Edmund Wilson
Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s & '30s: The Shores of Light, Axel's Castle, Uncollected Reviews
Edited by Lewis M. Dabney
LIBRARY OF AMERICA; 958 PAGES; $40
Edmund Wilson
Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s & '40s: The Triple Thinkers, the Wound and the Bow, Classics and Commercials, Uncollected Reviews
Edited by Lewis M. Dabney
LIBRARY OF AMERICA; 979 PAGES; $40
Literary criticism is in deep trouble in the United States today. Aside from a couple of lucid voices (Louis Menand, for instance), what passes for reflection on books and literary themes is generally of embarrassing quality. Perhaps the assumption is that, in the Internet age, blogs have taken over as open forums of debate, making redundant the space allocated in periodicals for literary analysis. At least that’s the corollary one gets from the recent shrinkage of book review sections.
The fact is that media corporations have little patience for serious insight. They are interested in instant gratification. Trashy books about diets, sports, the reckless lives of celebrities and trying one’s luck in business are the crop out of New York every season. They don’t require much thought. The more literary ones sell far less, hardly ever justifying the investment. In other words, it seems that literature is about making a buck. If it doesn’t bring in money, it’s too complicated. Why waste time and energy discussing it? Also, the news media is now less about spreading information than about brainwashing people. The less you think, the happier the status quo will be. No wonder the country seems like Disneyland.
At this point, some readers will say, “There goes Stavans, again with his admonitions.” But I’m not the only one bored.
Worse even, I spend my days among academics in the humanities, a vast majority of whom make a profession of being pretentious. Writing, for them, is about obfuscation: Rather than enlightening a discussion, they make it more obscure. The state of literary criticism among them is even more dismal: It is self-obsessed, self-contained and self-referential, hiding behind terminologies that only a small group of initiated readers are able to grasp. But not much happens when they do. This is because this type of reflection is utterly useless. It’s a shame students have to waste themselves in graduate schools in order to produce totally incomprehensible writing. Its impact on the world per se is nil – or worse.
I’m afraid the publication by the Library of America, on its 25th anniversary, of the first two volumes of Edmund Wilson’s oeuvre won’t change the situation. Nothing might, at this point. We confuse democracy with a cacophonous shrieking of ideological arguments. Civility has been forgotten, and so have patience and introspection. Still, the Wilson volumes might serve, for the small audience that dares open them, as a reminder of an age not too distant from ours when literature mattered. The latest titles of Faulkner, Eliot, Hemingway, Pound, Stein and Dos Passos were reason enough to rush to the bookstore. They had an urgency to them, a vitality, a pathos. That’s because the idea of culture was important to Americans: What makes us distinct from Europe? How does America mature as a nation? … more>>
