Criticism in the Wilderness may be the best, most brilliant, most broadly useful book yet written by an American about the sudden swerve from the safety of established decorum toward bravely theoretical, mainly European forms of literary criticism. There are, however, immediate reasons why this book, when you first take it up, will disturb and put you off. Professor Hartman's style, for example, is always elegant but relies deliberately on puns, allusions, jumbled language levels, wild quoting, moments of self-parody and splashes of arcane terminology. Hartman also moves back and forth at lightning speed from thinker to thinker, leaping prodigiously from one incisive insight to the next. And the book's basic structure is hard-line and oracular, rational-empirical and theoretical-mystical. All of this is by way of demonstration, Hartman showing us the kind of thinking he wishes to defend; and all of this, if you hang on, turns out to be great fun and cause for high intellectual excitement.

Hartman is one of our smartest scholars; he knows as much about modern culture as anybody and says lots fast, yet not without a meditative undertow…. His method is playful, for reasons he clearly sets forth, but his message is deeply in earnest. He defines a kind of critical thinking which he calls "speculative," "philosophical," "theoretical," a kind of literary criticism which refuses the subordinate position assigned to it by Anglo-American practice, a criticism which would engage rather than serve its object, or, put another way, which presumes to serve literature best by becoming a counterliterature of its own.

I do not say that if you read Hartman you will be converted. The ideas of critics like Harold Bloom and Jacques Derrida are hard to love. But the predicament of literature will appear more racked with riddles than most of us dreamed, and those of us who think steadily about literature, about culture, about the toils of interpretation, must at least test the strength of our positions against the challenge Hartman offers.

To dismiss Continental thinkers as theory-mad is no solution. And here Hartman is especially helpful. The likes of Heidegger, Lukacs, Benjamin and Derrida are suddenly articulate. The rites of revisionism and deconstruction are revealed in a bright sweep of formulations, some as simple as saying that criticism "discloses the iconoclastic within the iconic." (pp. 471-72)

It will be objected that Hartman has been at pains to glorify his own profession and lift a second-order activity to the commanding status of art. Yes and no. Criticism gains a new dignity from boldly confronting its relation to literature, and by sacrificing the security of mere commentary, it extends the borders of literary experience. But it remains tied to a text and inherits that pathos….

A more serious objection is that by refusing to remain subordinate, criticism runs the risk of irresponsibility, promoting chaos and breaking norms. Again, yes and no. If the norms are false, they must go. And we are already deep in chaos; "tradition" is the euphemism we use to cover arbitrary order, and all critical theory stays rooted in what Hartman calls its "text-milieu," the very limited number of books we happen to know. As for responsibility, cant and posturing are always with us; but we don't have to read far, in a given case, to sense which way the wind blows.

We have only to see the remarkable things Hartman can say about specific poems—by Yeats, Dickinson, Williams—to realize that such insights simply cannot be had within the confines of practical criticism. As always, the proof is in the pudding. Revisionist criticism, which uses ideas freely, which dares to speculate, which exploits its own predicament and conducts itself in accord with its new sense of import, enriches the study of literature immensely. It keeps the mind's options open, turning now toward theology, now toward politics, expanding the reach of the art which remains at its center. (p. 473)