Houghton Library of the Harvard College Library

Review
Author(s): Jonathan Aaron
Review by: Jonathan Aaron
Source: Harvard Book Review, No. 13/14 (Summer - Fall, 1989), pp. 17-18
Published by: Harvard Review
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27545431
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HARVARD BOOK REVIEW HARVARD BOOK REVIEW HARVARD

has nothing to tell us about the nature of things or the way people should least. He has in its stead taken a positivist stance.
behave, and why itcannot provide ground-rules for establishing and demar Reality is now all. Itexists in (potentially) infinitesupply in the
cating the arenas of knowledge, Rorty has now written a book which does just it life by doing whatever it is we do,
human spirit, and it is our job to give
that. But instead of speaking ex cathedra, name it. so we enhance the
philosophically Rorty now speaks science, poetry, television, plastics, you By doing
from the philosophical armchair. In Contingency, more real. Seldom if ever has a
Irony, and Solidarity he reality of the world and make ourselves
offers not truth but wisdom. Like all of Rorty's work, this book combines smiled more benignly on mortal conation. Reality has (at least)
philosopher
erudition, wit, and unusual clarity of exposition. The heroes of modern culture, sixty-one evaluative dimensions which Professor Nozick construes (for no
released from their metaphysical inhibitions, now meet on common reason that Ican see) along with a universal vectorial towardness in a
ground good
Nietzsche and Orwell, Habermas and Proust, Harold Bloom, Nabokov, three-dimensional matrix. It is an extremely dubious and unwieldy structure
Kundera, Foucault, Derrida, and, most brilliantly, Heideggerand Freud are all reminiscent of the standard model of particle physics but without the quanti

engaged in a grand conversation about the relationship between private fication that makes assertions about particles verifiable. Evil exists but has no
at home
happiness and the public good. The conversation is piquant, but disappoint place in the matrix, though even a child can see that it is very much
ing, and one comes away wondering ifRorty may not have missed the point in reality. Itexists, but not on a parity with good. Why? "Because the negative
of the very movement he has helped to foster. ismore limited [than the positive] due to its own nature." (If that seems lame

Rorty's candidate to replace the philosopher as paradigmatic to you, as itdoes to me, rest easy, it seems lame to Professor Nozick, too.
intellectual iswhat he calls the "liberal ironist," a novel creature to whom he These are meditations, not rigorous proofs or fiats or dogmas.) The dice then

assigns, no doubt as a compliment, the pronominal feminine. She is an ironist would seem to be loaded in our favor, ifwe only cast out lotwith the Good.
because she recognizes that her existence, and the vocabularies she uses to Right?
describe it,are contingent. This makes her tolerant of others while she spends Not a bit of it. Since the Holocaust has occurred "Itwould not be a
her energy an autonomous and completely ifhuman kind ended, if the human were in
creating original identity. She special'tragedy species destroyed
does not make the mistake of ironic theorists such as Nietzsche and Hei atomic warfare or the earth passed through some cloud that made it impos

degger, who seek to impose their private myths on the public sphere. Rather, sible for the species to continue itself." IfProfessor Nozick is right
reproducing
in public matters she is a liberal, defined as a person who believes that cruelty here we can take some comfort from the fossil record, which suggests that
is the worst thing we can do. The role of institutions is to keep people from extinction is the natural destiny of all species. But what is a special tragedy?
doing each other harm by acting out their fantasies on each other. The model And how do wedistinguish it from non-special tragedies? He does not say.
for the private self is the Bloomian romantic poet, creating himself in anxious And not say. We know what he means.
he need Itwould not be a tragedy of
Freudian conflict
with his poetic predecessors. The model for the public any kind at all if the human species were to vanish from the earth, not for the
intellectual is not the poet but the novelist such as Nabokov, who, in Lolita, fauna we slaughter nor for the flora we despoil, not for the waters we foul nor
makes us feel the cruelty which our idiosyncrasies inflict on others, or George the air we vitiate. will surely come,
Our extinction though not likely by nuclear
Orwell, who exposes the cruelty of institutions. Intellectuals must renounce fission or magic cloud. seem most
Itwould likely to come about by our own
the urge to unite private and public perfection; such attempts lead to the relentless, greedy, insane manufacture of what Professor Nozick calls reality
victimization of society in what should be a private In liberal and professes to love. But here Iam-cavilling and preaching. It is impossible
fantasy.
democracy, we share not a common goal, buta common enemy~the cruelty not to. That iswhat at least one of the pleasures books such as this provide.
of people and institutions. The hope of changing is one of our greatest You cannot talk back to poetry and novels.
society
dangers. In his Introduction Professor Nozick
suggests that philosophical

Rorty has performed an immense service by taking liberalism to its texts such as his own might amount to something like "the intelligent Martian's
logical conclusions for our time, so that its contradictions can be observed. life" as opposed to novels, which an Earthling's
primer to human presume
One wonders if there will ever be a chance to meet either half of a liberal ironist. deep and easy acquaintance not merely with earthly life at certain times and
In the case of the self as ironist poet, it is doubtful
that most people, even most in certain places. It is a noble fancy. "There are very few books," he says,
intellectuals, feel the same anxious desirefor personal autonomy and self "that set out what a mature
person can believe-someone fully grown up, I
creation as Bloom's Wordsworth, or the unfortunate Marcus Aurelius's Es
patients of Rorty's Freud. mean. Aristotle's
Ethics, Meditations, Montaigne's
If they do, it is not mere contingency which they resist, but the intrusiveness says, and the essays of Samuel Johnson come to mind. Even with these, we
of our total culture. And as for the intellectual as liberal novelist, Rorty seems do not simply accept everything that is said." Not ifwe have actually read
not to have noticed that the moral authority of the novel, which he counts on them. If, however, we have been told that they are very great works of belles
as a stand-in for philosophy, has undergone much of the same lettres and philosophy we might skip reading them and merely stipulate their
decentering
that has affected philosophy. Realistic fiction cannot flourish when its acknowledged greatness, so that we might get back to our real
universally
roots have been undermined. And it has not. The practice of more real. Ithappens all the
philosophical work, enhancing reality and making ourselves
Beckett, Grass, Robbe-Grillet and Pynchon testifies to the erosion of moral time. Itwould be a pity if itwere to happen to 777e Examined Life.
authority in the novel. Orwell, Nabokov and Kundera, Rorty's novelist Paul Hannigan
champions, are all Cold Warriors, and pragmatism has a long association with
the Cold War. As Cornell West has shown in a recent book, the association With the Skin: Poems of AlexanderWat Translated and edited by Czeslaw
between pragmatism and
radical politics has often fallen victim to the pres Milosz and Leonard Nathan. Ecco, $17.95 ISBN 0-88001-183-1
sures of anti-communism. identified social hope with the totalitarian This book adds twenty poems to the sixteen included in the earlier
Having
state, Rorty's liberalism amounts to a program of keeping hope confined within version edited by Milosz and published by Ardis House in 1977. While both
private fantasy. Having renounced philosophical skepticism, he embraces versions center on two extended narrative poems, "Songs of a Wanderer"
on practical grounds. and consistent, and "Dreams from the Shore of the Mediterranean," the newer gives us a far
solipsism Rorty's book, penetrating
exciting and absurd, should teach us to mistrust the pronouncements of the clearer idea ofWat's tonal range and the occasions that prompted him towrite.
reformed For all we must assume about what their translations cannot bring across from
philosopher.
John Farrell the original Polish, Milosz and Nathan have given us poems that confirm, even
in English, a judgement that the earlier collection urged-that Wat is
strongly
The Examined Life: Meditations Robert Nozick. Simon & indeed one of the distinctive poetic voices of the century. Despite the almost
Philosophical
Schuster, $21.95 ISBN 0-671-47218-6 tumult and anguish of his life (which Stanislaw Baranczak
unimaginable
Itwill be a relief to many details elsewhere in this issue of Harvard Book Review), Wat produced
though not to all that Professor Nozick
that do what in fact only rarely accomplish: our
abjures his libertarian stance in these meditations for, among other good and poems poems They deepen
ethical reasons, "it did not fully knit the humane considerations and joint knowledge of the resilience of human will and imagination.

cooperative activities it left room for more into its fabric." To say the Not for a moment, however, should Wat's poems be read in terms
closely

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HARVARD BOOK REVIEW HARVARD BOOK REVIEW HARVARD

of a still persistent use art as a criticism of life. While there

notion that romanticizes and sentimentalizes contemporary impulse toward praise and the desire to
central and eastern poets as artists of protest or resistance. Wat's are numerous brilliant lines and passages here ("The evening thickens with a
European
poems are, first of all, deeply personal; in them he speaks only for himself, in chapter from the Koran..."), Stus was no Keats, no Shevchenko. Nor, for that
a spirit of rapt and indomitable curiosity. Moreover, in them we find a view of matter, were W.C. Williams, or Robert Frost, or Wallace Stevens. And yet,
the world and of his place in itabsolutely devoid of self-promotion and self while some of the work here may be attributed to the eager apprentice, the

congratulation, and, though he survived nearly half his lifetime in a series of basic Stus voice-print-quirky, hyperbolic, testy, and "musical"~is clearly
prisons from Warsaw to Alma Alta, he saw himself as anything but a hero. Nor audible.
is it through some sense of tact or modesty that he forebears to imply that his The subjects Stus revisits almost obsessively include: the pain caused
or exemplary-the service
experiences made his art special very idea would have by love enacted at a distance (though here it is, at least initially, military
invited his ridicule.Rather, it is the intrinsic lack of any desire or need to and not penal servitude which the lovers apart); the Ukrainian land
keeps
declare himself special that simultaneously conveys his poetic originality and scape, a geography viewed largely through grief's polarizing lens; and the
allows us to see him as a representative role played by memory, the memory of childhood, in
figure. significant especially
With the Skin reveals a poet of extraordinary breadth of tone and sustaining the beleaguered adult spirit. Stus cannot forget that, no matter how
manner. "Songs of a Wanderer," a variegated narrative mixing lyric, dream, implausible the proposition may seem at different times, the child is the father
and satire ineleven sections, and the even more impressive "Dreams from the of the man. Only by recalling the process that led one to one's present
Shore of the Mediterranean," eight linked monologues, are both followed by "a pseudomonstrous condition, may one be rejuvenated. "(F)all into your child
few author's notes," a selection of comments that, in themselves, act almost hood/fall into your fallen-out self," Stus advises. There are, of course, risks in
like a further poem even as they show the prolixity of Wat's sources and such potentially notions. Chief among them is the danger of
self-gratifying
concerns, which range from classical to a particularly sordid a rocky past with embroidered Stus avoids romance
mythology upholstering pillowcases.
instance of Stalin's personal sadism. Both poems have an epic quality, which because the wide arc of his memory carries him over the shallow
primarily
case by the disembodied a like Under a Wild Sun,
may be accounted for in each perspective of the pools of the purely personal, and lands him, in pastoral
speaker, who seems free of conventional
aerial, time and space. in pagan Ukraine at the time of Perun-that is to say, squarely inmyth.
But if these poems are the most sustained of Wat's achievements Stus's voice is peremptorily elegiac: most of his writing is about loss, or
these translations, at least), the thirty-four other poems in this volume the threat of loss. When he breaks out in celebration or praise,
(among finally
reflect asintensely what ismost basic to his poetic motivation-the experience something reigns him in:
of having been abandoned by an orderly fate. "To Be a Mouse" imagines life It is so good,
from the rodent's viewpoint; the tenderness and terror of Wat's vision here link so nice, to see
the minute with the cosmic: "...//in a mouse
To burrowhole against the time absorbed inherself
a pensive littlegirl
when wicked Boreas /will search
for me with his cold, bony fingers / so he can
(her left leg is too short,
squeeze my little heart under the blade of his claw, // a cowardly mouse heart and she takes piano lessons),
/ a palpitating crystal." Another poem, "Before a Weimar Portrait of D?rer," how she glows with her own dreams
"And hope? Oh yes, itmakes itself heard, like a bird at night, /when likea littlespring pool
concludes,
under the high heavens of March 17, 1965 ...
all voices are silent, when everything sleeps, /when everything has died and
all hopes are extinguished." And in "Ode III," foresaken, ineffect, by corporeal The poet sees, can't help seeing, both the lumen and the limp. This is Stus at
his truest: when he tries a less qualified panegyric, the praise feels willed. Most
rationality, Wat delineates in excruciating detail the stroke-induced pain that
wrote
cursed his final years. poets feel a natural impulse to bless ("Iwas born to love, not to judge,"
InMy Century, the record of his 1964-65 conversations with Milosz Pablo Neruda in his memoirs); one of the subtler costs of living under
perhaps
in California, Wat recalls a cell in 1940 with
of religious a group a totalitarian system is the all but unavoidable perversion of this instinct.
sharing
Not conventionally he felt "excluded" we do encounterhere and there the speculative, wry metaphy
prisoners. religious himself, yet envious. Though
"in the beginning there
"I satin my corner and wept," he says, "though Ished no tears." The complete sician spraying landscape with a web of theories:
the
absence of self-pity in this remark suggests was then..." the dominant stance in these poems seems
why the profound suffering his matter,/and largely
poems often record cannot, finally, obscure an equally profound capacity for either self-recriminating or accusatory. The tone, in tandem with the subject,
that illuminates such as "Before
the Elder," "Facing evokes the poet Robert Lowell, who wrote: "Always inside me is
praise poems Breughel occasionally
"A Recollection," or "The Bride," a lyric of remarkable the child who died,/always inside me is his will to die...."
Bonnard," beauty he
wrote to his wife on their fortieth anniversary and which stands, appropriately, While these admirable translations embody many of the difficulties and
as the final word in a book that enriches us all. of the originals, I often found myself wishing Lassowsky had
obliquities
Jonathan Aaron rendered them in a more idiomatic English. Stus's Ukrainian seems to me
and natural in places where Lassowsky's translation
generally colloquial
Selected Poems Vasyl Stus, translated and edited by Jaropolk Lassowsky, sounds rather stern or formal, or even stiff.
introduction by George Y. Shevelov. The Ukranian Free University. however, one is grateful for this generous selection of the early
Mainly,
A man's life, wrote Joseph Conrad, may be summarized on the back of when one remembers that there will be no late period, only a
work-especially
a matchbook: "He was born. He suffered. He died." Perhaps that's all that brilliant middle one (or, is that, de facto, considered late?). Stus isa major poet:
needs to be said about the case of Vasyl Stus, whose "career" really does one hopes that others assume the challenge implicit in this necessary work by
seem like a kind of paradigm us with an American version of Stus's
for Ukrainian (as well as many other Eastern directing their efforts toward providing
European, Asian, and "Third World") poets. For those interested in the bleak last work, Palimpsests.
particulars, there's the biographical sketch by Jaropolk Lassowsky that Askold Melnyczuk
follows this selection.
The present volume, with its comprehensive scholarly introduction by
Rudolfo A. Anaya: Focus on Criticism Edited by C?sar Gonz?lez. T. Lalo
George Y. Shevelov, provides us with a kind of etymology of the lyric impulse.
ISBN 0-9616941-49
Press (P.O. Box 12086, La Jolla, CA 92037), $19.95
All poets begin with animal spirits and a gift. These they either spoil early Outside of special issues of small literary journals, there has never
themselves, or, if they happen to live under totalitarian regimes, where what
author. This
been a book-length collection of criticism on the work of a Chicano
manifests itself as personal neurosis elsewhere is instead objectified and
exhaustive study of Rudolfo A. Anaya's seminal output is, merely by default, a
embodied in politics, the spirits and the gift find themselves under siege from
historic document. However, its deep seriousness and philosophical intent
the outside. In this selection, which includes everything from "notebook
make iteven more valuable.
entries" by a twenty-one-year-old hierophant to the ambitious, meditative, if
Rudolfo A. Anaya had the immense bad taste to have been born
slightly unfocussed poem "Streams," we see the poet tensed between the
this by himself as
Mexican-American. He further compounded identifying

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