A Scholar's Tale: Intellectual Journey of a Displaced Child of Europe (review)

Oscar Wilde claimed that "literary criticism is the only civilized form of autobiography." Part biographia literaria, part catalogue raisonné, part intellectual Bildung, Geoffrey Hartman's urbane memoir is above all a luminous defense of endangered literary and humanistic studies and a passionate plea for their preservation and continuing centrality. His Tale reviews over fifty years dedicated to learning, writing, and scholarship. "A life of learning has little moral weight unless it communicates the life in learning," he has said elsewhere, and his little book communicates, precisely and movingly, a subtle blend of self-reflection, moral gravitas, and generous tributes to other minds, in the companionable prose style (witty and good humored) that Hartman readers will readily recognize. Neither an introduction to the Hartman oeuvre, nor a candid revelation of the private man, the ideal readership of this backward glance would comprise those already familiar with the scope and variety of the territory, and especially with Hartman's impact during the heady revisionary 1970s and 1980s, years that changed the face of literary and critical studies, as well as with his later contributions to the fields of Holocaust and trauma studies and with his somber meditations on our cultures of mediation and memorialization. Displacement and a half-perceived, half-created pursuit of repair are the figural leitmotifs in the growth of this critic's mind, informed by a very literal (though, in this book, understated) displacement of the boy by Kindertransport in 1939 from Nazi Germany to England and then his transplantation, after the war, to the United States. Hartman's scholar-persona does not linger on the private, be it pain or gain, yet his autumnal reflections on a lifetime of reflection are strikingly personal. Sharp critical self-awareness, however, is never compromised in his account of continuities and discontinuities, of interactions with colleagues and peers, of an abiding love of and faith in poetry. The elegiac tone of the book's ending is tempered by an appended essay paying tribute to the great Erich Auerbach, to whose erudite legacy Hartman is a most distinguished successor.