Against Theory

AGAINST THEORY 541 likely to impose a severe strain on the ability of her readers. to assess the total complex arising from her consideration of Virgilian commentators, translators, imitators, illustrators. For another, the local density of some of these chapters deflects attention from the overview that, no doubt conscious of the dangers inherent in this kind of extended survey, she insists the reader bear always in mind. Inevitably, however, especially in the last two chapters, the rhythm and sweep of the earlier ones seem a bit diminished; the structure of the arch is still in view, but one is more likely to be aware of its separate segments: the readings of Pope and Frost, for example, emerge very much as blocks that can stand on their own, apart from their place in the scheme. Pastoral and Ideology is a book that will appeal to a great variety of scholars and specialists, unlikely though it is that anyone of them will possess the overall command of the material that the author has acquired in her committed pursuit of her theme. Her immersion in her research is everywhere evident, as is her thoughtfulness and seriousness. She strikes out independent positions of her own between New Historicist and Marxist extremes, and she writes throughout in lucid, unencumbered English. Given the ideological slant ofa book on pastoral, from a less tasteful critic we might have had the clubby Doric of academic; pseudo-language that cries out to be called 'Herdish.' This book avoids the trap; that is not the least of its pleasures. Against Theory JOSEPH ADAMSON Frank Lentricchia. Ariel and the Police: Michel Foucault, William James, Wallace Stevens Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 1988.208. us $22.95 The main theme holding the quite disparate essays in this book together is the danger of theoretical totalization. The first part of the title is a phrase from one of Stevens's letters: 'Now, Ariel, rescue me from police and all that kind of thing.' Ariel can be taken to refer to the escapism of a certain theoretical or idealizing impulse, while the police represent reality. The book, as the second part ofits title suggests, consists ofseparate discussions of each writer. The essays are framed by an introduction which sets the common theme with a daring political reading of Stevens's 'Anatomy of a Jar': the famous jar in Tennessee comes to take on wide-reaching implications, as it is linked with facts as disparate as William James's denunciation of the original American incursion into the Philippines and Michael Herr's use of the poem as an image of American imperialism in Vietnam. These linkages set the style for much of Lentricchia's argument, which frequently relies on such far-reaching - some would say far-fetched - associations to restore the American literary conscience to its authentic roots in the political and the socio-economic. The all-encompassing net that Lentricchia casts, however, would UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 58, NUMBER 4, SUMMER 1989 542 JOSEPH ADAMSON seem to contradict the book's own premise: that totalization is to be avoided at all costs. Lentricchia begins with Michel Foucault and his theory of institutional power, primarily as outlined in Discipline and Punish. Foucault's conception of power is criticized from an essentially Marxist perspective and is blamed for displacing the real ground of power (the economic base) by giving it an abstract metaphysical shape in which no particular historical subject -whether a class or an individualcan ever make a significant difference. Lentricchia extends this critique of the theory of power to Foucault's American epigones, those 'against theory' new historicists such as Stephen Greenblatt. In his chapter on James, Lentricchia treats the American philosopher as a basis for a discussion of certain current critical positions, most notably that of the new pragmatism. The new pragmatism is criticized, quite simply, for not being the old pragmatism, at least not that of James, whose great value, according to Lentricchia, consists in the political implications of his effort to bring against the systemizers and generalizers the testimony of the particular, the local, the ungeneralizable. So as not to lose sight of the particular, we must conceive of belief...