Sacrificing Commentary: Reading the End of Literature (review)

Book Reviews Book Reviews 139 Sacrificing Commentary: Reading the End of Literature, by Sandor Goodhart. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. 362 pp. $45.00. Extending the insights of Rene Girard about violence and the sacred, this brave and brilliant book not only concerns itself with anti-sacrificial themes in literary, biblical, and post-Holocaust texts, it also exemplifies a prophetic, anti-sacrificial stance-in its analysis of the "resistance to theory" by literary critics, on the one hand, and the "resistance of theory" to literature, on the other; in the foundation it lays for interfaith dialogue between Jews and Christians; in its insistence (inspired by Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas) on encountering the Other face-to-face; and in its practical refusal to stigmatize and to cast out the Other. This is particularly true in its respectful and creative meditation on, and use of, the deconstructive theory of one-time Nazi collaborator, Paul de Man. In the early pages of the book, Goodhart announces his basic thesis. Rejecting the New Critical position that "literature" differs sharply from "criticism," he follows de Man in arguing for "a certain interchangeability of literature with commentary" (p. 9). Indeed, as "a mode ofliterary study" (p. 245), "literature" is simultaneously sacralized by literary criticism and expelled by it as its monstrous double. Goodhart gives the fullest account of his thesis in summary fashion in the final chapters ofthe book. There he characterizes "literary criticism" as "thoroughly mythic in constitution" and predictably patterned by "critico-philosophic concerns that concretize older philosophic concerns" (pp. 246, 249). "Great literature," by way of contrast, is "constitutionally anti-mythic," offering a trenchant critique of "the myth ... out of which it comes" (p. 249). Indeed, literature criticizes "the same myths that criticism reconstructs" (p. 251), and it does so precisely because of its own status as commentary on myth. Both criticism and literature are thus "readings of the source material from which literature has come---eriticism reading it mythically, and literature anti-mythically" (p. 252). Recognizing in literature "a monstrous double of its own critical pretensions," criticism responds to it "sacrificially" both by sacralizing it and by offering reductive misreadings of its complexity. Goodhart praises deconstruction as approaching "an anti-sacrificial criticism," but faults it nonetheless for "stopping short of reading philosophy through tragedy" (p. 262). Exposing the traditional philosophical roots ofpostrnodern theory, Goodhart asks us to imagine "a non-Platonic and consequently non-Aristotelian reading ofliterature" 140 SHOFAR Spring 1998 Vol. 16, No.3 (p. 263), a "reading" that he fmds (surprisingly) in Greek tragedy, Shakespeare's plays, and biblical Scripture. In these literary works and in the witnessing of Holocaust survivors, Goodhart discovers not the "synchronic logic" of myth and philosophy (a logic that defines essences and relationships through "differe~tial systems"), but rather the "diachronic logic" that is historical, sequential, and prophetic (p. 256). The "logic ofthe diachronic" consists in "a repetition founded not upon difference but upon sameness or identicality, upon 'more ofthe same.'" It can therefore function prophetically by naming for us the tragic end of things "in advance of the end ... in order that we may gain the option of giving them up if we so choose" (p. 253). There are, Goodhart insists, "no nonsacrificial readings," only "those that are sacrificial, and those that are aware of their sacrificial dimensions, and to which we accordingly give the name 'anti-sacrificial'" (p. 258). In three clusters of essays grouped together under the headings of "Literary Reading," "Biblical Reading," and "Modern Reading" (that is, "Reading After Auschwitz"), Goodhart traces anti-sacrificial, anti-mythic, and anti-idolatrous themes in works that are united by their exploration of the "universal matrix of scapegoat politics" (p. 36). Goodhart's "Literary Reading" focuses on Greek tragedy and Shakespearean history. In Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus, Oedipus gives too ready credence to the myth of parricide, incest, and inexorable fate that would turn him into a scapegoat, embodying the guilt of all. Although the myth from which the play derives (as well as the literary criticism that subsequently resurrects the myth) asserts Oedipus's guilt, the Sophoclean tragedy leaves it an open question and admits other possibilities, taking a decidedly anti-mythic...