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literature. Like so many other defenders of reason, he has a cantankerous
and crotchety mind which will stand no nonsense and refuses to be
impressed by historical "laws," metaphysical architectonics, or over–
dramatized banalities. This is an indispensable quality in a critic of
literary movements, especially a movement with the corrupting prestige
of Symbolism (how often, in recent years, has conformity to the canons
of this one limited aesthetic theory been considered the ultimate touch–
stone of literary intelligence!). Winters can respond to a symbolic work
with sensitivity and profound understanding, but he will not be bullied
by the dogmas of Mallarme into puffing a minor writer like Poe or a
defective novel of Melville. Nor does he fall happily into step with con–
ventional valuations. For all his occasional eccentricity of taste and his
sometimes crude theorizing, he has the supreme virtue of making his
experience of the work the central issue of his criticism. To him, sym–
bolism is a way of coping with experience that must be judged in
each case by whether it illuminates or obscures, opens up the world or
insulates the poet from it.
Mr. Feidelson approaches the problem of symbolism in American
literature with a formidable stride, determined to make good the defects
of
Maule's Curse.
Like Winters, he rejects the view of American litera–
ture as a body of discrete texts, drawing no nourishment from one an–
other, each writer struggling unaided in his loneliness. There is, he finds,
a tradition, but the tradition does not grow out of a common theme
like the dedication of the novelists to the possibilities of democracy (as
Matthiessen and, more recently, Marius Bewley have asserted), but
rather "the really vital common denominator is precisely their attitude
toward their medium . . . ; their distinctive quality is a devotion to the
possibilities of symbolism." Put in this form, the completely valid and
relevant concern Wilson, Winters, and others feel with the symbolic
nature of American writing is insidiously transformed into something
else. Can a "devotion to the possibilities of symbolism"-which is a
category appropriate to literary history and not to literary experience–
ever be a "really
vital"
quality? Mr. Feidelson is offering a conception
in which literature finally refers to nothing outside itself. Nor does he
make any bones about this; he is not afraid of following the logic of
his position through:
Symbolism as a literary school is distinctively
problematic,
not merely
in the sense in which every literary symbol is indeterminate, but more
specifically in the sense that its characteristic subject is its own equiv–
ocal method.... When the symbolistic method becomes the theme of
symbolism, the literary work is attaining the immediate reality of symbol
by acknowledging that language, after all, is at the same time mediate.
