Insofar as I could discern a thesis in this diffuse book [Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today], I took it to go something like this: Anglo-American literary studies have come to be dominated by a dull and demeaning ideal of "practical" criticism. For a number of reasons, critics have narrowed their aims…. [The] dry, utilitarian spirit of Locke has triumphed over the more daring, speculative spirit of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. A prime expression of this practical bias of literary studies is the tendency to regard criticism as an austere science, holding itself pure of any imputation of literary character lest it compromise its objective authority. This bias has made Anglo-American professors suspicious of the free-ranging inquiries of Continental philosophers and critics, particularly as pursued by recent avant-garde thinkers like Jacques Derrida. What, then, is to be done? Without abandoning the close analysis of concrete literary works, criticism, Hartman urges, must open itself to theoretical inquiry. It must overcome its fastidious insistence on purity and acknowledge its communality with literature, especially with literature's impulse to call all things into question, including the premises of literature and criticism themselves.

Hartman connects the narrowly utilitarian view of criticism and the "defensive partition of the critical and creative spirit" with a more pervasive fear of self-conscious thought. He has written frequently on this theme in culture and literature, as for example in his useful essay, "Romanticism and Anti-Self-Consciousness." His basic notions, indeed, would seem to be an extension of the ideas of Romantic philosophers such as Schiller and Hegel: since the dawn of the modern age our culture has been so overwhelmed by its sense of the multiplicity and complexity of experience and the plurality of possible points of view that it has come to see the fully conscious pursuit of knowledge as leading not to enlightenment but to skepticism and paralysis of the will….

I have inferred the above summary rather than taken it directly from Criticism in the Wilderness, since Hartman does not choose to present his ideas in a linear fashion. Part of the problem is that this book is essentially a collection of disparate essays unconvincingly posing as "chapters" in a unified work. But I suspect the lack of linear exposition may itself be an attempt to make a point, to exemplify the "literary" conception of criticism that Hartman is recommending. Only the introduction and final chapter ("A Short History of Practical Criticism") yield incisive generalizations. The 265 pages between presumably justify inclusion as a series of show pieces demonstrating the proposed reunion of theory and explicative criticism. (p. 34)

In treating his variety of topics, Hartman all but comes to the point of asserting something. Instead of arguments, one gets wry remarks, witticisms, puns, allusions, and quotations, lots of allusions and quotations. In order to make sense of this long section, one has to watch for repeating motifs—repression, purification, etc.—as one would in taking in The Waste Land or a Wagnerian opera. Sometimes one encounters a passage that sounds so much like thinking that one rereads it four or five times in search of the sense, but with limited success…. Possibly in defense of this kind of writing, Hartman observes that "no one would argue that all subjects can be made easy." This is true, but we tolerate difficulty when we judge the results to be both worth the trouble and producible in no more simple way. That is not clearly the case here.

More serious an impediment than out-and-out opacity, though, is Hartman's habit of taking essential definitions and explanations for granted, as if it can be safely assumed that the reader is already so familiar with them that he would be bored by having them spelled out…. Such allusive writing both flatters and intimidates the reader. He is credited with inside knowledge but made to feel anxious if he reflects that he may not have it. Hartman no doubt knows what he means, but his technique of non-definition—taken in itself—encourages bluffing. It leads to a familiar kind of pseudo-communication in which all parties pretend to know what is going on while none of them really does for sure.

Hartman's most sustained piece of analysis comes in an interesting section on Walter Benjamin. He shows how the repressed ghost of theology persistently erupts through the intended Marxist sociology. What limits the exercise is that whereas Benjamin aspires to be profound, Hartman is seemingly content to be clever. Here and in other chapters, Hartman surrounds his topics with a tone of sophisticated irony that forbids the crudity of making a commitment or even stating a proposition. Again, it is a case of criticism aiming to be literature—according to a certain conception of literature, it should be noted—by making itself resistant to paraphrase, by turning itself into a dramatic "process" of thought rather than a chain of reasonings leading to a conclusion, by seeking to "be" rather than "mean," and by ironizing out of existence anything that threatens to become a conviction. (p. 35)

The trouble with Hartman's view lies not, I think, in his conflation of the critical with the literary, or his wish to merge literature, philosophy, and history. He is right in thinking that the isolation and compartmentalization of these subjects has had much to do with impoverishing literary discussion in the last 20 years. The trouble lies rather in Hartman's conception of what is "literary," a conception that excludes the making of statements. One assumes Hartman is not incapable of consecutive argument, but that he has decided that if it's consecutive argument you want you should have gone into electrical engineering or zero-sum accounting. Despite his repeated emphasis on the need to put our concepts in question, one feels Hartman has never questioned this very common view of literature as the antithesis of and antidote to positive science. Reacting against the dominance of commercial and technological institutions, one defines the literary (and often the humanistic in general) as everything that science and technology are not, which is to say, as non-logical, non-conceptual, non-objective, non-verifiable, and not open to refutation. This slanders literature in the process of celebrating it.

In Hartman's case, this attitude produces an instructive contradiction. Although, as we have seen, Hartman wants criticism to overcome its defensive aversion to philosophy, his own conception of criticism (and perhaps of philosophy too) is so defensively anti-scientific as to cause him to purge his writing of assertion. He himself complains that we define literature as whatever is left over after subtracting everything else, yet he falls for another version of this negative dialectic. Aiming to inject a vital impurity into critical discourse and to ruffle complacency, Hartman ends up keeping his own discourse pure of anything anybody could argue with. (p. 36)

None of my objections should distract us from recognizing the justice and importance of many of Hartman's criticisms of established literary studies. I agree with him that criticism has been made monotonous by the mass production of explication for explication's sake; that important theoretical questions about meaning and interpretation posed by avant-garde critics have been ignored or relegated to specialists; that the severance of literary studies from history, philosophy, and theology is a disaster, as is the estrangement of all these studies from the larger public culture (save where they filter down in a debased, therapeutic form). I think Hartman exaggerates the Anglo-American indifference to Continental ideas; existentialism, for example, has had great vogue here and influenced the New Criticism and other schools. But Hartman does not have his eye on many of the central problems of his discipline, and it is no doubt significant that a scholar of his stature should now speak out about them. Still, insofar as Hartman's own work is proffered as a model, it submerges us deeper into the "wilderness" mentioned in his title rather than showing a way out. I doubt if anybody but those already committed to avant-garde literary criticism will be moved by Hartman to think better of it than before reading him. The curious inquirer will get a clearer sense of the implications and uses of the newer critical theories from Jonathan Culler's Structuralist Poetics, from Culler's more recent essays in defense of deconstruction, and from Stanley Fish's theoretical papers, collected in his forth-coming Is There a Text in This Class? He may want to argue with much these writers say, but it is one of their strengths that what they say can be argued with. What is finally disappointing about Hartman's book is not that it renders its subjects obscure but that it renders them inarguable. (pp. 36-7)