Axel's Castle Research Articles

Axel's Classroom

Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle (1931) has been much blamed for characterising modernist literature by an aesthetic refusal to engage with society, and for encouraging the narrow formalism of New Critical pedagogy. The recovery of Wilson's own distinctive teaching practice, however, shows that he used the book to teach modernism's development out of coterie symbolism towards social engagement and cultural criticism. Modern literature classrooms like Wilson's functioned not to define literature's purity, but to explore the connections between then-contemporary modernism and all kinds of writing that describes, references, and names the material world in which it was created.

Last Kiss The Great Gatsby The Great Gatsby: An Edition of the Manuscript

Last Kiss The Great Gatsby The Great Gatsby: An Edition of the Manuscript

F. O. Matthiessen's Modernist Hawthorne

F. O. Matthiessen's Modernist Hawthorne

The Early Beckett's Approach to Reality through a Textual Struggle with Rimbaud

In his early career, Beckett often mentioned an aesthetic of ‘incoherent reality’, which he felt was characteristic of Arthur Rimbaud. Critics have agreed that Rimbaud influenced on Beckett in the ‘incoherent’ use of language, while the importance of the idea of ‘reality’ has yet to be explored. In this article, I attempt to elucidate Beckett's view of incoherent reality and how he formulated it through Rimbaud. The early part of my analysis, drawing on Proust, differentiates young Beckett's perspective of reality from literary symbolism and explains why he found elements of reality in Proust and Rimbaud rather than Mallarmé and W.B. Yeats. Axel's Castle by Edmund Wilson, a classical study of literary symbolism, supports this differentiation; Wilson addresses Rimbaud's social and mercantile activity, which is barely seen in other reclusive symbolists. I speculate that Beckett may have read Wilson's book because descriptions about symbolism, which are quite similar to Wilson's, are present in the notes taken by Leslie Daiken as a student of Beckett's at Trinity College Dublin. Moreover, allusions to Rimbaud in works such as ‘Enueg I’ or Mercier et Camier show how Beckett focussed on the incoherent reality and was distanced from Rimbaud's mysterious side. On the basis of these arguments, the final part of the article examines the meaning of the ‘reality of insane areas of silence’ discussed in Beckett's first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, to prove that he began to diverge from Rimbaud with an aesthetic of indolence, which would shape his own view of incoherent reality.

Fitzgerald and the Idea of Society

Fitzgerald and the Idea of Society

Modernism under Review: Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930

Modernism under Review: Edmund Wilson's <i>Axel's Castle</i>: <i>A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930</i>

Axel's Castle

Axel's Castle

Edmund Wilson: a life in literature

From the Jazz Age through the Kennedy administration, Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) stood at the center of the American cultural scene. A champion of the young Ernest Hemingway, a loyal friend and mentor of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and an ally of John Dos Passos during the Depression, Wilson wrote classics of literary and intellectual history (including Axel's Castle, To the Finaland Station, and Patriotic Gore), searching reportage, and insightful criticism. Though he documented his private life in openly erotic fiction and journals, he left the personal dramas at its center in shadow. Lewis M. Dabney, the first writer to integrate Wilson's life and work, vividly encompasses his formative love affair with Edna St. Vincent Millay, his tempestuous marriage to Mary McCarthy, and his lasting accord with Elena Mumm Thornton, as well as his volatile friendship with Vladimir Nabokov and enduring ties with W. H. Auden and Isaiah Berlin. Steeped in knowledge of the era, this compelling narrative follows the critic's intellectual development, from son of small-town New Jersey gentry to America's last great renaissance man, a lucid commentator on everything from the Russian classics to Native American rituals to the Dead Sea Scrolls. Dabney shows why Wilson was and has remained - in his cosmopolitanism and trenchant nonconformity - a model for young writers and intellectuals, as well as the favorite critic of the general reader. Edmund Wilson has been widely recognized as the authoritative biography of a brilliant man whose life reflected the grand sweep of twentieth-century cultural, social, and human experience.

A Sampler of Modernisms

Given the high authority of modernist art, it is remarkable to realize how recently modernism has been designated a distinctive cultural phenomenon. A good deal of the substance, if not the name, of modernism was occasionally recognized in Anglo-American criticism during the early decades of the century, Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle (1931) being perhaps the first sustained analysis. But the category and the term came into extensive use only in the 1950s and 1960s, at the same moment that its objects were being raised to canonical status in universities, museums, and the general culture. By and large the writers who constructed this cultural category, taking the artists at their own word, portrayed modernist art as a heroic enterprise, the only source of transcendence available in the derelict modern world. The resonances of this modernist construction in the 1950s and 1960s are not hard to discern. Modernist art became the repository of subjectivity in an intellectual world that had been divided in two by logical positivism and the scientific aspiration of the human sciences. Amid stalemated Cold War politics, the alienated artist also offered a means to something like freedom. Yet criticisms of modern art were present at the beginning of interpretation-Axel's Castle is one example -and by the late 1960s, hard on the heels of modernism itself, postmodernism entered critical discourse. Conscious of living in a late-capitalist, postimperial world, postmodern writers declared that the alienated stance and autonomous aesthetic sphere of modernism, as well as the phase of modernity to which it had responded, had reached an end. Yet most often they identified their own postmodern program with what was most vital in modernism and proceeded to reinterpret their parent tradition. The result has been a swelling volume of literature on modernism. There is now an excellent book devoted entirely to the differing interpretations of modernism in literature (Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism, 1990) and another that sorts out the complex permutations of the category (Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence,

THE RHETORIC OF EXTERMINISM Edmund Wilson's Israel and the Dead Sea Scrolls

A renevved interest in the Dead Sea Scrolls drew me back to Edmund Wilson's pioneering study vvhich is stili so often referred to in continuing discussions of the subject.1 An admirer of Axel's Castle and avvare of the political correctness of the author's Apology to the Iraquoıs, I was not prepared to find a crippling bias in this book. The surprise is increased by the author's disarming truthfulness about his linguistic limitations and his candor about his non-partisan stance. Since he professes himself neither Jew nor Christian, one is prepared to find him free of the biases vvhich have delayed the translation and given rise to opposing theories of dating of the scrolls. Indeed, on the surface, a ration and objective spirit seems to pervade Wilson's discussion of the scrolls themselves. Wilson really does not çare that "ignorant" Catholics might find their traditional faith disturbed by nevv information about the historical Jesus, for example

Unimagined Existence and the Fiction of the Real: Postmodernist Realism in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

LET Us Now PRAISE FAMOUS MEN, a book of photographs by Walker Evans and prose by James Agee, is one of the strangest texts in the American canon. Critics have seldom known quite what to make of this generically unclassifiable work. Because it deals with the actual lives of three families of tenant farmers in 1930s America, Praise, as I will henceforth call the text, is often categorized as social documentary. But the striking beauty of the photographs and the richness of the prose have led other critics to treat the work primarily as an object. It is the text's dual status as an aesthetic and as a political document that interests me. The collapse of the capitalist economy in 1929 ushered in the most intense period of documentation, the most exhaustive effort to represent the real in American history. The economic crash seems to have brought down systems of representation with it. Almost overnight, the rich modernism of the twenties gave way to a new realism. In an emblematic gesture, critic Edmund Wilson moved from his study of the symbolists, Axel's Castle, to his Study in the Writing and Acting of History, To the Finland Station. In some cases this shift led to a naive and crude naturalism, but the authors of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, like Wilson himself, brought the culture of modernism with them into their search for the real. Written near the end of the thirties when the vast mound of documentation seemed to have buried reality rather than to have clarified it, Praise embodies the proposition that representational systems are always inadequate, always miss the real, but that this inevitable inadequacy calls for greater aesthetic-political reflexivity and commitment rather than abandonment of the attempt to imagine the real. The text's sophistication stands in critique of simple realism, while

Does Axel's Castle Have a Street Address, or, What's New? Tendencies in the Poetry of Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones)

When American Imago opened its pages to psychological investigations of the jazz culture of the forties and fifties, psychiatrists Aaron H. Esman and Norman M. Margolis reported that contemporary hot jazz, which formally opposed the softness of commercialized swing and which symbolically transgressed social and sexual taboos, attracted audiences from predominantly three social groups: (1) intellectuals, (2) blacks, and (3) adolescents. While other groups reacted with anxiety toward modern jazz, an anxiety that accompanies many advances in art, and is superficially ascribed to the impact of something new, unknown, untried, jazz fans sought liberation and individuality in the new music. Their cultural gesture was no overt social protest, but an indulgence in regressive narcissistic gratification, which allowed them to experience the dissolution of barriers between self and outside world.2 At the height of the bebop craze, Amiri Baraka (born LeRoi Jones in Newark, New Jersey, in 1934) was an adolescent black intellectual and thus triply attracted to the rebellious impulses of black avantgardist music of the forties and fifties.

Proust and the Aesthetic of Suffering

In Axel's Castle Edmund Wilson suggests that Proust is guilty of the mediaeval sin of accidia, that combination of slothfulness and gloom which Dante represented as an eternal submergence mud. He goes on to state that A la recherche du temps perdu, in spite of all its humor and beauty, is one of the gloomiest books ever written.' In recent book on Proust, Roger Shattuck takes issue with this reading. Proust's vision, according to Shattuck, is essentially comic. Indeed, Shattuck insists, Proust's techniques have affinities with farce and slapstick; and his all-pervasive humor is of the sort that makes us [laugh] aloud. Shattuck concludes that A la recherche is a far cry from the gloomiest book ever written.2 Shattuck's analysis of the comic element A la recherche is valuable and illuminating. But it implies that the presence of comedy the novel dispels the Proustian gloom of which Wilson speaks. I do not think this is the case. King Lear has some magnificent comic moments; but it is nonetheless tragedy, vision of the terrible limitations of man's ability to understand and retaliate against the cosmic cruelties that beset him. The same is true of A la recherche. Proust's novel is, finally, tragic, even pessimistic, tone. Like all great tragedy, it depicts ennoblement through suffering; but it also

Edmund Wilson and a "Truly Human Culture"

Edmund Wilson, Upstate: Records and Recollections of Northern New York. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1971; Toronto: Doubleday, 1971. Pp. 386. $8.95. Edmund Wilson, A Window on Russia: for the Use of Foreign Readers. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1972; Toronto: Doubleday, 1972. Pp. 280. $9.25. Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: a Study in the Writing and Acting of History. With a New Introduction. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1972; Toronto, Doubleday, 1972. Pp. xvii + 590. $17.25. Leonard Kriegel, Edmund Wilson. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971; Don Mills: Burns and MacEachern, 1971. Pp. 145. $7.25. Edmund Wilson, who died last June at the age of seventy-seven at his ancestral home in Talcottville in upstate New York, was by almost uni- versal consent the leading twentieth-century American man of letters. His energies were protean, and the range of subjects upon which he wrote - always interestingly, often authoritatively, and sometimes, especially in his later years, crankily - is astonishing. His subjects include the Dead Sea scrolls, the Iroquois, income tax, the literatures and cultures of - inter alia - Canada, Haiti, Israel, Hungary, and Russia. There are a virtually countless number of essays, articles and reviews on literary subjects, some of them of classic stature, first-rate political and social reportage on the United States during the depression years, and other fine first-hand reporting - particularly his account of the plight of Europe at the end of World War II in Europe Without Baedeker: Sketches among the Ruins of Italy, Greece and England. There are also poems and stories, a novel, and a number of plays, which, if they will never occupy in Wilson's canon as major a place as he thought they deserved, are by no means uninteresting. And each of his three most major works - Axel's Castle: a Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930 (1931), To the Finland Station: a Study in the Writing and Acting of History (1940), and Patriotic Core: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (1962) - is both mas- terly in itself and quite different in subject matter from the others.

The Limits of Whitman's Symbolism

Whitman has often been thought of in the context of modern Symbolism. His conception of poetry as an indefinite art, his general tendency to treat the world of objects in terms of his subjective vision, and the extensive use he made of poetic symbols to present that vision are the aspects that have readily invited comparison with the aesthetics of Symbolism. In his sensibility, of course, Whitman is quite unlike the French Symbolists or their successors in the twentieth century who have taken over some of their characteristic attitudes. But the resemblances, too, in terms of aesthetic belief and method have been mentioned so frequently that an impression prevails among scholars that Whitman, like Poe, was in some ways a forerunner of the Symbolists. Thus, in Symbolism and American Literature, Charles Feidelson attempts to connect Whitman with modern Symbolism. He speaks of ‘the thoroughgoing symbolism of [Whitman's] poetic attitude’ (p. 21) and studies him as part of a dominant Symbolist tradition in American literature, in which Emerson, Hawthorne, Poe and Melville are the other great names. Following a suggestion by Edmund Wilson in his Axel's Castle, Feidelson maintains that, in their typical preoccupations, these writers were closer to ‘the symbolistic aesthetic that produced modern literature’ than to Romanticism (p. 4). But ‘Symbolism’, whether the term is understood in the French sense or in the somewhat wider sense defined by Feidelson, hardly seems to fit Whitman because of certain fundamental differences in his conception of poetry as well as his vision of reality.

A Revaluation of Axel

Villiers de l’Isle-Adam was said to have lived on terms of dangerous intimacy with the dream. His almost pathological fear of too-close association with his contemporaries made for an unhealthy state in his personal life. He lived apart from his fellow men in the manner of a recluse. The symptoms of this are everywhere evident in his last work, published posthumously in 1890, Axel. It is perhaps time for a reappraisal of that complicated drama which Edmund Wilson introduced to the American reader in his Axel's Castle (1931). Wilson's comments about the play were limited to certain belle-Iettristic remarks to give his thorough study of Symbolism a convenient fulcrum. In his final chapter he proceeded to contrast the Axel of Villiers de l1sle-Adam's play with the poet Rimbaud. Each was intended to represent an approach of the "Symbolist" man: Axel, the renunciation of life through suicide; Rimbaud, the rejection of art and the search for a new medium.

A Revaluation of Axel

A REVALUATION OF AXEL Vn.LIERS DE L1SLE-ADAM was said to have lived on terms of dangerous intimacy with the dream. His almost pathological fear of too-close association with his contemporaries made for an unhealthy state in his personal life. He lived apart from his fellow men in the manner of a recluse. The symptoms of this are everywhere evident in his last work, published posthumously in 1890, Axel. It is perhaps time for a reappraisal of that complicated drama which Edmund Wilson introduced to the American reader in his Axel's Castle (1931). Wilson's comments about the play were limited to certain belle-Iettristic remarks to give his thorough study of Symbolism a convenient fulcrum. In his final chapter he proceeded to contrast the Axel of Villiers de l1sle-Adam's play with the poet Rimbaud. Each was intended to represent an approach of the "Symbolist" man: Axel, the renunciation of life through suicide; Rimbaud, the rejection of art and the search for a new medium. Before Wilson's book, Axel had received little attention. The play was published by the Maison Quantin in Paris one year after its author's death. It was received ungratefully by a generation which was doubtless unprepared for it. Even the "abuses" multiplied by the Symbolist poets of the 1880's rarely went to the lengths suggested by Villiers' play. There were those who turned to Axel as a kind of liturgy of Symbolism, an almost sacred work, like W. B. Yeats and Mallarme. They found the possibility of performing it heretical; they forced it into the category of the closet drama. When it was finally put on at the Theatre de la Gaite lyrique, in Paris, it survived two performances (February 26 and 27, 1894). The reviews were consistently unfavorable. Both Lemaitre of Debats and Sarcey of the Temps, the most distinguished drama critics of the period, took violent exception to this "art nouveau" which Axel seemed to represent. It was agreed that the mere presence of dialogue did not make a literary work acceptable theater. The almost total absence of dramatic action, the over-sustained lyrical outpourings horrified drama critics who still believed that the "unities" carried conviction. (The problem will recur some years later when the first attempts were made to produce Paul Claudel. Only recently has the Comedie fran~aise admitted him to its repertoire by performing such plays as Le Soulier de satin, L'Annonce faite aMarie, and L'Otage.) It is difficult to know how Villiers himseH felt about his play. The presence of detailed, often excessively involved, stage directions would seem to indicate that he intended it eventually for the stage. One French critic (E. Drougard) writing about Axel remarked: "One can 236 1959 A REVALUATION OF Axel 237 state with conviction that it consumed the entire life of the author; he never stopped thinking about it, working on it; and finally only decided to publish it, so it seems, under the pressure of necessity. . . ." Axel then becomes Villiers' Faust. Thematically the two works beg comparison . Neither the second part of Goethe's work nor Axel is especially stageworthy, though each aspires to be dramatic. It is clear that Villiers had at least the Faust legend in mind when he wrote his own play. He probably knew Goethe's Faust in Nerval's translation which appeared in 1828; he perhaps also was familiar with Berlioz' Damnation of Faust which was popular with the Symbolists at the end of the 19th century. Axel, in an important sense, is the literary application of the formula for the synthesis of the arts set down in Wagner's treatise Opera and Drama. Villiers de l'Isle-Adam was another in the long succession of Symbolist writers who turned to the German composer for inspiration. He shared the opinion of his contemporaries who fashioned an ideal Wagner-making him over into a literary figure who had inadvertently wandered into music. Turning to Axel, one is struck by a series of "fin de siecle" effects which have been forced into a form casually resembling a play. It is divided into four sections each of which is referred to as...

To the Finland Station; A Study in the Writing and Acting of History

author's account of the aspirations towards revolution from the dreamers of the romantic period via Marx and Engels to Lenin's arrival at the Finland station in Petrograd in 1917. author also wrote Axel's Castle, The Wound and the Bow, The Shores of Light' and Patriotic Light.

Reviews

Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930, reviewed by E. K. Brown The Triple Thinkers, reviewed by E. K. Brown To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History, reviewed by E. K. Brown The Wound and thc Bow: Seven Studies in Literature, reviewed by E. K. Brown The Boys in the Back Room: Notes on California Novelists, reviewed by E. K. Brown Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation. I. Human Nature, reviewed by W. R. Taylor William E. Dodd and Martha Dodd, eds., Ambassador Dodd's Diary, 1933-1938, reviewed by G. deT. Glazebrook William L. Shirer, Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1931–1941, reviewed by G. deT. Glazebrook F. H. Soward, J. F. Parkinson, N. A. M. MacKenzie, T. W. L. MacDermot Canada in World Affairs: The Pre-War Years, reviewed by F. R. Scott Raoul de Roussy de Sales, ed., My New Order, reviewed by G. deT. Glazebrook

Notes on the Redon Article

Abstract1. Since this article was written a book has appeared which traces the continuity of the Symbolist movement from Mallarmé and de Nerval to Yeats, Valéry, Proust, T. S. Eliot. James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. (Scribners). The author is Edmund Wilson. The title, Axel's Castle, refers, of course, to the “Wagnerian, Romantic-Gothic” haunt of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's incredible hero.