Geoffrey
Hartman as Literary Critic
By Nicholas Birns
Hartman (1929-2016)
was born in Germany and came to America before the Second World War; he served
as a private in the US Army in the late 1940s, by which time he was already
pursuing an advanced degree at Yale, where he spent the entirety of his
academic career. After Wordsworth’s
Poetry, 1787-1814 (1964) Hartman became not only the late twentieth century‘s
leading expositor of the poetry of Wordsworth, but the critic who put Wordsworth
back on the map, rescuing him from decade of New Critical obloquy and restoring
him to the place in literary culture he had possessed in the time of Matthew Arnold.
Hartman, though, had a very different view of Wordsworth from Arnold, at once
de-emphasizing his sense of social responsibility and seeing him as, despite
his imaginative flights, bound to existence in a way that generated,
paradoxically, the euphoria of failed transcendence. Hartman liked Wordsworth’s
poetry, but neither idealized it nor used it to idealize experience or
perception. Hartman used the metaphor of akedah
(the Hebrew word for the binding of Isaac before his near-sacrifice to God
by Abraham) to express this sense of perilous yet concrete epiphany. Hartman’s
early work was seen by his teacher René Wellek as reflecting the influence of heidegger and sartre, but nonetheless going in its own distinct direction.
In the
1970s, Hartman also became known as one of the principal expositors of Derrida and as part of “the Yale
School.” Saving the Text (1981) was
originally published as essays in The
Georgia Review in the mid-1970s, when
that journal was under the editorship of John T. Irwin, and were expositions of
one of Derrida’s most difficult texts, Glas
(1974). Unlike most guides, Hartman did not aspire to be simpler than what
he was explicating. He took full advantage of Derrida’s wordplay and
allusiveness. In a sense this spirit of commentary was reminiscent of medieval
commentators on anterior texts such as Fulgentius. Indeed, Hartman spent much of the later
portion of his career working on a cognate tradition, the mode of Biblical
exposition practiced by scholars of the Hebrew Bible called midrash.
Hartman’s
growing concern with Jewish issues was manifested in his increasing interest in
issues of trauma, particularly regarding the Holocaust. The Third Pillar: Essays in Judaic Studies (2011) followed earlier
books such as The Longest Shadow: In The
Aftermath of the Holocaust (2002), in indicating Hartman’s dedication to
this subject and to, among other aspects, the oral testimony of the atrocity’s
victims---far from the nihilism and relativism often imputed to deconstruction
by its opponents. It was not only Hartman’s Jewish background but also his
depth of his involvement in Holocaust studies that made his strong defense of
his late friend Paul de Man, written after de Man‘s pro-Nazi wartime journalism
had been unearthed, so compelling. Hartman argued that de Man’s emphasis on
skepticism, critique, and unreliability could be read as atoning for the
ideological mistakes of his youth. In this respect, deconstruction was not a
nihilistic relativism but an ethically alert practice whose honesty lay in its
recognition of linguistic fissure and rupture, which made impossible the crude
doctrinal affirmations of de Man’s wartime writings. Hartman’s own position on
language, though, was as close to that of his lifelong friend and colleague
Harold Bloom as it was to deconstruction, seeing a strong if fractured agency
behind linguistic play. Not only Hartman’s critical acuteness but also his
rigor of judgment, his unwillingness to bend towards ideologies he saw as less
than perfect, made him an independent critical voice, which survived the
historical fate of deconstruction as such.
Bibliography
Atkins, G. Douglas, Geoffrey Hartman: Criticism as Answerable Style. London: Routledge,
1990.
Vermeulen, Pieter, ed. Geoffrey Hartman: Romanticism After The Holocaust. New York: Continuum, 2010.
Whitehead, Anne, “Geoffrey Hartman: A Deviant Homage.”
The Wordsworth Circle, 37, no. 1, (Winter
2006): 30-42.
