Public Space and the Thing Itself

BOOK REVIEWS "so many points of contact, correspondences, [and] intrinsic agreement." This essay focuses on the use of symbolism in Yeats's and Hofmannsthal 's lyric dramas, a feature, he says, that "never addressed only the passing historical moment" but evoked the sense of symbol "as the natural emanation of poetry, and of the drama as mask and ritual," producing in effect "a timeless dimension, a perpetuity of reference which belongs by definition to symbolism." In looking at their body of prose work and their roles as public figures, Hubert Lengauer considers both writers' attempts to resolve the dualism of art and life, attempts proceeding from the internalized conflict over the demands of committed political action and those of artistic integrity. And in his concluding essay Avril Pyman Uluminates Aleksandr Blok's simUar conflict between the particular and the poetic, remarking how the Russian writer was forced to contend finaUy with a social environment having grown less and less receptive to his work, the "new spectator" for whom all three authors had prepared in effect "elbowed out of the way by the bureaucrat and the censor," and "drained of his demanding youth and boldness." Pyman focuses weU on Yeats's and Blok's shared views on the nature of art and the role of the artist, especially on how these views changed and matured for them amid the national and global upheavals of their times, ultimately compelled as they were, as he quotes Blok, to create a "cosmos" out of "the given chaos." The connecting and relating of these three writers with and to each other, although perhaps at first glance seeming only an academic exercise, actually results in a comprehensive, insightful, embracing, significant collection that not only sheds new light on a critical theme of Yeats's work but also valuably introduces to the general reader works by two of Yeats's most influential continental contemporaries. Moreover , each of the nine papers (refreshingly void of theoretical cant, excellently edited and documented) serves as a lucid, incisive study in its own right, even as each uncovers another thematic layer, further contributing to the collection's overall scope and development. Gordon J. De La Vars ------------------- Keuka College Public Space and the Thing Itself Morris Dickstein. Double Agent: The Critic and Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. xvi + 207 pp. $23.00 99 ELT 37:1 1994 Robert Hughes. Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. xiii + 210pp. $19.95 THE EASIEST WAY to review these two books together would be to say that Robert Hughes provides the practice for which Morris Dickstein gives the history and theory. Hughes is the type of "generalist" critic who has values, and not just footnotes, and who addresses important matters of interest and concern to the public at large, not only to academics worried if they have enough African-American writers on their syllabi. What worries Dickstein most is that there are no more such critics left. Double Agent begins with a searching chapter on Matthew Arnold, and then tries to trace what's happened to an essayistic tradition of independent intellectual diagnosis, sensitive at once to aesthetic nuance as well as political import. Dickstem remarks in his preface that his book is not an "elegy" and that he could list two dozen young critics in whom the spirit of Edmund WUson and Lionel TrUling abides. Alas, however, he never names them. Worse, Dickstein doesn't seem quite aware of how his faUure to devote at least a final chapter to these critics—or reaUy anyone in the last three decades (although Roland Barthes's S/Z does get a few pages)—severely limits the nature of his book. George Orwell is the last critic treated at length. The concluding chapter of Double Agent consists of a rather stiff dialogue between a glum, Dickstein-like fellow, "A," and a spirited younger one, "B," far more sympathetic to whatever rough beast has been born out of deconstruction—principally seen here in the form of a new historicist. The older "A" allows that he's intrigued but seldom moved. Their game isn't my game." Fair enough, to a point...