A Scholar’s Tale: Intellectual Journey of a Displaced Child of Europe (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Scholar’s Tale: Intellectual Journey of a Displaced Child of Europe Elizabeth Freund Geoffrey Hartman, A Scholar’s Tale: Intellectual Journey of a Displaced Child of Europe. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007. 195 pp. “What is unexamined is not lived.” (A Scholar’s Tale, 131) “A life of learning,” Geoffrey Hartman said in his Charles Haskins lecture in 2000, “has little moral weight unless it communicates the life in learning.” In his memoir, A Scholar’s Tale, Hartman, renowned scholar, teacher, founder and disseminator of Jewish and Holocaust studies, lover of poetry, and humanist par excellence, sketches an introspective self-portrait. Casting a critical backward glance, he delineates the evolution of a life of and in learning over five remarkably productive decades. His chronicle of the growth of a critic’s mind takes us on a tour of his work and world across the years which changed the face of humanistic studies and gave new meaning to the terms “crisis” and “criticism.” The genre of the book is not that of a “life” in the conventional sense — it is a retrospective trek around the changing and variegated landscapes of the mind. The territory is complex and capacious, the detours rich in insight, and our guide through it a genial consciousness that cautiously avoids the pitfalls of solipsism — insatiably curious, candid, astonishingly erudite, gently inclusive. Readers of Hartman’s prose will recognize the elegant decorum — effortless reticence, [End Page 213] thick resonance, remarkable breadth of associations, and unceasing inquiry. The prominence of the question mark, the qualifying “and yet” (a gesture which Derrida described as writing with both hands) create a pluralistic space for alert (but never stridently polemical) reflection alongside a resolute self-reliance in the encounters with words, worlds, and other minds. Ever a close reader, retrospective Hartman is a persona reflecting on a lifetime of reflection and writing, testifying to its continuities and discontinuities, contingencies and (in)coherences, its eclectic diversity, its uninterrupted fascination the “variorum of interpretations,” its fruitful (and occasionally perturbing) professional camaraderies. This is probably the most urbane and least ego-centred intellectual self-portrait it has been my privilege to encounter. The autobiographical “I” is subtly diffident, yielding a unique blend of moral gravitas and good-humored wit. Given his early circumstances and later work on traumatic memory, Hartman’s reflections are surprisingly — benignly — free of bitterness or resentment. Keeping private issues in the wings of his mental theater, he is at pains to remind us that this work is above all “a defense of literary studies in their increased scope and variety,” rather than a piece of “ego fiction.” Thus, his tale does not linger on personal wounds, although a reflection on “wounds and words” is the subject of one of his finest essays (in Saving the Text, 1981). “Perhaps,” he remarks towards the end of his tale, “as Oscar Wilde claimed, literary criticism is the only civilized form of autobiography. The theater of the mind plays out a tension between reticence and self-revelation” (158). To what extent can the life of the mind remain severed from its material, cultural, and historical contexts, or its psychic wounds? Despite disavowals, a moving drama of identity construction, a measure of repair and a trajectory of “coasting homeward” (Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors) unfolds in the tension between reticence and self-revelation. The trope of a journey in Hartman’s subtitle is literally the story of “a displaced child of Europe,” a formative experience, alongside another governing trope of movement from innocence to experience. These are the cornerstones and indeed in some sense the moral and epistemic foci of his autobiography. The story of “origins,” a term Hartman characteristically queries as possibly too definitive, is told sparingly. In March 1939, a nine-year-old from Frankfurt is on his way to England on a Kindertransport. His father had decamped many years earlier; his mother is already in the United States, having left Germany shortly after Kristallnacht; the boy has been waiting for a visa. His grandmother, whose life would end in Theresienstadt, sees him off. This displaced and lonely child grows into a studious but rather forlorn and hungry teenager in...