316
PARTISAN REVIEW
with the arresting title
The English R enaissance: Fact or Fiction,
as if to
raise doubts about whether there ever was an English Renaissance .
The great periods always invite redefinition, and that the enterprise
seems far from complete with the period that embraces the first half
of the present century is hardly remarkable . Yet there is a curious
quality to those few treatments of the nature of the period, as if that
body of literature that we all know best, the age ofJoyce, Lawrence,
Yeats, Mann, Kafka, Gide, and Faulkner, were not a gestalt, which
we could now happily attempt to enclose, but a Rorschach test into
which we look, nervously finding self-projections.
Kingsley Widmer's
Edges oj Extremity,
although physically a
monograph, modest in size, has nonetheless a particular resonance,
both as an interim summary of Widmer's career as a distinguished
critic-of Melville, Lawrence, Conrad, Henry Miller, and a dozen
others-and as Widmer's own contribution to the unresolved
question of where the center of modernism lies . Widmer is variously
graceful and waspish with other people's senses of that center, laying
out, in his early pages, a quite biased but splendidly succinct
summary of Howe, Marcuse, Trilling, Ortega, Ellmann, Daniel
Bell, Maurice Beebe, Eugene Goodheart, Gerald Graff, and
Malcolm Bradbury. Done with his foils, Widmer defines his own
center. And that center, for him, is best located, paradoxically, by
marking out certain "extremities," moral and cultural anxieties
pushed to disturbing and unresolvable ends. It is less a common
ideology or social stance or esthetic that he seeks to name than a
common rhythm or impulse, an inexorable movement toward
nihilism .
The method works best with Conrad, his first exemplary figure.
Widmer measures the curious, often insupportable elevation of
"simple ideas," the distrust of mind, the full awareness of the malevo–
lence of the world, and the baroque indirection of the prose, finding
that, "in his ideological melodramas , it is often exemplary the way
the nihilist triumphs over the ostensible anti-nihilist, the villainous
intellectual over his conservative longings, the provocative modern–
ist over the mere moralist." With Lawrence, the exposition is less
striking because it is more familiar- the use of
The Man Who Died
and
Lady Chatterley
to show a movement beyond culture and class.
With Faulkner, the intent is to trace, using
Light in August,
the full
measure of the appalling burden of the past and its renunciation,
especially the renunciation of the Protestant ethos. Finally, briefly,
Celine, Richard Wright, and Nathanael West provide three
different versions of anger, cultural opposition, and extremity.
