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7 reviews for:
Axel's Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930
Edmund Wilson, Mary Gordon
4.01 AVERAGE
7 reviews for:
Axel's Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930
Edmund Wilson, Mary Gordon
4.01 AVERAGE
Wilson approaches everything he studies with the obsessiveness of a historian. It is not enough to understand the meaning of a text or to debate the author’s ideas— instead he looks to the largest scale of events and societies for an explanation of their thinking. He observes, with a telescope as well as a microscope, whatever subject he sets himself upon. This is a timeless book, perhaps because no one has been able to replicate the greatest features of his work— no one has taken his influence and developed farther. In his own oeuvre he has yet to be surpassed, and so he stands as the head of his own branch of criticism and history, still waiting to be supplanted.
Somewhere in the previous Wilson I recently read, the critic states that one of his favorite times in life is when he's able to describe a book to someone unfamiliar with such. That ripple of joy is on display here. Often. I truly wish I had read this book 30 years ago. It was probably the number of poets within which discouraged me at that time. Those childish things. A shrinking violet--in flannel. But a flaneur, nonetheless.
Wilson cites the advent of Symbolism as the movement which brought to the fore Joyce, Proust and Stein. The critic then develops a thesis of Romanticism being a response to Classicism. Naturalism then became a conservative easing of the Romantic fire which then led to the insular quest of Symbolism, crafted in a lab by the wonky Mallarmé and other, lesser, lights of contention. I find it odd that Valéry received a chapter but Huysmans did not. The effect of the Great War also appears nebulous in this reasoning.
There was much to learn in this ostensible primer. There was also a great deal of plot description. Some would wager an excessive amount. We can't deny Bunny his pleasure. My personal ax on Axel: not enough Freud and Faulkner.
Wilson cites the advent of Symbolism as the movement which brought to the fore Joyce, Proust and Stein. The critic then develops a thesis of Romanticism being a response to Classicism. Naturalism then became a conservative easing of the Romantic fire which then led to the insular quest of Symbolism, crafted in a lab by the wonky Mallarmé and other, lesser, lights of contention. I find it odd that Valéry received a chapter but Huysmans did not. The effect of the Great War also appears nebulous in this reasoning.
There was much to learn in this ostensible primer. There was also a great deal of plot description. Some would wager an excessive amount. We can't deny Bunny his pleasure. My personal ax on Axel: not enough Freud and Faulkner.
It's fascinating on so many levels. I first read it in the late seventies, as part of my "alien minds" project--to try to see through the eyes of minds utterly unlike mine, but with one sharing point (after I made an attempt with the Marquis de Sade, and was just repulsed, but I do not like horror). In this case, the touch point--I thought--was fantasy.
The full title includes the phrase "Imaginative Literature" but Wilson's six writers are not who I would have chosen to represent fantasy. I was actually glad--I wanted to learn what it was he saw worthwhile in Stein, for instance. I loved reports of what she said in the salons of Paris, but her writing was (and still is, to my eye) turgid and impenetrable.
I never bought the Symbolist movement--it seemed more self-consciously "Here I am so great" and pompously "art for the sake of art" than all the elite the expats scorned. Yet they were trying experiments, which I wanted to understand, even if I couldn't appreciate the effect.
Yeats I did come to value in later years; what Wilson gave me was a key to understanding, and appreciating, James Joyce.
The full title includes the phrase "Imaginative Literature" but Wilson's six writers are not who I would have chosen to represent fantasy. I was actually glad--I wanted to learn what it was he saw worthwhile in Stein, for instance. I loved reports of what she said in the salons of Paris, but her writing was (and still is, to my eye) turgid and impenetrable.
I never bought the Symbolist movement--it seemed more self-consciously "Here I am so great" and pompously "art for the sake of art" than all the elite the expats scorned. Yet they were trying experiments, which I wanted to understand, even if I couldn't appreciate the effect.
Yeats I did come to value in later years; what Wilson gave me was a key to understanding, and appreciating, James Joyce.
challenging
hopeful
informative
reflective
medium-paced
informative
slow-paced
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.