Let me begin by acknowledging rhetorical awkwardness facing conference respondent who is invited to do more than applaud but not expected to develop reading of her own. The proper thing for good Enlightenment critic to do would be to use time to formulate question or two for discussion, to begin to put pressure on argument, and to flag some areas of critical concern. But what if I had nothing to add and did not want to change one word? Probably most rhetorically dangerous thing to do--the most idiotic, most suggestive of farce and sacrilege--would be to say simply amen. This liturgical punctuation would be all more perverse given Geoffrey Hartman's concluding dismissal of the glittering rhetoric and artificial afflatus of explicit religious predication in favor of poetry that by its very verbal quietness conveys something of spirituality of everyday life. However easily and often word itself may be swallowed and hummed down--amen, I mean ahem,--there is perhaps no more rhetorically charged, loud, absolute, and unqualified ratification (literally, equivalent of saying Truth with capital T). Thus to cede one's place in critical discourse, by borrowing instead from conventional formulas of religious belief, would appear to foreclose on question that Hartman himself raises with enough ambivalence to want to keep it open, question he attributes to Raymond Williams's project of common culture: will persuade us that it is all right to live within our means, to quicken our response to low-profile words rather than wishing to be moved by thaumaturgic ones? (The Fateful Question of Culture 62). In spirit of this question I want to speak of an amen-like trope traceable through Hartman's work as well as in that of poets he writes on: minimally disruptive, self-quieting all but non-response or non-intervention, signifying consent and relinquishing for now of demand for change and improvement--a bump, skip, or fold in utterance that neither challenges nor fortifies an earlier thought (even when this has been shown to be precarious illusion or error), but simply end-stops it. Where there might have been wholesale liquidation and re-creation, potentially transformative energies recede into minor miracle of continuance--the moon rising another evening. What Blanchot once defined as Orphic task of bearing witness to underworld modes of being, not by light of day, but in their very recessiveness and fading to obscurity, never seems to have daunted Hartman, and perhaps it would take an equally fearless, patient critic to risk teasing out figures of non-emergence structuring Hartmanian thought--evidenced here in figure of who into Nature as if Nature had taken back what had not yet fully emerged, as well as elsewhere in theme of a pastoral culture, which fades into memory before it has emerged into maturity, like twilight presence of Lucy (The Fateful Question of Culture 76). One is tempted to speak with Laura Quinney of structure of disappointment, but without disappointment's affect: expectations are simply deflated, illusions let down, and this deflation follows so quietly on elation it is felt to be what sustains, rather than kills them; or there is sudden switch in perspective which nevertheless preserves illusion it disrupts: dies and this confirms, rather than destroys, sense of her untouchability. (1) Here are two comparatively high-pitched ecstatic examples of lyric utterances celebrating, and themselves coming to rest in, completion miraculously suffered without psychological maturation, traumatic break or crisis, both discussed by Hartman in his first book The Unmediated Vision (1954); first is from Rilke's second Sonnet to Orpheus: Singender Gott, wie hast/du sie vollendet, dass sie nicht begehrte,/erst wach zu sein? Sieh, sie erstand und schlief. …
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Nov 11, 2008
Sada Mire 
Open Access