Geistersprache-- An Interview with Geoffrey Hartman

BARNETT: Many critics have commented on the subterranean role continental philosophy plays in your work.  In particular what strikes me is the figure of Hegel.  Can your work be understood as a mapping out of a Wordsworth column that would replace the Genet column in Glas?  What does thinking the relation between Hegel and Wordsworth do to our understanding of Wordsworth?  And can you give us a sense of what a fly on the wall might have heard in the seminar on Hegel and Wordsworth you taught with de Man?
HARTMAN: I like the way you put this.  I too have thought: what would have happened if Derrida had used Wordsworth instead of Genet.  Had I written Glas (!)  I would have certainly done something like that.  Derrida mounts a very interesting juxtaposition, although I've never been very comfortable with it.
     You wanted to be a fly on the wall in the seminar on Wordsworth and Hegel.  What that fly on the wall might have heard would not have been very edifying.  Because de Man had a wonderful way of sustaining his thought: without being aggressive or polite, he made no concessions.  And I could never get him to give the early Hegel the same attention as the later Hegel.  He wanted to overcome the Hegel of the Phenomenology with the emphasis on internalization, Erinnerung.  The later Hegel, with its emphasis on Gedächtnis and who says thought begins with speech and who is less interested in Erinnerung, de Man emphasized all the time.  Internalization has the disadvantage of being understood psychologistically, but is relevant, for example in the Boy of Winander episode.  Think of how the landscape enters the child's heart like  traumatic shock (though buffered).  It enters by bypassing the ordinary mediations of consciousness.  But while I saw in this a moment of internalization, nevertheless, de Man was just not interested in that.  He wanted to get to the moment of death, to a death perspective.  Not because after death there came life, but because the coloring, the philosophic mind, as Wordsworth says in the Intimations Ode, looks through death.  De Man was always trying to get the color of what it was like to look through death.  In that sense he was very Wordsworthian or perhaps he was anticipating the interest in trauma, and the memory-impasse set up by trauma, which I am exploring.  But then I was more interested in the exact, stylistic  movement of the entire episode where one thing connected or did not connect with another.  I didn't persuade de Man and I decided not to do another seminar with him.  I ended up being an interested listener, you know, one of the students.  I learnt more from him than he in his recalcitrance could learn from me.
BARNETT: People have said that in your own work you don't explicitly draw these connections but it seems suffused and supported by meditations on thinkers like Hegel.
HARTMAN: It is not the machine of the dialectic which interests me, but Hegel's restlessness.  The incredible way he refuses to let another stage be final; the way it is immediately made dynamic by the dialectical action of the odysseying spirit.  Hegel's abstract descriptions of each stage are works of art--abstract works of art.  Hegel presupposes that you know what he is abstracting from.  Here and there he gives you clues: sometimes a small footnote relating to Socrates or Saint-Just.  By the time of Derrida, at the beginning of Glas, Hegel is super-mediated.  I try in Saving the Text to tease out the "quoi du reste," the "what remains."  I haven't teased it out completely: Derrida is a remarkably osmotic thinker, but his energy of conceptualization is up to the osmosis.  More than a vacuum cleaner, Derrida organizes the chaos; he organizes the quotations that have fallen into him.  I continue to think of Glas as one of the most remarkable constructions that we have and where philosophy has indeed become a literary text.
BARNETT: Derrida clearly has had a profound impact on you as a critic.  In particular, Glas seems to have been a defining experience for you.  It serves as the north star of Criticism in the Wilderness and as the subject of an entire book, Saving the Text. And as you comment in Criticism in the Wilderness: "I am sufficiently convinced that Glas, like Finnegans Wake, introduces our consciousness to a dimension it will not forget, and perhaps not forgive."  What can you not forget and what can you not forgive about Derrida in general?
HARTMAN: This is a difficult question--only because there was life before Derrida.  Derrida persuaded me that there could be a theory for the kind of practice I was engaging in.  That is, for the close--or, as I always called it, closer--reading I was trying to develop.  The closer reading that went right through the text to other texts and then came back to the original.  He caught me up in the illusion that there could be a theory for that.  His theory.  And so I felt relieved since I thought of theory as a good thing.  Because there are many who believe in theory, so that if they don't believe in the practice maybe you can add theory to it and then they will credit the practice.  It turned out not to be that way.  In any case, I began to be interested in the theory and in the way Derrida developed the theory from certain sources such as Husserl and Heidegger.  But I was limited in this because I had never studied philosophy professionally; I'm an autodidact in that area.  Thus it's hard for me to follow strictly what is a critique of Husserl.  I understand in general.  So the theory was important, although I'm afraid it was not important in itself or for its kind of truth claim.
BARNETT: It legitimated what you were doing?
HARTMAN: It legitimated what I was doing.  Since then I have not cared.  After a while you don't care for legitimation.  You are what you are.  So that has dropped away.  As for forgiving Derrida--I think he is a wonderful reader.  If I have any criticism, it's a rather superficial one.  It is that he leaves nothing alone and that he over-elaborates.  He goes through the same moves again and again.  But still, it doesn't matter--there are lots of surprises.  I prefer a principle of economy and it resists the kind of massive, recapitulative style of Derrida.  The playfulness is perhaps a little too sober, as I said in Saving the Text.  His puns are rather cold.  Maybe he laughs at them.  He wants to squeeze a philosophic yield out of everything and this I don't think is necessary.  In general, I am impatient with the style, except in Glas.  But, then, I am impatient with novels too.  There's a too-muchness in his style--but he remains the most inventive philosopher around.
BARNETT: Derrida was linked to what one could call the marketing of the concept of The Yale Critics.  Today, somewhat later, does that concept mean anything still?
HARTMAN: I don't think it meant very much from the beginning.
BARNETT: Bloom has disavowed it, and has expressed embarrassment over the Deconstruction and Criticism volume.
HARTMAN: From the beginning Bloom was not interested in continental philosophy and in Derrida.  He was interested in America and the American grain and he wanted to revive the post-Romantic criticism that came from Emerson.  He went back to that neglected and misunderstood source to achieve a renaissance.  From the beginning he wasn't part of deconstruction.  I was in it because I liked its sheer intellectual intensity.  And I shared some of the continental sources, both in poetry and philosophy.  So I was more interested in it than Bloom.  So was Hillis Miller.  The core, however, was clearly Derrida and de Man.  Hillis Miller was a very understanding presence who added English literature and the novel, which were what was missing.  The Yale critics as an entity were created partly by Hillis Miller in a review in The New Republic and partly by Deconstruction and Criticism.  We undertook the book to show we were not identical, an effort that--as we should have known--backfired.  I tried to urge the publisher to advertise it as a non-manifesto, but of course he wouldn't do so.  He described it as a manifesto, which went against what we wished to achieve with such a book.  I think calling us Yale critics is only justified in so far as we were close to each other; we read each other's work and would often comment on it.  Now this in academic circles is unforgivable.  Yet it produced a very small but visible group.  Very small because there were maybe six, seven people: the four of us--Shoshana Felman and some younger people.  But a tiny fraction, if you think in terms of all the professors of literature at Yale.
BARNETT: That's why it's bizarre to say "Yale," when in point of fact . . . .
HARTMAN: Totally bizarre.  This department--literary humanities at Yale--was always highly eclectic and remained rather conservative.  But the visibility of this small group became so great that I suppose there was some resentment, and some attacks, even at Yale.  It's partly that resentment and resistance that caused Derrida to leave, together with Hillis Miller, for Irvine.  They saw a new frontier--Deconstruction West.
BARNETT: Being shamelessly autobiographical seems to be in such vogue among academics that I was wondering if I could lure you into it as well.  I can't help wondering about the nature of the special and enduring relationship you have with Wordsworth.  As you note in The Unremarkable Wordsworth: "I have never been able to get away from Wordsworth for any length of time."  How do you understand this relationship?  Why do you think Wordsworth means what he does to you?
HARTMAN: Wordsworth and I got together in high school in England and it was just the intensest poetry reading experience I had at that time.  I can only guess why.  Because his poetry didn't seem to go through people.   Or rather through socialized people.   It was between Wordsworth and whatever he looked at very strongly.  The visibility of the thinking was important for me--though visibility is too strong a word.  I could really feel that his thought-time and mine were in harmony.  It wasn't a harmony of content necessarily, but, compared to other poetry, his was not over-condensed or over-relaxed.  It was just thinking--not abstract thinking but, clearly, thinking.  The second factor was what John Stuart Mill calls the culture of the feelings, especially nature feelings--and this I shared.  I had some of the same feeling for the (what seemed to me) animate but not necessarily personal universe.  That is, it was personal for me, but it was not anthropomorphized.  His "sentiment of Being" indicated a mode of perception that was non-anthropomorphic, though at the same time not non-human.  Make sense?
BARNETT: That's interesting though since later you're the one that demolishes the notion of Wordsworth as nature poet.
HARTMAN: Right.  That's been overemphasized.  I established the dialectical relation involved in his return to nature.  This is a return not only from a time of exile, spent in politics, but a return that happened again and again.  In other words, a return within the moment of thinking.  Away from abstraction and yet not toward false concretion.  So I would never think Wordsworth was not a nature poet.   But I showed how reflective nature poetry was in Wordsworth.  There's a lot more nature detail in the descriptive sense in poets before Wordsworth.
BARNETT: So it's his reaction against the historically mediated nature of nature poetry that makes him a real nature poet.
HARTMAN: That's right.  The design, the argument-from-design poetry, all that occasionally he plays with it.  He's aware of it, but it is in no way central to him.  On the contrary--you like the word demolish, so I will use it--if he demolishes anything it is that, those traditions.
BARNETT: There seems to be general sense of crisis in the profession.  Indeed, many signs confirm this sense.  MLA conference talks seem more concerned with catching the latest trend in criticism--usually buttressed by a foreign critic who has just been translated into English.  Entire catalogs of publishers are embracing specific critical methodologies.  Which in turn will determine the direction of research.  Courses seem oriented more towards the secondary literature of the teacher's current research project than anything else.  It was this situation that inspired Bloom's The Western Canon, where he makes the bleak prediction that English departments will shrivel into the equivalent of classics departments and be superceded by departments of cultural studies.  And lately we have seen scholars band together in an effort to turn the clock back to 1950--certainly an unattractive alternative.  Do you share this sense of crisis?  And if so, what do you think are the reasons for our predicament and where do you see us heading?
HARTMAN: The profession of English was a much narrower and less populated field--even when expanding after the Second World War when I entered it at the beginning of the fifties.  The canon, as we now say, was more limited.  There were distinct prestige fields--contemporary poetry was not studied on the whole.  It was appreciated but kept for individual enjoyment.  All that has changed.  The profession now is highly populated; some would say over populated, given a scarcity of jobs.  The canon is expanding like mad and I am not sure there are prestige fields.  But there are marginal fields that have moved to the center, which produces a sense of liberation.  There's a lot of interesting and wild stuff out there.  It's much better in that respect than when I came in--everything was decorous.  Most worked within certain conventional schemes and often did very interesting work.  Even those who went outside the conventional schemes practiced a fairly classical kind of style, like Northrop Frye.  It was always intelligible, always at a certain level of accessibility.  Now all of this just isn't there any more--for good or bad.  So you can talk about that crisis too in addition to the economic one.
     There is a crisis in style, of style, since much of contemporary criticism is not all that readable any more.  But why is it not so readable?  Probably there's too much that jostles for attention and each new field becomes invested by the hordes of young people who are sincerely reading and making a career.  The crisis of style has spawned a point of view where you have a division between highly specialized or jargonic prose and the prose of the public intellectual.  But for me the crisis posed itself differently.  It wasn't a "crisis" I faced, at least in the 1950s and '60s.  It was simply that I reacted aggressively to the stipulated decorum of scholarly prose, to standard scholarly prose.  Call it the friendship style--although it wasn't always friendly.  It was standardized and didn't display or didn't want to display--maybe because of its gentility--any of the intensity for which I entered the field.  And it seemed to me that this was strange, this total reticence, when it came to feeling or the articulation of feeling.
 Now I was never for personalism as such and for the intrusion, the direct intrusion, of the autobiographical.  But I did want some of the intensity of our feeling-perception to come through.  I saw no reason why that intensity had to be left to fiction or poetry--we had to be sober, and they, the artists, were allowed to be drunk.  So all this resulted in an attempt on my part to fashion a new kind of prose style.  Let us have the kingdom of our own style, and let others adapt to it.
     All kinds of styles were floating around in the seventeenth century, before high journalistic prose like that of the Spectator emerged.  So let's see what will emerge now.  I felt that the field was too restrictive, cutting itself off from too much.  This was also accompanied by my sense that it didn't work to define literariness in terms of negatives--not this and not that and in particular not philosophy.  And so I did try to work with some (let's call them) philosophical dictions.  Not that I brought in philosophy as such--you know, a philosopher-theologian like Buber or others like Husserl or Hegel, the ones I was reading in the fifties.  But I wanted to bring their issues and concerns into literary studies, and this gave a certain density and maybe elusiveness to my style.  Since I was born abroad one might easily say: "well, he's a foreigner--who hasn't fully understood what English is like."
BARNETT: It seems now though that we have a generation that has grown up in this new context--that you among others helped to establish--and it seems that what's happened is that that reaction toward literariness, which you described, is now infused by critical theory.  In other words, they're now transporting the critical-theoretical sensibility to everything in the world; and that's in a sense why a lot of people see this crisis for the future.  For now, that literariness, what you were talking about, threatens to be lost as well as, in fact, literature itself.
HARTMAN:  Yes, let's talk this up.  You're quite right that there is a double expansion, one outward, one inward tending. The outward is certainly an export movement and I support this.  I support going with our very trained perception, our close reading, into other fields.  Some of the hermeneutic anthropologists also support this: though someone like Clifford Geertz obviously doesn't need literary critics, nevertheless the fact that they exist has helped to encourage him in his own endeavors to bring some of those reading skills to cultural practices--not only reading skills but theories which we took over and developed, such as structuralism.  This is what happened in the sixties.  There was a lot of experimentation for those who knew continental modes of thought, and not only the anthropology of Levi-Strauss.  The other tendency is what we can draw in from the surrounding disciplines.  And here it becomes more complicated, especially when we deal with a positivistic discipline like history.   History has a methodological problem with itself because it remains positivistic.  It doesn't like to think about the style of the historian.  The New Historicists think they know how to do history.  Indeed, bringing in a certain order of fact and what they might call contextualization will illuminate the poem.  But most of the time--I agree with you--it displaces the poem, sometimes to the point where one can barely find it.  If we go with the New Historicists the question of why we enjoy literature fades.  It almost becomes a guilty enjoyment or something which, well, we might allow, but . . . .   Where is the seriousness or the enjoyment of literature if we take their view to an extreme?  However, they are really--and by they I mean Jerome McGann, Majorie Levenson, Alan Liu, Stephen Greenblatt, David Simpson, and others--more nuanced than I pretend.  So history is a problematic discipline in itself and I'm not sure how much we can learn for literary studies from it.
     All the more so since the question about how to write literary history--which de Man and I were wrestling with in the seventies--doesn't seem to have caught on.  A different mode of literary history is necessary, one that is more experimental, but at least the chronological pattern is being thought about today.  The strongest intake from the outside comes from political theory, political science, socio-economics.  Anglo-American criticism for a long time had no sociology of literature at all.  What sociology there was was practiced on the continent and came through disciplines such as stylistics.  If you look at romance philologists like Leo Spitzer, they're fascinated by the ambience of words, and how words shift semantically, through a Bedeutungswandel.  They illuminate the milieu in which the literary works they study takes place.  But there's no critique of a particular historical era.  For them study is more like an intense tourism.  Relatively non-judgmental.  This is how it was in those days.
 There is no one crisis: there is an economic crisis; there is a crisis of style; and perhaps there is a pedagogical crisis.  How accessible can we make literature?  There is also a crisis about what we should study.  And a general crisis of conscience: what are we doing in this field anyway?  These intensities of professional consciousness were certainly not there when I entered English and Comparative Literature in the early fifties.
BARNETT: The basic thrust of the explicit and implicit New Historicist arguments against your work is that you have forgotten or looked over--just as Wordsworth turned a blind eye, say, to the homeless in Tintern Abbey--the real political context and dimension of art.  And, as such, you succumb to what has been termed the "Romantic ideology," the insistence on the autonomy of the aesthetic that the Romantics themselves helped to formalize.  Although it's unfair to ask you to respond to this in such an impromptu and limited format, I wonder if you could indicate the outline of your position on these issues.
HARTMAN: I try to be sympathetic to the argument that there's some complicity between critics like myself and the Romantics.  But there's also much to be said against that.  I don't even know how to begin answering this.
     In any act of interpretation you have to be with the subject and distanced from it.  I would never neglect the distance that is minimally historical, that is historical.  Yet more than history stands between a critic and the work criticized.  Or between an interpreter and the object interpreted.  One must think about that distance and what flexibilities there are.  Just as when you zoom in, you do not have to maintain the same distance; you have to be conscious that there is a distance and you don't confuse yourself with the object.  That seems to me so commonplace as not to require comment.  And therefore I say to myself: McGann and the others can't mean that.  What exactly do they mean?  Perhaps that we are not politically enlightened.  That we grant, as you put it, the aesthetic a certain autonomy.  Maybe that is part of the Romantic ideology.  But I really don't know what ideology means in this context.  That the Romantics invented the idea of aesthetic autonomy?--I don't think that makes sense.  Aesthetics, as some New Historicists use the term, is a very contemporary concept, and  certainly not "aesthetics" as it was used in the eighteenth century.  The problem I have with the New Historicists is that I can critique what they do, but I'm now responding to their critique of what I do, which is a different thing.  I can only utter banalities such as: oh, come now, what do you think you're saying?  Don't we have to use an act of imaginative transposition to really absorb, to come nearer to the thought and sensibility of that time and the literary context?  If you get this through history, fine.  But I'm not willing to grant that readers must always know that near Tintern Abbey there were iron mills.  Place is important, but not every detail of the place.  Moreover, each significant work of fiction or poem displaces perception.  That is its power.  It modifies perception and so, after it, we can't think about things in quite the same way as before.  There are many prose accounts and some, like the tour books, mention the poverty of the Wye valley.  But there's only one "Tintern Abbey" and if the poem is not transfigurative then it is transformative.  If Blake had stood in the same place, he would either have seen Satanic mills or he might have transformed the scene in a completely different manner.  So much so that you wouldn't realize you were standing at Tintern.  The referential base would have been lost entirely.  The fact that you have such a strong referential base is in itself an achievement.  A referential base in terms of the specifics of the landscape and of the person contemplating it.
     I feel the suffering or endurance of Wordworth's people much more than anything in Blake.  Or in Shelley for that matter.  So why dump on Wordsworth?  Because he is a strong, worthwhile opponent.  Because the New Historicists would like to overcome him.  But he sticks in their intellectual throat.  Fine.  It makes for good debate and there are even some interesting concepts that come out of that,  having to do with the strength of the attempt to contain, the strength of the repression as indicating what is suppressed.  However, the range of reference in New Historicism tends to be interesting . . . apocalyptic even.  By "apocalyptic" reference I mean that what they credit are macro-historical events: disasters, revolutions, abject poverty, riots.  Jerry McGann was kind enough when Harvard republished Wordsworth's Poetry in the late 80s (the first edition of which came out in '64) to write a blurb for it.  He says, approximately, "It's a landmark book in scholarship after the Korean war."   Which is sort of what I mean by apocalyptic: histoire événmentielle.  Peter Manning's discussion of "The Solitary Reaper" in Romantic Texts and Contexts is very informative.  I enjoyed reading it and learned from it.  And yet at the end, I don't know--you may differ--what we have gained in terms of reading the poem that makes us say this has something to do with Wordsworth's originality.  I don't think it's an attack on Wordsworth; it's more an attack on critics (myself included) who leave certain things out.  But Manning himself leaves out the fact that I put "The Solitary Reaper" into the radical Protestant tradition of looking for evidence of election.  Well, that's a "social" fact too, but he neglects it.  Because it's not poverty; it's not Scotland; the relation of Scotland and England . . .  There is selectivity on his part also.  I continue to think that what aesthetic critics focus on reveals more of Wordsworth's originality or idiosyncrasy.
     The point at which I become resentful is when we are made to take on the role of purists.  As if only the New Historicists, as materialists, know what a mess human nature is.  Yet, there is, I would insist a certain glow, a certain separation of the individual poem and Wordsworth's stance from the socio-economic context.  And to think that this is just euphemistic or meliorative thinking is a mistake.  To counter that error one would have to consider what the milieu of Nature means to us.  That is, go into what has lately become an interesting subject in criticism, ecology.  Mental ecology.
BARNETT: It seems Romantic New Historicism has a unique set of problems that it doesn't share with Renaissance New Historicism or Victorian New Historicism.  People like Greenblatt or D. A. Miller can show us the political work a literary work enacts.  In other words, they can get into the literary text and show us how it engages--and furthers--certain historic discourses.  The Romantic New Historicist seems caught in the endless predicament of proving that there's something wrong with the Romantic lyric itself.  It is not reflective in any thoroughly political way of any social reality.  My suspicion is that this comes from Hegel via Lukács and this sense of what the tasks and capabilities of various literary genres are.  In other words, lyric is intensely subjective, isolated, imploded; drama is potentially social but limited; and the novel and prose is the most complex politically valid form.
HARTMAN: It's not entirely wrong, this attitude, if you think that Keats' career always tried to go beyond "Flora and Old Pan" and towards a more human or humanized subject matter.  Shakespeare remained the beacon.  We would have to talk about the authenticity of Romantic pastoral consciousness, which is partly what I mean by mental ecology.  What we react to in literature is a powerful mode of representation, which has a reality orientation, yes.  But we don't always want the same reality orientation.  Should Wordsworth have looked at the Wye Valley with Shakespearean eyes?  I don't think the new Historicists understand  the new representational mode of the Romantics.  They have less difficulty with the Renaissance.  They can establish more easily the Renaissance mode of representation.  They're into political symbolism.  Greenblatt's strength is that he sees the symbolic component of everything.  This makes him more aesthetic, in fact, than most of us Romantic critics.  He talks even about wonder more than we do.  I talk about surmise.  He talks about wonder.  For him the Renaissance is wondrous; it's like an anthropologist going to a foreign country and seeing customs such as witchcraft, or other strange practices.  These are realia, not just superstitions.  These are a part of the lore and knowledge of that time.  In a sense such a scholar is advantaged.  He is advantaged because he can use more learning.  You have to look up these things; you have to read medical manuals.  He is advantaged because these things were deeply conventional or "naturally" symbolic; they were accepted and that is rarely the case with the Romantics, who know they're dealing with poetry as an artificial mode, something that may be doomed.  Of course, they seek to naturalize it again.
BARNETT: This is from Criticism in the Wilderness: "Art slanders an established order for good or bad by not conforming.  Its very existence is often a resistance.  It gives the lie to every attempt to impose a truth by state sponsored power."  Couldn't one use that to confront this critique of your work?  Is then Romantic New Historicism symptomatic of a guilt or resistance that's intrinsic to art in general?  Is that a valid summation?
HARTMAN:  Yes, that's fair.  But I would also think that it is worth inquiring why both nature poetry and pastoral poetry are renewed in the Romantic period.  The Wordsworth book is realistic in that sense.  You might say it has too much of a thesis, although I complicate things by the dialectic I sketch out.  I try to show how proleptic Wordsworth's mind is, how fearful he is--and why--about losing Nature.  Losing the ground on which the mind stands.   This has to do with the Industrial Revolution and accompanying events.  Now there's no question in my mind that Wordsworth is the most profound of these poets.  His imagination has led him further than anyone else.  Any careful reading of what I have done on Wordsworth, in fact any careful reading of Wordsworth, will lead you back not to a concern with specific laws or specific economic changes but to the changing character of the natural bonds of man's relation to the natural word.  He foresees a loss in that relationship, even a nature lost to imagination.  This absolute loss is what I call apocalyptic.  And the reasons for fearing that loss had to do with the political, ecological (in the broad sense) and industrial changes of his time.
BARNETT: Doesn't he also introduce the response to this failure of politics?  What we have in The Excursion, The Prelude, are these dashed hopes for politics.
HARTMAN: Yes.  And it may be that the New Historicists refuse to acknowledge that the French Revolution is still failing.  Not only failed then.  That revolutionary activity tends to fail.
BARNETT: That's what in a sense is so interesting--that the Revolution continues to fail.  The Russian revolution has failed . . . .
HARTMAN:  It continues to fail.  They want to keep up hope and faith in revolutionary social activity.  Wordsworth faces the issue of reform or of holding back the tide of loss without hope in revolutionary change.  Partly because he has come to the conclusion that revolutionary change has hastened that loss instead of bringing about a new dawn.  So maybe there is a deep--call it ideological--difference having to do with the New Historicists' faith in an attempt to restore a hope in revolutionary activity rather than restore hope itself as something revolutionary.
     I have become very pessimistic about politics.  In the world as we now know it, powerful religions are really politics, as in Islam or Iran.  State ideologies are political religions.  In America, there is a democracy that we like to describe as a civil religion.  And we believe in intermediate institutions, non-governmental organizations and grass roots groups; we "grow them" to use a current metaphor.  I do accept conflict at this level.  I think there has to be.  And I understand, but don't share, what seems to be taking hold of so many Americans, the suspicion of big government, or of Washington.  As if we could return totally to local politics.  But I understand that reaction and don't think it will go away.  I also find the use of the word politics almost opaque by now.  Opaque or totally simplified.  If politics simply means the right kind of politics--progressive politics--then it's only interesting as an ideal.  It's no more interesting than saying we can complete the French revolution.  And that has certain implications.  But I don't see issues raised at that level.
    Some matters are clear enough.  You do want people to live above subsistence level.  One tries to find a paradigm for what political action might achieve.  Since you know that the tea workers in Bangladesh are oppressed, do you stop drinking tea?  Well, you might make their condition worse.  It is only if you believe in a Ghandi-like action (which is also symbolic), or in hunger strikes (something that might be fatal to yourself), that you can talk about effective politics.  You can intervene--and this is nothing against particular interventions--but you have to realize that the effect will be short-range.  As to long-range thought--that is always doubtfully prophetic.  I shouldn't talk about this.  I have no overview, no total conception.  If you take politics seriously, you could find many reasons to do yourself in.  But are there some ways of doing yourself in that might be effective?  As I have said, you could go on a hunger strike and so on.  It really does mean sacrifice.  It can also lead to craziness.  And to violence.  This is why professing literature is a relatively benign and healthy activity.  You generally don't die from it.  You take some enjoyment.  What's wrong with aesthetic enjoyment, after all?  I don't understand the attacks on the aesthetic or statements about the end of the "aesthetic ideology."
BARNETT: It seems to react to something inward, which is interesting.  The failure of politics seems to be what leads to despondency.  Wordsworth discusses that in The Excursion.  As Mill says, Wordsworth is about this return from despondency.  Where do you draw the line between politics and despondency?
HARTMAN:  It is not quite, as some say, including M. H. Abrams, that there is an inward turn.  That's not a sufficient explanation.  Because Blake is certainly as inward as anyone.  (Of course the same "turn" may have happened to Blake.)  I think it has more to do with giving up a certain kind of hope.  And yet not falling because of that into despondency.  You give up hope in revolutionary change--which is difficult, especially when you've experienced that hope directly.
BARNETT: Can we connect this to an Hegelian vision of politics and history?  Perhaps Wordsworth is confronting an apocalyptic form of politics, one that can be identified with a macro-subject of world history.  The French Revolution and fascism are in a sense equatable from this perspective.  That is what leads to despondency.  Not that that means that one excludes politics per se.  Just this sort of vision of politics.
HARTMAN:  There's no question that Wordsworth becomes a conservative thinker who wants to hold up the acceleration towards very large events, the accumulation of men in cities, the growth of sensationalism, and so on.  And who wants to think that there might be a peaceful and fruitful transition between an agrarian ethos and a modern or industrial ethos.  He knows that industrialization is there, but he wants to preserve--he really wants to carry over not just to keep--the old, to carry it over into modernity.  Now I think he comes upon a limit.  He doesn't really succeed.  I'm not sure anyone has succeeded with this translation.  Do the rural virtues, do these qualities exist to the extent that Wordsworth makes them exist for us.   Can the character of "Michael" be carried over into modern life?  The poet's depiction of people like Michael or the Wanderer or the Peddlar are meant to be more than nostalgic exemplars.  They have qualities that he is loath to give up and that he is afraid that modern life will destroy.  Which doesn't mean he's more inward.  There's very little introspection in Wordsworth.  As I've said about the Boy of Winander, when the poet stands looking at the boy's grave, we don't know what he is thinking.  You might object that "Tintern Abbey" is an interior monologue.  Yet though it is introspective, it always goes outward, or is "excursive."
BARNETT: Could one say that Wordsworth still has something to say to contemporary politics?  Your recent work in a sense emanates from the Preface to Lyrical Ballads with its assessment of modernization and the destruction of ethical sensibility.
HARTMAN: I try to make that case all the time.  Especially in The Longest Shadow and the essay called "Public Memory and its Discontents."  There I'm thinking of that aspect of Wordsworth and the relation to what he said of our contemporary media mediations.  Wordsworth sensed that the mind was being narrowed, was being besieged, made increasingly dependent on violent (perceptual) stimulants.  I think what he saw near the beginning of the industrial revolution is totally born out and is more acute today.
BARNETT: So is his political value his emphasis on literary "nothingness"?  Is it the non-narrative quality of Wordsworth, the challenge to find something of interest after the addiction to the culture of modernity?
HARTMAN:  It's really a weaning from the addiction.  That's why I call him a minimalist, strange as it may seem.  One wonders whether anything worthwhile "narrating" happens in Wordsworth.  And what of the modern movement towards abstraction?  What do the New Historicists think about modern abstract art?  There will have to be some peculiar mental gymnastics.
BARNETT: That's why I'm reminded of that modernism debate in Germany--Brecht, Lukács, Adorno.  That's the crux of it--what do you do with modernist art?--which like Romantic lyric seems to turn its back on social reality.
HARTMAN: It has eyes in the back of its head.  It turns its back, but it still sees.  Now the Historicists would say that that very strong gestures say like this bespeak something about reality.  One can also argue that to represent directly what's in front of one's eyes is actually less effective.  I taught a course last semester on the limits of realism in Holocaust film and fiction.  Vis-à-vis extreme events, realism is not always the most effective mode of representation.  But I have been pleased and surprised that what I thought would happen has not happened.  Wordsworth was not marginalized.  Blake, Shelley and Byron have not hogged the whole field of literary attention.
BARNETT: So Wordsworth survives as bête noir.
HARTMAN: Yes, and there the Bloomian principle comes in: it is better to fight what's been there before than to evade.  Moreover, I don't know whether my work on Wordsworth has been totally consistent.  I had often to go back, to get another view and yet another.  There may be inconsistencies; there may be real differences.  You can tell much better than I can.  I get as much intellectual pleasure in thinking once again about the Lucy poems or thinking yet again about "Old Man Traveling."  They are such peculiar poems.
BARNETT: To pursue this question of politics, I can't help thinking that, like Adorno and Auerbach, your own life was profoundly affected by fascism.  And here I conjecture, leaving it to you to correct me, that a closer proximity to the collusion between culture and ideology and the consequences that can result from this led to an interest in the manner in which art resists ideological appropriation.   This also seems to have led to a sensitivity to the tenor of current political criticism.  As you have noted, "The quest to make theory politically accountable--always a difficult, sometimes repressive factor in intellectual life--is approaching the 1930s in intensity."  Can one argue that your work has from the start been a reaction to the dangerous potential in the relation between culture and politics--to the dangers of the apocalyptic imagination?
HARTMAN:  That's a good question.
BARNETT: A New Historicist would say you're evading politics.  Can one say--although it may be more implicit than explicit--your work has been a reaction to politics all along?
HARTMAN: I've always been conscious of what happened in the 30s, both in Russia and--obviously--in Nazi Germany.  And behind the iron curtain after the war.  That's always on my mind.  The mistake might be to think it's on other people's minds too.  Or the mistake is that I am encompassed if not entrapped by the period in which I grew up.
BARNETT: Most American critics want to place art in the service of a politics, an imagined politics.  Compare this to the European scene right before the war, when left and right, Stalin and Hitler, blur in the enslavement of art to serve this political end.  Thus we see--I mentioned Auerbach and Adorno--critics react to that and point to the aesthetic as resistant, that it will never be entirely incorporated.  And that's what defines art--if it's incorporated, it isn't art.  Its resistance defines it as art.
HARTMAN: Absolutely.  Even in the '30s the beginning of the New Criticism had some of that attitude, a very defensive attitude.  Those holding to the aesthetic element--or literariness--did circle the wagons against the encroachment of politics.  There will be a return to evaluating the aesthetic element in art.  I'm sure it will come back.  I may be limited by the fact that I don't focus on a particular part of the globe or a new body of literature.  My glance tends to be inward and expansive.  I am interested by a change in the way that literary history has moved.  The passage of time, the incursion of the new, produces oblivion.  The spotlight moves, things fall into the abyss and then there comes a point when this has gone too far and there is a recovery, a series of renaissances.  The paradigm instance is the period we call the Renaissance.  In the past, it was always something in the past, often considerable past, which was recovered.  But today--this is one change--you recover something which is in the future.  You value something because it promises, for instance, a post-colonial ideology.
     You might argue that's because we have rejected in the past class, race, gender, ethnicity, and so on.  But these categories now become proleptic values.  Moreover, as the past falls more rapidly into the past one wonders whether the forward movement by means of renaissances is over.  There does seem to be a new structure developing, but is it the structure of literary history.  One might say, then, that literary history stopped in 1950.  We may come to a provocative statement like that because what happens after that date is not literary history in so far as it is not a movement of restitution and recovery.  In the field of women's literature, however, the restitutive and proleptic visions coincide.  We are still recovering neglected works, and recovery may actually be spurring an interesting new literature.  In the past too, of course, recovery was not only for the sake of recovery: it gave vigor to the people on the ground, now.  Yet, there may be other ways of moving forward and being creative.  What we are now restituting is the future--that more and more uncertain future.  Some young people seem more uncertain of the future than we were after the Second World War, when we had hope that it would never happen again.