Though there is evidence here and there that [Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays 1958–1970] is a kind of housecleaning before a new start, Professor Hartman has indeed rendered a "book"—a statement from mid-career, Janus-faced, a summary and a prospect. It is also a major critical statement, made with an indirectness and a sense of the problematic of all such statements that seem to be Hartman's especial contribution to the critical project: that open, tentative, endless, self-contradictory violation by the mind of the very object of its love. Beyond Formalism is a confession of American roots and European efflorescence, the statement of one critic's education in the necessity and perverseness of the word and therefore his embodiment of the paradox of man, the myth-maker condemned to unravel (demystify) his own enchantments in order to begin again.

At first glance, Beyond Formalism is a classic example of the arbitrary, an accident of some twelve years, a multiple of interests, and not a few commissions. At the second, it has all the coherence of a single consciousness exploring the problematic of consciousness, questioning itself, seeking, and holding final answers at a distance. To be sure, the twenty-one essays and reviews, divided for the purposes of the book into four untitled and somewhat arbitrary subdivisions, ranging from practical exegesis to the criticism of criticism and from masters like Milton to moderns of questionable repute, present a very tentative order. The order it has is more like a tapestry than a narrative. In fact, the weaving of the tapestry is the metaphor to which Professor Hartman finally turns as the "figure" of literary language, "The Voice of the Shuttle." But the book also has a "theme," a "subject." For Professor Hartman, the scholar of comparative Romanticism, that "theme" is Romance—Romance as the story of story-telling, the "myth," if only because life depends on the reciprocal and continuing activity which allows the telling to begin again and throws man into his historicity. (p. 178)

For Hartman, literature, like human culture, is inexplicable without some understanding of Romance (the world of man's imagining, myth-making). If, therefore, the historical period of the great Romantic poets brings that activity to a focal point, the history of literature itself is the history of the Romantic, of the crisis of self-consciousness. (p. 179)

Readers of these provocative essays will remark the contrary pull toward theoretical statement and a resistance to leaving the text. This is especially evident in the practical criticism in the essays on Milton and Marvell, on Wordsworth and on the explorations of Romantic anti-self-consciousness and the "genius loci." Hartman distrusts the authoritative and privileged detachment of even those critics he admires—like Frye and Blanchot—just as he resists the kind of intimacy with the text evident in the criticism of Georges Poulet, whose singular preoccupation with consciousness he finds a particular kind of "formalism," the concern with greater as opposed to lesser forms, with the authorial cogito rather than the particular work. In a sense, Hartman is commenting on the "blindness" (as Paul de Man calls it) implicit in any critical holism. The act of criticism for him must above all resist its own consuming desire for reification.

For Hartman, in the end, poetry is the best commentary on poetry (as Romantic poetry, in its self-reflexiveness, often makes evident), for it recognizes the necessity of enchantment in its own activity. But if criticism cannot be poetry, if interpretation cannot ultimately resist its demystifying function, it can refuse to accept the illusion that it recovers an ultimate truth and value from the text. If criticism must play its inevitable role, of making exoteric the esoteric or hidden or "sacred" silence of the text, it needs to make clear that such "profanations" are in the nature of poetry itself, the bringing to "word" of some sacred mystery. In his practical criticism, Hartman tends to be a kind of allegorist, weaving in a texture of metaphors about metaphors his story of the poetry's story, the drama of mediation or, in Heidegger's terms, of the fall into language.

Hartman proposes no "anatomy" (of either literature or criticism), then, but an activity which will make poetry talk about itself, as Romantic and post-Romantic poetry habitually does…. The metaphor of the precarious journey, which can end at no truth, is the figure of both poetry and criticism for Hartman. The function of criticism, like that of the poetry it explores, is not to deliver some final truth or enlightenment, but to keep all forms open. (pp. 180-81)

Hartman's theory, and even his practical criticism, does distract one at times with its own resistance to the inevitable "opening" of interpretation, its persistence in trying to sustain the enchantments of the text. This hesitance to demystify produces a critical text that punctuates its usual clarity with areas of strategic opaqueness, as if the criticism grown doubly-self-conscious could at will escape its own mediating force and reaffirm presence at the center of the imaginative event. Hartman will not go as far as Blanchot, nor even his colleague Paul de Man, in confronting the nothingness at the center of fictions. He still holds out for the possibilities of transcendence, for the transport of Romance from self-consciousness to imagination. But as Wallace Stevens, the poet who provides Hartman with a running series of metaphors about metaphors, wrote: "the absence of imagination had / Itself to be imagined." That opens upon a world beyond formalism, but it also throws us back into the problematic of imagination, that it may be our last fiction. If it is, can we refuse to demystify it, as a part of our living the fiction itself? (p. 181)