Axels Castle

Edmund Wilson famously links the great European and American Modernists of the 20th Century to symbolism, tracing each author to his or her originary soil. Wilson is working very much as an aesthetic historian of literature-he is not particularly concerned with the political or ideological pressures which would push modern literature in various directions. Rather, he looks to classical (and often abstract) aesthetic influences on our modern masters. For Yeats, Wilson determines an ancestry in Mallarme, and for Eliot the influence is Laforgue. Wilson's treatment of Joyce is clearly of note- for it would not be for years before any other American would begin to read 'Ulysses' as anything but a vulgar curiosity. There are brilliant passages in this essay, "we are in the presence of a mind which has much in common with that of a certain type of philosopher, who in his effort to understand the causes of things, to interrelate the different elements of the universe, has reached a point where the ordinary values of good and bad, beautiful and ugly, have been lost in the excellence and beauty of transcendent understanding itself." 'Axel's Castle,' is a classic of its form. Although Wilson's treatments of Stein and Rimbaud are less complex, this is still a remarkable work of literary analysis, as well as an indisputable landmark in the history of aesthetic taste.

This collection of essays was published in 1931. It is available as a separate publication, and also included in Volume 1 of the LoA edition of E.Wilson, who was one of America's most important literary critics in the 30s to 50s. I knew him initially mainly due to his relationship with Nabokov, which is summarized in an entertaining letter collection: Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya. In Axel's Castle, Wilson tells us the history of fiction and poetry since 1870 with a focus on 'schools'. In broad strokes: Romanticism had been born as a rebellion of the individual and disorder against the orderliness of Neo-classicism. With the growth of science during the 19th, the reaction against the romantic school was Naturalism, which in turn provoked Symbolism as the extrapolation of the romantic rebellion. EW claims that all relevant literature up to the time of his publication could be put in either the Symbolist drawer, or the Naturalist one, or they were syntheses of both. That may all very well be the case, but I find it rather uninteresting. What is interesting is the individual writer, not any school that brought him/her forth. The essays cover specifically Yeats, Valery, Eliot, Proust, Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Villiers de L'Isle Adam and Rimbaud. Not to forget the road from Stein to Dada via plain nonsense. I think that no writer who needs a label for his characterization has been really great. The most interesting essays in the collection are therefore those on Proust and Joyce. Unfortunately, EW tried to squeeze them into his bed of Procrustes, but that notwithstanding, the discussions of La Recherche and of Ulysses are making this volume worth while. They add to our understanding and are helpful if you have a basic knowledge of the two monster books already. If not, they give you a good starting point. And then, EW tries to tell us that Proust reflects the new theories just developed by Einstein & Co. That the changing light, in which the protagonists in the Recherche appear over time, is exemplifying for us the theory of relativity. What crap.

The day Edmund Wilson is found irrelevant is the day literature is banned from our bookstores and libraries. This day is unlikely to come, but many small decisions are made everyday that take us closer to this eventuality. Librarians toss books routinely now to make room for play rooms, computer booths, and the lot. Public schools choose anthologies of the daily lives of workers and slaves and prisoners over the novels reviewed here by Edmund Wilson. Ask your kids if their English teacher has read any of these authors. Proust and Joyce in the public schools? No way. They are 'dead white males'. Wilson would have been appalled, but it is perhaps not surprising that things are moving in this direction. Wilson did not attend public school, and it is doubtful that if he had he would have become the foremost literary critic of his day. Then and now literature really belongs to a very small segment of society. Wilson studied Greek and Latin in private secondary school, French and Italian in college, and then taught himself Hebrew, Hungarian and Russian in middle-age. One reason he wrote well about Modernism is that he could understand it. Now that the classics are gone, Modern literature becomes harder and harder to comprehend, especially by so-called teachers with their government-issue certificates in nutrition awareness training; the day will come when our English teachers won't be able to understand anything but the memoirs of 19th century mill workers. That might be a good thing - you decide - but I hope they will have the honestly to change the names of these departments from that of English to departments of dreck.

To find in modern Literature a motion toward the idealistic and aesthetic, towards what Wilson calls the Symbolic is a unifying theme of this work. In the words of the critic William Troy the technique of Symbolism means for Wilson , " "Symbolism represents the effort to communicate, by means of a unique personal language, ideas, feelings and sensations more faithfully than they are rendered through the conventional and universal language of ordinary literature. The function of this language is "to intimate things rather than state them plainly"; it depends on suggestion rather than statement. " Wilson analyzes the symbolic work of Yeats, Paul Valery, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Proust and Joyce. He brings together the names which brought about the great modernist revolution in Literature, the new way of seeing things which in some sense corresponded with the Cubist revolution of Braque - Picasso and the non- total revolution of Schoenberg. Wilson is a great reader and provides the first real guide to many of the works which today are considered 'classics'. One may not always agree with him, but he is always interesting, provocative, alive. And in his ability to make us see works in a new way he is one of the supreme literary critics of the twentieth century.

_Axel's Castle_ provides a wonderful introduction to modern literature and its sources in the Symbolist movement. However, the book is a bit uneven, and some writers garner more attention than others; Stein gets only about ten pages. It is clear that Wilson views Joyce and Proust as the two most significant modern writers, and those two chapters are accordingly the most insightful of the book and worth the price of the entire volume. In addition, the book will introduce most readers to the deservedly obscure Villiers de L'Isle Adam and may impel them to read _Axel_. Perhaps the latter volume will someday return to print now that Wilson's first work of literary criticism has finally done so. If you are at all interested in any of these authors or the Symbolist movement, this book is essential as Wilson is one of the foremost literary critics of the century, and this is perhaps his most representative and greatest work.