Endless Experiments: Essays on the Heroic Experience in American Romanticism by Todd M. Lieber (review)

Studies in American Fiction229 (Summer, 1962), he suggests a kinship between the Georgia writer and Nathanael West in much the way Busch manages his Nabokov-Hawkes confrontation. I could go on almost endlessly praising Hawkes: A Guide to His Fictions. It not only turns a wise and knowing gaze at a difficult body of work but also modestly suggests areas for further exploration in an "agenda" affixed to the end of the book. One of the most pressing needs certainly is for someone to comment systematically on the handling of point of view in each of the novels. Busch's speaking of "a narrative focus that does not reveal the consistent viewpoint encountered in more traditional novelists" (p. 62) does not help us very much in understanding how The Owl and The Goose on the Grave work narratively. There is a certain vagueness here also: "Charivari has, essentially, no narrative focus; it is told by a voice as all-knowing and acidic as that of the third-person narrator which runs through The Waste Ixind" (p. 35). Busch is quite right in lamenting the shortage of serious critical attention shown Hawkes' work. He accounts for what he believes to be the best of it in a "Bibliographical Note" placed between the notes section and the index. I should personally have preferred a complete listing of secondary material on Hawkes to bring up to date Jackson R. Bryer's bibliography in the Fall 1963 Critique- There is not so much of it that this could not have been easily managed. Besides, Busch refers to "Marshall C. Olds's unpublished bibliography [which] supersedes Bryer's" (p. 184).Why not have used this, perhaps in addition to the very intelligent and useful "Bibliographical Note"? As things now stand there is mention only of AlbertJ. Guerard's superb essay in the Fall 1963 Critique; this issue also contains first-rate studies by Alan Trachtenberg, D. P. Reutlinger, and Charles Matthews. I should also like to see some reference to interesting pieces like Marc Ratner's "The Constructed Vision: The Fiction of John Hawkes," Studi Americani, 11 (1965). Hawkes: A Guide to His Fictions has very few lapses indeed. I can point only to William Hencher being mistakenly referred to as Michael Hencher (p. 89) and Stephen Dedalus appearing as Stephen Daedalus (p. 137). I don't mean to abandon Mr. Busch on this negative note. He has written as good a book as we are likely to get for a long time on John Hawkes. We can hope only that he will feel obliged to update it periodically whenever Hawkes comes out with new fiction or drama. University of Wisconsin, MilwaukeeMelvin J. Friedman Lieber, Todd M. Endless Experiments: Essays on the Heroic Experience in American Romanticism. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1973. 277 pp. Cloth: $8.00. Years ago, Arthur O. Lovejoy, in "On the Discrimination of Romanticisms," complained that the term "Romanticism" had taken on so many different, even contradictory, meanings as to be useless; and he suggested that one of our most pressing critical tasks was to restore integrity to that word by distinguishing various "Romanticisms " from one another and analyzing each type in terms of "the several ideas and aesthetic susceptibilities of which it is composed." Heeding Lovejoy's caution and responding to his challenge, Mr. Lieber has attempted to "apprehend the metaphysical structure of American Romanticism and to examine the manner in which the ideas become manifest in the dramatic experience of the Romantic hero" (p. viii). His thesis neither staitles nor invites controversy: serious American Romanticism, since it stems from a 230Reviews Puritan Weltanschauung, is, he says, inescapably dualistic in its assumptions about the relationships between mind and object, spirit and matter, the human and the divine; and the American Romantic imagination, aspiring -to achieve a reconciliation of these polarities, characteristically discovers that such harmonies are essentially unstable and require "endless experimentation" and continuous re-creation in art to be kept fresh. Unable to accept any fixed absolutes, the American artist finds a mediatingvision possible only in fleeting moments and otherwise moves from point to point among these persistent dualities. While numerous of the larger implications of his thesis...