Authors are partial to their Wit, 'tis true. But are not Criticks to their Judgment too? .âe¯.âe¯. Those monsters, Criticks! -- Alexander Pope, "An Essay on Criticism," 1711 Critics George Orwell and Edmund Wilson are emblematic names that have come down to us from the still ticking heart of the twentieth centuryâe< -- âemeaning. Speak of Orwell, and what reverberates is monitory: Animal Farm and 1984, each a forceful parable of totalitarian oppression. But Orwell was also renowned as a sonorous essayist, one who is nowadays not much read beyond the campus, where "Shooting an Elephant" is a mainstay of the college anthologies. Except for Animal Farm, his fiction fails to attract ongoing noticeâe< -- âeKeep the Aspidistra Flying, long ago interred among the forgotten social novels of the 1930s. And apart from Orwell specialists, who now reads The Road to Wigan Pier ? Yet Big Brother and Newspeak and memory hole are so ingrained in the common idiom that for many it hardly seems necessary to trouble to turn the already familiar pages of 1984. None of this matters; what counts is the echo of Orwell's name and the bleakness it evokes: dread; deception; injustice; anomie; soullessness. Orwell has become Orwellian. Edmund Wilson germinates no parallel verbal progeny: Wilsonian, if it suggests anything, characterizes the policies of an American president. We have no single termâe< -- âe In 1928, in an acerbic and dismissive essay titled "The Critic Who Does Not Exist," he complained of the lack of serious literary criticism in the United States. "A work of art," he said, "is not a set of ideas or an exercise of technique, or even a combination of both. But I am strongly disposed to believe that our contemporary writing would benefit by a genuine literary criticism that should deal expertly with ideas and art.âe¯.âe¯.âe¯. In a sense, it can probably be said that no such creature exists as a full-time literary criticâe< -- âewas that creature, and today there are a number of first-rate writers of criticism who are at work full-time; but are there enough to make what can be called an expansive literary culture? If we isolate only one decade of the many Wilson dominatedâe< -- âe It should be understoodâe< -- âe And here is the shock of it. Wilson stands as a kind of symbolâe< -- âehe is not read. Admired, honored, influential, legendary; rumored, but not read. Which brings us, alarmingly, to the Orwellian: the dying of the imagination through the invisibility of the past. As for the uses of criticism by the denizens of the present moment: envisioning society whole by way of the contemplation of its parts, the delicate along with the tumultuous, the weighty together with the trifling, is how a culture can learn to imagine its own face. Without the critics, incoherence. The Boys in the Alley, The Disappearing Readers, and the Novel's Ghostly Twin "On or about December 1910," Virginia Woolf wrote more than one hundred years ago, "human character changed." The phrase has come down to us mockingly, notoriously, but also with the truth-like endurance of a maxim. By a change in human character, Woolf meant modernism, and by modernism she meant the kind of overt self-consciousness that identifies and interrogates its own motions and motives. Set forth in "Character in Fiction," an essay arguing for innovation in the novel, it was an aesthetic rather than an essentialist proposition. The changeâe<âe< -- âe<âe
