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assault on wrongheaded earlier commentaries. Literary interpretations
or judgments drastically contrary to his own are simply omitted. Hart–
man's Midrashic hermeneutics result in an appealingly generous and
noncombative method of commentary. Interpretations and quotations
multiply without forcing choices or the expectation of c1osurc; no intcr–
pretive victory is at stake.
This reconciliatory tone is important on occasions such as the
1993
celebration in Weimar for the reunification of the Eastern and Western
German Shakespeare societies (which split in
1962).
Historical and
political conflicts more intense than rival literary interpretations threat–
ened this festive occasion, including what Hartman names as the "Ban–
quo's ghost" of Buchenwald nearby. But the rich tradition of
Shakespeare commentary helps Hartman to exorcise menacing ghosts.
In "Shakespeare and the Ethical Question," translated from his German
lecture in Weimar, commentators as various as Goethe, Keats, Trilling,
Jan Kott, Hazlitt, Augustine, Harold Bloom, Voltaire, Coleridge, and
even Matthew Arnold (not ordinarily included in Hartman's Midrash)
all coexist more or less at peace as he revisits the age-old question of
whether or not there exists an identifiable ethical position in Shake–
speare's drama. Many paragraphs end in questions, including one near
the end which begins: "[n conclusion.... " As the introduction to
Midrash and Literature
remarks: "In this spacious scene of writing, the
interpreter's associative knowledge is invested with remarkably broad
powers, including even the hermeneutical privilege of allowing ques–
tions to stand as part of answers."
In other essays, Hartman's associative knowledge often leads to far–
fetched allusion and quotation. For instance, in a
1987
essay,
"Wordsworth's Touching Compulsion," he interprets the recurrence in
Wordsworth's poetry of "bare markers," like a single tree or field, as
"part of an earth-writing, an undecyphered geography or geometry." He
then moves on to Homer, or rather to Mircea Eliade: "One may call these
markers boundary images or omphaloi (navel-points of the cosmos), a
term Mircea Eliade adapts from Homer, and they link poetic to geomet–
ric absoluteness." The associative train (indebted as much to Freud as to
Midrash) picks up
omphaloi
from Eliade and moves punningly on from
"Geometry" to "Geomatry," to circle back to a point about Wordsworth
that (minus the citations) is really rather familiar-namely that his
imagery evokes a "mother-in-nature, ... the guardian of something invul–
nerable, which is either the mother-child relation itself or an ideal of psy–
chic development." As the essay proceeds, the status of the point in
Wordsworth criticism really doesn't matter, because Hartman's point
