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Reviews
Axel's Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930 by Edmund Wilson, Mary Gordon
mgeake's review against another edition
challenging
hopeful
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.25
tome15's review against another edition
5.0
Wilson, Edmund. Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1931.
Anyone interested in the modernist movement in literature should read Edmund Wilson’s Axel’s Castle. It is much less dated than any work of literary criticism that is almost 90 years old has any right to be. Wilson writes with an almost journalistic clarity about subjects that are themselves sometimes intentionally vague, abstruse, and arcane, and he does so at a time when many of the works he discusses were just beginning to be read and understood in any depth. He writes about James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, for example, when it was still being published in draft pieces. If the romantic poets were reacting against classicism and connecting their own subjective experience to our objective understanding of nature, the late 19th-century French symbolist poets, Wilson tells us, reacted against the objectivity of romanticism and against realism and naturalism. Wilson then locates Yeats in this new symbolist tradition and shows how later in his career he blends it with more realistic elements, as did the early work of Joyce and T. S. Eliot. In discussing Joyce and Proust, he points out that consciousness for them had a much more evanescent quality than it did for the romantics. They needed to catch it on the fly and connect it, not to nature, but to the depths of their own unconscious minds. Language for many of these writers was more important for its suggestive, often private, values than for its denotative connections. This explains, Wilson says, why so many of these works are difficult to decipher. Axel’s Castle is Wilson’s ultimate symbol for language that has become completely self-absorbed and private. He somewhat unfairly, I think, disparages the poetry of Gertrude Stein for this tendency. On a less serious note, Wilson gives me good reason not to read Proust, and suggests that maybe I ought to try to really read all the layers I can in in the palimpsest that is Finnegans Wake. Wilson gets five stars for this one.
Anyone interested in the modernist movement in literature should read Edmund Wilson’s Axel’s Castle. It is much less dated than any work of literary criticism that is almost 90 years old has any right to be. Wilson writes with an almost journalistic clarity about subjects that are themselves sometimes intentionally vague, abstruse, and arcane, and he does so at a time when many of the works he discusses were just beginning to be read and understood in any depth. He writes about James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, for example, when it was still being published in draft pieces. If the romantic poets were reacting against classicism and connecting their own subjective experience to our objective understanding of nature, the late 19th-century French symbolist poets, Wilson tells us, reacted against the objectivity of romanticism and against realism and naturalism. Wilson then locates Yeats in this new symbolist tradition and shows how later in his career he blends it with more realistic elements, as did the early work of Joyce and T. S. Eliot. In discussing Joyce and Proust, he points out that consciousness for them had a much more evanescent quality than it did for the romantics. They needed to catch it on the fly and connect it, not to nature, but to the depths of their own unconscious minds. Language for many of these writers was more important for its suggestive, often private, values than for its denotative connections. This explains, Wilson says, why so many of these works are difficult to decipher. Axel’s Castle is Wilson’s ultimate symbol for language that has become completely self-absorbed and private. He somewhat unfairly, I think, disparages the poetry of Gertrude Stein for this tendency. On a less serious note, Wilson gives me good reason not to read Proust, and suggests that maybe I ought to try to really read all the layers I can in in the palimpsest that is Finnegans Wake. Wilson gets five stars for this one.
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