticent about his earlier life. The prefatory
"Polemica l Memoir" only briefly o utlin es the distinctive itinerary that
brought him as a German Jewish child emigre from Nazi Germany to
Yale Eng li sh and Comparative Literature, by way of seven years in Eng–
land, and then postwar undergraduate study at Queens Co ll ege in New
York. Only a few laconic sentences report hi s total separation from fam–
ily between age nine and sixteen. Another succinct paragraph takes him
through hi s postwar reunion with hi s mother in America, his under–
graduate education, and on into what takes on the status of a new
