Christopher Ricks

The Enigma of Arrival: V.S. Naipaul’s title is the one at which Apollinaire enigmatically arrived, for the painting by Giorgio de Chirico. A detail of it illuminates Naipaul’s cover and his book: making their huddled way from a classical quayside (the scene bathed both in shadow and in sun), two stoled figures have their obscured faces towards us and their backs to a wall. Above the wall billows the sunlit summit of a sail.

Faintly repelled by elaborate theories of irony and by taxonomies of it, D.J. Enright has set himself to muster instances, observations, localities and anecdotes. There is no continuing argument, and not much argufying even, but there are plenty of penetrating glances. ‘Rather than theory, it is something resembling “practical criticism” that this book will concern itself with: the exploration of individual ironies as they are manifest in life as well as in literature.’ This is good-naturedly loose, the recipe for something resembling a scrapbook, a scrappy one. ‘When I was making notes for this book I came, before long, to see irony everywhere.’ Likewise when you were making a book for these notes.

Patricia Highsmith has been praised by Graham Greene in the good old way as ‘a writer who has created a world of her own’. She can be even better than that – when she takes a world and makes it not only her own but ours. She lurks in the murk where you have to peer to check if this is an – or the – underworld. In her seething city-settings, paranoia may be the saving of you, and yet paranoia does have, too, a hideously masochistic alluring power. She is the poet of these death-bearing pheromones of fear.’

Geoffrey Hartman’s Easy Pieces can be hard going. ‘To see, oneself unseen, as at the movies, is only less than the ecstasy of an unseeing seeing: of going beyond the non-language of images to the non-language of non-images, or a glance that is not guilty, that is both knowing and pure.’ This is not incomprehensible, but it is not by any stretch easy either, and it tips a glance that is guilty. It invites the mild dismay of a poet to whom Hartman is prudently indifferent, Byron: ‘I wish he would explain his explanation.’ Yet it was Coleridge whom Byron was scorning there, and Hartman would not mind being tarred with the same brush as so myriad-minded a critic. But then again Coleridge didn’t go in for ingratiations, for titles like Easy Pieces, an act of calculated charm not compatible with the essential (in its essence) charmlessness which has to end an essay like this: ‘Even philosophy’s insistence on clear and distinct ideas may express this “ineluctable modality” of the perceptible that makes what we call representation the unexcludable middle between phenomenal reality and mind, between thinking in images and thinking by means of texts against them.’ This is a dour culmination, and it is a pity that Hartman’s sense of himself and of his enterprise will not entirely countenance honest dourness even of his own choosing – which is why he has to insinuate the easy piece ‘what we call representation’. What does it actually what we call mean to say ‘what we call representation’? This is manoeuvring, ‘I could an I would’, both knowing and impure: ‘propitiation’s claw’. For these pieces, like so much of recent Hartman, and unlike his large upright book on Wordsworth, are not easy but uneasy.’