A Study of Phenomenology

31:4 Book Reviews There are so many questionable points in Keane's reading of the Gregory elegy that Keane himself is forced to concede, "I am not sure I 'believe' every detail of my own argument" (241). It is not clear, however, that he is aware of the extent to which his argument is at odds with his methodology. Implicit in the "genetic" criticism that Keane pursues throughout his book is the claim that he makes explicitly at one point: "That genetic impulse survived all revision" (157). This survivor can be identified with the survivor of the Gregory elegy, to whom Keane gives the names of "Yeats," but only if that name designates, not the "unique individual" Yeats, who might rule by authorial intention, but the multiplicity of voices that survive as the echoes that Keane hears in the poem. Keane's case for Yeats's "covert meaning," in the phrase he takes from Irvin Ehrenpreis (200), is in fact built wholly on his detection of echoes from a wide variety of authors, including Wordsworth, Milton, Shakespeare , Jonson, Donne, Chatterton, Hardy, and most surprisingly, but nonetheless convincingly, Dryden. Because this chorus sings with a "dark voice" (201), deliberately repressed, Keane elsewhere assigns it qualities of the culturally repressed "fecund darkness of woman" (41). Thus, "the tragic and authoritative voice of Jonathan Swift" emerges from "a female medium" in Yeats's play The Words upon the Window-pane (63), and the authorial voice of Yeats emerges from a similar medium in the Gregory elegy. Keane's critical theory subordinates the medium to the voice, the darkness to the "phallic flame" (xvi), which, engraved by Blake, supplies the frontispiece to Keane's book. Nevertheless, Keane's theory is betrayed by his method, which mutes voice in order to hear echoes. Once he has heard their siren song, it is too late for Keane to tie himself to the phallic mast. He is already bound for deconstruction. Terence Diggory Skidmore College A STUDY OF PHENOMENOLOGY Mario J. Valdés. Phenomenological Hermeneutics and the Study of Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987. $25.00 Written as a companion volume to Shadows in the Cave, Mario Valdés's Phenomenological Hermeneutics tries in a very brief space to crack a handful of literary theory's hardest chestnuts: "What is the text? Does it have a fixed or a variable identity? Is it shared by a plurality of readers?" Through his chary if sanguine responses to these questions, Valdés situates himself between "the absolutist quest for the author's intentions" (historicism) on the one hand and the "giddy irresponsibility of a 'joy ride'" (deconstruction) on the other. By neither abandoning the ideal of interpretive verification nor defining it as adherence to an a priori principle, the author holds out the hope that the critical enterprise can be undertaken responsibly and yet undogmatically. 512 31:4 Book Reviews Phenomenological Hermeneutics opens with a whirlwind survey of "the tradition of relational commentary"—by which is meant something like "relativist" commentary , without the skeptical connotations. Beginning with Vives and touching on Vico, Humboldt, Saussure, Croce, Sapir, Merleau-Ponty, the Russian formalists, the Constance school, Gadamer, and Ricoeur, Valdés covers vast tracts of intellectual landscape in two dozen pages, and for just that reason he manages neither to establish the existence of this hitherto unheard-of tradition nor to make more than vaguely suggestive comments on the numerous figures he mentions. To do justice to this topic would require considerably more intensive examination than Valdés here gives it. The important issues he is addressing certainly warcant more thoroughness. To the question how shared meaning is possible, for instance, Valdés responds basically as follows: "in the critical or scholarly encounter the text is reactualized within a contextual framework based on the ongoing tradition to which they [sic] belong. . . . Every time we offer commentary on literature we participate in the tradition of commentary." Valdés thus endorses Croce's idea that "a community of commentary ... is the true author of great works of literature that make up our sense of world." This conception has a good deal to recommend it. It overcomes the problem of the...