America's Leading Critic
EDMUND WILSON has the reputation of being the foremost liter critic in the United States of America writing today. It is e doubtful if we have in this country at present anyone to match h The Wound and the Bow is thz title of the last of the seven es, in his new volume, a brief but pregnant discussion of the Philoct, of Sophocles. In spite of the fact that some of the best critic] has come from poets and novelists, increasing specialisation left its mark upon criticism, and a critic who can find time for . patient, prolonged and exhaustive reading necessary today in or to review important literary works competently is unlikely to fi time for other kinds of writing. This book contains seven CS53 the two on Dickens and Kipling taking up 182 out of the 295 pa:: the rest being given to Casanova, Edith Wharton, Hemingway Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Every page bears witness to Mr. Wils extensive but unparaded reading, and this gives all his estimation solidity and richness which it would be vain to seek for in other contemporary critics ; he has also a tough digestion, whereas there are critics who can make a display of their wi acquaintance with past and present European literature, most these have that sort of superficial familiarity which does not br understanding, and I know of none who equals Mr. Wilson depth of insight and soundness of judgement.
In all good criticism art is related to life, and Mr. Wilson is 0. in the tradition when he takes pains to analyse the human sour of a writer's work, but his bias is to the social rather than individual life ; so that in spite of his awareness of the discoveries modern psychology he tends, in my opinion, to overstress the so factors and not to allow sufficiently for those special attributes individuality which we have been wont to call genius. This le him, for instance, to explain Dickens the writer too much in te of a man who never found his right social milieu, who was nes properly adjusted to his environment. Surely he overlooks the that no man of genius can ever be anything but a misfit air° other men, in any place or time? Is not that precisely his s value in his own age? But it is not by any means all his val Can one infer that Dickens' social criticism was the product his childhood days in the blacking factory? It may explain a cli of plot and setting in Dickens' novels, but it does not explain genius. Nor can the specific psychology of Dickens be comPlet
reduced to terms of reaction to environment. Mr. Wilson, I .am sure, would admit this, but at the same time declare that some selection from the innumerable factors that go to make up a great writer is necessary in criticism and that the social factors were his special business. Well, then, is it not strange that in his brilliant
analysis of James Joyce's last work, Finnegans Wake, he fails to note (if not to perceive) the preponderating part played by the squalor and sordidness of the Dublin of Joyce's youth in the character of his fiction?
Mr. Wilson is surely right in considering Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as two of the most astonishing and remarkable literary productions of our age, but he does not put his finger on the reason of their comparative neglect. He admits a certain monotony, though, as he rightly points out, Proust is less neglected but equally monotonous ; he admits that Joyce is deficient in drama and narra- tive, that his constant re7w1iting blurred very often the outlines of his work to no advantage ; but he never pushes his analysis to the point of realising that what makes Joyce finally unreadable is that fundamentally he is uninteresting. To say that Joyce is an un- interesting writer is, I fear, to appear too simple to our young literary, man-eating tigers, for whom Joyce is an indigestible idol. But it is no use their replying that from a scientific viewpoint nothing is uninteresting, for the answer is that the scientific curiosity and thirst for knowledge are so far satisfied when a thing is known. Joyce's heroes—Bloom of Ulysses and Earwicker of Finnegans Wake—are both too readily intelligible to retain our interest for long. They are simply ourselves reduced to a few certain basic elements, like a human bbdy handed to us at a crematorium in a vase of ashes. What shall we do with them? I suggest that their fates will be the same—everlasting neglect. Word-chemists may, in the future, study Joyce for his prodigious verbal virtuosity, but men and women will not read him. W. j. TURNER.
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