The Fate of Reading is a new selection of Geoffrey Hartman's writings, from work published during the past five years. Many essays resume the themes of an earlier selection, Beyond Formalism …, extending their implications or exacerbating them as the mood of Hartman's mind requires. A reader who does not already know Professor Hartman's work should repair that deficiency before tackling the new book. Otherwise, The Fate of Reading would appear a random miscellany of fugitive pieces caught and held for trail merely because Professor Hartman had an interest in their capture. In fact, the book is most compelling as evidence of the range and quality of Professor Hartman's mind and of the point it has reached in a causerie set astir in his first book, The Unmediated Vision….

Two verses from Deuteronomy made an epigraph for The Unmediated Vision. Moses says to the people of Israel: "The Lord talked with you face to face in the mount out of the midst of the fire", and then, "I stood between the Lord and you at that time, to shew you the word of the Lord; for ye were afraid by reason of the fire, and went not up into the mount." In the first, the people have an unmediated vision of the Lord; in the second, Moses places himself as mediator, critic, and linguist between the people and their Lord. Three verses later the Lord forbids the people to make graven images "or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above or that is in the earth beneath or that is in the waters beneath the earth". It is my impression that Professor Hartman has been pondering these verses for their bearing upon the nature of poetry: his books are meditations upon visions mediated and unmediated, graven images, the status of presentation and representation, likeness and language.

The book of evidence consists of The Unmediated Vision, the analysis of action and history in Malraux …, the brooding upon imagination and nature in Wordsworth's Poetry 1787–1814 …, considerations of the sinister aspect of mediation as trespass and transgression, most clearly produced in "The Voice of the Shuttle" and an essay on Blanchot in Beyond Formalism, and now the anxious pages on "the living, ancestor-haunted consciousness" in The Fate of Reading. The argument of these books does not make an impeccable logic. There are signs of internal contradiction, and especially of a moment which I think of Professor Hartman as having reached in 1969 when he found himself losing faith in every doctrine which declares that an unmediated vision is possible. In 1967 Paul de Man asserted that sign and meaning can never coincide, and that literature is defined by this tragic knowledge: "it is the only form of language free from the fallacy of unmediated expression". I cannot see how Professor Hartman could have read that assertion without a shudder, unless he rushed back to Deuteronomy and renewed his faith in Moses as a sounder critic than de Man.

Professor Hartman's early books assume that poets seek and sometimes achieve an unmediated expression. Written in the spirit of literary idealism, these books declare the possibility of "a constitutive self" capable of breaking through "social veils and similar determinants". To Professor Hartman, an unmediated vision is a vision of life free from the restraint of a canonical text: the modern poet "passes through experience by means of the unmediated vision; Nature, the body, and human consciousness—that is the only text". He speaks again of "a vision unconditioned by the particularity of experience", and in the study of Wordsworth he refers to the poet's urge "to cast out nature and to achieve an unmediated contact with the principle of things"….

An unmediated expression is a desire congenial to poetic genius, and in Beyond Formalism Professor Hartman opposes genius to Genius, "the personal 'ingenium' in its unmediated, forgetful vigour" to the starry guide "whose influence accompanies us from birth but is revealed mainly at crucial historical or self-conscious junctures". In another version the unmediated vision is given as the authority of a poet's voice, not a Mallarméan vibration but the spirit's audible presence to itself. Every version is animated not only by Deuteronomy but by that passage in the Confessions in which St Augustine, praying to his God, says that "what I know about myself I only know because your light shines upon me, and what I do not know about myself I shall continue not to know until I see you face to face and my dusk is noonday". Professor Hartman's books are therefore odes to the poetical character construed as an embodiment of the sublime.

The unmediated vision, Professor Hartman's supreme fiction, is menaced or compromised by the loss of Eden—the substitution of an arbitrary for a natural language, and the rift between consciousness and experience. But he maintains as a perennial desire or a mythology of self what de Man and other critics have set aside as a fallacy, the unmediated character of the poet's gibberish, the magician's abracadabra. He is stubborn in associating art with freedom, seeing art as an unmediated virtue thriving in the throes of mediation. In the study of Malraux he returns to Malraux's reflection upon Goya, a painter who represents the unusual, the terrible, the inhuman, not by depicting an actual or imaginary spectacle but "by inventing a script capable of representing these things without being forced to submit to their elements". If art can do that, surely the idiom of genius, spirit and voice is justified.

I cannot find in The Fate of Reading conclusive evidence that Professor Hartman has either given up or renewed his faith in the unmediated power of imagination. He is impressed by de Man's assertion, but he has not fulfilled its logic. Meanwhile he reveals the poet living in the indeterminate middle ground which is human life, a space marked if not filled by "boughten mercies and mediations". If the middle ground cannot be held, it collapses into "a direct, unmediated confrontation of the individual and his God". While the going is good, the world mediates between man and God: the paradigm for this happiness is another passage in the Confessions where the earth, interrogated, says "I am not God, but God is He who made me". Another version is Wordsworth's faith, reached in The Prelude, that Nature suffices the energies of consciousness, a faith which Professor Hartman in The Fate of Reading presents as the consummation of Wordsworth's "spousal verse", a vision of Nature as "recreated rather than consumed by the demands of consciousness". Art is a process by which feeling, instead of consuming itself in use, is recycled in an endless restoration. Professor Hartman does not haggle over the nature of Nature, whether it is substance or sign, appearances or the codes we impose upon them. In the study of Malraux he votes for styles, forms, and models rather than "the seductive and hypnotic realm of appearance", and speaks of the artist accepting a system of received signs until he finds his own. But he does not fret, he continues to believe in the transforming power of imagination. With such a faith, he can see with equanimity the mediating role of nature and the proliferation of its defects: all will be well.

Professor Hartman quotes with pleasure a passage from the Histoire de France in which Michelet says that Rabelais collected wisdom from the old, popular idioms, from sayings, proverbs, school farces in the mouths of fools and clowns, "but mediated by follies of this kind the genius of the age and its prophetic power are revealed in their majesty". In this quoting mood Professor Hartman is ready to accept the fact of mediacy, if only as a curse; it is "the inveterate mediacy of the word", the darkness of mediations in which Coleridge's mariner finds himself. He then takes the risk of mediation by translating it into the idiom of trespass, transgression, estrangement and interpolation. But he never takes pleasure in the sheer resourcefulness of language. At one point he refers to Stevens's "lingua franca et jocundissima", but the only passage I can recall which responds to the jocund spirit in language is a few pages in Beyond Formalism where he writes of puns as interventions—two meanings jostling for the space of one and making a room wide enough to accommodate both. Otherwise he writes of language as if it were a desperate expedient and never a joy….

Twice in The Fate of Reading he quotes the passage in The Philosophy of History where Hegel describes the Greek character "transforming the merely Natural into an expression of its own being". The Greek spirit "knows itself free in its productions", and respects and venerates them…. (p. 934)

I am surprised, therefore, that [Professor Hartman] does not resort to Hegel rather than keep up the strain of mediating between situations mediated and unmediated. In the preface to The Phenomenology of Mind Hegel, speaking of the magical power of mind which converts the negative into being, says that it "cancels abstract immediacy, i e immediacy which merely is, and, by so doing, becomes the true substance, becomes being or immediacy that does not have mediation outside it, but is this mediation itself". Again, in the Logic, Hegel says that nothing is absolutely immediate in the sense that it is in no way mediated; and nothing is mediated in the absolute sense that it is in no way immediate…. I am not saying that Hegel ends the matter, but that Professor Hartman should have pressed the argument of immediacy and mediation a good deal harder before relying upon its service in five books. The trouble with the distinction between visions mediated and unmediated is that if it is confused it spreads confusion further into its critical consequences, making distinctions without real difference.

When Professor Hartman writes brilliantly, as he often does when the occasion is a poem by Wordsworth, Valéry, Keats, Smart, Goethe, Milton, or Marvell, his mind surges beyond concepts and theories into the poetry itself. Nearly everything he writes in this mood could be sustained, if it needed any support beyond its own justice and coherence, by one sentence from Hegel, namely, "Greek freedom of thought is excited by an alien existence, but it is free because it transforms and virtually reproduces the stimulus by its own operations". This is enough to be going on with, and to allow Professor Hartman to appeal to art as "a reservoir of resonances". Clearly, his heart is in the right mood in The Fate of Reading. He wants poetry to tell the time of history without sinking into historical determinism, he insists on "the sense of an informing spirit" in art, the source of its authority; and he has many important things to say about myth, depth psychology, the poet's identity, the psychology of art. But I am not convinced that he has found for his perceptions the appropriate "lingua franca et jocundissima" which he associates with "vernacular perception".

Professor Hartman's theory of art is basically simple: it is Art as Philomela. Tereus having raped Philomela cut out her tongue to prevent discovery, but she wove a tell-tale account of the crime into a tapestry, and there is magic in the web of it. What Professor Hartman calls "the thaumaturgic Word" could not be silenced; the truth must emerge, consciousness struggles to appear as form and not as consciousness. So we come to the truth-telling power of fiction. Professor Hartman quotes in summary a story by S. Y. Agnon which endorses the magic of Philomela's tapestry…. (pp. 934-35)

It is a beautiful, happy ending, and I am sure Professor Hartman believes in it, at least on the Sabbath. What he believes on other days is not clear. Is language great because it tells the truth? Or a cheat because it cannot do what it offers to do? Are words, as Feste claims, "very rascals", Cretan liars? In The Fate of Reading Professor Hartman never gives himself space or time to answer these questions, though they break into his pages when given half a chance; naturally, since his essays are meditations upon Keats, Wordsworth, Goethe, I. A. Richards, Harold Bloom, Valéry, and the mystery story.

There is a particular impediment in The Fate of Reading and that is Professor Hartman's style, or rather its present phase. He can write as lucidly as any critic, and more powerfully than most, but his current mood is aggressive. "I admit to a variable style", he says, "which consists mainly of a playful dissolving of terms and abstractions, but one that seeks to bring out their creative force as unrecognized 'poetic dictions'." He argues that criticism should not be a yea yea, nay nay affair conducted in dry prose. Why should not the critic be "divers et ondoyant"? "We should not see the things of this world under the species of a false objectivity, or of its killing nomenclature." True, but these arguments can easily serve a bad cause, an equally corrupt subjectivity. Professor Hartman seems to me to have moved into the decadent phase of his mind, having left behind, unresolved, many fundamental problems….

I could be more patient with … [certain of his] sentences if I thought … [they were] sustained by a coherent theory of literature, by sound principles cogently maintained, and a sense of literature as far more important than anything that can be said about it. Professor Hartman probably thinks of his work as l'écriture rather than as criticism. Under any name I think his current style too self-regarding to be wholesome; it compels his intelligence to feed upon high-jinks and rascality.

The essays on Keats are the most important things in The Fate of Reading, and the most remarkable, but even in these triumphs Professor Hartman's wilfulness is a nuisance. Eloquent on the anxiety of influence, "the burden of authorship", and Keats's "shame at self-assertion", he has little to say of the other power, Keats's self-confidence, his buoyancy even in the Hyperion poems. What Professor Hartman says of Keats's burdens and compulsions I do in part believe, but I wish he would make his account truer to the poems by sensing everything the poet received from the gods, the muses, the poetic forms. The anxiety of influence is not merely angst. Professor Hartman knows this, but the excess of his style does not allow him to say it. His work is most valuable when it is possessed by a force more thoughtful than its decadence, and speaks with that authority; this, for instance, on Keats: "Most of the Odes", Hartman writes, "are a feverish quest to enter the life of a pictured scene, to be totally where the imagination is." I am content with that. (p. 935)