The Hedgehog's Tale
IN a short preface to this new collection of essays, Professor Heller explains his own pecu- liarity as a literary critic in terms of Sir Isaiah Berlin's distinction—derived from the Greek poet Archilochus—between the hedgehog and the fox: 'The fox knows many things, but the hedge- hog knows one big thing.' Professor Heller is a hedgehog. Whatever he writes about—and in the present book his subjects include not only literature and philosophy but painting and sculpture, with asides on music and architecture —he tends to write about the same thing; and this 'one big thing,' in his case, is the difficulty or impossibility of being spiritually at home in the modern world.
Whether he is tracing the treatment of the Faustus theme from the sixteenth century to the twentieth, defining Romantic art or connecting Rilke's Duino Elegies with Hegel's predictions about the evolution of modern poetry, his true concerns remain constant. The conclusion of the opening essay, 'Faust's Damnation,' sums up one aspect of Professor Heller's 'big thing': The ambiguities of his [Goethe's] Faust pro- vide the measure of his lasting dilemma, a dilemma that is bound to stay with us. But the refusal to contemplate it on a level beyond the expediencies of science, technology, and states- manship would deny the essential freedom in which we may still—no, not resolve the ten- sion but sustain it without despairing. Where nothing can be done, the deed is in the en- hancement of being. If, as even Goethe's Faust might teach us. grace cannot be merited by man, he may yet try to earn his hope. Goethe's intuition of the 'categorical imperative' that is needful in the pursuit of knowledge can be articulated but vaguely. Yet this is no reason for preferring the exact prospect opened by that scientific earnestness and moral frivolity which would hear nothing of the inexact morality of knowledge. For that exact prospect is monstrous in its exactitude: a race of magician's apprentices who, as the one in Goethe's poem Der Zauberlehrling, are about to perish in the floods they themselves have released by the magic formula; a horde of cave- dwellers, their souls impoverished by machines and panic helplessness, sheltering themselves from the products of their titanically superior brains.
The argument in that passage is not un- familiar, and it could have been rendered more briefly by paraphrase; but only Professor Heller's own words can convey something of his manner, of that 'hedgehoggy quality' which makes him something other than a literary critic. More often than not, his literary subjects provide him with texts for a kind of lay sermon; and, eloquent, lively and witty as those sermons are, one's response to them will depend in part on one's sympathy or lack of sympathy with Professor Heller's constant concerns.
I happen to share his misgivings about the extent to which knowledge and technology have become ends in themselves, not to be questioned or related to other human needs. Yet, being more of a fox than Professor Heller, I am often exasperated by his 'hedgehoggy' ways. His con- clusions about the Faustus theme are acceptable to me not only because I agree with them but because there is sufficient basis for them in the subject itself. For the same reason his early essay on Schiller, included in this collection, strikes lite as much more satisfactory than the considerably m°-e ambitious title and centre- piec6, with its overriding thesis about the grow- ing 'inwardness' of art.
A separate short piece is devoted to 'The Realistic Fallacy'; but, fallacious as realism may be in a philosophical sense, Professor Heller simply does not take it seriously enough as a literary mode. Philosophical criteria are not nearly as relevant to artistic creation as most of his essays assume. Even if Rilke had read Hegel, he would have cared very little about the degree to which his practice as a poet agreed with Hegel's aesthetics. Almost all of Professor Heller's literary examples are drawn from a narrow range of writers, mainly German. Keats, Wordsworth and Eliot provide texts that accord with Professor Heller's thesis; but nothing is said of those modern poets, let alone the prose writers, whose relations with the 'real' world were passionate, happy and absorbing. Hopkins, Lawrence and William Carlos Williams are only a few names that spring to mind. This is not to deny that every kind of involvement in the physical and visible world has become problematical in modern poetry; but poetry goes on all the same, mainly because poets are less concerned with problems than with writing what they can and must write.
Professor Heller, on the other hand, is much more acutely aware of the problems than of the poetry. That is why too much of his writing gives me the uncomfortable sensation of not being able to see the trees for the wood. His treatment not only of specific texts but of writers for whom he has no use can be extra- ordinarily facile and glib. The heart of every philistine will warm to him when he writes: And. furthermore, what is the distance be- tween Keats and our singers singing ever sorrier songs, songs without rhyme or reason, songs in which melodies would be out of place and the poetry would not matter?
Or when he refers to 'the minor manufacturers of last tapes, end games, tin drums, rhinoceroses,
and other stories about the desolation of the Spirit in the face of a desolate world.' That lumping together of writers as different as Sathuel Beckett, Grass and Ionesco is at once 'hedge- hoggy' and academic, since the only thing those writers have in common is that they are still alive, so that it is far too early to say whether or not they are minor writers.
Professor Heller is at his best in the border regions between imaginative literature and philosophy, with 'philosophical' poets like Schiller and poetic, existential thinkers like Nietzsche. (Whether he is right to see Wittgenstein, too, as one of the latter, I am not competent to judge; but his essay on 'Wittgenstein and Nietzsche' is full of striking perceptions.) His strength is to see connections everywhere; his weakness, to pay too little regard to differences and quiddities.
If I believed that foxes and hedgehogs were divided by an absolute gulf, I should be only repeating what Professor Heller says about him- self; but I know no good reason why 'anybody should conform to one type or the other.
MICHAEL HAMBURGER
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