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120 the minnesota review rightly holds that Zola's texts can no more literally incorporate the world than money can literally become the objects it buys. What distinguishes Bell's approach from currently hegemonic criticism is recognition that the theoretical impossibility of direct representation in no way diminishes the pragmatic impact of representation collectively accepted as valid. It is grotesque to assume that words on paper can capture the reality of history; it is equally grotesque to assume that words on paper can buy things. Both absurdities are facts, and Models ofPower is an important exploration of their literary and social consequences. SANDY PETREY Paul Buhle. C.L.R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary. London and New York: Verso, 1988, pp. 197. $13.95 (paper). When the revolutionary socialist, Pan-Africanist, and cricket correspondent C.L.R. James was buried in Trinidad in June, 1989, a Caribbean steel band paid tribute by adding "The Internationale" and Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" to its usual repertoire. Paul Buhle's C.L.R. James shows why such a mixing of different—some would say opposing—traditions was a consummately fitting way to honor James. The late Trinidadian historian and prime minister Eric Williams once portrayed James as a potentially great figure tragically hamstrung by a commitment to "the absurdities of world revolution." Buhle recognizes that such a view is itself absurd. He writes that James, committed as he was to world revolution, was "at once scholar and Trinidad's greatest cultural nationalist. Cricket afforded one sort of public fulfillment..., Marxism another." (44) For Buhle, James was many things: artist, revolutionary, athlete, nationalist, internationalist , Angloplile, Graecophile, libertarian, leninist, Black liberationist, Pan-Africanist, classicist and lover of popular culture. The central achievement of Buhle's biography of James is that he shows that James did not connect his various roles with the word "nevertheless." Rather he saw himself as artist and therefore revolutionary; as nationalist and therefore Pan-Africanist. James' initial unwillingness to accept such categories as eternal opposites probably antedated his appreciation of Hegel, but it is a profoundly Hegelian stance in any case. Indeed James, like Hegel, never understood the resolution of contradictions as the mere reconciliation of polarities . He did not take his roles in pairs but sought to see things whole. To know James therefore almost requires the "algebra in constant movement" which, according to James, Hegel's philosophy provides. Buhle imposes no such formulae (and is curiously reticent on James' Hegelianism) but his impressive range and his willingness to take intellectual chances to make connections among James' various activities mark the study as an attempt to picture the whole James. Buhle also follows James in refusing to cast objectivity and passion as opposites. James introduced his 1960 lectures at Trinidad Public Library by observing, "I do not propose to be impartial. Any public lecturer on politics who says he is impartial is either an idiot or a traitor. You cannot be impartial in matters of this kind; but you can present a rounded point of view." Those words fairly characterize Buhle's approach to James. He "sharefs] James' particular socialist vision" but attempts a rounded point of view. Moreover, Buhle realizes that there is so much in James that there can no more be one codification of James' "particular socialist vision" than there can be of Marx's. Likewise impressive, and necessary for a James biographer, is the ability of Buhle to range authoritatively over the continents, the centuries and the immensely varied cultural forms with which James was concerned. As the author of Marxism in the United States (1987) and the former editor of Cultural Correspondence, Buhle is especially well-prepared to provide context when discussing the labyrinth of the American anti- Stalinist left and to comment on James' writings on popular culture. But areas outside Buhle's specialties are also fully and intelligently discussed, with the material on James and West Indian nationalism being particularly well-developed . The lesson of James' life, and of Buhle's biography, is that the oppressed must not only avoid letting the oppressor make choices for them but must also avoid letting the oppressor present them with false and sterile choices. The...

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