In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

c h a p t e r 3 Complicity and Catharsis: The Immature Criticism of Harry Berger Susanne L. Wofford In participating in this volume, I am reminded of a translation problem that presents itself in reading Rabelais, who often refers to Pantagruel walking about Paris being accompanied by ‘‘ses gens’’—his people. Pantagruel goes everywhere with ‘‘his people,’’ who are not exactly family but definitely include his household, and not servants only but also followers and friends. ‘‘Ses gens’’ means everything from his people to his family, his household retainers, his followers, his friends, and includes the sense of people of his kind. In this essay I try to define what it means to be Harry Berger’s ‘‘gens,’’ and this essay locates itself among its kin and family in ways that I hope will be illuminating. Rabelais presents us also with the scene of the wonderfully enigmatic meeting of Pantagruel and Panurge. The chapter title tells of the sudden, surprising friendship that springs up instantly between these two great opposites: ‘‘How Pantagruel met Panurge, whom he loved all his life’’ (‘‘lequel il aima toute sa vie’’). Berger can seem to be the trickster Panurge —pan ourgos—who speaks all languages but finally cannot get Pantagruel to read the truth of the body, but it would be more accurate to say that the two of them—these two great friends—come together to form a single figure resembling that of Harry Berger. For Berger is first and foremost a humanist and a moral thinker. As Peter Erickson points 31 32 The Immature Criticism of Harry Berger out in his introduction to Making Trifles of Terrors, ‘‘Berger is resolutely —some might same relentlessly—moral in his critical pursuits,’’1 and he is also importantly the classicist, the reader of Plato, the scholar of myth and epic. But Berger is also the trickster, guilty of multilingual puns and wordplay galore. The deep and completely inexplicable love that Rabelais celebrates between his two characters—the giant humanist who celebrates education and the scrawny trickster without a crown to his name—captures the unusual nature of Berger’s scholarship and helps to explain why his works always represent something so much more than just another smart book on a Renaissance or classical topic. Berger’s work takes us to the wellhead of our deepest intellectual desires, but once there he discovers to us the things we had to turn our eyes away from in order to get there. This trick qualifies the anagnorisis and narrativizes it—it becomes now a journey, an epic Spenserian journey where what seemed like the telos is actually the start of the voyage. Berger came to a similar moment in which ending serves as a new beginning very early in his career when, in 1957, he ended The Allegorical Temper by revealing that the quest which Guyon and the Palmer (in Spenser ’s Faerie Queene Book Two, the subject of his book) had thought was over was only just beginning: In the final moment they stand on the edge of the false paradise waiting for the fresh wind of Creation to take them home. In a sense they have found themselves; they have a feeling, at least, that they are not home. Perhaps there is even a faint echo of hopelessness. Perhaps their essential selves harbor a vague uneasiness too profound to be articulate or clearly felt: that they are ordained to wander ‘‘on the foam / Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.’’ This is a modest revelation. But it is the best temperance can do. The goodly frame is complete, and the world lies all before them.2 Berger makes this ‘‘modest revelation’’ seem more and more modest as his passage continues, until suddenly one realizes almost as a surprise that what seemed like a celebration of the successful conclusion to the quest has instead become a lament for the limitations of temperance as a virtue and an evocation of the ways in which deeper imaginings may occasionally be visible through its veils. Finally, Berger wants to suggest the incompleteness and inadequacy of temperance as an ethical mode for confronting the fallen, diminished world in which mortal beings operate, but by quoting the final lines of Paradise Lost to do so, he implicitly contrasts his own ending with Guyon’s—as he and the reader hand in hand but slowly wend their way out of the book and away from the limitations of...

Share