Chance and the Text of Experience: Freud, Nietzsche, and Shakespeare's Hamlet (review)

136Philosophy and Literature is how to persuade that Ingarden and some others are right. Ifthe accumulated experiences of ages are anything to go by, humanity will go on alternately enjoying art in its own perverse ways, or destroying it when its mood changes— caring not a bit for the broad Ingardenian theses, never mind their subdeties and distinctions. The present selection consists ofeight papers and a monumentalbibliography of works by and on Ingarden, which takes up over a quarter of the book. McCormick endeavors to convince us that he has put together a balanced representation ofIngarden's crucial works, but he has simply gathered scattered papers that have become available in translation since 1961. In addition to the one already cited, these include: "On Philosophical Aesthetics," "Phenomenological Aesthetics: An Attemptat Defining Its Range," "A Marginal Commentary on Aristotie's Poetics," "Psychologism and Psychology in Literary Scholarship," "Artistic and Aesthetic Value," "Aesthetic Experience and Aesthetic Object," and "The Physicalistic Theory of Language and the Work of Literature." Nor has McCormick paid much attention to the detail of editorial responsibilities . The paper on psychologism is preceded by the translator's (John Fizer's) useful introduction, but such material should either have been incorporated into the editor's general introduction or each paper given a similar separate introduction for consistency's sake. Moreover, in this book obviously aimed at readers with no German, Fizer is allowed to quote in German some crucial sentences from Ingarden's The Literary Work of Art, which he refers to as Das Literarische Kunstwerk and claims, against McCormick's testimony to the contrary, that it is not yet available in English. Ingarden's own texts have not been checked for similar inconsistencies and Husserl's work is sometimes referred to as Logische Untersuchungen, sometimes as Logical Investigations. The dust jacket correcdy informs that Ingarden died in 1970, but Fizer is allowed to say he died a year earlier, while the Congress Catalog rubric gives his date of birth as 1983 and implies, perhaps not surprisingly, that he is still alive. Curiously, the book is published in a series devoted to "Austrian intellectual history." LondonAdam Czerniawski Chance and the Text of Experience: Freud, Nietzsche, and Shakespeare's Hamlet, by William Beatty Warner; 308 pp. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986, $29.95. Iffinding the rightjacket photo is a matter ofchance, this author was certainly Reviews137 lucky. The cover shows Nietzsche and Paul Rèe drawing a small cart; in the driver's seat, holding a whip and smiling like the Mona Lisa, is Lou Salomé. Chance brought them together, chance provided the props and, if one were writing about those photographed, the intersection of their chances with one's own would be a chance too good to miss—a chance that would not only compel interpretation but would also offer the writer some purchase, some mastery over the labyrinths of those texts, those lives. Warner's book explores what is at stake for the subject who accommodates the threats and opportunities chance brings its way. At the same time, Warner also offers a program for biographical criticism. By studying the archive of a life and thought in the making, he aims to recuperate the role chance plays in the production of texts. This archive or "life-writing" is often directed to or against another person in a dialogue that is only pardy under conscious control and, for Freud in the 1890s, that other was Wilhelm Fliess. Warner's account of the role chance plays in Freud's life and thought in the 1890s begins with an explication of the interplay between memory and fantasy in psychic life and moves on to a detailed reading of Freud's "non-vixit" dream. Where Freud relates the dream to a single primal scene of rivalry, Warner's analysis is more concerned with the mechanisms that allow Freud to settle on such a singular reading. Other scenes compete with the one Freud privileges, but Freud feels interpellated by a linguistic coincidence and his response to this chance guides his interpretation in a self-serving way. It protects the self who interprets from its dissolution in interpretation; it turns Fliess into the defeated rival Freud...