艾德蒙．威爾森 Edmund Wilson
| 美國文學和社會評論家。一八九五年生於美國新澤西州雷德班克。美國普林斯頓大學畢業後進入新聞界，一九二六～三一年任《新共和》（New Republic）雜誌副主編，還為《紐約客》（New Yorker）雜誌撰寫書評。他早期的成奶壯@有象徵主義運動研究文集《阿克塞爾堡》。威爾森是位多產作家，取材廣泛，既有以美學、社會和政治為主題的作 品，也有詩歌、劇本、遊記和歷史著作。卒於一九七二年。 "埃德蒙•威尔逊（Edmund Wilson,1895-1972）是美国20世纪著名的文学与文化批评家。他的文学批评不仅以其独特的审美批评丰富了美国文学的艺术批评，而且还以其思 想的独立性和现实情怀关注美国文化的发展。这就是威尔逊文学批评的突出特点：对社会现实的诗性把握。也就是说，威尔逊在自己的批评中不仅关注到文学作品自 身的审美价值和批评家本身的艺术素养，而且他还表现了一个知识分子的公共特性和人文关怀。正是这种诗性把握和人文关怀使威尔逊的文学批评超越于文学之上， 而走向对美国整体文明的归纳与诠释。本文从威尔逊批评的这一特点出发，从渊源、轨迹和辐射三个方面分别对威尔逊批评的起源，文学批评的轨迹和向公共生活的 辐射进行阐述。第一章着重追溯了欧美人文主义文学批评传统，以及以他的父亲为代表的新英格兰传统对威尔逊批评观点形成的影响；第二章侧重于对威尔逊文学批 评特色的归纳和梳理；第三章则讨论了威尔逊如何以文学批评为平台实现向公共生活的迈进，以及对文明发展的描绘。三章之间有一种递进的关系，这样做正好对应 了威尔逊的文人生涯从点到面，从局域到整体，从文学到文明的轨迹。" 文學評論精選 蔡伸章譯 台北:志文 1977 "Edmund Wilson的Axel's Castle已经有中译本啦。你说《爱国者之血》，我才想起来，主要译者胡曙中教授是我们大学时候的老师。当年读书时候他还颇为自豪地在课上提起过这本书。" A VISION OF THE WOUNDED GENIUSTHE PORTABLE EDMUND WILSON Edited, with an Introduction and Notes, by Lewis M. Dabney. 647 pp. New York: The Viking Press. Cloth, $18.75. Penguin Books, Paper, $6.95. THE FORTIES From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period. By Edmund Wilson. Edited, with an Introduction, by Leon Edel. Illustrated. 369 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $17.95. ADECADE after his death, Edmund Wilson seems assured of a conspicuous place in the canon of 20th-century American writing, though its exact location is still to be settled. Even his literary identity is in dispute. ''The Portable Edmund Wilson,'' edited by Lewis M. Dabney, who teaches at the University of Wyoming, is an almost overrich intellectual feast that displays Wilson at work in a great variety of genres. And yet it contains none of his fiction except a barely mobile story, ''The Man Who Shot Snapping Turtles''; no example of his drama or poetry except his unsparing parody of ''The Hamlet of A. MacLeish'' ( ''The Omelet of A. MacLeish''); nothing about the income tax or Canada or the Dead Sea scrolls. Wilson sometimes spoke of himself as a journalist, citing as his heroes and predecessors the likes of De Quincey, Poe and Shaw, but this was mainly a way of establishing his distance from whatever school of literary criticism happened to be in the ascendancy. We can call him a man of letters who was primarily a literary critic, with a special bias toward history and biography. Or, perhaps more simply, a critic of history. To suggest the extraordinary reach of the man, one need only list the most powerful and comprehensive essays in ''The Portable Edmund Wilson,'' those on Marx and Engels, Dickens, the Supreme Court's Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the Philoctetes myth. Those far-ranging endeavors are linked by the most obsessive and compelling motif in Wilson's repertory and his most fertile contribution to critical understanding: the inestimable literary value of trauma and neurosis. This Freudian theme was given its major expression, of course, in ''The Wound and the Bow'' of 1941. Examining the ''Philoctetes'' of Sophocles - the drama of the hideously wounded great Greek archer - Wilson came upon ''the conception of superior strength as inseparable from disability''; in Andre Gide's play ''Philoctete,'' he discerned a larger implication, that ''genius and disease, like strength and mutilation, may be inextricably bound up together.'' But that principle had already been central to Wilson's appraisal of ''Das Kapital'' in ''To the Finland Station,'' in which he argued that Karl Marx's savage, historychanging world vision (''Here all is cruel discomfort, rape, repression, mutilation and massacre.'') sprang from his outrage over the unspeakable poverty of the Marx family's London life and his bad conscience about inflicting those wretched conditions on his family. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES'S cast of mind, and especially his chilly juridical belief that in historical fact might does make right, Wilson traces persuasively to Holmes's military adventures, his injuries and narrow escapes from death during the Civil War battles of Ball's Bluff and Antietam. Indeed, Wilson's honor roll was composed mostly of the wounded. It was Edna St. Vincent Millay's creative struggle with her nearly psychotic terrors and her desperate loneliness that in part explains Wilson's high opinion of her poetry; and his profoundly ambivalent lifelong involvement with Abraham Lincoln began with William Herndon's portrait of Lincoln as ''a great lawyer who was deeply neurotic'' and who, while fighting spells of nightmare depression, managed to steer his country through ''the crisis of society.'' Discovering this Lincoln in the year after his father's death in 1923, Wilson was able belatedly to understand Edmund Wilson Senior, a brilliant lawyer who was subject to misery of spirit and hypochondria and who enormously admired Lincoln as a fellow sufferer and warrior. And we may take the hint and inscribe Wilson Junior too somewhere on the list. In the world of letters, then, Wilson was anything but that merely ''impressionistic critic'' he was often said to be. He was not much given to critical theorizing (''impressionistic'' is a term used by theorists about nontheorists), but he had a pronounced and recognizable way with literary texts. His focus, as Mr. Dabney observes in his introduction to ''The Portable,'' the most cogent overview of Wilson's career yet written, ''is biographical. He sees society through the individual, takes style as a mirror of personality, and has the old nineteenth century interest in authors as persons.'' This was why he was at odds with the New Critics, who concentrated on the text not on the writer, and was in fact scorned by some of them. ''Imagine,'' I recall an accomplished New Critic saying to me about Wilson in the early 1950's, ''imagine devoting your whole life to literature and missing the entire point of it.'' But his special concerns led Wilson to critical insights that were quite half a century ahead of his time. In a review of Van Wyck Brooks's ''The Pilgrimage of Henry James'' in 1925, Wilson rejected Brooks's moralistic good-versus-evil interpretation of James's later work - an interpretation that would prevail for decades to come - and proposed instead a series of subtly staged conflicts between different sets of ideals and aspirations.In an article in 1928, he deplored the lack of critical attention to the first-rate writers of the American past and contended that an intelligent study of them would ''show how Hawthorne, Melville and Poe, besides becoming excessively eccentric persons, anticipated, in the middle of the last century, the temperament of our own day and invented a method for rendering it.'' (A couple of years ago, with very considerable labor, I devised a seminar for college teachers on this exact notion, sure that it was my original idea - ''premature modernity'' was my phrase for it - and preened myself on the groundbreaking nature of the enterprise.) TOWARD the close of ''Axel's Castle,'' his 1931 study of the Symbolist Movement, Wilson, quoting Paul Valery, foresaw a possibility that literature might become an art ''based on language as a creator of illusions, and not on language as a means of transmitting realities,'' and that it would survive chiefly as a game. He was optimistically doubtful about this eventuality. But 50 years later a heralded school of critics is maintaining that all literature since the dawn of time has been a linguistic game having no serious connection with reality. As the 20's gave way to the Depression of the 30's, Wilson made coast-to-coast excursions into contemporary reality; but the examples of his sociological reports in this collection - on Henry Ford, on the miners of West Virginia - don't hold up very well. I'd have preferred an essay or two on the Victorians or the Lincoln chapter from ''Patriotic Gore,'' Wilson's ambitious study of Civil War writers. But Mr. Dabney may have been justified in including these pieces from The New Republic as preparation for ''To the Finland Station'' of 1940, that masterwork about the intellectual origins of the Russian revolution. Here, as V.S. Pritchett once put it, Wilson performed as ''a critic in whom history is broken up into minds.'' The decade of the 40's was a crest time for Wilson: ''To the Finland Station'' was followed by ''The Wound and the Bow,'' with its studies of Dickens, Kipling and Hemingway; ''The Shock of Recognition,'' an invaluable anthology of American writers talking about other American writers; ''Memoirs of Hecate County,'' his collection of short stories; ''Europe Without a Baedeker,'' sketches of postwar England, Italy and Greece, and the collection of literary essays, ''Classics and Commercials.'' All this work went forward despite, or because of, a number of personal crises, one of which led to a divorce from Mary McCarthy and marriage to Elena Thornton, a cultivated and charming European-born magazine editor. Descriptions of those private experiences are lucidly interpolated by Leon Edel into ''The Forties,'' his selection of Wilson's notebooks and diaries of that decade - and the interpolations may be the best part of the book. I don't otherwise see the purpose of the compilation. A long section consists of Wilson's notebook entries in Italy just after World War II, which show him at his least interesting. Years before he had lectured F. Scott Fitzgerald on the superiority of European to American civilization, but now he had retreated into a wordy and superficial parochialism. We are made forcibly privy to Wilson's sexual doings with Elena, session by session, all of which I found vaguely offensive and embarrassing. (I could not but be arrested, however, by a sequence at Lenox, Mass., in 1947 in which a nice if mildly inaccurate little picture of Edith Wharton's former home, The Mount, is followed by a rhapsody about ''Kissing E.'s feet, with their insteps so high on the inside and their dense network of fine blue veins.'') One turns back with relief from such stuff to the magisterial essays of the same period, like the one about the impact, both crushing and galvanizing, on Charles Dickens of his father's three-month imprisonment for debt and even the robustly wrongheaded discourse on detective fiction, ''Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?'' and the accompanying pieces in ''Classics and Commercials.'' MOST of ''Patriotic Gore,'' published in 1962, appeared originally during the 50's in The New Yorker, with which Wilson was long affiliated. Lewis Dabney, like many others, regards ''Patriotic Gore'' as Wilson's supreme achievement and provides a generous sampling from it in ''The Portable'': on Holmes, Harriet Beecher Stowe, General Grant and his memoirs, Mary Chesnut and her diary, a trio of Southern generals. These are stirring historic-literary recreations, and the book does have a certain somber and durable magnificence. But for me it is damaged by Wilson's strenuous demythicizing of the war itself - his rejection as irrelevant of such matters as the fate of the Union and of the institution of slavery - which he seems not fully to have understood was an attempt to demythicize a vast segment of American culture. Within that culture, meanwhile, Wilson continued to play a vigorously shaping role until his death in 1972. Mr. Dabney tells us that the obituaries referred to Wilson as ''the last man of letters.'' The phrase isn't clear; Wilson, though a sizable man of letters, was not the final member of the species or the most complete representative in this century. He was curiously inept, for example, with modern American poetry (as against Russian and ancient Greek); he overrated Edna Millay, was deaf to Hart Crane and dismissed Robert Frost as an extremely dull writer of ''very poor verse.'' His own most attractive verse was comic, with a cultural sting. He included the following in a Christmas booklet he sent to his friends in 1952: Said Mario Praz to Mario Pei: ''Come ti piace the Great White Way?'' Said Mario Pei to Mario Praz: ''It's polyglots.'' WILSON'S grumpy withdrawal from the contemporary American scene in his later years was never altogether convincing. ''When, for example, I look through Life magazine,'' he remarked on reaching 60 in 1956, ''I feel that I do not belong to the country depicted there, that I do not even live in that country.'' Wilson's inability to apprehend the religious impulse seems another drawback; though in this regard, his atheism could be expressed with such valor and briskness that the most devout might be beguiled. ''The word God is now archaic,'' he wrote in another article of 1956, ''and it ought to be dropped by those who do not need it for moral support.'' Wallace Stevens never said it better. Wilson's formidable intelligence grappled unceasingly with literature and with history and with the minds and personalities that made them. The reader is drawn into the agon of a characteristic Wilson essay and stretched and toughened by it as by few other critical writings of the epoch. It is exhilarating to read ''The Portable Edmund Wilson,'' and it is humbling. |
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| 《到芬蘭車站－馬克思主義的起源及發展》 |
| 麥田 |
| 20000622 "可惜《到芬兰车站》无法在国内出版。呵呵。" |
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