Volume 38, Number 14 · August 15, 1991
Critics at the Top
By Denis Donoghue
Selected Writings 1950-1990
by Irving Howe
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 490 pp., $34.95
Minor Prophecies: The Literary Essay in the Culture Wars
by Geoffrey H. Hartman
Harvard University Press, 264 pp., $29.95
The Uses of Error
by Frank Kermode
Harvard University Press, 432 pp., $24.95
Versions of Pygmalion
by J. Hillis Miller
Harvard University Press, 263 pp., $25.00
Near the end of Versions of Pygmalion J. Hillis Miller argues that reading involves two obligations. On the one hand: 'to transfer to reading Henry James's injunction to the observer of life, the novice writer: 'Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!' ' On the other: 'to reduce the inexplicable to the explicable, to find its reason, its law, its ground.' I have never respected this second duty. It seems to me to pretend to knowledge where knowledge is impossible. I would much prefer to be shown that a book or a painting is mysterious than to have someone reduce it to the explicable for my poor benefit. But Miller's concern is a crucial one, as this passage from his book indicates:
Review, 5818 words
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