The Collected Essays of J. V. Cunningham by J.V. Cunningham (review)

truth in fiction, and therefore truth about this West, might reside in taking fictional care with lives and experience, rather than pressing them into the service of symbolizing. This does not mean that Milton should have written a "realistic" novel; I mean only to say that fiction of any kind can be compelled and compelling about its own inventions, to borrow a phrase from Richard Poirier, and this book is not. In setting his sights on the large Truths of the West, Milton seems to have missed available truth, the truth of fiction. And that seems to happen often, in various ways, when the "subject" of fiction is the West. As Thomas Hornsby Ferrill pointed out years ago, much Western fiction is vitiated by a low-grade romanticism in which landscape counts for more than complexity of human behavior. Some writers, realizing the fictional barrenness of that way of seeing the West, have turned the formula upside down and written their equivalents of Mel Brooks's "Blazing Saddles." Since the meaning of the myth still controls the fictional process, though here turned around, little attention is paid to fiction as fiction, and these novels are generally dreary. Other writers, among whom I would count Milton, seem to assume that deployment of sophisticated technique, as that phrase might be understood in a graduate seminar on literature, will save the West from excesses practiced upon it by hacks and myth-mongers. But here too the process of fiction itself is ignored or defeated, as I think we see in Milton's novel. Maybe, in one important way, the West has not been won. JACK BRENNER Jack Brenner teaches at the University of Washington. THE COLLECTED ESSAYS OF J. V. CUNNINGHAM (Chicago: The Swallow Press, 1976. 463 pages, $20.00.) One of the most pressing issues in contemporary criticism concerns the validity of critical interpretations. Like most current topics in criticism, this problem looks back to the New Criticism, which made critics acutely selfconscious about the inadequacies of their own critical prose. By insisting that a poem's meaning lay solely in the poem itself, the New Critics rendered critical restatement of that meaning an impossibility. Convinced that a poem was "untranslatable" in logical or rational terms, the New Critics had to concede, in Cleanth Brooks's words, that their own interpretations were "at best crude approximations" of the poems which they analyzed. 60BOOKS Recent critics have grown disenchanted with this tension between criticism and poetry. Some, notably I Iarold Bloom and Roland Barthes, have obliterated all distinctions between the two terms and have assimilated criticism to "prose poetry." Bloom, in fact, has gone so far as to call the critic a more or less "strong poet" whose creations wilfully misinterpret other poems. Others, however, have tried not to erase the differences between critical essays and poems but to redefine them in such a way as to make criticism a means of explaining, not rewriting or reducing, imaginative works. Such critics as E. D. Hirsch (in Validity in Interpretation) and Gerald Graff (in Poetic Statement and Critical Dogma) have argued that poems, like propositions, state meanings which we can rationally understand and share. J. V. Cunningham's Collected Essays makes an impressive contribution to this latter effort. Although he wrote most of these essays during the 1950's and early 1960's, Cunningham never succumbed to the New Critical views that flourished during those years. Instead, he regarded the New Criticism and the modernist literary achievements that it accompanied as revolutionary developments which had lost their original impetus. That impetus was "parasitic"; modernism derived its vitality from rebellion against pre-modern traditions but lost its "sharpness ;\\?? piquancy" when it finally triumphed over its adversaries. By the 1950's, in Cunningham's view, the modernist revolt had "the kingdom of letters" to itself and had grown "broad, pervasive, simple-minded, and scarcely scrutinized." It was already time for "a counterrevolution ." Cunningham, like his friend Yvor Winters, initiated this counterrevolt by speaking for the very traditions which twentieth-century criticism had so effectively discredited. True to his self-portrait as "a onetime scholar in Latin and in the English Renaissance," he reaffirmed the classical principles...