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stood. There he stopped. In our age people go further and explain
more than they have understood." Mr. Kenner's special genius lies in
explaining more than he has understood in ways that few others will
ever care to understand. He is more like an alchemist or a mathemati–
cian than he is like a critic; in his most typical essays he does nothing
less than conjure up an autonomous, self-referring universe, whose
terms have virtually nothing to do with experience, and which func–
tions according to some arcane concoction of rules whose unintelligi–
bility is the safeguard of their inconsequence. Mr. Kenner's writing
about Wyndham Lewis thoroughly exemplifies this practice. Once that
machine of mystification is set going, once one assumes that a work of
literature is a self-enclosed system, then all questions of judgment or
justification are impertinent (how else, after all,
could
one write about
Lewis?) and Mr. Kenner can come up with things like this: "Perfec–
tion, it seems, implies an exclusivity of function which leaves no room
for the self-knowledge which in Lewisian terms is the ground of intelli–
gence, and so intelligence is as rare among angels as among men." Mr.
Kenner's new essay on Lewis in
Gnomon
is, in fact, an achievement in
itself-it manages to have about as much relation to literature, to ex–
perience or to Lewis as the binomial theorem. He is similarly successful
in his discussion of Pound's
Rock-drill
cantos, from which I have ex–
tracted this representative passage of Mr. Kenner's prose:
the interaction between heaven, prince, and people paralleled by that
between the descent of light, the refractive processes of dented water,
and the substantiality of the water-bug, which results in a radiant un–
foreseeable entity, the spectral flower on the stone. This metaphysical
image effects a blending of the moral ambience of the
te
ideogram
with the motifs of the Paradiso proper in the latter half of the book.
Pity the poor English! How can we expect those sad and exhausted
empirical souls to continue to withstand this engine of organized inanity?
They have not, they have given in, surrendered unconditionally:
in
1956 Mr. Kenner was invited to address the Royal Society of Litera–
ture.
Eheu fugaces!
Meanwhile, from the antipodes speaks Maxwell Geismar, although
it does not seem quite credible to imply that he and Mr. Kenner
in–
habit the same universe. His new book,
American Moderns,
is subtitled
"From Rebellion to Conformity" and is largely made 'up of reviews
reprinted from
The Nation, The Saturday Review
and
The New York
Times.
Mr. Geismar stands for the tradition of "social protest," or, as
he felicitously puts it elsewhere, "the social realism school." We are,
