The Radical Reader (review)

114 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW Charlotte Delbo, None of Us WillReturn (Auschwitz and After). Beacon Press, Boston; 128pp., $3.95. This is a book of survival a tone poem of resignation and bitterness. Charlotte Delbo was active in the French Resistance before she and her husband, Georges Dudach, were arrested in Paris on March 2, 1942. Dudach was killed on May 23 by the Gestapo, at Mont-Valerien. Delbo was sent to Auschwitz. It was doubtless her political convictions that carried Delbo through that death camp, where to survive was to triumph. The fascist compression ofordinary capitalist wage-slavery—job, family, distractions, allegiance to the State—into the daily rape and annihilation of workers by the SS thugs made most people want to die. Is this the same as being dead, the author often wonders, herself dreamlike amid the dead, the dying, the mad, the terrified, and the broken. Her work breaks and other moments of peace and human contact with a few women a conscious and strong as she was perhaps made the difference. The hopelessness in Delbo's tone belies her rage at the mad dogs who captured and tried to break her, but did not. Roger Taus Stephen Knight and Michael Wilding, eds., The RadicalReader. Sydney*. Wild & WooUey, 1977. 145pp. "The RadicalReader is a collection of new, hitherto unpublished, radical criticism of Uterary topics," its editors write in their introduction. "Since we don't Uke either the existing social system or the existing criticism it produces, we offer alternatives." Like any anthology that aims "to offer an eclectic range of radicalism and criticism" by both American and Australian critics, TheRadicalReader lacks a clear and cohesive ideological focus (a touchstone of much bourgeois criticism), but its individual shafts of critical Ught are plentiful. Most of the essays here fall into traditional critical categories: there are studies of Uterary periods (David Craig and Michael Egan, "Decadence and Crack-Up: Literature and Society in the Twenties and Thirties"), of Uterary theory (Didier Coste, "PoUtextual Economy"), and of individual writers (Alastair Davidson on "The Literary Criticism of Antonio Gramski," Jonah Raskin on Traven, Jack Lindsay on John Ruskin, and Wilding on "The Radical Milton"). While some of the better pieces here fall into these more traditional Uterary analyses (Uke David Lawton's "English Poetry and EngUsh Society, 1370-1400," or Knight's "PoUtics and Chaucer's Poetry"), the real center of the collection deals with what the editors call "the sociology of the pubUshing and the academic teaching of Uterature." Carol Ferner's '"The Inadequacyof the Imagination'*. Towards a Feminist Literary Criticism" is an extremely useful survey of feminist criticism and a guide for its future. Richard Kostelanetz' "The Beginning of 'The End'" describes in detail thedifficulties he encountered in getting TheEndofIntelligent Writing published. Finally, Jan Bruck's "The AUenation of the Academic" discusses the alienating nature of Uterary studies in the academy today. BOOKS INBRIEF 115 The editors promise that The RadicalReader is just the first in a continuing series. "Contributions for future anthologies are welcome, sent to the editors in care of the publishers, or at the address below." (Knight/Wilding, Department of English, University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia.) Several of the essays here begin with descriptions of the limitations of bourgeois criticism in our age. The continuation of a coUection like The RadicalReader is one antidote to that condition. David Peck ...