Responding to the Call: Hartman Between Wordsworth and Hegel

Abstract

Genres, Jacques Derrida reminds us, ventriloquizing a long tradition should not be mixed. He noted this in just about same breath as he acknowledged virtual necessity of breaking this putative law of genre. Marc Redfield's idea for occasion of responding to a new essay by Geoffrey Hartman was originally that of a deviant or defiant homage, not normally expects of homage and so already more promising that non-visionary dreariness of sheer praise, however much warranted. My small contribution wavers or oscillates between response and homage, mixing two genres that are perhaps better kept separate. Nonetheless, to respond to criticism by Geoffrey Hartman is virtually to indulge in homage, and it is a particular pleasure to note that even in phase of his career that Wordsworth had already called retirement, we came to praise Hartman not to bury him, there being no sign that Geoffrey Hartman is at all ready to be buried, intellectually or otherwise. If only all of us could still have all our wits--or better Hartman's wits--about us in our retirements. For a long time I had hoped--given my admiration for Hartman's book on Wordsworth, perhaps best book on Wordsworth ever and one of finest single-author studies extant--that later in his career he might turn his attention to another of Romantics (I was secretly rooting for Keats) as subject for a book-length study. I thought to myself: if someone in his early thirties could write such a superb book on Wordsworth, then surely that same critic could write as great or a greater study on some other Romantic further down line. I wondered about frequent returns to Wordsworth, such as those collected in The Unremarkable Wordsworth, where Hartman remarks that he was never able to stay away from Wordsworth for any length of time. Why, I wanted to know, having written book on Wordsworth, would Geoffrey Hartman write sometimes came across as so many supplements to his first landmark study of Wordsworth? Was it busy-ness that comes with such eminence? Not likely or not simply, in so far as stream of books as steady as Derwent has kept coming, and if anything flow has increased in brief era of so-called retirement. And there has been no visible loss of power in essays of last decade or so. I'm not sure that as a group Romanticists keep up enough with Hartman's writings on non-Romantic topics but an essay such as Language and Culture after Holocaust in The Fateful Question of Culture, to take only one example, seems as magisterial, accomplished and learned as anything from glory days of Beyond Formalism. As a bonus, these essays often have powerful resonances with Romantic literature and thought even when not expressly addressing Romanticism. Hartman's returns to Wordsworth are far from repetitions, even if present paper on Lucy poems does repeat in perhaps even a finer tone central insight of his early study of Wordsworth, namely importance of apocalypticalization--if that's a word--of everyday, apocalypse being invoked in sense of a revelation or discovery, a disclosing that can be but is not necessarily of order of sacred. Here, in a reading different and deeper from his earlier approach to Strange Fits of Passion, Hartman tracks in precise and suggestive ways how the everyday in poem is crossed by eruption of singular, in this case: of what once befell lover. The is, a little unexpectedly but tellingly, a thought. Hartman's underscoring of this character of text as foregrounding a certain thought or kind of thought seems to me one of signal contributions of this new reading. We are familiar with notion of Wordsworth as philosophical poet, usually via readings of The Prelude or The Excursion, but I find emphasis on thought here in deceptively simpler Lyrical Ballads particularly illuminating. …