edmund wilson: a critic for our time

Midwest Modern Language Association

Edmund Wilson: A Critic for Our Time by Janet GrothReview by: Joseph FargnoliThe Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Autumn, 1990), pp.50-52Published by: Midwest Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1315224 .

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Stephen Knight's socially focused analysis, for instance, is based on far less cultural material. One aspect of the book, though, does become troubling: that is its tendency to hover ambiguously - some perhaps would say judiciously - between new historical and humanistic approaches. Strohm reads documents for the

ideologies they betray; he argues that those ideologies write themselves into an author's work; and he looks for the self-criticism lurking within any cultural document or expressed through a process of exclusion- the Plowman's stolen voice, for instance. And yet he privileges Chaucer, depicting him as both product and manipulator of powerful cultural ideologies, but apparently subject to no social blindness of his own. Is this finally the real social Chaucer?

Timothy D. O'Brien United States Naval Academy

Edmund Wilson: A Critic for our Time. By Janet Groth. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1989. 276 pp. $29.95.

Edmund Wilson's views on a wide range of subjects are regularly cited with ap- probation. Malcolm Bradbury, for instance, in a commentary on the Library of America, refers with approval to Wilson. In an essay about New York City's bookstores, Janet Malcolm forms her conclusions around some of Wilson's ideas. Raymond Williams, V. S. Pritchett, and Ronald Blythe each invoke Wilson's To the Finland Station in their respective discussions of Marxism, revolution, and the historical consciousness. C. Vann Woodward gratefully expresses a debt to Wil- son in his magnificent edition of Mary Chesnut. James W. Tuttleton, writing recently in the American Scholar about problems of modernism, concurs with Wil- son's fundamental estimate about the major modernist authors. In the 1985 edition of the Norton Anthology ofAmerican Literature, Wilson is lauded for an exem- plary prose style- though V. S. Pritchett, for one, finds Wilson's prose style rela- tively mediocre. Similar reservations about Wilson's lasting significance continue to surface in the fuller, more direct studies of him. Tuttleton, for example, while crediting Wilson in Axel's Castle with the modern articulation of the problem about "the great Conservative modernists," sees Wilson's historicism flawed by psychological and political reductionisms. Evidently, for a variety of reasons, Wilson's books and essays continue to appeal to many different kinds of readers. Who and what those readers and reasons are, though, pose complex questions, ones that have not been satisfactorily answered in the latest books about him. Janet Groth's book on Wilson, given its grandiose subtitle, "A Critic for Our Time," causes anticipations about the characterization of Wilson's stature and achievement in light of critical and historical changes in contemporary culture. Her study focuses on Wilson exclusively as a humanist literary critic, however;

50 Book Reviews



and the only connection made between this aspect of Wilson and "our time" are one or two assertions that Wilson's kind of humanist criticism is an antidote to

"... postprint culture, an essential counterweight ... to the nihilism of so much

postmodernist criticism." To limit the view of Wilson to one solely as a literary critic proves unsatisfac-

tory in a number of ways. Groth is correct in locating Wilson in the critical tradi- tion that descends through Sainte-Beuve and Matthew Arnold. But it could be

argued that Wilson's essays are valuable in spite of their real inadequacies, in par- ticular, as literary criticism. It is true, as Groth shows, that Sainte-Beuve, Arnold, and Wilson estimated literature by a humanist aesthetic standard. But the morality and "criticism of life" somewhat acceptable in the age of Arnold's criticism and even less so in the time of Wilson's - not to mention today - require investigation and explication. To argue, as Groth does, that Wilson indeed practiced literary criticism because he approached literature as art and had an aesthetic standard that evaluated works in terms of "morality" and "life" does not get very far. In his studies of literature, Wilson constantly resorted to a standard of mimesis. He wielded it without reflexiveness or sophistication. For the most part, it was a biased idea about realism. Literature took on heroic proportions in Wilson's

essays because of the way his views on writers, society, and politics informed his criticism. But as R. P. Blackmur once said, one has to take Wilson's word about the literary artistry of a given work, and look to Ransom for the literary criticism.

James W. Tuttleton's observations are apropos here. Groth devotes two chapters to Axel's Castle, offering long, descriptive paraphrases of Wilson's essays on Yeats and Proust. The chapters simplistically reassert and prove that Wilson was a humanist literary critic because in his essays he engaged the works of those authors and tested them against the humanist aesthetic standard of "life." As Tuttleton has shown, however, the salient value of Axel's Castle resides more in its broader, cultural criticisms and implications than in its literary analyses. Besides Blackmur, other critics of Wilson such as Delmore Schwartz and Rene Wellek have emphasized Wilson's serious limitations in the domain of literary criticism per se. Groth seems unfamiliar with Wellek's study of Wilson, though it has been published in various places since the late seventies, and most recently (1986) in his A History of Modern Criticism. She omits Wellek's article from her

bibliography, claiming that, since the time of Stanley Edgar Hyman's study (1948), Walter Berthoff's 1968 essay on Wilson ". .. represents the most authori- tative attempt to 'place' Wilson as a critic. .. ." Some of the scholarly references, page citations, and spelling in this book are a bit slipshod also, as in the consistent

misspelling, "Mary Chestnut" [sic]; a quote from Wilson, supposedly from A Piece of My Mind, but not discoverable on the page cited; and a substantial para- phrase of Giles Gunn, but without note.

It is certainly to Wilson's credit that his criticism regularly includes a view of literature as art, as well as views of literature as psychological, social, political, and historical materials. Groth, to the extent that she has confined her study of

Book Reviews 51



Wilson to chiefly literary considerations in only five of his essays (a very small sample, as important as they are)-in a predominantly descriptive account un- informed by poststructuralist poetics-barely marks out a legitimate, if minor

perimeter in the area of Wilson's controversial achievements. To be sure, her book performs a service in pointing to some real issues. But the controversy it- self- and any of its outcomes-are not in her pages. Wilson can be seen as less a critic for our time than as a time-an occasion, or topic-for our critics. He was not simply writing literary criticism about texts, or even biographical portraits of authors or studies of peoples and cultures. Foremostly an artist in the genre of criticism, he created in his books worlds of writers, literature, and history that were rendered with great imagination. His works continue to compel the atten- tion of specialized as well as general readers not so much because of what they say about any so-called, real states of affairs, but because of the engrossing narrative

persuasiveness, drama, and oftentimes epic scale of their vision.

Joseph Fargnoli Michigan State University

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edmund wilson: a critic for our time

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