Perspectives on world literature.
Gross, David S.
Geoffrey H. Hartman. The Fateful Question of Culture. New York.
Columbia University Press. 1997 (released 1998). xi + 250 pages. $22.50.
ISBN 0-231-08490-0.
"The core of these reflections," as Geoffrey Hartman puts
it himself, was presented as the 1992 Wellek Lectures at the University
of California, Irvine. (That date may help explain the "1997"
on the title page of a book which appeared in 1998.) The other eleven
authors and titles in the Wellek Lectures series of publications are
remarkably important and influential: Derrida, Said, Jameson, Cixous,
Lyotard-and those I am omitting are of similar stature and significance.
Of three books by Geoffrey Hartman I have reviewed in these pages, The
Fateful Question of Culture is the best. Hartman's intelligence,
erudition, and courage, along with the vital, crucial nature of the
things he talks about, make this a book of real value and importance. It
speaks to issues that matter to us all, not just to intellectuals.
To stand for a lot of what's enjoyable and good in this book,
I would cite two things that might seem merely matters of style or
method, though actually they lead well beyond formal issues:
breathtaking erudition alongside words and turns of phrase which are
"way late 90s." Hartman's tour de force of
comparative-literature-based erudition is amazing. Nietzsche, Freud,
Plato, Schiller, Wordsworth, and others play major parts, with important
lesser roles assigned to writers like Derrida, Marx, Blake, Arnold,
Geertz, Adorno, Rilke, Wallace Stevens, and Raymond Williams. But at one
moment Hartman is arguing with Plato- "Plato's attempt to
distinguish oral from written by attributing a sincerity he names truth
to the oral mode cannot be sustained"-while a few pages earlier he
calls intellectuals "deracinated airheads" (Hartman's
nice rendering of Mannheim's Luftmenschen). He proposes to
distinguish "culture" from other "sexy words"; he
suggests "the Big Bird theory" as a name for the culture of
empire under the blazon of the Eagle of Liberty.
The most questionable instance of this use of slang in serious
discourse would have to be Hartman's "definitive wake-up
call" to refer to the Holocaust. But the point he's making is
that we necessarily impose such patterns on history, in this case seeing
things in terms of catastrophes or salvation events, and that a safer,
calmer historical perspective, where all is "normalized" and
reduced to data, requires a facile complacency. Both the erudition and
the fooling around with contemporary words are always part of an attempt
to engage what have to be the most important issues there are. Three
times in the book Hartman uses the last page of Freud's
Civilization and Its Discontents to discuss the crucial role of culture
in the battle to see whether loving kindness and compassion will win out
over hate and our tendencies toward destruction.
The core scholarship here is literary, theoretical, and
philosophical. But everywhere such sites are put in the service of the
political, of what it is like to live on earth, what people hope for,
what is done to people so that they cannot be happy or even healthy.
Hartman's main antagonists in this book are the generally unnamed
extremists of the Right, especially those who draw on politics and
religion to foster an exclusionist notion of "a culture" or a
nation which deserves to dominate. For Hartman the question of culture
is "fateful" for several reasons. He posits his most central
concern this way: "Let me state my argument at this point.
'Culture' at present-I mean the ring and function of the word,
its emotional and conceptual resonance-even when it is abusively
applied, keeps hope of embodiment alive." According to Hartman, we
are "haunted" by our sense that life is elsewhere, that this
can't be it. Culture keeps alive "the hope for some unity of
being-which I call embodiment." Such yearnings are all too often
twisted into the parochial trappings of a certain kind of nationalism, a
soil-based feeling for country and place. That they led to the Holocaust
is an important emphasis of the book. But in Wordsworth and British
Romanticism Hartman sees an attitude toward life, nature, the land, and
its ordinary people which does not bring with it the sick allegiances
and unspeakable practices of Nazism.
I would quarrel with Hartman's criticism of Romanticism for
unrealistically idealizing rural life and rural speech, and for his
assumption that such a populist imaginaire has to be based on an
imagined better, simpler past. Such pastoralism is of course common, but
thinkers like Karl Marx and William Morris have presented a view of
past, present, and future based not on memories but on hopes. In The
Fateful Question of Culture Geoffrey Hartman has produced a book which
reopens questions and possibilities that are unequaled in their
importance for human life on the planet.
David S. Gross
University of Oklahoma
