BOOKS
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It was not his intention, Widmer argues at his conclusion, to
wave aside the modernists' "positive longings for a humane fidelity,
an impassioned communalism, an heroic stylization, an undoomed
ethos, a tenderness of feeling, a lyrical ordering, and other
goodness." Rather it was to locate certain terminal energies - toward
anarchy, atheism, nihilism, and cultural rage - to demonstrate their
centrality, and to assert their continuing relevance, for the contrary
extremity in the face of official culture seems no less urgent than it
did fifty years ago.
Readers of Widmer's exemplary figures are likely to feel that
significant works elude the formula- his reading of Conrad hardly
speaks to the force of
Youth
or
The Secret Sharer,
nor does his reading of
Faulkner speak to the power of
The Old Man
or
The Bear.
Yet, aware
of its size and scope, one responds to the book as a polemic, protest–
ing against the estheticizing and domesticating of the great modern–
ists. And as a polemic, it has two effects, one good, one not so good .
A hard man is good to find; there is no doubt that the edge of
the great modernists has been blunted by the mountain of criticism
that makes them, at once, more intelligible and less perverse, and
our sense of the modernists needs always to be put back in touch
with their extremities. Yet fixing the nature of modernism by
naming its extremities-nihilism, atheism, anarchism-distorts,
despite Widmer's disclaimer, first by simplifying the extraordinary
range of modernism, second by flattening out the irony so central to
the modernist imagination . It is not hard to begin to assemble a list
of crucially important figures who cannot be described in Widmer's
terms, figures who find their own perverse energies, but who mark
out a territory by no means nihilistic - Rilke, for example, or
William Carlos Williams. As for modernism's irony, Mann and
Joyce found their own ways of fathoming the abyss and little to
praise in their official cultures . Yet both of them found the manage–
ment of distance and a pervasive doubleness of vision so necessary to
their art that they would have been appalled to have found them–
selves described by Widmer's epithets. Both bracing and abrasive, as
Widmer surely intended it to be,
Edges
of
Extremity
does what it can to
counter the neutralization of that brilliant strain of nay-saying that
runs through the modernist movement. But as a synthesis of the
whole of the movement, it is one more look into the Rorschach test.
PHILIP STEVICK
