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  • David Simpson (bio)
The Fateful Question of Culture. By Geoffrey H. Hartman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. 272 pp. $24.50.

Whoever pleads for the maintenance of this radically culpable and shabby culture becomes its accomplice, while the man who says no to culture is directly furthering the barbarism which our culture showed itself to be.

—Theodor W. Adorno

There was a brief time when there were two cultures, us and them, the literary and the scientific, defended by the self-appointed knights in armor, Sir Frank (Leavis, much too prickly for a real knighthood) and Sir Charles (Snow, who got one), rattling their weapons across Cambridge high tables and into the microphones of the British radio stations. That simplification could perhaps have been maintained only in a major university in a small country for a short time; it could not have been expected to restrain so tidily a term that Raymond Williams has described as “one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.” 1 The current British minister of culture, who wrote a doctoral dissertation on Wordsworth, is also minister of sport and holds in his portfolio opera and theater but also soccer and the lottery. Williams claims that this broadest sense of culture, whereby everyone and everything has its own culture, was first publicized by Johann Gottfried von Herder (89). These days, as Geoffrey H. [End Page 251] Hartman observes in his now-published Wellek lectures of 1992, the designations have become even more microscopic: mall culture, beach culture, surfer culture, and so on and on. One reason is the decline in the “capital” of what is called (though not as often as it used to be) “high” culture. After Auschwitz, and Adorno and others on Auschwitz, mention of Beethoven has brought to mind barbarism as often as it has called up Bach. The culture vulture may thence be understood not just as keen-eyed, insatiable, and first to the scene but also as a carrion feeder that is first to the kill. Culture speaks with and for the dead but has been known to stand by watching as the dying occurs and even to participate energetically in the doing.

The power and pathos of Hartman’s address to culture, a topic rendered somewhat stale by the reporting if not by the content of the latest “culture wars,” arise because he is at once committed to a validation of the term and radically evasive about what “it” is. The dead for whom Hartman first spoke as a literary critic in the 1950s were the most eminent, the great poets. They are still here and still speaking. But as his career evolved, it took on the death and memory of ordinary men, women, and children, the “6 million,” along with the recollections of the survivors. He knows that no shelf of great books can do for them, or indeed for him. He also knows that he cannot do without those books, and the quiet claim, or hope, of this book is that no one else can do without them either. Hartman is sparing with the autobiographical touches and commendably wary of any concession to the flourishing genre of academic life stories, in which our colleagues tell us how they feel about everything and why—which I suppose is what must be called “personal culture.” So the few glimpses we get into his inner life are all the more telling. There is an avowed sense of “being an outsider to life,” of wanting to “be a part of all I perceive,” of wanting to feel with others instead of just “for” them (21). The considerable general and historical weight of these feelings in the life that is Hartman’s is in fact “cultural” in its experience of and continued engagement with the death and survival of Europe’s Jews, a matter that affects us all and that we will never learn enough about and whose allegorical [End Page 252] and analogical stresses incumbent on the desire to remember (and indeed to live through, even to die through) largely compose the recent popular cinematic culture. Schindler’s List, Titanic, Saving Private Ryan, as...

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