The Power of Aries: Myth and Reality in Karen Blixen's Life (review)
families sticking together, of small groups of people who love each other, and the laws of hospitality, charity, purity of heart, compassion, and community (not society)" and the assertion that Christa Wolf "has come within inches of being the most thoughtful writer of the Green movement on either side of the Wall." It is tempting to speculate upon the origin of such reductive formulations. Upon first reading, one may assume that the attempt to make the book accessible to a general audience could account for them. Upon further reflection, however, it seems more likely that Demetz' explicitly nontheoretical (and possibly even antitheoretical) orientation is the source of the book's more reductive aspects. By setting up in the book's preface an antithesis of pure theory and of his own "terrestial interests" in knowing "how good poems, plays, and novels are made, and how they relate to each other and to the kind of writing to which they belong, within the social context of their time," Demetz sidesteps the problem of defining the social context in any rigorous, theoreticaUy grounded way, resting content instead with the commonly accepted views of East and West German, Swiss, and Austrian societies and the role that literature plays within them. In the preface Demetz acknowledges that an exclusive interest in literary forms would constitute an approach close to his fundamental inclinations. That he has chosen to go beyond those fundamental inclinations speaks for the seriousness of his concern with extraliterary German history. One might only wish that his treatment of the relationship of literature and society and of the political dimensions of that relationship in particular had more fully realized his serious intention.