An ingenious - more than ingenious - gloss of the Daedalus myth
that locates a field of reference for American modernism that would
be trickier, certainly duller, to map by more specific means. It
was no accident that Pound and Williams identified their art as
"making:" another species of making is technology, and technology,
like the art of Pound and Williams, is also die-cut American and
supremely arbitrary. The Daedalian aspect Kenner sees in both has
to do with the inevitable escalation of inventions, each one
compelling the next toward the limits of possibility - New York
City, the modern American poem, Icarus into the drink. This is not,
however, a thesis book: for one thing, the myth is teasingly
applied to Kenner's moderns, with their sense of words as raw
material, their understanding that literary "norms are not imposed
by history, they are elected." Another reason is that this attitude
toward language and the past is the only thing that unites the
group, and tenuously at that. Pressed further, definition dissolves
into mud, or - as Kenner pursues it - breaks up into an array of
distinct but arbitrary aesthetics, a democracy of elected norms,
each of which requires a special mode of reading and appreciation.
These he supplies, with an elegance and sense of the appropriate as
well as wit. Novelists and poets both (Fitzgerald to Faulkner; as
different as Stevens, Williams, Zukofsky) are roundly handled by
this best rounded critic, and they will be ever the better read for
it whether or not their enterprise was inarguably doomed or the
"Red Wheel Barrow" was really an equivalent of the Wright Brothers'
"Flyer." (Kirkus Reviews)
The "homemade world" Hugh Kenner describes exists alongside the
world of Pound, Joyce, and Eliot. While they were laying the
international foundations of literary modernism, another modernism
far more specifically American was being born in the work of
William Faulkner, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams,
Marianne Moore, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Kenner deals in turn with each of the six, with the American
conditions that shaped them, and with the peculiarly homemade
strengths that led to their achievement. "A Homemade World" is a
book to stimulate thought, argument, and an altogether fresh
consideration of twentieth-century writing.
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