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William T. Stafford. Books Speaking to Books: A Contextual Approach to American Fiction. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1981. 150 pp. $16.50. A "perhaps even somewhat facetious class exercise" was the "true germ," the author tells us, for the chapters that follow. The exercise was to structure "a clearly defined and limited context of three novels [each] by three of America's most eminent novelists" to see if the arbitrary contiguity "rendered insights of a kind possibly not apparent in any other way" (p. 6). Thus appears one of Stafford's clearest accounts of "context," a term put forth as naming a significant critical methodology whose exemplification should justify the publication of this book. But the term and method are used with very little critical definiteness as they thread their way through this very looselyknit collection of applications. The only factor limiting the freedom of Stafford 's "contextuality" to devour whatever it chooses, it becomes evident, is its tripartite digestive system: grouping subjects in threes is the most consistent , yet unexplained, practice in this book. One of Stafford's basic convictions is that "almost all criticism is a form of parasitism," so it follows that we find in this book signs of the parasite almost as plentiful as those of the sustaining organism. The author provides much information about the gestation of the book from an unconscious teaching practice to a fully conscious "methodology," yet habitually he hedges the conclusions his method produces with so many adverbial and other qualifications that one senses his lack of faith in it. It is offered less as a hope for the future of criticism than as a summary of the author's own admittedly "subjective" critical concerns over a long career of teaching, editing, and writing. Thus, the last chapter, which was the first to be written and was published in American Literature in 1953, is placed to stand as the clincher proving the rightness of the method from the start. The argument of the book would be clearer, and some of the self-explanation and repetition precluded, I believe, if its chapters had been arranged according to the chronology of their subject-matter, from Emerson to Updike. Its title is inaccurate since books are not the only forms of writing described as speaking in the various contexts. A more dialogical emphasis--perhaps "Books Speaking With Books"--might have uncovered to the reader a more integrated tradition of written conversations or debates over central aesthetic and cultural issues. In spite of what I see as a vagueness reigning over the conception and organization of this book, however, it does offer distinct stimulating items of value. James readers will be interested specifically in Stafford's discussion of The Wings of the Dove in a context with Moby-Dick and Absalom, Absalom! (pp. 19-22), of the international theme in The American as a precursor to three modern films (pp. 53-70), and of James's story "The Birthplace" seen as a "fable for critics" (pp. 114-19). I question the decision to reprint, edited but with essentially the same argument, the 1953 essay "Emerson and the James Family." Its thesis was that the separate James men collectively saw Emerson "whole" according to Emerson's own criteria for the whole man as "the Knower, the Doer, and the Sayer." Thus, to the elder Henry, a theologian, Emerson was a divine manifestation; to the artist Henry, Emerson was primarily a moral philosopher; and to the philosopher William, Emerson was the supreme artist. THE HENRY JAMES REVIEW 154 WINTER, 1982 Stafford offers a fine selection of quotations from correspondence, essays, and orations by the four writers to carry his argument; but the idea that Emerson's criteria of human completeness were met, with regard to himself, through a combination of the views of three observers, each of whom evaluated him differently , is a result more ironic than convincing. Stafford's editing of his earlier essay, moreover, is not always felicitous. His later sentence style, perhaps in imitation of James, is, in many instances, more syntactically involved and less clear in diction than his earlier style; and the later version does not include as many...

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