An Interview With Geoffrey Hartman

7/27/2019 An Interview With Geoffrey Hartman

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An Interview with Geoffrey Hartman

BARNETT: Many critics have commented on the subterranean rolecontinental philosophy plays in your work. In particular what strikesme is the figure of Hegel. Can your work be understood as a mappingout of a Wordsworth column that would replace the Genet column inGlas? What does thinking the relation between Hegel andWordsworth do to our understanding of Wordsworth? And can yougive us a sense of what a fly on the wall might have heard in theseminar on Hegel and Wordsworth you taught with de Man?HARTMAN: I like the way you put this. I too have thought: whatwould have happened if Derrida had used Wordsworth instead ofGenet. Had I written Glas (!) I would have certainly done somethinglike that. Derrida mounts a very interesting juxtaposition, althoughI've never been very comfortable with it.

You wanted to be a fly on the wall in the seminar on Wordsworthand Hegel. What that fly on the wall might have heard would nothave been very edifying. Because de Man had a wonderful way ofsustaining his thought: without being aggressive or polite, he madeno concessions. And I could never get him to give the early Hegel thesame attention as the later Hegel. He wanted to overcome the Hegel

of the Phenomenologywith the emphasis on internalization,Erinnerung. The later Hegel, with its emphasis on Gedchtnis andwho says thought begins with speech and who is less interested inErinnerung, de Man emphasized all the time. Internalization has thedisadvantage of being understood psychologistically, but is relevant,for example in the Boy of Winander episode. Think of how thelandscape enters the child's heart like traumatic shock (thoughbuffered). It enters by bypassing the ordinary mediations ofconsciousness. But while I saw in this a moment of internalization,nevertheless, de Man was just not interested in that. He wanted toget to the moment of death, to a death perspective. Not because

after death there came life, but because the coloring, the philosophicmind, as Wordsworth says in the Intimations Ode, looks throughdeath. De Man was always trying to get the color of what it was liketo look through death. In that sense he was very Wordsworthian orperhaps he was anticipating the interest in trauma, and the memory-impasse set up by trauma, which I am exploring. But then I was moreinterested in the exact, stylistic movement of the entire episodewhere one thing connected or did not connect with another. I didn'tpersuade de Man and I decided not to do another seminar with him. Iended up being an interested listener, you know, one of the students.I learnt more from him than he in his recalcitrance could learn from


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me.BARNETT: People have said that in your own work you don't explicitlydraw these connections but it seems suffused and supported bymeditations on thinkers like Hegel.HARTMAN: It is not the machine of the dialectic which interests me,but Hegel's restlessness. The incredible way he refuses to let anotherstage be final; the way it is immediately made dynamic by thedialectical action of the odysseying spirit. Hegel's abstractdescriptions of each stage are works of art--abstract works of art.Hegel presupposes that you know what he is abstracting from. Hereand there he gives you clues: sometimes a small footnote relating toSocrates or Saint-Just. By the time of Derrida, at the beginning ofGlas, Hegel is super-mediated. I try in Saving the Textto tease outthe "quoi du reste," the "what remains." I haven't teased it outcompletely: Derrida is a remarkably osmotic thinker, but his energy ofconceptualization is up to the osmosis. More than a vacuum cleaner,Derrida organizes the chaos; he organizes the quotations that havefallen into him. I continue to think of Glas as one of the mostremarkable constructions that we have and where philosophy hasindeed become a literary text.BARNETT: Derrida clearly has had a profound impact on you as acritic. In particular, Glas seems to have been a defining experiencefor you. It serves as the north star ofCriticism in the Wilderness andas the subject of an entire book, Saving the Text. And as youcomment in Criticism in the Wilderness: "I am sufficiently convinced

that Glas, like Finnegans Wake, introduces our consciousness to adimension it will not forget, and perhaps not forgive." What can younot forget and what can you not forgive about Derrida in general?HARTMAN: This is a difficult question--only because there was lifebefore Derrida. Derrida persuaded me that there could be a theoryfor the kind of practice I was engaging in. That is, for the close--or, asI always called it, closer--reading I was trying to develop. The closerreading that went right through the text to other texts and then cameback to the original. He caught me up in the illusion that there couldbe a theory for that. His theory. And so I felt relieved since I thoughtof theory as a good thing. Because there are many who believe in

theory, so that if they don't believe in the practice maybe you canadd theory to it and then they will credit the practice. It turned outnot to be that way. In any case, I began to be interested in the theoryand in the way Derrida developed the theory from certain sourcessuch as Husserl and Heidegger. But I was limited in this because Ihad never studied philosophy professionally; I'm an autodidact in thatarea. Thus it's hard for me to follow strictly what is a critique ofHusserl. I understand in general. So the theory was important,although I'm afraid it was not important in itself or for its kind of truthclaim.BARNETT: It legitimated what you were doing?


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HARTMAN: It legitimated what I was doing. Since then I have notcared. After a while you don't care for legitimation. You are what youare. So that has dropped away. As for forgiving Derrida--I think he isa wonderful reader. If I have any criticism, it's a rather superficial

one. It is that he leaves nothing alone and that he over-elaborates.He goes through the same moves again and again. But still, it doesn'tmatter--there are lots of surprises. I prefer a principle of economyand it resists the kind of massive, recapitulative style of Derrida. Theplayfulness is perhaps a little too sober, as I said in Saving the Text.His puns are rather cold. Maybe he laughs at them. He wants tosqueeze a philosophic yield out of everything and this I don't think isnecessary. In general, I am impatient with the style, except in Glas.But, then, I am impatient with novels too. There's a too-muchness inhis style--but he remains the most inventive philosopher around.BARNETT: Derrida was linked to what one could call the marketing ofthe concept of The Yale Critics. Today, somewhat later, does thatconcept mean anything still?HARTMAN: I don't think it meant very much from the beginning.BARNETT: Bloom has disavowed it, and has expressedembarrassment over the Deconstruction and Criticism volume.HARTMAN: From the beginning Bloom was not interested incontinental philosophy and in Derrida. He was interested in Americaand the American grain and he wanted to revive the post-Romanticcriticism that came from Emerson. He went back to that neglectedand misunderstood source to achieve a renaissance. From the

beginning he wasn't part of deconstruction. I was in it because I likedits sheer intellectual intensity. And I shared some of the continentalsources, both in poetry and philosophy. So I was more interested in itthan Bloom. So was Hillis Miller. The core, however, was clearlyDerrida and de Man. Hillis Miller was a very understanding presencewho added English literature and the novel, which were what wasmissing. The Yale critics as an entity were created partly by HillisMiller in a review in The New Republic and partly by Deconstructionand Criticism. We undertook the book to show we were not identical,an effort that--as we should have known--backfired. I tried to urgethe publisher to advertise it as a non-manifesto, but of course he

wouldn't do so. He described it as a manifesto, which went againstwhat we wished to achieve with such a book. I think calling us Yalecritics is only justified in so far as we were close to each other; weread each other's work and would often comment on it. Now this inacademic circles is unforgivable. Yet it produced a very small butvisible group. Very small because there were maybe six, sevenpeople: the four of us--Shoshana Felman and some younger people.But a tiny fraction, if you think in terms of all the professors ofliterature at Yale.BARNETT: That's why it's bizarre to say "Yale," when in point of fact .. . .


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HARTMAN: Totally bizarre. This department--literary humanities atYale--was always highly eclectic and remained rather conservative.But the visibility of this small group became so great that I supposethere was some resentment, and some attacks, even at Yale. It's

partly that resentment and resistance that caused Derrida to leave,together with Hillis Miller, for Irvine. They saw a new frontier--Deconstruction West.BARNETT: Being shamelessly autobiographical seems to be in suchvogue among academics that I was wondering if I could lure you intoit as well. I can't help wondering about the nature of the special andenduring relationship you have with Wordsworth. As you note in TheUnremarkable Wordsworth: "I have never been able to get away fromWordsworth for any length of time." How do you understand thisrelationship? Why do you think Wordsworth means what he does toyou?HARTMAN: Wordsworth and I got together in high school in Englandand it was just the intensest poetry reading experience I had at thattime. I can only guess why. Because his poetry didn't seem to gothrough people. Or rather through socialized people. It wasbetween Wordsworth and whatever he looked at very strongly. Thevisibility of the thinking was important for me--though visibility is toostrong a word. I could really feel that his thought-time and mine werein harmony. It wasn't a harmony of content necessarily, but,compared to other poetry, his was not over-condensed or over-relaxed. It was just thinking--not abstract thinking but, clearly,

thinking. The second factor was what John Stuart Mill calls the cultureof the feelings, especially nature feelings--and this I shared. I hadsome of the same feeling for the (what seemed to me) animate butnot necessarily personal universe. That is, it was personal for me, butit was not anthropomorphized. His "sentiment of Being" indicated amode of perception that was non-anthropomorphic, though at thesame time not non-human. Make sense?BARNETT: That's interesting though since later you're the one thatdemolishes the notion of Wordsworth as nature poet.HARTMAN: Right. That's been overemphasized. I established thedialectical relation involved in his return to nature. This is a return

not only from a time of exile, spent in politics, but a return thathappened again and again. In other words, a return within themoment of thinking. Away from abstraction and yet not toward falseconcretion. So I would never think Wordsworth was not a naturepoet. But I showed how reflective nature poetry was in Wordsworth.

There's a lot more nature detail in the descriptive sense in poetsbefore Wordsworth.BARNETT: So it's his reaction against the historically mediatednature of nature poetry that makes him a real nature poet.HARTMAN: That's right. The design, the argument-from-designpoetry, all that occasionally he plays with it. He's aware of it, but it is


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in no way central to him. On the contrary--you like the worddemolish, so I will use it--if he demolishes anything it is that, thosetraditions.BARNETT: There seems to be general sense of crisis in the

profession. Indeed, many signs confirm this sense. MLA conferencetalks seem more concerned with catching the latest trend incriticism--usually buttressed by a foreign critic who has just beentranslated into English. Entire catalogs of publishers are embracingspecific critical methodologies. Which in turn will determine thedirection of research. Courses seem oriented more towards thesecondary literature of the teacher's current research project thananything else. It was this situation that inspired Bloom's The WesternCanon, where he makes the bleak prediction that Englishdepartments will shrivel into the equivalent of classics departmentsand be superceded by departments of cultural studies. And lately wehave seen scholars band together in an effort to turn the clock backto 1950--certainly an unattractive alternative. Do you share thissense of crisis? And if so, what do you think are the reasons for ourpredicament and where do you see us heading?HARTMAN: The profession of English was a much narrower and lesspopulated field--even when expanding after the Second World Warwhen I entered it at the beginning of the fifties. The canon, as wenow say, was more limited. There were distinct prestige fields--contemporary poetry was not studied on the whole. It wasappreciated but kept for individual enjoyment. All that has changed.

The profession now is highly populated; some would say overpopulated, given a scarcity of jobs. The canon is expanding like madand I am not sure there are prestige fields. But there are marginalfields that have moved to the center, which produces a sense ofliberation. There's a lot of interesting and wild stuff out there. It'smuch better in that respect than when I came in--everything wasdecorous. Most worked within certain conventional schemes andoften did very interesting work. Even those who went outside theconventional schemes practiced a fairly classical kind of style, likeNorthrop Frye. It was always intelligible, always at a certain level ofaccessibility. Now all of this just isn't there any more--for good or

bad. So you can talk about that crisis too in addition to the economicone.

There is a crisis in style, of style, since much of contemporarycriticism is not all that readable any more. But why is it not soreadable? Probably there's too much that jostles for attention andeach new field becomes invested by the hordes of young people whoare sincerely reading and making a career. The crisis of style hasspawned a point of view where you have a division between highlyspecialized or jargonic prose and the prose of the public intellectual.But for me the crisis posed itself differently. It wasn't a "crisis" Ifaced, at least in the 1950s and '60s. It was simply that I reacted


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aggressively to the stipulated decorum of scholarly prose, to standardscholarly prose. Call it the friendship style--although it wasn't alwaysfriendly. It was standardized and didn't display or didn't want todisplay--maybe because of its gentility--any of the intensity for which I

entered the field. And it seemed to me that this was strange, thistotal reticence, when it came to feeling or the articulation of feeling.Now I was never for personalism as such and for the intrusion, the

direct intrusion, of the autobiographical. But I did want some of theintensity of our feeling-perception to come through. I saw no reasonwhy that intensity had to be left to fiction or poetry--we had to besober, and they, the artists, were allowed to be drunk. So all thisresulted in an attempt on my part to fashion a new kind of prosestyle. Let us have the kingdom of our own style, and let others adaptto it.

All kinds of styles were floating around in the seventeenth century,before high journalistic prose like that of the Spectator emerged. Solet's see what will emerge now. I felt that the field was too restrictive,cutting itself off from too much. This was also accompanied by mysense that it didn't work to define literariness in terms of negatives--not this and not that and in particular not philosophy. And so I did tryto work with some (let's call them) philosophical dictions. Not that Ibrought in philosophy as such--you know, a philosopher-theologianlike Buber or others like Husserl or Hegel, the ones I was reading inthe fifties. But I wanted to bring their issues and concerns intoliterary studies, and this gave a certain density and maybe

elusiveness to my style. Since I was born abroad one might easilysay: "well, he's a foreigner--who hasn't fully understood what Englishis like."BARNETT: It seems now though that we have a generation that hasgrown up in this new context--that you among others helped toestablish--and it seems that what's happened is that that reactiontoward literariness, which you described, is now infused by criticaltheory. In other words, they're now transporting the critical-theoretical sensibility to everything in the world; and that's in a sensewhy a lot of people see this crisis for the future. For now, thatliterariness, what you were talking about, threatens to be lost as well

as, in fact, literature itself.HARTMAN: Yes, let's talk this up. You're quite right that there is adouble expansion, one outward, one inward tending. The outward iscertainly an export movement and I support this. I support going withour very trained perception, our close reading, into other fields. Someof the hermeneutic anthropologists also support this: though someonelike Clifford Geertz obviously doesn't need literary critics,nevertheless the fact that they exist has helped to encourage him inhis own endeavors to bring some of those reading skills to culturalpractices--not only reading skills but theories which we took over anddeveloped, such as structuralism. This is what happened in the


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sixties. There was a lot of experimentation for those who knewcontinental modes of thought, and not only the anthropology of Levi-Strauss. The other tendency is what we can draw in from thesurrounding disciplines. And here it becomes more complicated,

especially when we deal with a positivistic discipline like history.History has a methodological problem with itself because it remainspositivistic. It doesn't like to think about the style of the historian.

The New Historicists think they know how to do history. Indeed,bringing in a certain order of fact and what they might callcontextualization will illuminate the poem. But most of the time--Iagree with you--it displaces the poem, sometimes to the point whereone can barely find it. If we go with the New Historicists the questionof why we enjoy literature fades. It almost becomes a guiltyenjoyment or something which, well, we might allow, but . . . . Whereis the seriousness or the enjoyment of literature if we take their viewto an extreme? However, they are really--and by they I mean JeromeMcGann, Majorie Levenson, Alan Liu, Stephen Greenblatt, DavidSimpson, and others--more nuanced than I pretend. So history is aproblematic discipline in itself and I'm not sure how much we canlearn for literary studies from it.

All the more so since the question about how to write literaryhistory--which de Man and I were wrestling with in the seventies--doesn't seem to have caught on. A different mode of literary historyis necessary, one that is more experimental, but at least thechronological pattern is being thought about today. The strongest

intake from the outside comes from political theory, political science,socio-economics. Anglo-American criticism for a long time had nosociology of literature at all. What sociology there was was practicedon the continent and came through disciplines such as stylistics. Ifyou look at romance philologists like Leo Spitzer, they're fascinatedby the ambience of words, and how words shift semantically, througha Bedeutungswandel. They illuminate the milieu in which the literaryworks they study takes place. But there's no critique of a particularhistorical era. For them study is more like an intense tourism.Relatively non-judgmental. This is how it was in those days.There is no one crisis: there is an economic crisis; there is a crisis of

style; and perhaps there is a pedagogical crisis. How accessible canwe make literature? There is also a crisis about what we shouldstudy. And a general crisis of conscience: what are we doing in thisfield anyway? These intensities of professional consciousness werecertainly not there when I entered English and Comparative Literaturein the early fifties.BARNETT: The basic thrust of the explicit and implicit New Historicistarguments against your work is that you have forgotten or lookedover--just as Wordsworth turned a blind eye, say, to the homeless in

Tintern Abbey--the real political context and dimension of art. And, assuch, you succumb to what has been termed the "Romantic ideology,"


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the insistence on the autonomy of the aesthetic that the Romanticsthemselves helped to formalize. Although it's unfair to ask you torespond to this in such an impromptu and limited format, I wonder ifyou could indicate the outline of your position on these issues.HARTMAN: I try to be sympathetic to the argument that there's somecomplicity between critics like myself and the Romantics. But there'salso much to be said against that. I don't even know how to beginanswering this.

In any act of interpretation you have to be with the subject anddistanced from it. I would never neglect the distance that isminimally historical, that is historical. Yet more than history standsbetween a critic and the work criticized. Or between an interpreterand the object interpreted. One must think about that distance andwhat flexibilities there are. Just as when you zoom in, you do nothave to maintain the same distance; you have to be conscious thatthere is a distance and you don't confuse yourself with the object.

That seems to me so commonplace as not to require comment. Andtherefore I say to myself: McGann and the others can't mean that.What exactly do they mean? Perhaps that we are not politicallyenlightened. That we grant, as you put it, the aesthetic a certainautonomy. Maybe that is part of the Romantic ideology. But I reallydon't know what ideology means in this context. That the Romanticsinvented the idea of aesthetic autonomy?--I don't think that makessense. Aesthetics, as some New Historicists use the term, is a verycontemporary concept, and certainly not "aesthetics" as it was used

in the eighteenth century. The problem I have with the NewHistoricists is that I can critique what they do, but I'm now respondingto their critique of what I do, which is a different thing. I can onlyutter banalities such as: oh, come now, what do you think you'resaying? Don't we have to use an act of imaginative transposition toreally absorb, to come nearer to the thought and sensibility of thattime and the literary context? If you get this through history, fine.But I'm not willing to grant that readers must always know that near

Tintern Abbey there were iron mills. Place is important, but not everydetail of the place. Moreover, each significant work of fiction or poemdisplaces perception. That is its power. It modifies perception and

so, after it, we can't think about things in quite the same way asbefore. There are many prose accounts and some, like the tourbooks, mention the poverty of the Wye valley. But there's only one"Tintern Abbey" and if the poem is not transfigurative then it istransformative. If Blake had stood in the same place, he would eitherhave seen Satanic mills or he might have transformed the scene in acompletely different manner. So much so that you wouldn't realizeyou were standing at Tintern. The referential base would have beenlost entirely. The fact that you have such a strong referential base isin itself an achievement. A referential base in terms of the specificsof the landscape and of the person contemplating it.


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I feel the suffering or endurance of Wordworth's people much morethan anything in Blake. Or in Shelley for that matter. So why dumpon Wordsworth? Because he is a strong, worthwhile opponent.Because the New Historicists would like to overcome him. But he

sticks in their intellectual throat. Fine. It makes for good debate andthere are even some interesting concepts that come out of that,having to do with the strength of the attempt to contain, the strengthof the repression as indicating what is suppressed. However, therange of reference in New Historicism tends to be interesting . . .apocalyptic even. By "apocalyptic" reference I mean that what theycredit are macro-historical events: disasters, revolutions, abjectpoverty, riots. Jerry McGann was kind enough when Harvardrepublished Wordsworth's Poetryin the late 80s (the first edition ofwhich came out in '64) to write a blurb for it. He says, approximately,"It's a landmark book in scholarship after the Korean war." Which issort of what I mean by apocalyptic: histoire vnmentielle. PeterManning's discussion of "The Solitary Reaper" in Romantic Texts andContexts is very informative. I enjoyed reading it and learned fromit. And yet at the end, I don't know--you may differ--what we havegained in terms of reading the poem that makes us say this hassomething to do with Wordsworth's originality. I don't think it's anattack on Wordsworth; it's more an attack on critics (myself included)who leave certain things out. But Manning himself leaves out the factthat I put "The Solitary Reaper" into the radical Protestant tradition oflooking for evidence of election. Well, that's a "social" fact too, but he

neglects it. Because it's not poverty; it's not Scotland; the relation ofScotland and England . . . There is selectivity on his part also. Icontinue to think that what aesthetic critics focus on reveals more ofWordsworth's originality or idiosyncrasy.

The point at which I become resentful is when we are made to takeon the role of purists. As if only the New Historicists, as materialists,know what a mess human nature is. Yet, there is, I would insist acertain glow, a certain separation of the individual poem andWordsworth's stance from the socio-economic context. And to thinkthat this is just euphemistic or meliorative thinking is a mistake. Tocounter that error one would have to consider what the milieu of

Nature means to us. That is, go into what has lately become aninteresting subject in criticism, ecology. Mental ecology.BARNETT: It seems Romantic New Historicism has a unique set ofproblems that it doesn't share with Renaissance New Historicism orVictorian New Historicism. People like Greenblatt or D. A. Miller canshow us the political work a literary work enacts. In other words, theycan get into the literary text and show us how it engages--andfurthers--certain historic discourses. The Romantic New Historicistseems caught in the endless predicament of proving that there'ssomething wrong with the Romantic lyric itself. It is not reflective inany thoroughly political way of any social reality. My suspicion is that


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this comes from Hegel via Lukcs and this sense of what the tasksand capabilities of various literary genres are. In other words, lyric isintensely subjective, isolated, imploded; drama is potentially socialbut limited; and the novel and prose is the most complex politically

valid form.HARTMAN: It's not entirely wrong, this attitude, if you think thatKeats' career always tried to go beyond "Flora and Old Pan" andtowards a more human or humanized subject matter. Shakespeareremained the beacon. We would have to talk about the authenticityof Romantic pastoral consciousness, which is partly what I mean bymental ecology. What we react to in literature is a powerful mode ofrepresentation, which has a reality orientation, yes. But we don'talways want the same reality orientation. Should Wordsworth havelooked at the Wye Valley with Shakespearean eyes? I don't think thenew Historicists understand the new representational mode of theRomantics. They have less difficulty with the Renaissance. They canestablish more easily the Renaissance mode of representation.

They're into political symbolism. Greenblatt's strength is that he seesthe symbolic component of everything. This makes him moreaesthetic, in fact, than most of us Romantic critics. He talks evenabout wonder more than we do. I talk about surmise. He talks aboutwonder. For him the Renaissance is wondrous; it's like ananthropologist going to a foreign country and seeing customs such aswitchcraft, or other strange practices. These are realia, not justsuperstitions. These are a part of the lore and knowledge of that

time. In a sense such a scholar is advantaged. He is advantagedbecause he can use more learning. You have to look up these things;you have to read medical manuals. He is advantaged because thesethings were deeply conventional or "naturally" symbolic; they wereaccepted and that is rarely the case with the Romantics, who knowthey're dealing with poetry as an artificial mode, something that maybe doomed. Of course, they seek to naturalize it again.BARNETT: This is from Criticism in the Wilderness: "Art slanders anestablished order for good or bad by not conforming. Its veryexistence is often a resistance. It gives the lie to every attempt toimpose a truth by state sponsored power." Couldn't one use that to

confront this critique of your work? Is then Romantic New Historicismsymptomatic of a guilt or resistance that's intrinsic to art in general?Is that a valid summation?HARTMAN: Yes, that's fair. But I would also think that it is worthinquiring why both nature poetry and pastoral poetry are renewed inthe Romantic period. The Wordsworth book is realistic in that sense.

You might say it has too much of a thesis, although I complicatethings by the dialectic I sketch out. I try to show how prolepticWordsworth's mind is, how fearful he is--and why--about losingNature. Losing the ground on which the mind stands. This has to dowith the Industrial Revolution and accompanying events. Now there's


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no question in my mind that Wordsworth is the most profound ofthese poets. His imagination has led him further than anyone else.Any careful reading of what I have done on Wordsworth, in fact anycareful reading of Wordsworth, will lead you back not to a concern

with specific laws or specific economic changes but to the changingcharacter of the natural bonds of man's relation to the natural word.He foresees a loss in that relationship, even a nature lost toimagination. This absolute loss is what I call apocalyptic. And thereasons for fearing that loss had to do with the political, ecological (inthe broad sense) and industrial changes of his time.BARNETT: Doesn't he also introduce the response to this failure ofpolitics? What we have in The Excursion, The Prelude, are thesedashed hopes for politics.HARTMAN: Yes. And it may be that the New Historicists refuse toacknowledge that the French Revolution is still failing. Not only failedthen. That revolutionary activity tends to fail.BARNETT: That's what in a sense is so interesting--that theRevolution continues to fail. The Russian revolution has failed . . . .HARTMAN: It continues to fail. They want to keep up hope and faithin revolutionary social activity. Wordsworth faces the issue of reformor of holding back the tide of loss without hope in revolutionarychange. Partly because he has come to the conclusion thatrevolutionary change has hastened that loss instead of bringing abouta new dawn. So maybe there is a deep--call it ideological--differencehaving to do with the New Historicists' faith in an attempt to restore a

hope in revolutionary activity rather than restore hope itself assomething revolutionary.I have become very pessimistic about politics. In the world as we

now know it, powerful religions are really politics, as in Islam or Iran.State ideologies are political religions. In America, there is ademocracy that we like to describe as a civil religion. And we believein intermediate institutions, non-governmental organizations andgrass roots groups; we "grow them" to use a current metaphor. I doaccept conflict at this level. I think there has to be. And I understand,but don't share, what seems to be taking hold of so many Americans,the suspicion of big government, or of Washington. As if we could

return totally to local politics. But I understand that reaction anddon't think it will go away. I also find the use of the word politicsalmost opaque by now. Opaque or totally simplified. If politics simplymeans the right kind of politics--progressive politics--then it's onlyinteresting as an ideal. It's no more interesting than saying we cancomplete the French revolution. And that has certain implications.But I don't see issues raised at that level.

Some matters are clear enough. You do want people to live abovesubsistence level. One tries to find a paradigm for what politicalaction might achieve. Since you know that the tea workers inBangladesh are oppressed, do you stop drinking tea? Well, you might


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make their condition worse. It is only if you believe in a Ghandi-likeaction (which is also symbolic), or in hunger strikes (something thatmight be fatal to yourself), that you can talk about effective politics.

You can intervene--and this is nothing against particular

interventions--but you have to realize that the effect will be short-range. As to long-range thought--that is always doubtfully prophetic.I shouldn't talk about this. I have no overview, no total conception. Ifyou take politics seriously, you could find many reasons to do yourselfin. But are there some ways of doing yourself in that might beeffective? As I have said, you could go on a hunger strike and so on.It really does mean sacrifice. It can also lead to craziness. And toviolence. This is why professing literature is a relatively benign andhealthy activity. You generally don't die from it. You take someenjoyment. What's wrong with aesthetic enjoyment, after all? I don'tunderstand the attacks on the aesthetic or statements about the endof the "aesthetic ideology."BARNETT: It seems to react to something inward, which isinteresting. The failure of politics seems to be what leads todespondency. Wordsworth discusses that in The Excursion. As Millsays, Wordsworth is about this return from despondency. Where doyou draw the line between politics and despondency?HARTMAN: It is not quite, as some say, including M. H. Abrams, thatthere is an inward turn. That's not a sufficient explanation. BecauseBlake is certainly as inward as anyone. (Of course the same "turn"may have happened to Blake.) I think it has more to do with giving

up a certain kind of hope. And yet not falling because of that intodespondency. You give up hope in revolutionary change--which isdifficult, especially when you've experienced that hope directly.BARNETT: Can we connect this to an Hegelian vision of politics andhistory? Perhaps Wordsworth is confronting an apocalyptic form ofpolitics, one that can be identified with a macro-subject of worldhistory. The French Revolution and fascism are in a sense equatablefrom this perspective. That is what leads to despondency. Not thatthat means that one excludes politics per se. Just this sort of vision ofpolitics.HARTMAN: There's no question that Wordsworth becomes a

conservative thinker who wants to hold up the acceleration towardsvery large events, the accumulation of men in cities, the growth ofsensationalism, and so on. And who wants to think that there mightbe a peaceful and fruitful transition between an agrarian ethos and amodern or industrial ethos. He knows that industrialization is there,but he wants to preserve--he really wants to carry over not just tokeep--the old, to carry it over into modernity. Now I think he comesupon a limit. He doesn't really succeed. I'm not sure anyone hassucceeded with this translation. Do the rural virtues, do thesequalities exist to the extent that Wordsworth makes them exist forus. Can the character of "Michael" be carried over into modern life?


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The poet's depiction of people like Michael or the Wanderer or thePeddlar are meant to be more than nostalgic exemplars. They havequalities that he is loath to give up and that he is afraid that modernlife will destroy. Which doesn't mean he's more inward. There's very

little introspection in Wordsworth. As I've said about the Boy ofWinander, when the poet stands looking at the boy's grave, we don'tknow what he is thinking. You might object that "Tintern Abbey" is aninterior monologue. Yet though it is introspective, it always goesoutward, or is "excursive."BARNETT: Could one say that Wordsworth still has something to sayto contemporary politics? Your recent work in a sense emanates fromthe Preface to Lyrical Ballads with its assessment of modernizationand the destruction of ethical sensibility.HARTMAN: I try to make that case all the time. Especially in TheLongest Shadow and the essay called "Public Memory and itsDiscontents." There I'm thinking of that aspect of Wordsworth andthe relation to what he said of our contemporary media mediations.Wordsworth sensed that the mind was being narrowed, was beingbesieged, made increasingly dependent on violent (perceptual)stimulants. I think what he saw near the beginning of the industrialrevolution is totally born out and is more acute today.BARNETT: So is his political value his emphasis on literary"nothingness"? Is it the non-narrative quality of Wordsworth, thechallenge to find something of interest after the addiction to theculture of modernity?HARTMAN: It's really a weaning from the addiction. That's why I callhim a minimalist, strange as it may seem. One wonders whetheranything worthwhile "narrating" happens in Wordsworth. And what ofthe modern movement towards abstraction? What do the NewHistoricists think about modern abstract art? There will have to besome peculiar mental gymnastics.BARNETT: That's why I'm reminded of that modernism debate inGermany--Brecht, Lukcs, Adorno. That's the crux of it--what do youdo with modernist art?--which like Romantic lyric seems to turn itsback on social reality.HARTMAN: It has eyes in the back of its head. It turns its back, but it

still sees. Now the Historicists would say that that very stronggestures say like this bespeak something about reality. One can alsoargue that to represent directly what's in front of one's eyes isactually less effective. I taught a course last semester on the limits ofrealism in Holocaust film and fiction. Vis--vis extreme events,realism is not always the most effective mode of representation. But Ihave been pleased and surprised that what I thought would happenhas not happened. Wordsworth was not marginalized. Blake, Shelleyand Byron have not hogged the whole field of literary attention.BARNETT: So Wordsworth survives as bte noir.HARTMAN: Yes, and there the Bloomian principle comes in: it is


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better to fight what's been there before than to evade. Moreover, Idon't know whether my work on Wordsworth has been totallyconsistent. I had often to go back, to get another view and yetanother. There may be inconsistencies; there may be real

differences. You can tell much better than I can. I get as muchintellectual pleasure in thinking once again about the Lucy poems orthinking yet again about "Old Man Traveling." They are such peculiarpoems.BARNETT: To pursue this question of politics, I can't help thinkingthat, like Adorno and Auerbach, your own life was profoundly affectedby fascism. And here I conjecture, leaving it to you to correct me,that a closer proximity to the collusion between culture and ideologyand the consequences that can result from this led to an interest inthe manner in which art resists ideological appropriation. This alsoseems to have led to a sensitivity to the tenor of current politicalcriticism. As you have noted, "The quest to make theory politicallyaccountable--always a difficult, sometimes repressive factor inintellectual life--is approaching the 1930s in intensity." Can oneargue that your work has from the start been a reaction to thedangerous potential in the relation between culture and politics--tothe dangers of the apocalyptic imagination?HARTMAN: That's a good question.BARNETT: A New Historicist would say you're evading politics. Canone say--although it may be more implicit than explicit--your work hasbeen a reaction to politics all along?HARTMAN: I've always been conscious of what happened in the 30s,both in Russia and--obviously--in Nazi Germany. And behind the ironcurtain after the war. That's always on my mind. The mistake mightbe to think it's on other people's minds too. Or the mistake is that Iam encompassed if not entrapped by the period in which I grew up.BARNETT: Most American critics want to place art in the service of apolitics, an imagined politics. Compare this to the European sceneright before the war, when left and right, Stalin and Hitler, blur in theenslavement of art to serve this political end. Thus we see--Imentioned Auerbach and Adorno--critics react to that and point to theaesthetic as resistant, that it will never be entirely incorporated. And

that's what defines art--if it's incorporated, it isn't art. Its resistancedefines it as art.HARTMAN: Absolutely. Even in the '30s the beginning of the NewCriticism had some of that attitude, a very defensive attitude. Thoseholding to the aesthetic element--or literariness--did circle the wagonsagainst the encroachment of politics. There will be a return toevaluating the aesthetic element in art. I'm sure it will come back. Imay be limited by the fact that I don't focus on a particular part of theglobe or a new body of literature. My glance tends to be inward andexpansive. I am interested by a change in the way that literaryhistory has moved. The passage of time, the incursion of the new,


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Documents

An Interview With Geoffrey Hartman